The sound of sirens always soothed his soul. In the pitch-black night, the throbbing lights of the fire engines and cop cars did not make his pulse pound, but rather made it slow and steady itself. As ever, he was completely in control.

Curtain up! Showtime! Evan Durand lay flat against the porch roof across the street, four houses down from the conflagration. He had a front-row seat in the balcony to watch the actors in the grand pageant. For he was both director and producer of the chaos he had created with such care and cleverness.

They would never catch him, never pin the multistate string of arsons on him. In Like A Ghost, Out Like A Ghost--that was the name of this epic drama, Evan thought as he twisted his mother's onyx ring around his little finger with his thumb.

Both the wildfire in the woodlot 6.4 miles away and this blaze in a house a stone's throw from a suburban fire station were in his script. He was the genius in the Du-rand family, not his father. Let the hotshot FBI Serial Arson Team think they could identify him by his M.O. That's what they were desperate to do. He was so proud his work was getting national reviews now, not just local ones! Finally, the morons had figured out that his successes were linked, were from the same brilliant brain.

The cops shouted at the growing crowd of onlookers to get back. An EMS vehicle and two more fire engines screeched up, much too late. They'd been pulled away by his smaller decoy fire. Firefighters piled from the ladder truck. It reminded him of a circus act where the clowns spilled out, and he shook with laughter. Some carried axes; some dragged hoses. They were fighting a smoke-belching fire less than a third of a mile from their station house, yet they'd been suckered in again. Evan Durand--rave reviews and standing room only; America's firefighters--a one-night stand. And the FBI team--beneath contempt.

On his belly, Evan inched away from the edge of the porch roof, closer to the house. He'd been hiding in the bushes when a young couple ran out to watch, and he'd used the woodpile they had stacked close to their house to get up on the porch roof. Man, if he'd chosen them instead of Jane Stinchcomb, he wouldn't have had to do much more than throw a low-grade liquid accelerant here, then toss a match. The pile, the porch and the entire wooden frame would be ablaze in minutes.

But Evan always chose the house of a woman living alone. That had made the firefighters and local arson investigators in Helena, Mission Viejo, Boulder, Seattle, Salt Lake, Reno, Lake Tahoe and Boise blame themselves even more when they failed. And now that the FBI had been called in, this would make them feel like the fools they were, he thought, and gave his ring another hard twist. A little woodlot fire made them late for their big entrance.

For the first time, Evan heard the woman's screams from the burning house. Rising action! At least the protagonist had great voice projection.

He'd jimmied her front window and heaved the jar of liquid white phosphorus where it would ignite the bottom of the staircase and trap her upstairs. WP or Willy Pete, his source had called the volatile stuff when he'd sold it to him. And all the research Evan had done on it was absolutely on target. He could smell its garlic-like stench; its flames were as yellow as the glare of a spotlight. Its dense white smoke was a curtain ready to go up.

Had the doomed heroine of the tragedy been sleeping through all the noise and flames and smoke before this moment? Had she missed the sound of shattering glass? She was probably so used to hearing sirens that she didn't react at first, not even when they came close. People living near fire stations,much like firefighters them-selves--especially those cocky crews battling wildfires--were way too certain they were safe. He'd proved that.

Evan watched four firefighters charge inside while one climbed a ladder. Incandescent, canary-colored flames waved merrily from the blown-out lower windows, even as the hoses poured in water. Sand smothered WP better than water, but this would work eventually. Meanwhile, the cops kept the growing cluster of neighbors and fire junkies back from the belching heat.

And then he saw something that made his pulse pound. An unmarked black car pulled up and three men and a woman jumped out. They showed the cops something in their hands--no doubt their badges--and charged right through the yellow-tape perimeter.

One of the men was broad shouldered and blond, while another was gray-haired. The third, a heavyset man, limped badly. He could tell that the woman was fairly young and had long, brown hair. It had to be the vaunted FBI arson team.

Now they would realize that their so-called Boy Next Door Arsonist had brought his operation to their own backyard. This fire was just nine miles from their FBI office in downtown Denver, where they tried to track him with all their forensic evidence and wild profiling theories. Evan had a good notion to drive right over to their office and start a fire there.

The thought made him laugh so hard he felt the shingles vibrate under him. He tried to make out the faces of the new arrivals, but they didn't turn his way. Besides, it was difficult to see through the smoke screen created by the WP.

A crick in his neck suddenly pained him, so he rotated his head to ease it. And then he saw the old woman. Her face lit by dancing flames, she was staring out a second-story window of this house. How long had she been there? And had she glimpsed his face? Evan longed to savor this Dante's Inferno--no, Durand's Inferno--but knew he had to get the hell out of Denver. Yet not before he left some sort of insulting message for the government crew. The sobriquet Boy Next Door Arsonist was all wrong. He was not a boy, but thirty years old. Besides, he wanted to be called something worthy, like the Fire Phantom or Smoke Ghost. Speaking of which, he had to disappear now, and fast.

Evan pulled his baseball cap down over his forehead and belly-crawled away from the woman's window to the edge of the roof. What if she phoned the cops? He had a mind to bust in her window and shut her up for good, but that was not the way he operated. Peons worked with brute strength, not with the finesse and intellect that were his calling cards.

Evan scooted to the side of the porch, scraping his stomach right through his black T-shirt, and then dangled his legs until his feet found the top of the wood-pile. When he let go, he snagged his ring, yanking his knuckle. At least the ring didn't pull off.

Fortunately none of the cops at the scene so much as looked his direction as he walked calmly away between two houses.After about a hundred yards,he began to run. He hoped that old lady wasn't a glitch in his master plan. Maybe, with this pièce de résistance tonight, it was time for a break, another change of scenery. Back to the wilds for a while, like that little California working vacation two years ago.Only this time he'd go somewhere he knew, somewhere farther out so he could get lost--really lost.

And he knew just the place.

September 5, 2005

Lauren Taylor left the Lost Lake area and flew her white Cessna 206 combination wheeled-pontoon plane over the crest of Salish Range and down into the Flathead Valley. The county seat of Kalispell lay beneath her as she followed the Flathead River and Route 93 south. Though she'd made many instrument approaches to the city airport south of town during rain or snow storms, it was great to be able to just fly by the landmarks today. That always made her feel more in command of her life, which had spun badly out of control.

The firs, pines and spruces lining the lake and Bigfork Bay looked green from this height, but it hadn't rained in weeks and all of northwest Montana was bone dry. At least this weather made for an easy trip, thought Lauren, though she had no fear of flying, even in the mountains. In fact, she loved it. Up there, surrounded by massive granite peaks, or soaring over vast snowfields and glaciers, she found an escape from her great loss.

The monumental tragedy of her thirty years was losing her husband Ross when he fought a wildfire two summers ago. He'd left her with a log house on the edge of a small town, this plane and their son, Nicky, now six years old.

Thank heavens Ross had taught her to fly this trusty old warhorse. They had nicknamed the plane Silver, after the Lone Ranger's pure white steed in the old cowboy stories. Silver was her and Nicky's livelihood and her lifeline to the outside. Their mountain-sheltered town of Vermillion was miles from any populated areas and could be reached on the ground only by twisting roads, which rockslides or winter avalanches sometimes cut off completely. Still, as far as Lauren was concerned, after once seeing the jade green, glacial-melt Lost Lake, its alpine meadows and protective ring of mountains, nothing else compared.

Silver and six other pontoon or ice-runner aircraft flew everything--from mail and food, to hikers and skiers--between Vermillion and Kalispell. Her plane could seat up to six, but Lauren usually took out the back four seats for cargo. Today she was picking up newspapers, mail and cartons of dairy products for the general store, plus one passenger, a hiker named Rocky Mars-ton who had contacted her via her Web site.

From Kalispell it was an hour's flight to Vermillion and Lost Lake. At three hundred dollars an hour per passenger, she figured this Marston guy must really like solo hiking. There were fewer passengers in the summer than in the winter when the ski lodge was open. If Mars-ton had bargained with her, she might have come down in price, but he'd e-mailed her only once from Phoenix. She was grateful for the money. Nicky's birthday was coming up, and she wanted to buy him a beginner's mountain bike.

"Cessna Niner One Zulu," came the crackling voice on her radio, answering h...