Those thoughts had crossed her mind, but only fleetingly. She shook her head. “I’m more afraid of spending night after night with a nagging conscience that won’t let me forget that I didn’t do all I could to save someone. That because I hesitated or wasn’t there to save them, someone died. There are enough things to feel guilty about in this world without adding to the sum total.”
She didn’t want to continue focusing on herself or her reaction to things. There was a more important topic to pursue. “So, did you find out anything useful?” she pressed.
What did she think she missed? “You were only gone a few minutes,” he reminded her. The rest of the time, she’d been with him every step of the way—not that he really minded it. Even with soot on her face, the woman was extremely easy on the eyes.
“Crucial things can be said in less than a minute,” she observed. Was he deliberately being evasive? Had he learned something?
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Ethan said. “But nothing noteworthy was ascertained.” He looked back at the building. The firemen had contained the blaze and only a section of the building had been destroyed. But it was still going to have to be evacuated for a good chunk of time while reconstruction was undertaken. “We’ll know more when the ashes cool off and we can conduct a thorough search.”
“That’s my department,” Kansas reminded him, taking pleasure in the fact that—as a fire investigator—her work took priority over his.
“Not tonight.” He saw her eyes narrow, like someone getting ready for a fight. “Look, I don’t want to have to go over your head,” he warned her. He and the task force had dibs and that was that.
“And I don’t want to have to take yours off,” she fired back with feeling. “So back off. This is my investigation, O’Brien. Someone is burning down buildings in Aurora.”
“And running the risk of killing people while he’s doing it,” Ethan concluded. “Dead people fall under my jurisdiction.” And that, he felt, terminated the argument.
“And investigating man-made fires comes under mine,” she insisted.
She didn’t give an inch. Why didn’t that surprise him?
“So you work together.”
They turned in unison to see who had made the simple declaration. It had come from Brian Cavanaugh, the chief of police. When Dax had called him, Brian had lost no time getting to the site of the latest unexplained fire.
Brian looked from his new nephew to the woman Ethan was having a difference of opinion with. He saw not just a clash of temperaments as they fought over jurisdiction, but something more.
Something that, of late, he’d found himself privy to more than a few times. There had to be something in the air lately.
These two mixed like oil and water, he thought. And they’d be together for quite a while, he was willing to bet a month’s salary on it.
His intense blue eyes, eyes that were identical in hue to those of the young man his late brother had sired, swept over Ethan and the investigator whose name he’d been told was Kansas. He perceived resistance to his instruction in both of them.
“Have I made myself clear?” Brian asked evenly.
“Perfectly,” Ethan responded, coming to attention and standing soldier-straight.
Rather than mumble an agreement the way he’d expected her to, the young woman looked at him skeptically. “Did you clear this with the chief and my captain?”
“It was cleared the minute I suggested it,” Brian said with no conceit attached to his words. “The bottom line is that we all want to find whoever’s responsible for all this.”
The expression was kind, the tone firm. This was a man, she sensed, people didn’t argue with. And neither would she.
Unless it was for a good cause.
* * *
Kansas stayed long after the police task force had recorded and photographed their data, folded their tents and disappeared into what was left of the night. She liked conducting her investigation without having to trip over people, well intentioned or not. Gregarious and outgoing, Kansas still felt there was a time for silence and she processed things much better when there was a minimum of noise to distract her.
She’d found that obnoxious Detective O’Brien and his annoying smile most distracting of all.
Contrary to the fledgling opinion that had been formed—most likely to soothe the nerves of the shelter’s residents—the fire hadn’t been an accident. It had been started intentionally. She’d discovered an incendiary device hidden right off the kitchen, set for a time when the area was presumably empty. So whoever had done this hadn’t wanted to isolate anyone or cut them off from making an escape. A fire in the kitchen when there was no one in the kitchen meant that the goal was destruction of property, not lives.
Too bad things didn’t always go according to plan, she silently mourned. One of the shelter volunteers had gotten cut off from the others and hadn’t made it out of the building. She’d been found on the floor, unconscious. The paramedics had worked over the young woman for close to half an hour before she’d finally come around. She was one of the lucky.
Frowning, Kansas rocked back on her heels and shook her head.
This psychopath needed to be found and brought to justice quickly, before he did any more damage.
And she needed to get some sleep before she fell on her face.
She wondered where the displaced residents of the shelter would be sleeping tonight. She took comfort in the knowledge that they’d be returning in a few weeks even if the construction wasn’t yet completed.
With a weary sigh, Kansas stood up and headed for the front entrance.
Just before she crossed the charred threshold, she kicked something. Curious, thinking it might just possibly have something to do with the identity of whoever started the fire, she stooped down to pick it up.
It turned out to be a cell phone—in pretty awful condition, from what she could tell. Flipping it open, she found that the battery was still active. She could just barely make out the wallpaper. It was a picture of three people. Squinting, she realized that the obnoxious detective who’d thought she’d needed to be carried out of the building fireman-style was in the photo.
There were two more people with him, both of whom looked identical to him. Now there was a curse, she mused, closing the phone again. Three Detective O’Briens. Kansas shivered at the thought.
“Tough night, huh?” the captain said, coming up to her. It wasn’t really a question.
“That it was. On the heels of a tough day,” she added. She hated not being able to come up with an answer, to have unsolved cases pile up on top of one another like some kind of uneven pyramid.
Captain John Lawrence looked at her with compassion. “Why don’t you go home, Kansas?”
“I’m almost done,” she told him.
His eyes swept over her and he shook his head. “Looks to me like you’re almost done in.” Lawrence nodded toward the building they’d just walked out of. “This’ll all still be here tomorrow morning, Kansas. And you’ll be a lot fresher. Maybe it’ll make more sense to you then.”
Kansas paused to look back at the building and sighed. “Burning buildings will never make any sense to me,” she contradicted. “But maybe you’re right about needing to look at this with fresh eyes.”
“I’m always right,” Lawrence told her with a chuckle. “That’s why they made me the captain.”
Kansas grinned. “That, and don’t forget your overwhelming modesty.”
“You’ve been paying attention.” His eyes crinkled, all but disappearing when he smiled.
“Right from the beginning, Captain Lawrence,” she assured him.
Captain Lawrence had been more than fair to her, and she appreciated that. She’d heard horror stories about other houses and how life became so intolerable that female firefighters wound up quitting. Not that she ever would. It wasn’t in her nature to quit. But she appreciated not having to make that choice.
Looking down, she realiz
ed that she was even more covered with dust and soot than before. She attempted to dust herself off, but it seemed like an almost impos-sible task.
“I’ll have a preliminary report on your desk in the morning,” she promised.
Lawrence tapped her on the shoulder, and when she looked at him quizzically, he pointed up toward the sky. “It already is morning.”
“Then I’d better go home and start typing,” she quipped.
“Type later,” Lawrence ordered. “Sleep now.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re a nag, Captain Lawrence?”
“My wife,” he answered without skipping a beat. “But then, what does she know? Besides, compared to Martha, I’m a novice. You ever want to hear a pro, just stop by the house. I’ll drop some socks on the floor and have her go at it for you.” He looked at her. “I don’t want to see you until at least midday.”
“ ‘O, Captain! my Captain!’ ” Throwing her wrist against her forehead in a melodramatic fashion, Kansas quoted a line out of a classic poem by Walt Whitman that seemed to fit here. “You’ve hurt my feelings.”
He gave her a knowing look. “Can’t hurt what you don’t have.”
“Right,” she murmured.
She’d deliberately gone out of her way to come across like a militant fire investigator, more macho than the men she worked with. There was a reason for that. She didn’t want to allow anything to tap into her feelings. By her reckoning, there had to be an entire reservoir of tears and emotions she had never allowed herself to access because she was sincerely afraid that if she ever did, she wouldn’t be able to shut off the valve. It was far better never to access it in the first place.
Heading to her car, she put her hand into her pocket for the key...and touched the cell phone she’d discovered instead. She took it out and glanced down at it. She supposed that she could just drop it off at O’Brien’s precinct. But he had looked concerned about losing the phone, and if she hadn’t plowed into him like that, he wouldn’t have lost the device.
Kansas frowned. She supposed she owed O’Brien for that.
She looked around and saw that there was still one person with the police department on the premises. Not pausing to debate the wisdom of her actions, she hurried over to the man. She was fairly certain that the chief of detectives would know where she could find the incorrigible Detective O’Brien.
* * *
“I could drop it off for you,” Brian Cavanaugh volunteered after the pretty fire investigator had approached him to say that she’d found Ethan’s cell phone.
She looked down at the smoke-streaked device and gave the chief’s suggestion some thought. She was bone-tired, and she knew that the chief would get the phone to O’Brien.
Still, she had to admit that personally handing the cell phone to O’Brien would bring about some small sense of closure for her. And closure was a very rare thing in her life.
“No, that’s all right. I’ll do it,” she told him. “If you could just tell me where to find him, I’d appreciate it.”
“Of course, no problem. I have the address right here,” he told her.
Brian suppressed a smile as he reached into his inside pocket for a pen and a piece of paper. Finding both, he took them out and began writing the address in large block letters.
Not for a second had he doubted that that was going to be her answer.
“Here you go,” he said, handing her the paper.
This, he thought, was going to be the start of something lasting.
Chapter 4
Ethan wasn’t a morning person, not by any stretch of the imagination. He never had been. Not even under the best of circumstances, coming off an actual full night’s sleep, something that eluded him these days. Having less than four hours in which to recharge had left him feeling surly, less than communicative and only half-human.
So when he heard the doorbell to his garden apartment ring, Ethan’s first impulse was to just ignore it. No one he knew had said anything about coming by at a little after six that morning, and it was either someone trying to save his soul—a religious sect had been making the rounds lately, scattering pamphlets about a better life to come in their wake—or the neighbor in the apartment catty-corner to his who had been pestering him with everything from a clogged drain to a key stuck in the ignition of her car, all of which he finally realized were just flimsy pretexts to see him. The woman, a very chatty brunette who wore too much makeup and too little clothing, had invited him over more than a dozen times, and each time he’d politely but firmly turned her down. By the time the woman had turned up on his doorstep a fifth time, his inner radar had screamed, “Run!” Two invitations were hospitable. Five, a bit pushy. More than a dozen was downright creepy.
When he didn’t answer the first two rings, whoever was on his doorstep started knocking.
Pounding was actually a more accurate description of what was happening on the other side of his door.
Okay, he thought, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Whoever was banging on his door was going to get more than just a piece of his mind. He wasn’t in the mood for this.
Swinging the door open, Ethan snapped, “What the hell do you want?” before he saw that it wasn’t someone looking to guide him to the Promised Land, nor was it the pushy neighbor who wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was the woman he’d met at the fire. The one, he’d thought, whose parents had a warped sense of humor and named her after a state best known for a little girl who’d gone traveling with her house and a dog named Toto.
“To give you back your cell phone,” Kansas snapped back in the same tone he’d just used. “Here.” She thrust the near-fried object at him.
As he took it, Kansas turned on her heel and started to walk away. March away was actually more of an accurate description.
It took Ethan a second to come to. “Wait, I’m sorry,” he called out, hurrying after her to stop her from leaving. “I’m not my best in the morning,” he apologized.
Now there was a news flash. “No kidding,” she quipped, whirling around to face him. “I’ve seen friendlier grizzlies terrorizing a campsite on the Discovery Channel.”
With a sigh, he dragged his hand through his unruly hair. “I thought you were someone else.”
She laughed shortly. “My condolences to ‘someone else.’ ” Obviously, it was true: no good deed really did go unpunished, Kansas thought.
But as she started to leave again, her short mission of reuniting O’Brien with his missing cell phone completed, the detective moved swiftly to get in front of her.
“You want to come in?” he asked, gesturing toward his apartment behind him.
Kansas glanced at it, and then at him. She was bone-weary and in no mood for a verbal sparring match. “Not really. I just wanted to deliver that in person, since, according to you, I was the reason you lost it in the first place.”
Ethan winced slightly. Looking down at the charred device, he asked, “Where did you find it?”
“It was lying on the floor just inside the building.” Because he seemed to want specifics, she took a guess how it had gotten there. “Someone must have accidentally kicked it in.” She looked down at the phone. It did look pretty damaged. “I don’t think it can be saved, but maybe the information that’s stored on it can be transferred to another phone or something.” She punctuated her statement with a shrug.
She’d done all she could on her end. The rest was up to him. In any case, all she wanted to do was get home, not stand here talking to a man wearing pajama bottoms precariously perched on a set of pretty damn terrific-looking hips. Their initial encounter last night had given her no idea that he had abs that would make the average woman weak in the knees.
The average woman, but not her, of course. She wasn’t that shallow. Just very, very observant.
With effort, she raised her eyes to his face.
Ethan frowned at the bit of charred phone in his hand. They had a tech at the precinct who was very close to a magician when it came t
o electronic devices. If anyone could extract something from his fried phone, it was Albert.
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” he told her.
“That’s me, thoughtful,” Kansas retorted. It was too early for him to process sarcasm, so he just let her response pass. “Well, I’ll see you—”
Ethan suddenly came to life. Shifting again so that he was once more blocking her path, he asked, “Have you had breakfast yet?”
Kansas blinked. “Breakfast?” she echoed. “I haven’t had dinner yet.” She’d been at the site of the women’s shelter fire this entire time. And then she replayed his question in her head—and looked at him, stunned. “Are you offering to cook for me, Detective O’Brien?”
“Me?” he asked incredulously. “Hell, no.” Ethan shook his head with feeling. “That wouldn’t exactly be paying you back for being nice enough to bring this over to me. No, I was just thinking of taking someone up on a standing invitation.”
And just what did that have to do with her? Kansas wondered. The man really wasn’t kidding about mornings not being his best time. His thought process seemed to be leapfrogging all over the place.
“Well, you go ahead and take somebody up on that standing invitation,” she told him, patting his shoulder. “And I’ll—”
He cut her off, realizing he hadn’t been clear. “The invitation isn’t just for me. It applies to anyone I want to bring with me.”
She looked at him. Suspicion crept in and got a toehold. Ethan O’Brien was more than mildly good-looking. Tall, dark, with movie-star chiseled features and electric-blue eyes, he was the type of man who made otherwise reasonable, intelligent women become monosyllabic, slack-jawed idiots when he entered a room. But she’d had her shots against those kinds of men. She’d been married to one and swiftly divorced from him, as well. The upshot of that experience was that she only made a mistake once, and then she learned enough not to repeat it.
Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
“It’s easier to show you. Wait here,” Ethan told her, backing into the apartment. “I’ve just got to get dressed and get my gun.”
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