Kenny tossed him a pair of new gloves from his own kit. “If it helps, I think I could feel the same way about her mom.”

“Camille?” Joe stared at him. “Okay, that’s it, no more soap operas at lunchtime for you.”

Kenny’s smile faded. “You have a problem with me going out with Camille after the investigation’s over?”

“No, Camille would be so lucky to have you. But Kenny, she won’t keep you. Who do you think taught Summer that love is either a terrifying soul destroyer or skin-deep only?”

“They’re just both skittish, is all.” Kenny smiled confidently. “With the right man, they could learn to trust their hearts.”

“You’re scaring me, I mean it.”

“You girls going to work or gab all damn day?” the chief barked at them from fifty yards away.

Kenny and Joe looked at each other, then moved into the building, dropping all their problems at the door to concentrate, as they’d done for two years now.

Inside the store was a mess. The walls were charred through to the studs and the furnishings were either melted, burnt to a crisp, or floating in the mud and debris on the ground. Joe flicked open the lens on his camera and began shooting.

The first thing that stuck out like a sore thumb were the puddles of wax throughout the store. Candles, he thought grimly, snapping pictures of them. “Summer thinks she might have left one lit.”

Kenny made a sorrowful noise. They both knew exactly how dangerous candles were. They saw hundreds of fires caused by them every year. They waded through an inch of water and grime to find each and every puddle of wax, and recorded it.

The hot spot had been in the small employee’s bathroom off the main floor, a room lined with wooden paneling and smooth parquet flooring. According to the burn pattern, here was the area of origin. There’d been a candle originally seated on the porcelain sink, now just another puddle of melted wax on the wood.

“If people knew the statistics on how many fires these votives started, would they stop buying them?” Kenny asked.

“Doubt it. People never think its going to happen to them.” Oddly enough, even if the candle had tipped here, there was no additional fuel to keep it burning, nor was it beneath the burn pattern on the opposite wall.

Which meant the candle hadn’t been the point of origin at all. Joe pulled out his handheld accelerant detector unit as a matter of course. The reading meter went crazy.

Joe exchanged a long look with Kenny.

“Interesting,” Kenny said.

Given that it was a bathroom, there were all sorts of possibilities. Nail polish remover. Oil. Chemicals. A neglectful accident.