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be a way to get in.

    There. She kicked away a section of metal bars. This window was hidden in the shadow of the alley, away from view of the street. The charred grate had been screwed into the brick at one time, but the rusted screws had loosened. Anya could imagine her firebug crouched here in anonymity, working on the grate until he could pry it free. He’d also put it back into place when he left, suggesting he hadn’t panicked, that he wanted to cover his tracks. He was careful and methodical. Not a good sign.

    The glass beneath had been ripped out, the tatters of chicken wire cut cleanly. Anya photographed the edges carefully. Wire cutters or tin snips would have made short work of this. She made a mental note to get the evidence technicians here to check for prints.

    But now, she wanted to see what the firebug saw, what he’d done when he’d set fire to the building. Anya circled back around to the main entrance, stepping over the tentacles of fire hoses.

    She clicked on her flashlight and peered into the damp blackness. The first floor was a ruin. The weight of the second and third floors groaned heavily on the remaining walls, trailing charred beams through holes open all the way up to the ruined roof. Structures of this era used wood extensively, not as much steel as modern ones. Anya could see where the fire had raced along the scarred wooden floors, fed by decades of old varnish and debris. Pieces of drywall were cracked open on the floor like bits of eggshell, shattered by the weight of walls falling. Anya expected that those bits of wall had been built much later, as Marsh had said, to accommodate rented storage space. The debris strewn above and around her was a jumble of junk: broken file cabinets, soggy black cardboard boxes, melted trash bags trailing from the ceiling like ghosts. Pieces of waterlogged furniture were stacked in massive piles, standing in ashy puddles. Water dripped down on her from above, drops suspending filthy ash in a black rain. She saw no evidence of sprinklers overhead as she picked her way through the rubble. Anya expected that this space would simply need to be bulldozed. She could see nothing salvageable.

    She swept her light before her, searching for the way into the basement. She found a stairwell door beside an elevator. The elevator was old-fashioned, with a cage door now disintegrating on hinges that had melted from the heat. Patterns of smoke and carbon swirled inside the shaft, and she imagined the flames roaring up from the basement. She looked up and saw the ruins of the car dangling somewhere on the second floor. This open elevator shaft would have been a perfect conductor for the oxygen that the fire needed to move throughout the building.

    The stairwell door was blocked by a mass of blackened crates. She shoved them aside, feeling the surface of the ruined wood shatter in her gloved hands. The firebug likely hadn’t made it to the first floor; he’d done his work in the basement and left. If he’d taken the elevator back down, the car would have remained in the basement.

    Why hadn’t the firebug been curious about what was in the warehouse? Wouldn’t he have wanted to take a look around, see if there was anything worth stealing? He had plenty of time and opportunity—no alarm, no one watching—but apparently no motivation for theft.

    Anya opened the metal door and it grated against the warped doorframe. Her flashlight picked out steps above and below, ruined and disintegrating in the fire. There was nothing left above her that would hold the weight of a person. Below her, only a decorative metal handrail remained.

    She snagged a short ladder from one of the trucks and dragged it through the maze of debris. She shoved it into the doorway, braced it on the doorframe, and clambered down into the mouth of the basement. Her last step landed her in a puddle that sloshed coldly around her ankles.

    This deep in the building, she was insulated from the street