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door handle when she realized Brian had come up beside her.
    He held out his hand and then turned it over. Lynda’s earrings filled his palm. “They were hot. I took them off so they couldn’t burn her anymore.”
    He looked lost and devastated. He needed reassurance, but she had none to give. She put the earrings in her pocket and then gave him a quick hug. “Thank you—for everything.”
    Two men, a firefighter and an ambulance attendant, climbed in back with Lynda. They worked with quiet efficiency in the cramped space, one cutting off her clothes, the other hanging an IV.
    “How is the pain now?” Catherine heard one of them ask.
    “Better,” Lynda murmured.
    “There aren’t any medals for bravery around here. I want you to tell me when it hurts so I can do something about it.”
    “I will.”
    The depth of relief in Lynda’s voice made Catherine flinch. Lynda never gave in to pain. She’d even refused aspirin when she’d broken a tooth and exposed the nerve.
    Catherine felt something in her hand and looked down at flecks of Lynda’s hair caught between her fingers. She rolled them in her palm until they turned into a fine powder.
    She tried, but couldn’t stop her tears. What was to become of her beautiful, carefree daughter?

4
    R ICK SAWYER SPOTTED THE ROILING BLACK SMOKE from the car fire six blocks away. He tapped his engineer’s arm and pointed. Steve McMahon nodded.
    “Looks like it’s been going for a while,” Rick said. The fire was in the middle of an apartment complex in the poorer section of their district, and was most likely set by someone covering a theft. Car fires with bodies inside were rarely set in public places.
    Steve slowed and hit the air horn as they neared an intersection, then swung the fire engine into the turn lane to go around the stopped traffic. Although bored with being at a slow firehouse, Rick liked his crew, especially his engineer. Steve knew his district and wasn’t a frustrated race car driver. He handled the fire engine with such finesse it could have been a sports car, and he had the uncanny knack of knowing precisely how Rick wanted to fight a fire from the moment they arrived on the scene.
    “Hey, Captain—look over there,” Paul Murdoch said over the intercom.
    Rick twisted in his seat to look out the back where the rookie pointed. Paul had spotted the fire. His grin of anticipation at responding to his first fire exposed every tooth in his mouth.
    “That’s it all right.” Rick gave him a thumbs-up signal and turned back around, shaking his head.
    Steve laughed. He’d heard the exchange through the headset that connected the cab to the rear-facing back seat. To Rick, he said, “You forget what it was like when you first came on until you get a rookie to remind you.”
    Rick had been with the Sacramento Fire Department for eighteen years and could remember his first fire as clearly as if it had happened his last shift. His baptism had been more memorable than most—a warehouse fire where he’d found a transient still alive when every rule of medicine said he should have been long dead. Nothing in the intervening years had come close to the horror he’d felt that night. Now the ones he remembered were the saves. The man whose heart had stopped beating, who brought a cake to the firehouse three weeks later; the five-year-old girl they’d pulled from the bottom of a swimming pool, whose mother now brought her to the firehouse every year on the day she was rescued to celebrate her rebirth day; the thirteen-year-old who wrote them a letter thanking them for rescuing his dog from a burning garage.
    Steve pulled into the apartment complex and around the back where they were greeted by anexcited man waving his arms. The car was an Oldsmobile, a ‘74 or ‘75, lowered, with junk rims and small tires used for spares in a lot of new cars. Rick called dispatch and told them that there were no structures involved and that their engine could handle the call,