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food came, followed immediately by an incoming call to Scott’s cell phone.
    “Agent Matthews,” he answered.
    Scott only said a few words over the course of the brief phone call, but from the sound of his end of the conversation, we may have had another scene. Scott clicked off from his call and waved our waitress over. “We need our bill,” he said.
    The woman acknowledged.
    “Shovel your food down. We’re headed out,” Scott said. “North of here about fifteen miles.”
    I spoke over a mouthful of chicken sandwich. “What did they say?”
    “That was the Omaha office. They cover all of Nebraska and Iowa. They just got a call from the local sheriff’s department at the scene of a fire in Van Meter. It’s our couple, and apparently they torched the house they were at.”
    “No sign of the couple, though?” Bill asked.
    “Gone.”
    “Why light a house on fire to announce where you are?” Beth asked.
    “Don’t know. But it means they’re still around,” Scott said. “We need to get on scene and see what we can come up with as quickly as possible.”
    “Is someone from Omaha going to meet us there?” Bill asked.
    “Yeah. A couple of agents and a forensics team, but we’ll beat them there by a half hour or so would be my guess.”
    The waitress came to the edge of the table and set down a black folder with our bill inside.
    “I’ll get it,” I said. “We can figure it out later.” I glanced inside the folder, took my copy of the receipt, and fished enough cash out of my wallet. I jammed the remaining quarter of a chicken sandwich in my mouth and stood.
    “We’ll meet you out front in a minute,” Scott said. “We need to go gather our things.”
    “Not coming back?” Beth asked.
    “Doubt it.”
    We waited for them out front of the hotel and then made our way to Van Meter, a small city located next to West Des Moines.
    Beth and I followed Scott and Bill down a two-lane country road. Each home was spaced out by an acre or more at the minimum—a handful of times we didn’t spot a house for a half mile or more. Miles from the property, we saw smoke hanging in the air above the treetops. We could smell it coming through the vents of our rental car as we neared the house. A minute or two later, I saw law-enforcement vehicles and a fire truck at the right-hand side of the street. Beth slowed, and we tucked in behind Bill and Scott, pulling to the road’s shoulder behind a local sheriff’s cruiser.
    The four of us stepped from our cars and headed toward the scene.
    Scott pointed over toward the house as we approached. “There’s our BOLO truck.”
    A white Ford F-150 sat parked off to the side of the driveway in the grass. The house was a light tan ranch, and the left side of the home, including its roof, had mostly burned through, leaving a few smoldering studs. I spotted what appeared to be charred appliances farther back inside the building. The right side of the home, including the garage, was still intact. The garage door was open—a black pickup truck and a smaller dark-blue car were parked inside. To the right of the garage was a double-tall carport that spanned the entire depth of the home.
    A deputy in a brown sheriff’s-department jacket over a tan shirt and brown tie met us at the base of the driveway. He held out his hand for a handshake to Bill, who led our group. “I take it you’re with the FBI?” he asked.
    We went through a quick round of introductions with the deputy, named Marrero. He took us up the driveway to meet with the fire chief, Paul Siegfried, and Captain Partridge of the sheriff’s department. The pair of men stood together, talking roughly fifty feet from the front of the home. We made our introductions while the firemen, nearer the house, sprayed down a few areas still smoldering.
    “What do we know here?” Bill asked.
    Siegfried, the fire chief, tucked his helmet under his arm. “The call came to us about an hour ago. We were on the scene here with our