Arsonist

Insufficient Evidence

"Confess, we know you did it," A hardened detective pressed for the third time, his dark hair falling in his face. He was clearly aging, although it could be due to the stress that comes with working as a detective in Cambridge. Across him an unafraid woman sat in handcuffs, barely blinking at his questions. She had a calmness about her, a type of ease that played as arrogance.

"I'm sure I don't know you mean Officer..." Feigning innocence through a thick Brooklyn accent, she paused to read his badge. "Oh, I'm sorry, Detective Sutters."

"You know exactly what I mean. You're Laura Pimento, you've been arrested eighteen different times for various accounts murder, theft, property damage and arson in three different states. Yesterday witnesses placed you at a coffee shop two blocks away from The Harvard Library before it burned down. Everyone knows it was you, so confess." Laura smirked at Sutters, her mischievous green eyes glimmering as she folded her long spindly hands.

"You're forgetting one thing, darling."

"And what's that?" He said, his voice cold.

"All eighteen times I've been released forty-eight-hours following my arrest due to insufficient evidence. Seeing how upset you're co-workers are, I'm guessing this time isn't so different. You've got nothing on me." The detective's jaw clenched, she was right of course. There was no weapon, no witnesses, no camera footage of her ever committing the crime, and of course, the place burned down to ashes so there was no hope of finding any DNA evidence. At this time she is only a suspect alongside the thousands of other people in the area at the time of the crime. "You have forty-eight hours, Mister Sutters, better get cracking."

He turned to leave the interrogation room, slamming the door on the way out. It was so obviously her, when he saw her he just arrested her. Was it a mistake? Yes, they didn't have any evidence except that she was in the area at the time of the burning. In fact, anytime a building burned down or a theft was covered up by a fire, she was always there, but other than that there were no leads. Dozens of cases that involved Laura were deemed unsolvable due to a lack of evidence, she's gotten away with everything accused of her. She always had a stone cold alibi, placing her a distance away from the burnings, but never too far. The only time she had been convicted was when she was sixteen she was sent to a juvenile detention center for setting fire to an upstairs toilet in her school. Fire was her MO, every crime she committed had something to do with fire.

"Forensics just got back to us, it wasn't triggered by anything, it seems to have started in the first-floor bathroom," A fellow detective said, the bullpen bustling with nervous and hurried energy.

"It wasn't a trigger?" The other man shook his head.

"Sutters do your research, it's never been a bomb or incendiary device," A woman from across the room shouted. While the whole precinct knew that Sutters was right, they were all angry at him for forcing them to work for the next 48 hours straight.

"Is there any chance she paid someone to do it? Like a Kamikaze situation?"

"I can check her bank records and cross-reference the dates to previous cases of arson, there might be something there," The woman said.

"God why isn't major crimes busting our ass for this case?"

"Because it's an unsolvable case, Sutters," The detective that gave the forensic report said. "Who would want an unsolvable case?"

"Look there has to be a way to link her and the burnings!"

"There isn't! Damnit, Sutters why can't you get that through your head! She's never even in the building for God's sake. She's barely in the area of the crime for two minutes before shit goes down!"