The Fire Within

by Dana Marie Bell

  Beth took less time than she thought at the office. There were a few messages from Mr. Blake—she’d have to deal with them soon, but first she wanted to sink her hands into the mess Kensington had made of her apartment. She made one phone call before heading over. “Andi?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Are you busy right now?”

  Beth heard the rustling of papers. “I can free up an hour or two. Why?”

  “We, Dante and I, think the killer was after something and trashed my place to get it. I need help on clean-up, but I also need help looking for anything he might have left behind.”

  “I’m on my way. Anything I should bring?”

  “Six gallons of Mr. Clean and a bazooka to kill the guy who did this.”

  Andi laughed. “Sure thing. See you soon.”

  Beth hung up and headed back out to Dante’s car. She headed for her apartment, ready to face the mess inside.

  When she entered the apartment the smell of kerosene and rotting food was so strong she had to take a quick step back. With her hand over her mouth she ran for the sliding glass doors and threw them wide, hoping the fresh air would blow some of the stench away.

  It had gotten bad much faster than expected.

  Turning, she surveyed the mess. There was no way, absolutely no way she could let this mess sit until Dante was ready to help her. She was doubly glad she’d called Andi.

  Sometimes it paid to have friends.

  “Mother of God.”

  Beth grimaced at the shocked tone. Andi stepped gingerly into her apartment, her high-heeled boots wobbling as she stepped on a broken bit of end table. “Your friend threw one hell of a party, didn’t he?”

  “The son of a bitch shot Dante.”

  Andi almost fell on her ass. “What?”

  “Yup. We went to talk to this guy, Robert Kensington. We think he’s blackmailing either Todd Blessing or was blackmailing Jennifer Blake. We’re not exactly sure.”

  “You’ve got Sam looking into it, right?” Andi picked up the table leg and set it gently aside.

  “She’s checking everything she can.”

  “Are you sure Kensington is your man? Because if he’s not, then whoever did this might come back.”

  “I’m reasonably sure, but...” Beth remembered how Dante told her he wasn’t sure Kensington was a Shem. “But he might not be.”

  “Do you think the bad guy knows Sam is working with you? If so, he might go after her next.”

  Beth cursed. “I didn’t think of that. I’d better call her and warn her.”

  Surprisingly, Sam picked up on the first ring. “Hello? Beth? What’s wrong?”

  “I forgot to tell you yesterday, but my apartment was broken into and trashed.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Sam sounded breathless with fear. They’d seen each other just yesterday, but Sam was probably in the zone and wasn’t thinking straight. “It’s okay, Sammie. I’m fine. I wasn’t there when it happened.”

  “Oh. Oh, good.” Her relief was obvious. “Do you need anything? Should I come over?”

  Beth smiled. As flaky as Sam was, she was loyal to the bone. If Beth asked, Sam would rush over to help. “Andi’s here helping me clean.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes, then.”

  “Wait, Sammie. That’s not why I called.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “Dante and I think they tossed my apartment looking for something on the Blake case, or to warn me off it.”

  Sam sucked in a breath. “And you think they’ll come after me.”

  “Yeah. Andi mentioned it. If I’d thought of it I would have warned you yesterday.”

  Sam giggled. “I have Precious, remember? Anyone breaking in would have to deal with her.”

  Beth didn’t think Sam’s pit bull could stop a Shem. “This guy is serious, Sammie. He might hurt Precious.” Hell, she doubted Precious would make the guy pause. If Kensington really was a Shem he’d be far more powerful than a dog, no matter how big.

  Besides, Precious was a huge teddy bear. Kensington would just have to bring a bone and she’d let him steal whatever he wanted. But most people took one look at the dog and assumed she was vicious, and stayed away from Sam.

  It was a shame. Precious was the sweetest dog she’d ever met. She’d seen the dog stare at Sam and wag her tail until Sam got up and fed her, but she wouldn’t eat until she saw food on Sam’s plate as well. It was almost as if Sam were the puppy Precious had decided to take care of.

  “Listen. Seth and Abby already know what happened, and as preggers as Abby is she’d still try and come over and help, so don’t call her. And Dante got shot yesterday, so he can’t help either.”

  “Man, you’ve had a busy couple of days.” Andi grimaced as she pulled on some thick rubber gloves.

  “Dante got shot?” She could almost picture Sam waving her hands around. “Is he all right? No, of course he’s not all right. Oh, Beth. I’m so sorry.”

  “Calm down, Sam. He’s hurt, but he’s going to be fine. He’s already home, recovering.”

  “Is he safe there? You want me to take Precious over? We can watch him until you go back.”

  Beth smiled. “Sweetie, keep Precious with you. Dante’s safe, for now anyway.” She blinked. “Wait. How did you know I was staying with Dante?”

  Sam giggled. “I just do. You think the big, bad detective would let you stay anywhere else? Especially after your apartment got trashed? It was obvious when I saw you guys. Besides, you still had morning-after Muppet hair, so you didn’t just arrive with a bran muffin and a smile. I’m flaky, but I’m not blind.”

  Beth grunted. Sam had a point.

  “All right. What do you want me to do?” She heard the creak of Sam’s office chair.

  “Keep Precious close, and if you suspect anything is out of the ordinary you run. Got it? Don’t try to play hero.” Beth watched as Andi began shoveling rotting food and debris into an industrial strength trash bag. “If Precious growls, run faster.”

  “Tell Dante I said I hope he feels better. As soon as I have some more information I’ll give you a call.”

  “Thanks. Take care, Sammie.”

  “You too, Bethie.”

  Beth smiled as she hung up the phone. “She’s going to be all right.”

  “And if she’s not I’ll take her to Piotr.” Andi paused. “You know she’s trying to get a job there? That’s where her interviews have been.” Andi smiled. “I think she’s going to get the job too. She’s got mad skills, and Piotr’s always on the lookout for good hackers. And I put in a good word for her.”

  Beth’s brows rose. “Um, Andi?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Piotr might be a suspect.”

  Andi paused, some soggy bagels in her hand. “What?”

  “The money that was embezzled from the Blessing campaign came from Piotr. We haven’t been able to track any other source for the funds, and it was directly removed from his account and deposited to the campaign bank account.”

  Andi laughed. “And you think he’d go after you for that?”

  “Well...”

  “Trust me. He’d go after the bad guy, not you.”

  “But he might come after my computer to find out who I thought the bad guy was.”

  Andi shook her head. “Trust me. This—” she waved her hand around “—isn’t his style. He’d hire someone like Sam to hack your computer. You wouldn’t even know he’d been there.”

  “You really trust him that much?”

  Andi stared at Beth, a soft expression on her face, and nodded. “With my life. He’s a good man, even if not everyone can see it.”

  She trusted Andi, and her intuition. “I’ll take your word for it.”
>
  “Thanks.”

  Beth was standing over the ruins of her computer, frowning. Something didn’t seem right.

  “Remind me next time you call for a little help to ask what the little help is.” Andi gagged. The stench was truly horrendous, despite the open doors and windows.

  “Would you rather I had called Sam and told her first about yesterday?” Beth glared over her glasses at Andi.

  “I still can’t believe you slept with him.” Andi practically Snoopy danced as she threw away some old cheeseburgers.

  Beth shrugged. Something was wrong about the smashed computer. Something... missing?

  Just as she thought she had it figured out, Andi called her. “Beth?”

  Turning, she saw Andi carrying a pan gingerly by the handle. “Yeah?”

  “Did you burn something recently?” Andi held out the pot.

  Beth stared inside at the melted, blackened plastic mess, looked back down at her computer, and began to swear. “That son of a fucking bitch whore.”

  “Um.” Andi began to laugh. “I gather you know what this is?”

  “Yeah.” Beth blew out a frustrated breath and took the pan. “My hard drive and backup tapes.”

  “Oh.” Andi stared down into the pan. “So your thief stole the data and then made sure you couldn’t get to it anymore.”

  “I had more than the Blake case on those.” And it was information that would take her weeks, maybe months to replace. “I’m going to kill that fucker.”

  “Did you give backups to Sam?” She held up her hands in surrender as Beth snarled. “Sorry, just asking.”

  Beth grumbled. “I’ll make sure she has some from now on.” Her home computer held the truly sensitive information, the stuff she didn’t feel comfortable leaving at the office. If someone broke in there, they’d find only what Beth wanted them to.

  Someone knew that. Knew that Beth took the important information with her and stored it in her home.

  The question was, who?

  Chapter Eighteen

  “My hard drives are missing, and the son of a bitch melted my backup tapes.”

  He had to hide a smile. She looked extremely grumpy as she threw herself down on the leather sofa and pulled her boots off.

  “Say again?” Dante stood and went to her, sitting on the sofa next to her.

  “The son of a bitch stole my hard drives and melted my backup tapes on the stove. Burned my best pot too.”

  “You don’t cook.”

  She scowled at him. “I can open a can of soup, and that’s not the point. I had Sam check the computer out. Whoever took the drives took them out carefully, like they knew what they were doing, and then smashed the case to make it look like another piece of random vandalism so I wouldn’t look too closely. Now I know why my place was trashed. They were trying to destroy evidence.” She stood up and began to pace like a caged tigress.

  “They wanted your data on the Blake case wiped out of existence.”

  “Which means we were on to something and didn’t even know it.” She tapped out a rhythm on her thigh. “But what?

  “I don’t think it was Kensington. He barely knows how to use a mouse.”

  “How do you know that?” Elizabeth stopped and stared down at him.

  “Don’t you remember? Candy mentioned it when we interviewed her. She said it drove Blessing crazy that his head PR man couldn’t function on a computer without someone holding his hand.”

  Elizabeth grimaced. “I didn’t really pay attention to much of what she said.”

  Dante smiled smugly. “Every little bit of information can prove useful.”

  He watched fondly as Elizabeth flopped ungracefully into an armchair. “Okay. So it wasn’t Kensington in my apartment. Blessing?”

  Dante thought about it for a moment, then shook his head slowly. “Not his style. He seems like the type for direct confrontation.”

  “What makes you say that?” Elizabeth asked. He could see the curiosity practically eating her alive.

  “Because he went down to the station and confronted Kensington. Yelled at him in front of the entire precinct, saying how he’d killed Jennifer, and then tried to take a swing at him. Took two cops to hold him back.”

  Elizabeth whistled. “Wow. Sorry I missed it.”

  “Me too. One of my buddies called and told me about it while you were out, knowing I’d been working the case.”

  Elizabeth blew out a frustrated breath. “All right. Not Kensington, not Blessing. Who does that leave?”

  “How’s Blake with computers?”

  “He’s a network engineer. He’d know how to steal the hard drives, all right, but I can’t see him doing it.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked at him speculatively. “How did you react when you found out that Lillian had been cheating on you?”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I kicked her sorry ass out the door, locked it behind her, and filed for divorce the very next day.”

  “After recovering from the hangover?”

  He met her knowing gaze, and shook his head. “Believe it or not—and I can say this now—it was a relief.”

  Elizabeth blinked and grinned wickedly. “Having your wife dancing the mattress mambo with another man was a relief?”

  Dante frowned at her. “No, not that. The divorce. Getting rid of Lillian was the best thing that ever happened to me. I should have done it sooner, but my Mama taught me not to give up without a fight. Marriage, even a shaky one, is worth fighting for.”

  He was rewarded by her slow smile. “But Lillian turned around and proved that, for her, it wasn’t.”

  “Exactly. And I got rid of her. Oh, I hated Hershman, no mistake about that. The son of a bitch got me shot—”

  “Shot? He got you shot?” Beth hadn’t heard about this.

  “It was only a flesh wound.”

  Still. Beth had the urge to hunt him down and see how he felt about getting shot.

  “He seduced Lillian and humiliated me, but worst of all, the bad guy got away because of him. If I had my way, he’d rot in hell for a very, very long time.”

  “Think of it this way—now he’s married to Lillian.”

  He started laughing. “You know what? I never thought of it that way.” And he prayed to God she’d decide to call off the divorce. Lillian needed to get out his life permanently.

  “Good, now you do. Now can you help me with my problem?”

  “Okay, okay.” He threw his hand up in a gesture of surrender. “Where were we?”

  “Not Kensington, not Blessing. Not Blake. Who does that leave?”

  “Oates, Messinger, Cranston, a couple of secretaries.”

  “Cranston’s a spaz, Oates is a straight arrow, and Messinger is too old to shimmy down a rope ladder.” Beth leaned back in her chair. “Romanov.”

  Dante frowned. “Romanov? Why Romanov?” Not that it wasn’t a viable theory. Piotr was more than capable of hiring someone to do his dirty work.

  Elizabeth leaned forward and clasped her hands between her knees, frowning in thought. “Just to play devil’s advocate here, what if Jennifer was the one behind the thefts of the Romanov money?”

  “And Kensington mistakenly blackmailed Blessing thinking he’d been the one?” Dante leaned back and thought about it. “Romanov could hire someone to get to the hard drives, a pro.”

  “Make it look like a break in, get the data he thinks I’ve got stored, get his money back. Simple. Then we go after Kensington, thinking he’s the one, when all along it was Romanov.”

  “And he’d know how to make the murder look like a Shem attack.” Except there was no way for a Nephilim to generate that Shem stink.

  Even as he thought that, Elizabeth leane
d back, shaking her head. “It’s a long shot. I can see him doing the break-in, but the murder? Nah. But we need to talk to him so we can officially cross him off the list.”

  “What are you going to tell Blake?”

  She shook her head sadly. “I spoke to him on the phone this afternoon. He was not a happy man, but told me to keep going.”

  Dante nodded. “Did you pick up the milk and the juice?”

  She laughed, surprised. “Yes.”

  He stood and waited patiently for her to get to her feet. “Good.” He kissed her long, and sweet, feeling better than he had all day now that she was home. As he lifted his head, he frowned down at her. “Why do you smell like kerosene?”

  With a sigh, she hugged him. “Andi helped me clean the apartment today.”

  “Didn’t I ask you to wait for me?” He should have known better. Elizabeth wouldn’t wait for him or anyone if she felt something needed to be done. At least she’d had Andi’s help.

  She shrugged, and her next words proved him right. “It needed doing, so I did it.” She lifted her head and grinned up at him. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Pizza.”

  “Toppings?”

  “Pepperoni and mushrooms.”

  “Oh, my favorite!”

  He laughed as she skipped her way up the stairs and into the kitchen, lured by the aroma of the pizza.

  “So. Think I can get in to go speak with Piotr again?”

  Dante handed her a plate. “I think something can be arranged, but I’m going with you.”

  She paused, her pizza halfway to her plate. “Uh. I don’t think so.”

  “You aren’t chasing a Shem by yourself.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll take Seth.” She pointed toward the sofa. “Your injured ass is staying right here, where you can heal and not get shot again.”

  He sighed. “Going to see Piotr won’t tax me too much.” He pointed to the sling he currently had his injured arm in. “I’ll wear this, and I’ll take it easy. But I’m going.”

  She made a low, angry sound and practically threw the pizza on her plate. “Why do you have to be so stubborn?”