Polar (Book 2): Polar Day by Julie Flanders

and get some rest. You're booked on a flight to Anchorage in the morning so you can meet with Nick Torrance's partner. Maybe for once we'll get lucky and this guy can give us the magic link between Torrance and Fugate. But odds are it’s just going to be yet another shitty day so you might as well get some rest while you can.”
    Danny gave a mock salute as he walked to the door of the conference room. “Aye, aye, Captain,” he said, ducking out of the room before the wadded up ball of paper his boss threw his way could hit him in the head.
    ****

Chapter 17
    Jamie sat at his desk and impatiently clicked through the local news sites to read all he could about the reactions to his fires. The night shift couldn’t have suited him more since he could now count on even more solitude. He could find out all he wanted to without having to worry about interruptions from his supervisor or colleagues. Everything he was finding out so far was even more entertaining than he expected.
    His victims had both been identified and while the name Max Fugate was nothing new to him the identity of his second victim was intriguing. For one, he couldn't believe his luck that he'd managed to pick a visitor to the city while searching for someone to burn at the baseball game. The fact that Nick Torrance was from Anchorage would surely help confound the police more than he had dared hope. But the truly fun revelation about Nick Torrance was that he was gay.
    Jamie had known Max Fugate was gay when he'd chosen him, as everyone at the hospital did, but that hadn't had anything to do with his selection. He'd merely wanted a jogger who enjoyed jogging at night while relatively few people were around. He’d started following Fugate after he’d been on the same elevator as the surgeon and heard him talking to a colleague about how much he loved jogging in Griffin Park at night. So it was merely a delightful coincidence that Nick Torrance turned out to be gay as well. Jamie loved coincidences. And this unexpected link convinced him even more that his plan was meant to be carried it out.
    To his dismay, there was nothing in the news about his letters. He figured the police would keep their letter under wraps, but he had obviously guessed wrong about Jennifer Higgins. He'd been certain she would jump on the letter and use it for one of her crime features. He wondered how the police had convinced her to keep it to herself. Regardless, he was angry that he'd misjudged her, but that wasn't what he wanted to focus on now. There was too much to be happy about.
    The police were sure to jump on the gay connection between his two victims. Jamie tried to imagine their conversations about the issue and chuckled a bit as he thought of the various detectives and investigators he had seen at the baseball game. He remembered the clueless cop who had questioned him and asked if he’d noticed anything suspicious at the park before the fire started.
    He imagined that cop and his colleagues wondering if Jamie was an anti-gay zealot out to spread his message that homosexuality was a sin. Jamie could have some fun with this. The opportunity was too good to pass up.
    ****

Chapter 18
    It only took an hour to fly from Fairbanks to Anchorage, but even that short round-trip flight felt like a waste of two hours to Danny. He and Tessa had met with Andrew Cushings and discussed Nick Torrance but found absolutely nothing to link the man to Max Fugate, an outcome which surprised neither of them. They also found nothing in Torrance's present or past to suggest he had any enemies willing to burn him alive.
    “I don't think our guy even knew Torrance,” Danny said as he cracked his window to blow out smoke from his newly-lit cigarette. A blast of the steamy hot air outside the car greeted him immediately. He hated opening the window when he had the air conditioning on full-blast, but he knew Tessa hated the cigarette smoke. She wouldn't let him smoke in her car and he actually felt