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The pack was heavy and he rooted through the balled-up damp clothing. He found a Ziploc bag with residue of marijuana. See, he thought to himself, everybody is guilty. He wondered if they’d purchased it from a sapphire miner. He put it back, and dug further, thinking maybe he’d find matches and an accelerant and close the case like a supercop. Instead, he closed his fingers around the loving and familiar and understanding neck of a full bottle of Jim Beam.

He whispered, “Oh, no.”

Then: I’ve got to make another call.

Then: To whom? Especially now.

Then: This is not happenstance. This is fate. And Fate says, “You need to drink this. It’s why I left it for you to find. You’ll need it to get through this.”

Before he made the decision he knew he’d make, he looked up and saw Larry walking toward his Ford. And he shoved the bottle back into the daypack and pushed it aside.

* * *

“Well?” Cody asked, opening the door and sliding outside. His boots hit the mud with two squish-plops.

Larry’s shaved head beaded with rain and a rivulet ran down between his eyebrow and pooled on his upper lip. “I’m thinking accidental death with an outside chance of suicide, so I’m happy.”

Cody grunted. They’d discussed it before, how at every death scene they hoped like hell it was a natural or an accidental or a suicide, that they’d be done with it in a matter of hours after they turned it over to the coroner.

“Show me,” Cody said, “show me what led to your thinking suicide.”

“Which means you’re not so sure,” Larry said.

“Which means nothing at all.”

“Is suicide on your mind?”

“Constantly.”

“You know what I mean. So, did you call Skeeter?”

Cody sighed, “Yeah. But given the distance and the rain, I figure we’ve got an hour before he gets here.”

“Sheriff coming?”

“Don’t know.”

The two of them slogged down the flagstone path toward the scene, when Larry suddenly stopped. “Hey,” he said, “An hour for what?”

“To come to a consensus,” Cody said, widening the beam on his light to encompass the burned half of the cabin. “Okay, walk me through it.”

Larry pinched down the beam of his Mag to use as a pointer within the wide pool of light. He started with the blackened woodstove.

“First thing I noticed,” Larry said, “is the door to the stove is open. I don’t see that happening after the fire started, do you? The handle locks down from the top, so a falling beam wouldn’t hit it and knock it open. So I conclude it was open before the fire started. So what likely happened was our victim had a fire going-it’s sure as hell cold enough this summer-and left the door open for some reason. The logs inside shifted or sparks flew out or something. Thus starting the blaze.”

Cody said, “Go on.”

“It’s speculation until the arson team comes and looks things over, of course,” Larry said while he slowly moved the beam of his light from the open door of the stove to the black muck that was the former hardwood floor, “but it looks like the fire started here a few feet from the open door and spread outward. The floorboards are completely gone right here, burned completely through to ash.”

He danced his light around the edges of the structure, where the floor butted up against the concrete foundation. “See, there’s still some floor left up against the foundation. So I’m thinking the fire started in the middle of the room and took off from there in all directions. Probably caught some curtains or the walls and climbed up to the ceiling, and then spread across the inside top of the ceiling. With fire burning the floor and all four walls and the ceiling, it was like an incinerator in the room. A fire like that sucks all the oxygen out, so our vic could have died from smoke inhalation before he barbecued-but that’s for the autopsy guys in Missoula to tell us. My guess from working a few of these fire cases is he was dead before he burned, and way dead before the roof came down on him.”

“Okay,” Cody said, “why’d the victim leave the stove door open and crash on the couch?”

“The question at hand,” Larry said, playing it like a game, “the question we must answer in order to declare it a suicide and go home and climb into our dry beds with our hot mamas.”

Cody snorted. He had no hot mama at home, and neither did Larry.

Larry stepped carefully over the exposed foundation and sank ankle deep into the black muck, cursing. He shuffled toward the couch frame and the body, the beam of his flashlight bouncing all over until it settled on a black stalk jutting up from the surface a few feet from the couch.

“You got pictures of this, right?” Larry asked, hesitating before he reached out.

“Yeah.”