For all the wonderful “nifty-gifties” I taught through

       the years. The bad guys in this one aren’t you, my darlings, but the good guys surely are. Enjoy…and remember that it’s just fiction.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Chapter Twenty-Three

      Chapter Twenty-Four

      Chapter Twenty-Five

      Chapter Twenty-Six

      Chapter Twenty-Seven

      Chapter Twenty-Eight

      Chapter Twenty-Nine

      Chapter Chapter Thirty

      Chapter Thirty-One

      Prologue

      “It was already starting to get boring. I mean, how many times can you do the same thing?”

      “Boring? You mean compared to the excitement of just sitting here?”

      “You know what I mean.”

      “I know you’re so full of shit your breath stinks. You weren’t bored. You were a lot of things, dude, but you were not bored.”

      “I’m bored.” The girl beside him reached for his beer.

      “Because you have no imagination,” he said, releasing it.

      He watched as she took a draw, tilting her head back so that he could see the movement of her throat in the moonlight. The pale column of her neck looked thin. Fragile. Vulnerable.

      “So what do we do now, Mr. Imagination?” she asked when she finally lowered the bottle.

      “Time delay,” the boy in the back seat said. “We rig some kind of incendiary device and a trigger. Something that lets us be far away when it goes up.”

      The boy in the back was his friend. The only person he had ever considered in that light. That gave him certain privileges. Including, he guessed, making stupid suggestions.

      “You got that kind of device, bozo? And something to use for the trigger? Like what, man?”

      “I don’t know what it would take, but I can find out. You can find out how to do anything on the web. Just Google nuclear bomb and you could build one.”

      “Because if you don’t have it already,” he went on, ignoring the crap-spew, “then you’d have to go out and buy it. All purchases are traceable, but something like that…Besides, all of that’s gonna to leave behind evidence.”

      “In a fire—”

      “Because that is the key to success in any criminal activity, my friend. Leave nothing behind. Nothing they can play their little CSI games on.”

      In the resulting silence, he retrieved his beer, draining it in one swallow. Stolen bottle by bottle from his father’s basement fridge, there was never quite enough to get a good buzz going. Especially not when it had to be shared.

      “As if,” his friend said. “That’s shit anyway. Maybe up North they do all that, but not down here. You think the pissant state labs here have got stuff like that?”

      “The feds do.”

      “The feds?” the girl repeated.

      “ATF. They’re the ones who broke the other case.”

      “People saw ’em, dude. They left tire tracks, for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t take a genius—”

      “Maybe it does.”

      Another silence as the other two tried to figure out what he meant. And since he wasn’t exactly sure…

      “What does that mean?” the boy in the back finally asked.

      “All you have to be to carry out any crime is smarter than the cops, right?” He glanced back, pressing for agreement.

      His friend shrugged. “Yeah. I guess.”

      “Actually, you’ve only got to be smarter than the smartest cop. He doesn’t figure it out, the rest sure won’t.”

      “You want to give the cops IQ tests?” The girl laughed, a sound that was beginning to get on his nerves. “We see which of them is the smartest and…what? Plan to do something criminal that even he can’t figure out?”

      She was being sarcastic, what passed for wit in her narrow world. Like that saying about the mouths of babes, the simplicity of it seemed to loop over and over inside his head.

      See which one of them is the smartest and do something even he can’t figure out.

      And if he couldn’t outsmart the local constabulary, he needed to reevaluate his life goals. They thought they were so fucking smart with those patrols. He’d love to be able to circumvent them. Set one more fire, just to prove he could.

      But the risks were too great. He wasn’t going to risk his future. He had that all planned out, and it didn’t include any of the things a conviction would entail. Whatever he did to prove to those bozos that he wasn’t defeated would, like the fires, have to be something that they could never trace back to him. Or to anyone associated with him.

      He’d had lots of time during the summer to think about the way to set those fires without leaving evidence. And he’d been right about all of it. The cops had nothing.

      With school started, he’d have less time. So…something simpler. But without the risk, would the satisfaction be the same?

      There had to be a way to feel the same exhilaration he’d felt watching through his father’s binoculars as those churches went up in flames.

      “Exactly,” he said. “Something he can’t figure out. Or trace back to us. Something like the fires. Only better.”

      “Like what?” the boy in the back asked.

      “I don’t know yet,” he answered truthfully.

      Lower risk. Same exhilaration. Raise the stakes in the game with the cops without raising the stakes for himself.

      To do that meant that the risk would have to be very high for somebody else. But after all, that really wasn’t his problem.

      One

      Lindsey Sloan hesitated, her knuckles hovering just beneath the metal plaque on the door. David Campbell and then below the name in smaller letters, Principal.

      Although it was unusual for Dave to leave