Payoff by Alex Hughes

thin snakes, poisonous and waiting. A pile of collapsed, charred brick sat angrily in front of the house, as crime scene techs and people in fire department jackets poked at the remains of the house and muttered to one another.
    The surrounding houses up and down the cramped street were solid brick on all sides; this one, if I had to hazard a guess, had been mostly wood. And that was the first clue.
    The second clue was the burned tree stump in the front yard; the grass had burned in a perfect circle around it, that circle and none other. The rest of the grass in that area was untouched.
    The last—and final—clue was the smell, when the wind changed. A smell like ozone and pepper and paprika, the smell of lightning and seasoned food blended into a perfect, instinctual whole.
    “Fire Marshall,” Cherabino said from beside me.
    I turned. He was a short man, balding, given to fat, but with the cynicism that only came from a lifetime of chasing criminals. His jacket was a size too small for him, and he grimaced in the changed wind. “Take a look, would you? No way this was a normal fire, but I can’t find an accelerant for the life of me.”
    Cherabino looked at me. “It might not be the—”
    “It’s okay,” I interrupted. I’d been worried about the crime scene, worried about having to fake it, or push my mind to major pain to read Mindspace in this area. But I wouldn’t have to. I’d smelled that scent before. “You have a rogue pyro, Marshall.”
    “It’s arson, I know. I can feel it. But there’s no accelerant. If you could read the scene . . . they say you can tell me where the perp was standing.”
    I took a breath, that distinctive smell filling my nostrils again. “No, not an arsonist. Well, not exactly. A pyro. A firestarter, you guys call it. And not Guild.”
    And distantly, like a siren a few blocks away, I felt his concern leak out into Mindspace.
    Finally, the exercises were paying off.

Continue reading for a sneak preview of
    the next book in Alex Hughes’s
    Mindspace Investigation series,
    SHARP
    Coming in April 2013—available wherever books and ebooks are sold.

I stood in the observation room smoking, long sinuous trails of gray smoke drifting up into the ceiling. The recording technician coughed and turned the filter setting up even higher, the whirr of the motor the loudest sound in the place, the popping of ionizing energy removing the pollutants from the air. Even with the police department’s recent budget cuts, the filter was a solid, midrange-quality one, good enough to handle the smoke without blinking. With the air so bad out, we needed every advantage we could get.
    With the higher setting, the tech stopped caring about the smoke, and I could focus on the pleasant little buzz of the cigarette without worrying about her discomfort.
    On the other side of the one-way glass, in the interview room sitting alone, was a sweating overweight man in an old-style trucker hat and a shirt full of holes, decorated with the silhouette of a naked woman. His hat had a large fishhook clipped on the brim. A company uniform shirt, blue with white stitching, lay wadded on the table.
    A knock on the door behind me made me look up.
    “Put that out, would you?” the woman said with an odd pushy cheer. A plain blonde, she was hefty, tall, and focused. She must be new; we didn’t have many women in the department.
    I tried to read her telepathically, and came up largely blank; since a case six weeks ago when I’d burned out my mind, I was struggling to recover, my telepathy coming back only in fits and starts. I’d seen enough old students go through the process, heck, helped them through the process, that I knew what to expect. I had rested like I was supposed to, done the exercises like I was supposed to, over and over again, and tried to be patient. I had some of the telepathy back—in the mornings, before two or three o’clock, before I was too tired and it got spotty again. Now was the