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Ferro and I build the list on her whiteboard Monday night. Scene photos, all seven fires, cross-referenced faces. And there he is. Edge of frame at the bandstand, dead center at Margaretville handing out water bottles, reflective vest, helpful, unremarkable, invisible: Dale Prewitt. Thirty-four. Washed out of the volunteer department's academy twice — the second time after a training-ground incident nobody wrote up properly. Works stocking shelves at the ag supply in Andes. Applied to be "event safety staff" for three county festivals this fall.

Including — Ferro finds it in the parks department inbox at 11:40 p.m., and reads it out loud in a voice gone very quiet — the Autumn Glow Launch at Wicked Good Candle Co. Application denied last month, because the event went with a private security plan instead.

Mine. My plan. My gate list is the reason Dale Prewitt doesn't get to wear a vest at Sloane's launch and stand inside the tape line of the biggest fire this county's ever seen.

We drive past the ag supply in Andes on Tuesday morning, unmarked, coffee going cold in the cupholders, and I get my first live look at him. He's corralling carts in the lot — vest, gloves, waving somebody's grandmother through the crosswalk with a smile — and he looks like nothing. They always look like nothing. That's the job security of the whole profile: the world sorts men into dangerous and harmless by volume, and the quiet ones who wave grandmothers through crosswalks get filed harmless by default, and some of them are, and some of them go home and read about their fires with their hearts going like hummingbirds.

"Tell me what you see," Ferro says, watching me watch him.

"Boots are new." The old ones being in an evidence locker's future, if the culvert cast comes back right. "He's got a scanner clip on his belt — county fire frequency, I'd put money. And he parks facing the road." Engine out. A man who likes to know he can leave. "He's going to be helpful when you finally interview him. Eager. He's been rehearsing being interviewed his whole life. It's the closest thing to the tape line he's ever going to get legally."

"You've met him before."

"I've met him nine times." I put the truck in gear. "Different names, different counties. Same guy."

"Partial print's not enough," Ferro says, letting me absorb it. "Tread's circumstantial, presence at scenes is circumstantial, a denied application isn't a crime. DA wants him caught with hands dirty or a confession. We watch him."

"We watch him," I agree, and I don't say the other thing, the thing with no evidentiary standard: that the launch is in four days, that being told no is the exact fuel this profile runs on, and that somewhere in Andes tonight there's a man who's been practicing all autumn for a show he just found out he isn't invited to.

He'll come anyway. They always come.

Tuesday afternoon, we test the wall. Ferro sends her youngest deputy into the ag supply for a can of camp fuel and a tarp, dressed civilian. Prewitt rings him up. And here's the detail that goes into my notes underlined twice: he tells the kid about the fires. Unprompted, over the register — did you hear about Margaretville, three units, they're saying it's the same guy, some kind of professional up from the city working the case. There's a case group, you know.

He knows there's a case group. That's not public.

He's not just reading the paper anymore. He's listening to scanners, tracking us tracking him, and somewhere in that transaction he found a way to say a professional up from the city with something under the retail cheer that Ferro's deputy, twenty-three years old and sharp as a new nail, describes in his report as "pride, maybe? like he was introducing his band."

A professional up from the city. He knows about me, too.

Good, I think, and I don't write that part down.

I want to be wrong. I file the want next to the finding, and drive back to Woodbridge Falls at one in the morning, and idle at the bottom of a gravel driveway I have no legitimate reason to be at until the upstairs light — she's awake, she's fine, cameras green, rotation car logged at 12:15 — clicks off. Then I drive to the cabin and stare at the ceiling where the sirens used to be.

Reyes calls somewhere in there to say the marina file closed and to ask, in the studied-casual voice of a man who's been talking to Alden, how the candle county is treating me. "You sound different," he says. "Rested. It's unsettling." I tell him it's the mountain air. He says, "Sure, the air," and lets it go, because Reyes is the only man I know with worse follow-through on gossip than me, God bless him.

Wednesday brings Wes, a duffel bag, and the worst dinner of my life.

He arrives at nine with bagels for a construction crew we don't have, hugs his sister off the ground, hugs me — I'm braced for it and it still lands like weather — and declares himself launch labor, reporting for duty, point him at the heavy things.

He installs himself at Sloane's like launch-week infrastructure — hauling boxes, drafting parking-lot flow charts, wearing the flannel with his sleeves shoved up, bellowing carols he's rewritten to be about candles. It's good. It's the two of them, the Mercer engine, dialed all the way up, and I watch Sloane bloom another ten percent with her brother orbiting her big week, and I think: this. This is the thing you're gambling, Callahan. This exact kitchen, sounding like this.

"Tap & Barrel, eight o'clock, no arguments," Wes announces, pointing at me over a box of numbered jars. "You've been living in a motel doing — actually, you look like chewed rope, buddy, what are they feeding you on this case? Doesn't matter. Georgie's got the porter on. The three of us. Family calories."

The three of us. He says it warm, easy, no idea he's naming the crime scene.

I say yes, because there's no version of no that doesn't require testimony, and spend the drive to town rehearsing a dinner the way I'd work a scene: entrances, exits, what not to touch, what not to look at directly.

Dinner is the Tap & Barrel's corner booth, and it's Sloane wedged in across from me with her knee three inches from mine under a two-foot table, and it's Wes between us at the head, incandescent, telling stories, and it's me doing the thing I have done flawlessly for ten years and cannot, suddenly, do at all.

Because here's what ten years of practice never had to survive: knowing.

The old system ran on ignorance. I could sit through a hundred dinners when she was a hypothesis — when the far end of the tent held a woman I'd assessed once, at twenty-two, across a campfire, and never verified again. Distance kept the data stale, and stale data was survivable. You can starve a fire of oxygen. You cannot do anything at all about a fire you keep feeding every morning at 0900 with correct coffee.

I know what her mouth tastes like now. I know she sleeps with one foot out of the covers, that she sings the wrong lyrics to everything on purpose, that she cried on a county certificate with my license number on it. I know she keeps jar 001 hidden behind the register for herself, that her wallet's stocked like a prepper's, that when she says structured she means both. She passes me the bread and our fingers brush, deliberate, one second, and I take a drink of water like a man putting out a car fire with a squirt gun.

"—so the inspector says, ma'am, that's a load-bearing wall, and Sloane, seventeen years old, says, WELL IT'S BEARING THE WRONG LOAD—" Wes is crying laughing at his own story. Sloane's doing the voices. I'm laughing too — real laughing, that's the horror of it, this is the best table in the world and I'm at it on false papers.

"Tell him about the zoning appeal," Sloane says, wiping her eyes, "tell him the part with Mom and the easement—" and under the table, briefly, her ankle hooks mine. An accident of geometry. Or not. Her face gives up nothing. Ten years I was the practiced one, and she's lapping me in a corner booth.