Kisscut

The house had a bad feeling to it, and she let herself think what Jeffrey had probably thought when he had found the yellow raincoat. Lacey had been here. She could still be here. At least, her body could.

"Smell that?" Jeffrey whispered.

Lena sniffed the air, and realized that she had been smelling fresh paint with something sharper underneath. "Clorox," she whispered back. "Something else I can't place."

"Those pictures of Mark you took when you arrested him," Jeffrey began. "He had paint on his clothes, right?"

Lena nodded, turning around in the room. She looked around the corner, finding the stairs. "Have you been up yet?" she asked, just as a tapping noise came from upstairs.

They both raised their weapons at the same time, and Lena took point before Jeffrey could. She walked sideways up the stairs, keeping her gun directed up toward the ceiling. She tested her foot on each stair, noting that they, too, had been stripped. Every muscle in her body tensed as adrenaline pumped through her system.

At the top of the stairs, Lena paused before looking down a long hallway. A wall was to her left, a small window that she had not noticed from the outside mounted up high. It was cracked open, and Lena saw some leaves and debris on the floor. Black curtains hung from a rod with weights sewn into the bottom edges. The paint under the window was marked where the weights had hit it, and fresh white paint lined the edge of the material. Lena pointed this out to Jeffrey, thinking it might have caused the noise they heard, and Jeffrey shrugged, as if to say maybe, maybe not.

Lean started to go down the hall, but Jeffrey walked ahead of her, peering into the open doorways of each room. She followed, seeing that the bathroom and two bedrooms had been cleaned out just like the downstairs. She wondered if Jeffrey's gut clenched each time he looked into a room, thinking Lacey Patterson might be in there. Lena had an eerie reminder of this morning with Mark as Jeffrey stopped in front of the only closed door at the end of the hall.

He stood in front of the door, both hands cupping his gun. For some reason, he wasn't moving, and Lena thought to take over, but something about the look on his face stopped her. Was he scared of what he would find? Lena knew she was.

He leaned toward the door, like he heard something.

She mouthed, "What?"

He shook his head, as if to tell her to give him a minute to think. Lena stood beside him, her shoulder to the wall by the door, sweating as she waited for him to make a decision. She hoped he would not wait too long, because stopping to think was taking away some of her resolve.

Finally, he motioned her back behind him, then even farther back. He kept waving her down the hall, then into the stairway. When she was standing on the stair second from the top, her neck craned so she could look around the corner, he seemed satisfied. Lena braced herself for action as he raised his foot and kicked in the door. A flash of light came a split-second later, and somehow the door blew back, pushing Jeffrey down the hallway. A roar came a couple of beats later, and Lena ducked into the stairs as a ball of fire flashed up the hallway.

"Jesus," she whispered, covering herself with her arms as she knelt on the stairs. Lena waited for the heat to envelop her, or flames to eat her alive, but nothing happened. She stood from her crouch and peered around the corner into the hallway. Jeffrey was underneath the door, but he was moving. The top of the door was charred to a crisp. There were black soot marks along the walls, but there was no fire. The heat must have been so intense that it burned itself out.

She heard a crackling to her left and turned quickly. The black curtains were on fire. Lena took off her jacket and beat them until they fell from the rod. She stamped the last embers out on the floor just as Jeffrey pushed the door off of him.

"What the hell happened?" he demanded, touching his face and body, probably to see if he had been burned. He seemed okay from what Lena could tell. Somehow, the door had protected him from the blast.

"I have no idea," she said, dropping her coat and walking over to help him stand.

"I thought I smelled something outside the door," he told her, leaning heavily on her shoulder. "What the hell was that?"

She asked, "What did you smell?"

"Gasoline, I guess. I wasn't sure. It was hard to tell with the paint." He brushed his slacks off, but there was really no point. They both looked at his shoes. The soles had melted from the heat.

"Dammit," he muttered. "I just bought these last week."

Lena stared at him, wondering if he had hit his head.

"Are you all right?" he asked, brushing something off her shoulder.

"I'm fine," she told him, and she was, but only because Jeffrey had made her stand in the stairwell.

"Is that out?" he asked, pointing to the window. The heat from the blast had knocked out the panes and busted the sash. There were dark gashes in the wall where the curtains had ignited.

"I think so," Lena said, brushing back her hair. Dust fell out, and she guessed the ends might have been burned.

Jeffrey walked down the hall, stopping just outside the doorway of the room. He was being careful, looking for a second device. Finally, he stepped into the room and turned around. "There was a trigger over the door," he said, his hand over his chest. Lena wondered just for a second how he could be thinking so clearly. He could have easily been killed by the blast.

Jeffrey pointed over the jamb, saying, "There's a wire here that goes…" He followed something with his eyes, turning slowly around the room. "Here."

Lena peeked in to see what he was talking about. Three cans of gasoline were stacked in the corner. On top of them was a scorched bath towel and something that looked like it had been a clock radio at one time. The plastic was blown apart, and wires spewed out. The walls and ceiling were scorched and the plastic slats of the blinds in the window looked melted together, but remarkably nothing had ignited.

Lena looked at the device, wondering who could have built something so rudimentary. The metal cans were sealed tight, and the clock had not even been co

She said, "This was stupid."

"Yeah," Jeffrey agreed. "What exploded, though?"

"I have no idea," she said, looking around the room. For the first time, she noticed that this was the only room in the house that was still furnished. Carpet was on the floor, and posters of boy bands were stuck on the wall. There was a little-girl feel to the room, with its once pink walls, white wicker furniture, and shelves full of stuffed animals. A full-sized bed with a pink blanket over it was against the wall opposite the door. The material was stiff-looking, as if it had been saturated at one point, then air-dried in the heat. Lena touched the blanket, then sniffed her fingers.

She said, "Gasoline."

Jeffrey was looking around the room, too. "Everything looks like it was soaked in gas," he said. "The windows are locked tight. Maybe the fumes built up, and when the door triggered the clock, the fumes caught fire?" Jeffrey looked down the hallway. "Fire needs oxygen to burn. Maybe the open window at the end of the hall sucked it out?"

"It sure looked that way from where I was standing," Lena told him. "The bomb guys can figure that out."

"Right," he said, and pulled his cell phone out of his breast pocket. He made two calls, one to Frank at the station to get the bomb squad moving, the other to Nick Shelton at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He requested that a crime scene team come out to the house and search it with a fine-tooth comb.