Excerpt of The Truth Seeker by Dee Henderson

Chapter One

The fire had been alive; it had left its signature in the coiled, twisted wood, the bent metal, the heavy ash. It was a tamed beast, but still here, ready to come back to life with a nudge. Lisa O'Malley walked with great respect up the stairs following her brother Jack into the heart of the fire damage. The heavy boots he had insisted she wear were welcome as she realized it was glass crunching beneath her feet. Lightbulbs and picture frames had shattered in the heat. The fire coat was harder to get accustomed to. The Nomex cloth was rough and it felt like thirty pounds on her back as she struggled to keep her balance. When Jack worked a fire he ran stairs wearing the coat and an air tank, carrying another forty pounds of gear. She didn't know how he did it. The man rarely showed a serious side, but it was there when he was doing the job he excelled at.

Reaching the upstairs landing, she turned her flashlight to inspect the hallway ceiling and walls. The superheated gas created by the fire had reached down five feet from the ceiling, burning into the paint and wood, marking a suicide line. Two or three feet down indicated a severe fire; five was explosive. The firemen confronting this fire had been taking their lives in their hands in facing it head-on.

"Watch your step, I don't trustthis hallway. Stay close to the north wall."

Lisa returned her flashlight to the floor to pick her next steps. Jack had hesitated before letting her come up. The house was safe for now, but with the weight of walls and joists shifting to beams not designed to handle the weight, every day brought the structure closer to collapse. It had rained yesterday, making the damaged wood swell and further stressing the structure.

She was careful not to get snagged by a nail or by exposed wiring. The fire crews had pulled down part of the hallway ceiling and torn portions of the walls back to the studs in order to locate dangerous pockets of lingering heat. Six days ago this had been a two-alarm fire. In the smoldering remains, still in his bed, the body of Egan Hampton had been recovered.

She reached the back bedroom and stopped.

"An accident-" She could only shake her head in disbelief. The furniture was charred, the mattress burned down to the springs; books on the shelf were now warped spines enfolding wrinkled pages of ash; the alarm clock was a chunk of deformed plastic adhered to the bedside table; the television tube had cracked and buckled in.

The only items not burned or blackened in the room were a portion of the bedding that had been protected by Egan's body and a section of the floor rug that had been under the bed frame. The bedroom door was still on its hinges but it had burned on both sides to a fraction of its normal width.

"Like I said, it was a hot fire."

She stepped with caution inside the room, instinctively looking up to make sure she wasn't going to get hit with something. The ceiling was open in sections, revealing part of the attic, and in one place she could see all the way through to the sky.

Through the destroyed window she could see the orchard and nursery, the buildings and commercial greenhouses that comprised Nakomi Nurseries, the business Egan had built up over the years and recently passed to his nephew Walter to manage.

Jack dealt with fire every day; he knew how it moved and breathed and burned. She'd learned enough from him to understand the patterns. This looked like a flashover- everything in the room heating up, reaching burn point, and suddenly bursting into flames en masse. "Did the room smolder and smoke before flashover or was it a steady fire? In the police report Walter said he saw the smoke and then a flash and called 911."

"It began as a smoldering fire." Jack knelt and picked up large shards of glass from the shattered window. "Look at the smoke stain that burned into the pane of window glass."

He used the crowbar to pull off the bottom piece of the window frame casing and turned it over to show her the details. "You can tell it started as a floor fire burning upward because the fire swept across this wood and out the window. Had it initially been flames at the ceiling coming down the wall and out the window, the burning would be pitting on the top of the wood, not this charring underneath."

Daniel had done the autopsy on Egan Hampton. While smoke had killed the man-carbon monoxide had been found in his lungs indicating he'd been alive when the fire started- there was also a puzzle. He had suffered a contusion on the left temple coincident to death. It wasn't severe; the bruising had just begun to seep into the deep tissue.

The explanation could be as simple as something falling on him when the fire began, but it needed to be explained. And there was the fact he had taken what had been determined to be two sleeping pills. Within the doctor's prescribed dosage, but still a factor to be looked at. For now the autopsy results were inconclusive.

As with all cases that could go either way, it had come back to the central staff at the state crime lab for another look at the autopsy results in light of the case circumstances. Her boss had dropped the case in her lap Friday afternoon.

As a forensic pathologist the question she asked was simple to state and often maddeningly hard to answer: Was the death suspicious, warranting a murder investigation, or accidental?

Lisa loved a good puzzle, but not one that arrived to ruin a weekend. She'd read the reports yesterday, concluded only that she needed more information. "It would help if you could tell me this was an arson fire."

"It was a hot fire, but then it's been a hot, dry summer. The house has no air-conditioning, and the furniture and flooring had absorbed the afternoon heat. We found a lot of dry rot in the roof, and with this being a small back bedroom the fire was able to flashover within minutes."

"The fire started at the base of this wall?"

"As best we can tell, he fell asleep and dropped his cigar. We found the remains of one there." Jack pointed. "It hit what appears to have been a burlap bag of laundry. The fire moved across the floor, you can see the distinct burn line-" he traced it with his hand-"and eventually reached into the closet where it had an unlimited fuel load. It built in intensity and then moved back into the bedroom along the ceiling-see the bubbling in the wood? By then it was moving hot and fast."

"How long before the smoke blanket dropped low enough to kill him?"

"The fire probably took four to six minutes to get a footing. From then to a killing blanket of toxic smoke, you're talking maybe two minutes at the outside. The window was open, and the door, an unfortunate reality for him. The airflow would cause a natural eddy of smoke into that corner of the room over the bed."

She looked at the damage, now more able to understand why Mr. Hampton had not awakened. The fire Jack described would not be loud enough to wake a man sleeping heavily under the influence of two sleeping pills and building carbon monoxide. By the time the fire surged from the closet back into the room, the smoke would have been thick enough to kill.

She looked again for what might have caused the bruise. "The heat weakened and collapsed the plaster?"

"The house is old construction, they used a plaster paste over wood, and you can tell that most of it broke away. Directly above this room in the attic were cardboard boxes storing his wife's things, including clothes." "Another fuel load."

"Yes. Once in the attic, the fire was burning on both sides of these joists."

"So falling plaster could account for the blow." Lisa walked to the remains of the bed frame and started searching the area. "Is there any evidence of a picture on the wall? Something else that might have fallen on him?"

Jack started tugging back debris.

They searched for ten minutes and found the remains of two picture frames and a shelf. The shelf would have been heavy enough, or an item on it. She felt herself relax. "One of these items is probably what caused the bruise."

"Agreed. The cat was found there." Jack pointed to the far corner of the room.

"Cat? What cat?"

"It wasn't in the notes? There should be an addendum to the fire report. Craig found it during the fire mop-up. We figured the cat was on the bed, got a face full of the smoke, retreated to escape the fire, then got trapped."

"A cat losing all of its nine lives? I thought the door was open."

"It was open when we came up the stairs fighting the fire. I suppose it's possible the force of the water pushed it open, but that would be apparent in the burn patterns."

Jack crossed over to the door and carefully swung it to take a look. "The door was open during the fire. If it were closed, this door edge around the knob and the edge back by the hinges would have been protected by the door frame, but both show serious burning."

"Then why didn't the cat bolt from the room?"

"It's hard to tell a burned cat's age, but it looked young. And a cat is not going to jump through fire at the window or past fire in the doorway. It tried to hide and the smoke eventually overcame it. We've seen it before."

"Jack?"

"Up here, Ford."

Footsteps sounded on the stairs as the detective assigned to the case came upstairs. He had been talking with Egan's nephew Walter. The house was going to have to be demolished in the next few days. Walter was in the process of recovering what essential papers he could from the downstairs office.

"Ford, do you know what happened to the cat?" Lisa asked before she realized Walter had also come upstairs with the detective.

Walter was the one to answer. "I'm sorry, I buried the cat this morning. I didn't realize it would be a problem. The crows had been attracted by the death; I found them in here." He swallowed hard. "Listen, it's in a shoe box buried at the end of the garden. It will take only a minute to get it for you."

"No," Lisa replied, stopping his retreat. "It's okay. Jack just told me it had also been killed."

"Egan liked that cat. It was from a neighbor cat's spring litter. I guess the house was lonely at night since Patricia was taken to the nursing home. He never liked pets before."

Lisa saw Walter look again toward the bed and knew it was best that they leave. She could see how hard this was on him. He was in his forties, lean, a landscaper by profession with an appearance that fit it, his jeans and gray T-shirt sweaty in the heat. At close range, the ravages of the last six days-the healing burns, the stress, the grief, and the lack of sleep-were all there to be seen on his face. He'd tried to reach his uncle but had been unable to get past the flames.

"I've got everything I need to finish up my report. We were just coming down." She was comfortable with the assessment that this had been a tragic accident. The dead cat disturbed her, but Jack was right, pets died in fires. She'd think it through again tonight, look one last time at the autopsy results, and if she didn't see anything else, she'd recommend to her boss that they sign it off as an accidental death.

Lisa was relieved. The last thing she needed was another murder investigation.

U.S. Marshal Quinn Diamond walked through the concourse at O'Hare, carrying a briefcase he hated, his cowboy boots leaving an echo behind him. His face was weathered by the sun and wind, the lines around his eyes deep. He was not a man to enjoy the crush of people, but at least Chicago was better than New York or Washington.

He had planned to take a direct flight from Washington, D.C., to Montana, spend his month of vacation at his ranch, let the physical hard work wipe away the aftereffects of two months spent tracking down who had murdered a federal judge.

Instead, he was in Chicago on very short notice. The folded newsclip in his billfold was from yesterday's Chicago Tribune. There was a book signing Tuesday night for a Sierra Club book entitled A Photographic Guide to Birds in the Midwest. The author's name-Amy Ireland Nugan.

Quinn had been checking out of the hotel in Washington when the news alert service tracked him down. It had been so long since the last lead. Was it her? Was it the Amy Ireland he had sought for so long?

He'd been able to get a few answers. She was married to a Paul Nugan. She was the right age, thirty-seven. Amy had been seventeen when she disappeared from Justin, Montana, twenty years ago.

The same day Amy had disappeared, his father had been shot in the back out on the southern range of the ranch near the bluffs.

After twenty years of searching he had finally accepted that Amy must have also died that day, but if she had instead fled and appeared sometime later in Chicago-he didn't think she would have pulled the trigger, but she might have been with someone who had.

If he could solve what had happened to Amy Ireland, maybe he could get a lead on who had killed his father.

He had almost given up hope of ever finding a trace of her. He'd eliminated dozens of Amy Irelands over the years, but this one ... the sense of hope was back. It fit. Amy had been a high-school photographer with a passion for what her camera could reveal. She'd had real talent even in her teens. Quinn could easily see her making it a future career.

He had to know if this was the right Amy Ireland. And if it was, he had to be very careful not to send her running again. Practicing patience was not going to be easy.

His partner, Marcus O'Malley, would have joined him if Quinn had alerted him to the hit on the name; he was that kind of friend. But Quinn hadn't wanted to interrupt Marcus's chance to spend time with his sister who was undergoing cancer treatment at Johns Hopkins and his new fiancée, Shari. Instead, Quinn had called an old friend.

Quinn found Lincoln Beaumont waiting in the United Airlines' business lounge. If he hadn't known better, on first impression he would have assumed lawyer or investment banker, not retired U.S. Marshal and now private investigator. "Thanks for coming, Lincoln." He tipped his cowboy hat to the lady with the retired marshal. "Ma'am."

"Emily Randall; I handle Lincoln's research." She was a nice-looking lady, businesslike in her handshake, feminine in her dress, and confident in her gaze. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Diamond."

"The pleasure's mine," Quinn replied with a smile. Lincoln had been right; she'd be perfect if it became necessary to have someone approach Amy.

The smile directed at him showed curiosity. He was accustomed to it; he made no attempt to disguise the fact he was a misplaced man in the city. Why that should draw women was a phenomenon he accepted but didn't really understand.

It didn't attract the attention of the one lady he wanted to notice him. No, he changed that. Lisa O'Malley noticed; she just found his interest uncomfortable to deal with and more often than not scowled rather than smiled when she saw him.

He was determined to get Marcus's sister to accept a dinner invitation on this trip through Chicago. She'd been ducking him long enough. He wasn't after something profound; he just wanted to change her rather mixed reaction to him and replace it with a solid friendship. He visited Chicago on a regular basis; he wanted to be able to call Lisa when he was in town and have her actually be pleased to hear from him.

Eating alone was a waste of time, so was spending his downtime at a hotel watching TV. He spent enough time with strangers. Lisa he knew, and she was the kind of friend he wanted: loyal, fun, and smart, with a stubborn streak he liked to ruffle. It was a bit like rubbing a cat's fur the wrong way. She was cute when annoyed, and calling her ma'am always got a reaction. One thing was certain: Lisa's life was never boring.

He smiled as he thought of the excuses she was likely to throw up to the invitation to dinner and unfortunately misled Ms. Randall into assuming his smile was in response to hers. Before she could say something that would put them both in a fix, he calmly turned the conversation. "Tell me what you've found out about Amy Ireland."