Charred by Kate Watterson

case file.” He patted the papers on his desk casually.
    “Today?”
    “Why are you here, Joe?”
    His boss just chuckled. “Okay, point taken, but my list is a must-do, not a volunteer project. What file brought you here?” He put up a hand. “No, wait, let me guess. The homicide yesterday. Am I right?”
    There was a disadvantage to working with someone for years. He might just know you a little too well. Carl sat back in his chair. “It caught my eye.”
    “I figured it would.”
    Damn Metzger . He remembered everything. Carl set aside the file and folded his hands on his desk. “Why is that?”
    The other man’s gaze was razor sharp. “You had a case … years ago; how long was it? When I got the call and heard the murder included arson I wondered about it, and I suspect that’s the file right there on your desk. Look, Carl, I’ve assigned detectives to this case already.”
    Oh, he knew it. He knew it all too well. “I could do it better,” he said evenly. “Come on, Joe, I know it and you know it. I’ve got more experience.”
    “Don’t sell Santiago or MacIntosh short. He’s better at breaking down a witness than any cop I know, including you, by the way, and she’s got that special edge I’ve been looking for since I had to move you to vice.”
    That wasn’t easy to hear. Demoted was bad enough, but replaced was worse. “It really could be the same person that did that burning five years ago, and this is my case.”
    “ Was your case, but I’m listening. Come into my office.”
    This wasn’t exactly a coup, but then again, Metzger was at least listening .
    Carl followed him down the hall and took a chair by a desk that was cluttered with paperwork, but he knew he was organized, just no one but Metzger could find anything in that daunting pile. The chief sat down behind his desk and rubbed his chin. “Why do you think there is a connection?”
    “I feel it.”
    “Well crap, Carl, I’m not one to discount instincts in police work, but give me a fact or two, will you?”
    His smile was tight. “I can do that. There are some dissimilarities. The latest victim, for instance was a woman and the first was a local reverend. A pastor. Middle-aged. There’s no connection between them. Not that I can see anyway, except that table.”
    Metzger folded his hands and stared at him. “The table? It is apparently enough for you to come in on your day off when you could be lying by the pool with a cold beer in your hand. You go ahead, convince me this is pertinent.”
    With confidence, Carl said, “I can do that.”
    *   *   *
    “Can’t be a different perp.” Fingering a glass of scotch, his gaze intent on the face of the woman across from him, Carl spoke slowly but surely. “He’s the same one.”
    Rachel gave him one of those smiles. The kind he hadn’t ever been able to decipher, even after sex, even when they were sweating and breathless in the aftermath, because it always felt like she was on camera, even now, after she’d left television for academia.
    He hated that. This wasn’t a production. It was an investigation.
    “Maybe, but you couldn’t find him the first time, so what makes you think you’ll have any success now?”
    The restaurant was noisy, which was good. Though their conversation wasn’t necessarily secret, he was not interested in anyone overhearing them either. “I went over my notes. I went over your notes from when you were following it. All of it has a purpose and the presentation is the same. Exactly.”
    “How can you tell? Has the body been identified?”
    His sources in the department had said no. Now that he was no longer a homicide detective he wouldn’t get the real reports unless he really called in some favors, and it wasn’t to that point yet.
    He leaned back and shook his head. “No. But we have the table, and a fire.”
    “There are some similarities, I agree.” She had ordered white wine and sipped it, her long elegant fingers curling