Chapter 1

"Unsafe wiring in an unpermitted addition," Chief Bo Traywick read off the page, loud enough for the whole yard.

It was 6:40 in the morning. Frost lay gray across the blackened ground. What was left of Ruth Ann Coker's house was a steaming hole with the chimney standing in the middle of it, and the smell of wet ash was still coming off the walls.

Bo stood in the center of the yard in his navy chief's jacket with the gold trim, boots polished, a manila folder open in one hand. He read from a typed page. Clean paper. Not a smudge on it.

Behind him, at the tailgate of a pickup, nineteen-year-old Junior Purdy sat with a bucket and a boot brush, rinsing soot off his boots. He'd been rinsing them since before Ruth Ann walked over from her daughter's car.

Ruth Ann stood in her gray zip-up coat with her hands in her pockets. She had soot on her cheek she kept forgetting to wipe. Arlen's ring hung on a cord inside her collar, where it had hung for seven years.

"Bo," she said. "How long was the tanker at my hydrant?"

He didn't look up from the page. "The report covers it."

"Then let me read the report."

"It's on file at the hall." He turned the folder a little, closing it. "I'll walk you through the whole thing when things settle. You've got enough this morning."

The county paper's man wrote something in his pad. Hoyt Mullins from the feed store stood with his arms crossed, looking at the chimney.

Ruth Ann walked past Bo to the tailgate. Junior's ears were red. His turnout pants were borrowed and too short.

"Junior."

He kept brushing.

"I served you lunch for six years. Did you open my hydrant?"

The brush stopped. He looked at the ground, at the frost, at the county road. He was nineteen and he looked twelve.

"Ruth Ann." Bo's voice had gone soft and patient, the voice he used on claims. "The boy's been up all night. Let him be."

She looked at Bo then. In his jacket pocket, tucked behind the flap, she could see the corner of a yellow paper - the color of a carbon copy, the kind that came in a book, the kind that went through the typewriter at the hall.

Bo's hand came down flat over his pocket. Casual. Like a man checking for his keys.

Ruth Ann got her spiral notebook out of the truck and opened it to a clean page. Bills on the left side of that book, going back to 1991. On this page she wrote the date across the top.

Then she wrote 6:40 a.m., and under it: Bo read the cause off a typed page. Not a mark on it. Still dark when he got here.

She closed the notebook and looked at the smoking hole where her kitchen had been.

A man does not type a report in a burning yard.