hard again, Kat began her fumbling, cautious ascent. She paused at each step, resisting the urge to sprint up them two at a time. Despite her utter exhaustion, part of her wanted to just get to the top and see what awaited her. But another part of her already knew, and it terrified her.
Pausing halfway up the stairs, she leaned against the railing and listened for sounds from above. She heard nothing. Not for the first time, she wondered if she was wrong. About her destination. About what was being planned there. But everything she had learned in the past day pointed to this place. This moment. This hour.
Kat’s thoughts suddenly slipped away from her. It was happening with alarming frequency now. Her train of thought would derail and she’d suddenly find herself blank and aimless, wondering where the hell she was and what she was doing. Severe sleep deprivation did that to you.
She couldn’t bring herself back with a slap. Although it had worked earlier that night, it would be too noisy in that echo chamber of a stairwell. Instead, she pinched herself. Hard. Right on the back of her upper arm, where it hurt the most.
It did the trick.
Alert again, she pushed on. Up the stairs. Heart pounding. Trigger finger flexing at her Glock.
Soon she was at the top of the stairs and rising into the room. There were more windows there, massive ones that let in enough light to see by.
Taking in the room, Kat realized she would have preferred darkness.
The first thing she saw was a body on the floor. It was a man, slumped on his side and facing the far wall. Blood matted his hair and oozed from beneath his head in a circular pool that crept across the floorboards.
Even without seeing his face, Kat could identify him. She rushed to his side and, despite already knowing that he was dead and gone, checked his wrist for a pulse. When she didn’t feel one, a heaviness flooded her heart. Yet another casualty in a day that was full of them.
“Who did this to you?” she whispered. “And why—”
She stopped speaking as her gaze flicked to the dark corner nearest the body. Something was there, shrouded in the shadows.
A propane tank.
It was small, just like the one hooked up to the gas grill in her backyard. The cap had been removed, replaced with a grease-smeared handkerchief that soaked up the liquid inside. The gas that leaked out was a noxious vapor that made Kat dizzy.
She glanced in the opposite corner. It also contained a propane tank. As did the room’s other two corners. Each tank was the same. Caps off. Stuffed with rags. Waiting to be ignited.
A mere spark on one of the rags could make an entire tank explode. That would set off a chain reaction. Explosion after explosion after explosion.
The whole room had been turned into a bomb.
And Kat was now standing right in the heart of it.
Kat was dreaming about Henry when she heard the sirens. She had no idea why. It’s not as if she dwelled on him so much during her waking hours that it invaded her subconscious at night. In fact, it had been weeks since she thought about Henry, months since she had heard from him, and a full year since she last saw him.
Yet there he was, front and center in her dream. They were in a nondescript room so dim and vast that Kat wasn’t sure if it was a room at all. Dreams were like that. Ceilings not supported by walls. Floors as malleable as wet sand. The only thing concrete about their surroundings was the table in front of them—white Formica as bright as a smile in a toothpaste commercial.
On the table were two large sheets of paper, thin and translucent. Henry, staring at his swath of paper, frowned.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“It’s easy,” Kat said. “I’ll show you.”
She lifted a corner of her sheet to the center, cementing the fold with a crease. Henry followed suit. They did it again, this time simultaneously, with an upper fold.
“See,” she said. “I told you it was easy.”
Then the sirens started, so distant and muffled that Kat at first thought they were just another part of the dream. But they continued, even after Henry, the table, and the paper all vanished. That’s when she knew they were real.
Kat listened without opening her eyes. Although they were far away, she could tell the sirens belonged to the fire department and not her police force. The ones on the fire trucks were louder and deeper—the baritones to her patrol cars’ tenor.
Sliding out of bed, she went to the window and saw the reason for the sirens—a fire, glowing orange and eerie in the distance. She couldn’t tell how large it was or pinpoint its exact location. All she knew was that she needed to be there, no matter how much she wanted to crawl back into bed. Pausing only long enough to yawn, she started to put on her uniform a mere hour and a half after taking it off.
She was mostly dressed by the time her phone rang. As expected, it was Carl Bauersox, her deputy, sounding much more energetic than she did. On the night shift, he was used to being alert at this hour. Kat was not.
“We’ve got a fire, Chief.”
“I know,” Kat said. “I hear the sirens. What’s burning?”
“The museum.”
He was referring to the Perry Hollow Historical Society and Exhibition Hall, a collection of documents, artifacts, and photographs that dated back to the town’s founding and beyond. Because of its unwieldy name, and because most of the town’s history resided within its walls, people simply called it the museum.
“Is it bad?”
“Looks like it,” Carl said. “It’s a big draw, too. We’re going to have a crowd control problem on our hands in a minute.”
This didn’t surprise Kat. Fires weren’t common in Perry Hollow, and she was sure a good portion of the town would come out to gawk. They certainly couldn’t sleep. Not with all those sirens echoing down the streets.
“Hold them off as best you can. I’ll be there soon.”
When she was finally on the road, her own sirens blaring, Kat noticed that the fire was visible from all over town. Even from six blocks away, she could see the licks of flame flashing over the rooftops of neighboring buildings. A thick column of black smoke, rising straight up into the night sky, punctuated the blaze like an exclamation point.
Crossing Main Street, she noticed plenty of residents staggering along the sidewalk in tossed-on sweatpants, sneakers, and robes. All of them were headed in the same direction she was, drawn mothlike to the flames. Crowd control problem, indeed.
She brought her Crown Vic to a stop a block away from the museum, parking sideways in the middle of the street. It wasn’t much of a roadblock, but it would be enough to keep any cars from trying to come through. Plus, it was easy to move out of the way to let in fire trucks from neighboring towns, if it came to that.
Kat hoped it wouldn’t.
Leaving her patrol car, she hurried down the street, finally getting a good look at the blaze. It wasn’t as big as she first thought, but still bad by Perry Hollow standards. It looked to be contained to the front of the building, a three-story Queen Anne with all the frilly trimmings. Fire ate away at the steeply pitched roof and munched swiftly toward the ornate turret in its center. Flames leaped from the front windows and curled in the crisp autumn air, making Kat think of Satan’s fingers beckoning a group of