The woman was playing him. The second the steel doors parted, he all but shot out of the elevator, heading for the precinct entrance. “Never mind,” he ground out. “You want to drive? Because if you do, we’ll take your car.”
She preceded him outside. There was a soft spring breeze rustling through everything, quietly reminding them that at any moment, it could pick up and fan any flames it encountered.
“You don’t trust me with your car?” she asked. Typical male, she thought.
“I don’t trust anybody with my car,” he told her. “I spent too much time, effort and money restoring her to just hand the keys over to someone else.”
Sounded like the man was obsessed with his car, she thought. The smile she raised to her lips was the embodiment of serenity. “You can drive,” she told him. “It’s okay.”
She was yanking his chain—and a few other things, as well. He led the way to his car, parked over in the third row. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re laughing at me?”
The woman looked as if she was seriously considering the question. “My first guess would be insecurity,” she said brightly.
“Your first guess would be wrong,” he retorted.
She paused before the cream-colored two-seater. She wasn’t really up on cars, but she recognized it as a classic. “It really is a beauty,” she told him.
The compliment instantly softened him. “Thanks.” He pressed the security button on his key chain and released the locks. “You have the list of sites where the fires took place?” he asked. Since she’d already gotten in on her side, he slid in behind the steering wheel—and saw that instead of buckling up, she was holding up several sheets of paper. He presumed they were the list he’d referred to. “Okay, where to first?”
“How about MacArthur and Main?” she suggested after a beat. “That’s the church,” she explained, shifting as she buckled her seat belt. “That was the first fire,” she added in case he’d forgotten.
He hadn’t. “Where that firefighter rescued the visiting priest from Spain. The priest was sleeping in Father Colm’s room,” he recalled.
She vividly remembered all the details of that one. Daring, last-minute rescues like that always tugged on her heartstrings. “There was footage of the old priest being carried out of the burning building.”
The media, always hungry for something to sink its teeth into, had carried the story for days, and the morning talk shows vied for the exclusive rights to being the first to interview both the firefighter and the priest, sitting in the studio side by side.
He thought of the theory that he’d espoused. It seemed rather shaky here. “I really doubt that the church is being put up for sale.”
“I doubt it, too,” she agreed. Since he’d backed off, she could afford to be magnanimous. “But we can still ask if anyone made any offers on the property since the fire.” She shrugged again. “At any rate, it’s better than nothing.”
As he drove, he slanted a glance at her, looking for confirmation in her expression. “You’re humoring me, aren’t you?”
“No,” she said honestly, sitting back in her seat, “what I’m trying to do is prove or disprove your theory once and for all so we can move on.”
He knew which side of the argument she was on, and he didn’t care for being summarily dismissed. “What if it turns out that I’m right?”
“Then, most likely,” she recited, “you’ll be impossible to live with and I’ll be happy that I’m not part of the police department, because I won’t have to put up with it. But even if hell does freeze over and you’re right, the upshot will be that we’ve caught the person or persons responsible for all this destruction, and that’ll be a very good thing.” And then the corners of her mouth curved in a forced smile. “But you won’t be right, so there’s no point in anticipating it.”
The woman was being downright smug, he thought. Since when did he find smug so arousing? “You’re that sure?”
She lifted her chin ever so slightly, making it a good target, he couldn’t help thinking. Damn, his feelings were bouncing all over the place today. “I’m that sure.”
The light up ahead turned yellow. In any other car he would have stepped on the gas and flown through. But this was his baby, and he eased into a stop at the intersection several beats before the light turned red.
“Tell me,” he said, turning toward her, “do you walk on water all the time, or just on Sundays?”
“Mainly Sundays,” she answered with a straight face. There wasn’t even a hint of a smile. “There’s the church.” She pointed to the building in the distance on the right. “Looks like it’s being rebuilt.”
The light turned green. Ethan drove over to the church and said nothing as he pulled the vehicle into the parking lot. He brought his vehicle to a stop in front of the partially demolished building.
Kansas was out of the car before he had a chance to pull up the hand brake. For a woman who was wearing rather high heels, she moved inordinately quickly, he thought.
Kansas was more than several strides ahead of him by the time he got out.
“Father,” she called out to the cleric, waving her hand to get his attention.
A white-haired man in jeans and a sweatshirt, its sleeves pushed all the way back beyond his elbows, turned around in response to her call. He was holding on to the base of a ladder that was up against the side of the church, keeping it steady while a much younger man stood close to the top, trying to spread an even layer of stucco.
Kansas flipped her wallet open to her ID and held it up for the priest to see as she approached. “I’m Investigator Kansas Beckett—with the fire department.” Putting her ID away, she nodded toward Ethan. “This is Detective Ethan O’Brien with the Aurora P.D. We’re looking into this awful fire that almost took down your church, Father.”
“Almost being the key word,” the priest responded with a pleased smile. He turned back to look at the church. His smile told her that he was seeing beyond what was currently standing before them.
“I see that you’re rebuilding,” Ethan observed.
“Not me,” the priest answered modestly. “I’m just holding the ladder, stirring paint, that sort of thing. St. Angela’s is blessed to have such a talented congregation.” He beamed, looking up the ladder he was holding steady. “Mr. Wicks is a general contractor who, luckily for us, is temporarily in between assignments, and he kindly volunteered to give us the benefit of his expertise.”
The man Father Colm was referring to climbed down the ladder. Once his feet were on the ground, he shook hands with Ethan and Kansas, holding on to her hand, she noted, a beat longer than necessary. But she did like the appreciative smile on his lips as he looked at her.
Flattery without any possibility of entanglement. The best of all worlds, she thought.
“By ‘in between,’ Father Colm means unemployed.” Wicks regarded the older man with affection. “I’m just glad to help. It keeps me active and allows me to practice my trade so I don’t forget what to do. It’s been a long dry spell,” he confessed.
“With so many of the parishioners volunteering their time and talent, it won’t be long before we have the church whole and functional again,” the priest informed them with no small amount of pride.
It was as good an opening as any, Kansas thought. “Father, right after the fire—”
“Terrible, terrible time,” the priest murmured, shaking his head. His bright blue eyes shone with tears as he recalled. “I was afraid that the Vatican wouldn’t approve of our being here any longer and would just authorize everyone to attend Our Lady of Angels Church on the other end of Aurora.”
Kansas waited politely for the priest to finish unloading the sentiments that were weighing down on him. When he stopped, she continued her line of questioning. “Did anyone come with an offer to take the property off your hands? Or, more aptly I guess, off the Church’s hands?”
“The only ones who approached me,” Father Colm told her an
d O’Brien, “were Mr. Wick and some of the other parishioners. Everyone’s been so generous, donating either their time, or money, or sometimes even both, to rebuild St. Angela’s.” He sighed deeply. “I am a very, very blessed man.” There was a hitch in his voice and he stopped to clear it.
Ethan rephrased the question, asking it again, just to be perfectly clear about the events. “So, you’re sure that no one offered to give you money for the property, saying you’d be better off starting over somewhere else from the ground up?”
“No, Detective O’Brien,” the priest assured him. “I might be old, but I would have remembered that. Because I would have said no. I’ve been here for thirty-six years. I’m too old to start at a new location.” And then he paused, looking from one to the other, before exchanging puzzled looks with the general contractor. “Why do you ask?”
O’Brien hesitated. Kansas saw no reason for secrecy, not with the priest. So she was the one who answered the man. “We’re investigating the rash of recent fires in Aurora. Yours was among the first. We’re attempting to find a common motive.”
Father Colm looked horrified. “You seriously think that someone deliberately tried to burn down St. Angela’s?”
“All evidence points to the fact that the fire here wasn’t just an accident. It was set,” Ethan told the priest.
“You’re kidding,” Wicks said, looking as if he’d been broadsided.
Father Colm shook his head, his expression adamant. “No, I refuse to think of this as a hate crime, Detective O’Brien. That’s just too terrible a thought to entertain.”
“I don’t believe that it was a hate crime, either,” Kansas assured him. Although, she supposed that would be another avenue they could explore if they ran out of options. “This is the only church that was burned down. If it were a hate crime, there would have been at least a few more places of worship, more churches targeted. Instead, the range of structures that were torched is quite wide and diverse.”
The priest looked as if he were struggling to absorb the theory. “But the fires were all deliberately set?”
O’Brien looked as if he were searching for a diplomatic way to phrase his answer. Kansas took the straightforward path. “Yes.”
The old man, a priest for fifty-one years, appeared shell-shocked. “Why?” The question came out in a hoarse whisper.
“That, Father, is what we’re trying to find out,” Ethan told him, thinking that they had just come full circle. He was quick to launch into basic questions of his own.
Again the priest, and this time Wicks, were asked if there was anything unusual about that day, anything out of the ordinary that either of them could remember seeing or hearing, no matter how minor.
Nothing came to either of the men’s minds.
Kansas nodded. She really hadn’t expected any earthshaking revelations. Hoped, but hadn’t expected.
She dug into her pocket and retrieved two of her cards. “If either of you do think of anything,” Kansas told the men as she held out her business cards, offering one to each of them, “please call me.”
Ethan gave the priest and Wicks his own card. “Please call us,” he amended, glancing in Kansas’s direction and silently reprimanding her for what he took to be her attempt to edge him out.
“Right, us,” Kansas corrected with a quirk of a smile that came and left her lips in less than a heartbeat. “I forgot I’m temporarily assigned to Detective O’Brien’s task force,” she confided to the priest.
Father Colm nodded, apparently giving his wholehearted approval to the venture. “The more minds working on this, the faster this terrible situation will be resolved.”
She’d never gone to any house of worship. There’d been no one to urge her to choose one religion over the other, no one to care if she prayed or not. But if she were to choose a single place, she thought, it would be one whose pastor was loving and kind. A pastor like Father Colm.
Kansas flashed a grin at the cleric. “From your lips to God’s ears,” she said, reciting a phrase she’d once heard one of the social workers say to one of the other children in the group home.
Father Colm laughed warmly in response. Kansas found the sound strangely reassuring. “I’ll be back,” she promised.
The bright blue eyes met hers. “Feel free to stop by anytime,” the priest urged. “God’s house is always open to you.”
Kansas merely nodded as she left.
* * *
O’Brien and she made no headway of any kind at the site of the second fire. The charred remains of the building were still there, abandoned by one and all and presently neglected by the city. Kansas made a mental note to look up the current status of the property and see who owned it.
The site of the third fire, a movie triplex that had gone up in flames long after the last show had let out, appeared to be suffering the same fate as the second site. Except that someone had put in a bid for it.
In front of the burnt-out shell that had once contained three movie theaters was a relatively new sign announcing that several stores were coming soon to that area. The name of the developer was printed in block letters on the bottom right-hand side of the sign. Brad McCormack and Sons.
Kansas wrote the name down in her small, battered notepad. “What do you say to paying Mr. McCormack a visit?” she asked when she finished.
“Sure,” Ethan agreed. He glanced at his watch. “How about right after lunch?”
“It’s too early for lunch,” she protested. She wanted to keep going until they actually had something to work with.
“It’s almost noon,” he pointed out. “What time do you eat lunch?”
It couldn’t be that late. Kansas glanced at her watch, ready to prove him wrong. Except that she couldn’t. “You’re right,” she muttered.
“I know. I had to learn how to tell time before they’d let me join the police force,” he told her drily.
She sighed, walking back to his car. “Did you have to learn sarcasm, as well? Or was that something you brought to the table on your own?”
“The latter.” He waited until she got in. Because she’d leaned her hand on the car’s hood for a moment, Ethan doubled back and wiped away the print with a handkerchief before finally getting in on his side. He didn’t have to look at her to know that Kansas had rolled her eyes. “And speaking of table, where would you like to go for lunch?”
He wasn’t going to stop until she gave in, she thought. That could start a dangerous precedent. Where the hell had that come from? she wondered, caught off guard by her own thoughts.
Out loud she asked, “What is it with you and food?”
“I like having it. Keeps me from being grumpy.” He looked at her pointedly as he started up the vehicle. “You might want to think about trying it sometime. Might do wonders for your personality.”
She let the comment pass. “All right, since you have to eat, how about a drive-through?”
He was thinking more in terms of sitting back and recharging for an hour. “How about a sit-down restaurant with tables and chairs?” he countered.
She merely looked at him. “Takes less than twenty minutes to start a fire.”
Yeah, he thought, his eyes washing over the woman sitting next to him in the vehicle. Tell me something I didn’t already know.
And then he sighed. “Drive-through it is.”
Chapter 7
“Is it okay to pull over somewhere and eat this, or do we have to ingest lunch while en route to the next destination?” Ethan asked drily, driving away from the fast-food restaurant’s take-out window.
The bag with their lunches was resting precariously against his thigh while the two containers of economy-size sodas were nestled in the vehicle’s cup holders. The plastic lids that covered the containers looked far from secure.
Amused rather than annoyed by the detective’s sarcasm, Kansas answered, “It’s okay to pull over. I just meant that going inside a restaurant is usually a full-hour proposition, especially at th
is time of day. And if we’re going to spend time together, I’d rather it was at one of the sites where the fires took place.”
Driving to a relatively empty corner of the parking lot that accommodated seven different fast-food establishments, Ethan pulled up the parking brake. He rolled down his window and shut off the engine. Glancing inside the oversize paper bag he’d been awarded at the drive-through window, he pulled out a long, tubular, green-wrapped item and held it out to her.
“This is yours, I believe. I ordered the cheeseburger.”
“I know. Not exactly very imaginative,” Kansas commented, taking the meat-and-cheese wrap from him.
She tried not to notice how infectious his grin was. “Sue me. I like basic things. I’m a very uncomplicated guy.”
Uncomplicated? Kansas raised her eyes to his. Who does he think he’s kidding?
Drop-dead gorgeous men with their own agendas were generally as difficult to figure out as a Rubik’s Cube. Definitely not uncomplicated.
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” she muttered audibly just before taking her first bite.
With a cheeseburger in one hand, he reached into the bag with the other and pulled out several French fries. He held them out to her. “Want some of my fries?” he offered.
She shook her head, swallowing another bite. She hadn’t realized until she’d started eating just how hungry she actually was. If she didn’t know better, she would have said her stomach was celebrating. “No, I’m good, thanks.”
A hint of a smile curved his mouth. “I’m sure you are.”
The low, sultry tone he’d used had her looking at him again, but she kept silent. She had a feeling that she was better off not knowing the explanation behind his words. No doubt, the path to seduction, or what he perceived as the path to seduction, was mixed in there somewhere.
Giving her full attention to eating the turkey-and-pastrami wrap she’d ordered, Kansas was in no way prepared for what came next.
“You never knew your mother?”
The bite she’d just taken went down her windpipe instead of her esophagus. She started coughing until there were tears in her eyes. Abandoning his lunch, Ethan twisted her in her seat and began pounding on her back until she held her hand up in surrender.
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