“That I am,” Ethan confirmed, slipping his wallet back into his pocket. “I’m on the task force investigating the recent crop of fires that have broken out in Aurora.”
“They didn’t just ‘break out,’ ” she corrected him. “Those fires were all orchestrated, all set ahead of time.”
“Yes, I know,” Ethan allowed. He regarded her for a moment, wondering how much she might have by way of information. “How long have you been investigating this?”
There was only one way to answer that. “Longer than you,” she promised.
She seemed awfully cocky. He found himself itching to take her down a peg. Take her down a peg and at the same time clean the soot off her bottom lip with his own.
Careful, O’Brien, he warned himself. If anything, this is a professional relationship. Don’t get personally involved, not even for a minute.
“And you would know this how?” he challenged her. How would she know what was going on in his squad room?
“Simple. The fire department investigates every fire to make sure that it wasn’t deliberately set,” she answered him without missing a beat. “That would be something you should know heading into your investigation.”
He’d never been one of those guys who felt superior to the softer of the species simply because he was a man. In his opinion, especially after growing up with Greer, women were every bit as capable and intelligent as men. More so, sometimes. But he’d never had any use for people—male or female—who felt themselves to be above the law. Especially when they came across as haughty.
“Tell me,” he said, lowering his voice as if he were about to share a secret thought. “How do you manage to stand up with that huge chip on your shoulder?”
Her eyes hardened, but to his surprise, no choice names were attached to his personage. Instead, using the same tone as he just had, she informed him, “I manage just fine, thanks.”
“Kansas!” The fire chief, at least a decade older than his men and the young woman he called out to, hurried over to join them. Concern was etched into his features. “Are you all right?”
She flashed the older man a wide smile. “I’m fine, Chief,” she assured him.
The expression on the older man’s face said that he wasn’t all that sure. “Someone said you ran into the burning building.” He gestured toward the blazing building even as he leaned over to get a closer look at her face. “They weren’t kidding, were they?”
She shrugged, not wanting to call any more undue attention to herself or her actions. “I heard kids screaming—”
Chief John Lawrence cut her off as he shook his head more in concern than disapproval. “You’re not a firefighter anymore, Kansas,” he pointed out. “And you should know better than to run into a burning building with no protective gear on.”
She smiled and Ethan noted that it transformed her, softening her features and in general lighting up the immediate area around her. She was one of those people, he realized, who could light up a room with her smile. And frost it over with her frown.
It was never a good idea to argue with the fire chief. “Yes, I do, and I promise to do better next time,” she told him, raising her hand as if she were taking an oath. “Hopefully, there won’t be a next time.”
“Amen to that,” the chief agreed wholeheartedly. He had to get back to his men. The fire wasn’t fully contained yet. “You stay put here until things are cool enough for you to conduct your initial investigation,” he instructed.
The smile had turned into a grin and she rendered a mock salute in response to the man’s attempt at admonishing her. “Yes, sir.”
“Father?” Ethan asked the moment the chief had returned to his truck and his men.
Kansas turned toward him. He’d clearly lost her. “What?”
“Is the chief your father?” The older man certainly acted as if she were his daughter, Ethan thought.
Kansas laughed as she shook her head. “Don’t let his wife hear you say that. No, Captain Lawrence is just a very good friend,” she answered. “He helped train me, and when I wanted to get into investigative work, he backed me all the way. He’s not my dad, but I wouldn’t have minded it if he were.”
At least, Kansas thought, that way she would have known who her father was.
His curiosity aroused, Ethan tried to read between the lines. Was there more to this “friend” thing than met the eye? Lawrence was certainly old enough to be her father, but that didn’t stop some men. Or some women, especially if they wanted to get ahead.
“Friend,” Ethan echoed. “As in boyfriend?” He raised an eyebrow, waiting to see how she’d react.
She lifted her chin. “Unless you’re writing my biography, you don’t have the right to ask that kind of question,” she snapped.
Ethan’s smile never wavered. He had a hunch that this woman’s biography did not make for boring reading. “I’m not writing your biography,” he clarified. “But there are some things I need to know—just for the record.”
She bet he could talk the skin off a snake. “All right. For the ‘record’ I was the first one on the scene when the shelter began to burn—”
He’d already figured that part out. “Which is why I want to question you—at length,” he added before she could brush the request aside. “I need to know if you saw anyone or anything that might have aroused your suspicions.”
“Yes,” she deadpanned, “I saw the flames—and I instantly knew it was a fire.”
He had nothing against an occasional joke, but he resented like hell having his chain yanked. “Hey, ‘Kansas,’ in case it’s escaped you, we’re both on the same team. It seems to me that means we should be sharing information.”
She was sure that he was more than eager for her to “share” and doubted very much that it would be a two-way street as far as he was concerned. Until he brought something to the table other than words, she was not about to share anything with him.
“Sorry.” With that, she pushed past him.
“I bet the box that said ‘works and plays well with others’ always had ‘needs improvement’ checked on it,” he said, raising his voice as she walked away.
She looked at him over her shoulder. “But the box labeled ‘pummels annoying cop senseless’ was also checked every time.”
Ethan shook his head. Working together was just going to have to wait a couple of days. He had a definite hunch that she’d be coming around by then.
“Your loss,” he called after her, and turned just as he saw Dax Cavanaugh coming toward him.
Right behind him were Richard Ortiz and Alan Youngman, two other veteran detectives on the force who now found themselves part of the arson task force. Remarkably, none of the men seemed to resent his presence despite the fact that they were all veterans with several years to their credit, while this was his very first assignment as a detective.
There were times he could have sworn that his shield was still warm in his wallet.
“What have you got?” Ortiz asked him, looking more than a little disgruntled. “And it better be worth it because I was just about to get lucky with this hot little number.”
“He doesn’t want to hear about your rubber doll collection,” Youngman deadpanned to his partner.
Ortiz looked insulted. “Hey, just because you’re in a rut doesn’t mean that I am,” the younger man protested.
“Guys,” Dax admonished in a low voice. “Playtime is over.”
Youngman frowned as he shook his head. “You’re no fun since they put you in charge.”
“We’ll have fun after we catch this arsonist and confiscate his matches,” Dax replied.
Overhearing, Kansas couldn’t help crossing back to the men and correcting this new detective. “He’s not an arsonist.”
Dax turned to her. His eyes, Ethan noticed, swept over the woman as if he were taking inventory. What was conspicuously missing was any indication of attraction. Brenda must be one hell of a woman, Ethan couldn’t help thinking about th
e man’s wife.
“And you would know this how?” Dax asked the self-proclaimed fire investigator.
“An angel whispered in her ear,” Ethan quipped. “Dax, this is Kansas Beckett. She says she’s the fire department’s investigator. Kansas, this is Dax Cavanaugh, Alan Youngman and Richard Ortiz.” Three heads bobbed in order of the introductions.
It was more information than she wanted, but she nodded at each man, then looked at the man conducting the introductions. “I didn’t say I was the fire investigator. I am the fire investigator. And how did you know my last name?” she wanted to know. “I didn’t give it to you.”
“But remarkably, I can read,” Ethan answered with an enigmatic smile. “And it was on the ID you showed me.”
“How do you know it’s not an arsonist?” Dax persisted, more emphatically this time.
She patiently recited the standard differentiation. “Arsonists do it for profit,” she told him, moving out of the way of several firefighters as they raced by, heading straight for the building’s perimeter. “Their own or someone else’s. The buildings that were torched, as far as we can ascertain, have no common thread drawing them together. For instance, there’s no one who stands to profit from getting rid of a battered-women’s shelter.”
Ethan turned the thought over in his head. “Maybe there’s a developer in the wings, looking to buy up land cheap in order to build a residential community or a king-size mall or some vast hotel, something along those lines.”
But she shook her head. “Too spread apart, too far-fetched,” she pointed out. “It would have to be the biggest such undertaking in the country,” she emphasized. “And I don’t really think that’s what’s going on here.”
Dax was open to any kind of a guess at this point. “So who or what do you think is behind these fires?” he asked her.
She was silent for a moment. Almost against her will, she glanced in Ethan’s direction before answering. “My guess is that it’s either a pyromaniac who’s doing it for the sheer thrill of it, or we’re up against someone with a vendetta who’s trying to hide his crime in plain sight with a lot of camouflage activity.”
“In which case, we have to find which is the intentional fire and which were set for show,” Ethan theorized.
Kansas looked at him. “I’m impressed. Chalk one up for the pretty boy.”
He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or actually giving him his due. With Kansas, he had a hunch that it was a little bit of both.
Chapter 3
In all, twelve children and nineteen adults were saved. Because the firefighters had responded so quickly to Kansas’s call—and despite the fact that several women and children wound up being taken to the hospital for treatment—not a single life was lost.
Tired, seriously bordering on being punchy, Ethan nonetheless remained at the scene with the other detectives, interviewing anyone who’d been in the building just before the fire broke out. It was a long shot, but he kept hoping that someone might have witnessed even the slightest thing that seemed out of the ordinary at the time.
Because she wanted to spare the victims any more unnecessary trauma, and since the nature of the questions that the police were asking were along the lines of what she wanted to ask, Kansas decided it was best to temporarily join forces with the Neanderthal who had slung her over his shoulder.
The women and children who’d been in the fire had her complete sympathy. She knew the horror they’d gone through. Knew, firsthand, how vulnerable and helpless they’d all felt. And how they’d all thought, at one point or another, that they were going to die.
Because she’d been trapped in just such a fire herself once.
When she was twelve years old, she’d been caught in a burning building. It occurred in the group home where she’d always managed to return. She’d come to regard it as a holding zone, a place to stay in between being placed in various foster homes. But in that case, there’d been no mystery as to how the fire had gotten started. Eric Johnson had disobeyed the woman who was in charge and not only played with matches but deliberately had set the draperies in the common room on fire.
Seeing what he’d done, Kansas had run toward the draperies and tried to put the fire out using a blanket that someone had left behind. All that had done was spread the flames. Eric had been sent to juvenile hall right after that.
Kansas couldn’t help wondering what had happened to Eric after all these years. Was he out there somewhere, perpetuating his love affair with fire?
She made a mental note to see if she could find out where he was these days.
Kansas glanced at O’Brien. He looked tired, she noted, but he continued pushing on. For the most part, he was asking all the right questions. And for a good-looking man, he seemed to display a vein of sensitivity, as well. In her experience, most good-looking men didn’t. They were usually one-dimensional and shallow, too enamored with the image in their mirror to even think about anyone else.
More than an hour of questioning yielded the consensus that the fire had “just come out nowhere.” Most of the women questioned seemed to think it had started in the recreation room, although no one had actually seen it being started or even knew how it had started. When questioned further, they all more or less said the same thing. That they were just suddenly aware of the fire being there.
Panic had ensued as mothers frantically began searching for their children. The ones who hadn’t been separated from their children to begin with herded them out into the moonless night amid screaming and accelerated pandemonium.
The chaos slowly abated as mother after mother was reunited with her children. But there was still one woman left searching. Looking bedraggled and utterly shell-shocked, the woman went from one person to another, asking if anyone had seen her daughter. No one had.
Unable to stand it any longer, Kansas caught O’Brien by the arm and pulled him around. She pointed to the hysterical woman. “She shouldn’t have to look for her daughter on her own.”
Busy comparing his findings with Dax and all but running on empty, Ethan nodded. “Fine, why don’t you go help her.” More than any of them, this impetuous, pushy woman seemed to have a relationship with the women at the shelter. At the very least, she seemed to be able to relate to them. Maybe she could pick up on something that he and the others on the task force couldn’t—and more important, she could bring to the table what he felt was a woman’s natural tendency to empathize. That would probably go a long way in giving the other woman some measure of comfort until they were able to hopefully locate her missing daughter.
Kansas pressed her lips together, biting back a stinging retort. She couldn’t help thinking she’d just been brushed off.
Not damn likely, Detective.
Detective Ethan O’Brien, she silently promised herself, was about to discover that she didn’t brush aside easily.
The moment she approached the distraught woman, the latter grabbed her by the arm. “Have you seen her? Can you help me find my Jennifer?”
“We’re going to do everything we can to find her,” Kansas told the woman as she gently escorted her over to one of the firemen. “Conway, I need your help.”
“Anytime, Kansas. I’m all yours,” the blond-haired fireman told her as he flashed a quick, toothy grin.
“This woman can’t find her daughter. She might have been one of the kids taken to the hospital. See what you can do to reunite them,” Kansas requested.
The fireman looked disappointed for a moment, then with a resigned shrug did as he was asked and took charge of the woman. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he said in a soothing, baritone voice.
Kansas flashed a smile at Conway before returning to O’Brien to listen in on his latest interview.
“Buck passing?” Ethan asked when she made her way back to his circle. Curious to see what she did with the woman, he’d been watching her out of the corner of his eye.
“No,” she answered tersely. “Choosing the most
efficient path to get things done. Conway was part of the first team that made it inside. If there was anyone left to save, he would have found them.” She crossed her arms. “He’s also got a photographic memory and was there, helping to put the injured kids into the ambulances. If anyone can help find this woman’s daughter, he can.”
Ethan nodded, taking the information in. “You seem to know a lot about this Conway guy. You worked with him before?”
“For five years.”
He was tempted to ask if she’d done more than just work with the man. The fact that the question even occurred to him caught him off guard. The woman was a barracuda. A gorgeous barracuda, but still a barracuda, and he knew better than to swim in the water near one. So it shouldn’t matter whether their relationship went any deeper than just work.
But it did.
“How does someone get into that line of work?” he wanted to know.
He was prejudiced. It figured... “You mean how does a woman get into that line of work?”
Ethan knew what the sexy force of nature was doing, and he refused to get embroiled in a discussion that revolved around stereotypes. He had a more basic question than that. “How do you make yourself rush into burning buildings when everyone else is running in the opposite direction?”
It was something she’d never thought twice about. She’d just done it. It was the right thing to do. “Because you want to help, to save people. You did the very same thing,” she pointed out, “and no one’s even paying you to do it. It’s not your job.” She looked back toward Conway and the woman she’d entrusted to him. He was on the phone, most likely calling the hospital to find out if her daughter was there. Mentally, Kansas crossed her fingers for the woman.
“It’s all part of ‘protect and serve,’ ” she heard O’Brien telling her.
Kansas turned her attention back to the irritating detective with the sexy mouth. “If you understand that, then you have your answer.”
Greer blustered through life, but Ethan’s mother had been meek. He’d always thought that more women were like his mother than his sister. “Aren’t you afraid of getting hurt? Of getting permanently scarred?”
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