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order.’
    â€˜Jesus! Fine.’ He turned around, spotted Ada. ‘Mrs Strauss . . . what’s she doing here?’
    â€˜Her mom’s a resident. I don’t know who that other woman is. Do you know what started the fire?’
Yes, Lil, good question – who, what, when, where, why.
    â€˜Fire Marshall just got here, too soon to know.’
    Lil made a mental memo to put a call in to Sam King – Grenville’s Fire Marshall. While not exactly friends with Sam, her prior life as Dr Campbell’s wife, office manager and pseudo-nurse had given her an unobstructed view of the layered reality of her hometown and its residents. Sam would take her call, not that she’d ever blackmail a former patient of Bradley’s. No, that’s something she would never do, but would Sam – married with children and treated, on two occasions, for the clap – know that?
    Hank looked down at Delia, pulled out a digital camera from an inside pocket and, circling the body, started to snap photos. ‘Shit!’ He pressed the button on the camera. A red light blinked. ‘I really hate these things.’ His forefinger jammed on the button, but nothing.
    â€˜Dead battery?’ Lil asked.
    He nodded and after trying a couple more times jammed the camera back into his pocket.
    â€˜It looks like the fire was hottest on the second floor,’ she offered, switching from the what to the where.
    â€˜Looks like,’ he said, being deliberately obtuse.
    â€˜I saw them take Betty Grasso off the roof . . .’ She felt her throat close off. She didn’t want to cry. ‘She’s not OK, is she?’
    He shook his head in the negative. ‘No,’ he said, and he pulled out his cell. He turned his back to her and stepped away. With sirens in the background, some from miles away, it was near impossible for her to hear him. Her battery was nearly dead as she aimed the camera’s microphone toward Hank, figuring she could plug it into the computer and try to up the volume later. A pair of state troopers rounded the corner of the building.
    â€˜Over here,’ he shouted. ‘Lil, you need to take your friends and get out of here.’
    â€˜Of course.’ As the red light blinked faster signaling the battery’s last few seconds she caught his instructions to the troopers. ‘Treat it as a crime scene. And for Christ’s sake be careful. The state’s going to be here in force and let’s not look like morons.’

THREE
    N ot long after, Hank Morgan was staring at another dead body. Dr Norman Trask –
Dennis Trask’s dad
– dead in bed. ‘Shit!’ He wondered how many hours had passed since he’d moved from being more tired than he’d ever been in his life, to this weird state. His thoughts zipped as he and Grenville’s Fire Marshall, Sam King, got their first look at the ground zero of what would become the most devastating fire in their town’s history. On the barely scratched surface things were shaping up as one God-awful accident. But Hank, who over thirty years ago had been Grenville’s first police chief – prior to him it had been all resident troopers – made no assumptions. With a borrowed camera in hand, and Sam doing the same with a state-of-the-art Nikon, they’d pushed their way into Trask’s overstuffed rooms.
    â€˜What the hell!’ Sam had muttered. The balding Fire Marshall had to squeeze to make it through the narrow, ceiling-high paths of charred boxes and magazines bundled in twine. ‘Are you kidding me?’ A look of abject disgust on his face. ‘Why the hell wasn’t this reported? It’s one thing to have a hoarder in a private residence, but when we’re talking shared walls . . . Shit!’ And with dirty water swirling around their thick-soled boots they’d trudged through soaked plastic bags, bundled newspapers and stacks of God knows what that