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"I believe I've got two staff and a budget." She nods at the slope. "You believe it?"

I walk the perimeter first, because origin is a conversation the whole burn has with you, not a spot you find. Fire moves like an audience — it leans toward what feeds it, away from what doesn't. The V-patterns on the standing trunks all funnel back downhill, toward the lot, toward a neat little area maybe two feet across, at the base of a stump that's charred deeper, blacker, angrier than anything around it.

Smoking materials burn shallow and wander. This didn't wander. This sat down and worked.

I crouch. The soil at the origin has a rainbow sheen where the morning dew hit it, and the char has an alligatored gloss I've seen a few hundred times, and there — pressed into the softer dirt just outside the burn, half a boot print, toe dug in, facing the fire.

Facing it. Not running from it. Somebody stood here and watched their work get going.

"Ferro." I don't touch anything. "You'll want your camera. And a sample kit."

She crouches next to me, looks where I'm looking, and says a word that would've gotten us both citated in Sloane's barn.

"How long you been doing this?" Ferro asks, while I'm photographing the print with a scale card.

"Fifteen years."

"And how often does the gut call it before the lab does?"

"The gut doesn't call anything. The gut requests testing." I sit back on my heels. "But it's run about ninety percent lately."

"Yeah." She looks up the black slope, hands on her hips, and I watch twenty years of small-county experience arrive at the same address mine did. "You know what I keep coming back to? Nobody saw anything. Five scenes, five different corners of my county, all of them spots you'd only know were quiet if you lived here. This isn't somebody passing through, Callahan. This is somebody's neighbor. Somebody who waves at my deputies. Somebody who's gonna stand at the tape at the next one making the right face." She exhales through her nose. "I hate the ones who make the right face."

We work it together for two hours. Shallow pour pattern, maybe a pint of accelerant, something light — camp fuel, most likely, cheap and everywhere and nearly anonymous. Same story as the shed on Route 9, if anyone had worked the shed on Route 9 instead of shoveling it into a dumpster. Five fires in eight weeks, each one a little bigger, each one closer to town, each one a little more public. Brush, dumpster, shed, field, trailhead.

Practice. Somebody's practicing, and their taste is developing, and the thing about this profile — the thing that follows me back down the ridge and into the truck — is that practice always graduates. Firesetters like this don't stop at half-acres nobody sees. They start needing witnesses. An audience. A show.

And the biggest show this county has scheduled — two hundred people, press coverage, a barn full of open flame on every poster in every shop window on Main Street — is Sloane's launch. Seventeen days out.

I sit in the truck outside the trailhead lot for ten minutes, which is becoming a habit, engine off, hands on the wheel.

There's a version of this where I'm wrong. Where it's teenagers, where Ferro's samples come back clean, where the pattern is a story I'm telling myself because I've spent fifteen years learning to see arsonists in water stains. I would love that version. I have rarely wanted to be wrong this badly.

But I file two things before I pull out of the lot, because feelings aren't findings and I only trust what's written down.

One: email to Ferro, copying Alden — request for lab priority on the accelerant samples, plus incident reports for all five fires, because if I'm right, the next one's bigger.

Two: a note in the Mercer assessment file, appendix C, in language dry enough that no one will hear my pulse in it: Recommend event security plan include ignition-source monitoring and site access control. Assessor available on-site through event date.

Available on-site through event date.

I told myself I'd do the job, file the report, and drive home. Now I'm the last thing standing between a developing serial firesetter and a woman who this morning made me hold a paint pen, and the honest audit — the one I'd never put in any file — is this:

Wes asked me to take care of her. The barn, I mean.

Alden calls as I'm pulling onto the county road, because Alden's timing is a natural phenomenon, like frost.

"Callahan. Your interim report reads like a man renovating a barn one line item at a time." Paper shuffles. I can see him at his desk, reading glasses down his nose, finding my file fascinating. "Remediation verified, remediation verified, remediation verified. When's the final?"

"Client's event is in seventeen days. I'm recommending on-site presence through the event date."

"Are you." It's not a question. It's a fisherman watching a bobber. "That's three weeks on a five-day scope. The carrier's not going to pay for a wedding planner, Brady."

"The carrier's going to pay for this one." I watch the ridge in the mirror. "Pull the incident reports out of the county file — the ones I flagged this afternoon. There's an accelerant signature at the trailhead scene, and if the lab confirms what I saw today, this county has a serial firesetter working up the courage for something with an audience. The biggest audience within thirty miles is my client's launch event. So yes. On-site. Through the event date."

Alden's quiet for a moment. Twenty-two years in this business, and he's got the best silence in it.

"And that's the only reason," he says.