Into the Flames

by Multi-Author

  Duncan flashed a quick glance at the clock. Five AM. He sighed. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  * * *

  The fire had mostly been extinguished by the time he got there. Duncan climbed out of his truck and stood watching as firefighters spread copious amounts of water over the charred and broken house.

  It looked like it had once been a cute house. A tiny Cape Cod with well-tended gardens that were trampled and saturated, painted in gray ash. There was a small crowd of onlookers, standing behind the barriers the first responders had placed in the street to keep them a safe distance from the fire. He’d been in the business in some form or another for several years—first as a cop, then a fireman and finally as an investigator—and he still hadn’t gotten used to the public’s fascination with infernos.

  Fire was a dangerous, all-consuming force of nature and it didn’t discriminate. Rich or poor, any race, age or gender, everybody succumbed to its life-altering touch. But despite the danger…or maybe because of it…the human beast was seduced by its handiwork, viewing it with a kind of horrified awe.

  Especially firebugs. They more than most were drawn to the object of their obsession. Even when it put them at risk of getting caught. As he always did, Duncan scanned the crowd of onlookers with a practiced eye. He was looking for somebody who had a little too keen an interest. Someone whose body language exhibited an undue attraction for the flames. Someone whose gaze was a bit too bright…whose expression was a bit too smug. Or, the rare firebug, someone who seemed a little too disinterested.

  He didn’t see anyone who appeared to fit the profile in the small crowd pressing against the barrier so his gaze slid to the soggy, trampled lawn of the small house. He found his buddy, Ash standing beside a slender woman wrapped in a fuzzy, pink blanket.

  She was nodding at something he said, her face pale. From where he was standing, Duncan could only see her profile, but he liked what he saw. Midnight black hair fell across high cheekbones, escaped from a messy ponytail set high on her head. Her nose was long and straight, her lips full. The flashing lights from the firetrucks danced over her features, highlighting the tear tracks on her cheeks.

  Seeing her tears, Duncan had an uncomfortable flashback to the dream that had ripped him from sleep less than an hour earlier.

  He shoved the residue of the nightmare away and started across the street. Duncan watched the woman as he approached, assessing her posture for clues to her real emotional state. It wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility that she could be the firebug. A rare, confident few liked to put themselves at the center of an investigation, reveling in the thrill of walking that razor’s edge, where the slightest mistake could mark them as suspects.

  Duncan read the unmistakable signs of guilt in her body language and experienced a feeling of disappointment. She was beautiful, with a quiet elegance that tugged something deep inside him. He realized with a start that she reminded him of someone, unfortunately in that moment he had no idea who it was.

  Then, as if she sensed his approach, she turned. The woman’s wide blue gaze locked onto his, and Duncan felt the earth fall out from under him.

  * * *

  Hilda Bennet swallowed down a cry of alarm, her hand tightening on the blanket she clutched against her chest.

  The sexy fireman she’d been talking to raised his arm, waving a greeting to the man strolling toward them across the yard. The man’s serious green gaze was locked on hers, his square jaw flexed as the wide mouth tightened. A mouth she knew would have just the tiniest overbite, a sexy trait that made her want to nibble his upper lip.

  She’d know that rolling gate anywhere. The broad shoulders, long, long legs, and fringe of dark brown hair across his forehead that always made him look like he’d just rolled out of bed.

  She realized with a start that he probably had just climbed out of bed, and dueling sensations of lust and guilt formed a knot beneath her ribs.

  “Here’s the fire investigator I told you about,” the fireman said. “He’ll get to the bottom of this, Miss. Don’t worry.”

  She swallowed hard, her gaze skating guiltily away from the approaching man. Hilda clamped down on an irrational desire to make a run for it. Surely after all these years she had nothing to fear from Duncan Yves. Surely he’d lost his almost supernatural power over her.

  But as he came within a few feet of where she stood, his sexy, green eyes narrowing slightly as if he’d just recognized her, Hilda realized the power he had over her hadn’t waned in the years since they’d last seen each other. In fact, she realized as he stopped in front of her, his delicious scent heating the air between them, that the years might as well have never happened.

  Because she was still just as in love with him as she’d ever been.

  “Ash.” Duncan’s deep voice rolled down her spine like hot oil, making her stomach clench with need.

  “Dunc, this is Ms. Bennet. She was in the home when it went up in flames.”

  Duncan smiled and her heart stopped beating. “Miss Bennet.” Her throat clamped down and she suddenly couldn’t swallow.

  She waited for him to recognize her, torn between hoping he did and being mortified at the thought that he might. “Mr. Yves.”

  He blinked. “You know me?”

  Panic drew blood from her face and she felt momentarily faint. She’d screwed up…given too much away. He hadn’t given her his last name, yet she’d known it. Her thoughts flew, trying to come up with a plausible explanation. She shook her head, staring helplessly at him. If only he’d give some sign he knew her… Finally, his friend the fireman saved her.

  “I told her I’d called the best fire investigator in the city.” The fireman clasped hands with Duncan. “Thanks for coming out at this ungodly hour on your day off, man.”

  Duncan nodded, his gaze sliding over her. She could almost see his thoughts turning as he catalogued her condition… the soot covering her hair and skin…the skimpy nightgown beneath the borrowed blanket. “Is there someplace I can take you, Ms. Bennet? Family? Friends? We can talk about what happened along the way.”

  She panicked at the thought of being alone with him in a car. Or anywhere. “Don’t you need to go over the scene?”

  His smile was cool, detached. She realized with disappointment that he didn’t know who she was. “I’ll walk the perimeter before we go, but I can’t go inside until things have cooled down a bit.”

  “Oh.” She cast around for an excuse not to go with him. “I…uh…”

  “Duncan?”

  He turned away and Hilda breathed a sigh of relief.

  A beefy man in a police uniform strode toward them, his gaze sliding a little too comfortably over her. Duncan threw a set of keys toward Ash. “I have some clean sweats in my backseat. Can you make sure Ms. Bennet gets them? I’m sure she’s freezing.” He scoured a sizzling look over her bare feet and legs and the knot of need coiling in her lower belly tightened further.

  She watched him move away, drawn toward her ravaged home by the other man, who was talking and gesticulating as they walked.

  She was so caught up in watching his taut, round behind move away from her that the fact his friend was talking to her didn’t register until he placed a hand on her arm. Hilda jumped, blinking rapidly.

  Ash lifted his hand, smiling at her like she was a terrified kitten in a tree. “Sorry to startle you. Let’s go get you some clothes. You’re starting to turn blue.”

  She wanted to argue. The idea of wrapping herself in Duncan’s clothes…his scent…was almost more than she could bear on top of the night’s traumatic events. Unfortunately, Ash wasn’t wrong. She was so cold her skin had taken on a bluish hue and she knew all too well that shock was a danger. So she nodded and let herself be pulled toward the big, black truck on the street. But she couldn’t stop herself from glancing back in the direction Duncan had gone. Just to get one last look at him

  Chapter Two

 
Duncan knelt in the pre-dawn cold, his breath wafting away from him on a smoky cloud as he ran his fingers over a large boot print frozen into the icy ground. “This couldn’t have been made last night,” he told Vance Lott.

  Lott shook his head. The light of the lantern he held in one beefy paw bathed his naked scalp in a silvery glow. “Temps were warm yesterday and it rained. The ground probably stayed pretty soft until about nine pm. Then the cold front came through, freezing everything on top.”

  Duncan stood and took the lantern from Lott. He followed the boot prints toward a window at the back of the house. The ground closer to the structure was soft and sloppy where the heat from the fire had thawed it and the hoses had dumped copious amounts of water on top of the soggy grass. He lost the trail of prints about eight feet away from the house. But the trajectory would have put them at a small window to the right of what used to be a fairly large screened porch. “It looks like our Miss Bennet had a peeper.”

  Vance came up behind him. “That’s what I thought too.” He shook his head. “Sick fuck. Though you have to admit he has good taste. That is one sweet little piece of ass.”

  Duncan stiffened at the tasteless remark, anger surging. Buried beneath the anger was a spark of surprise at his strong reaction. Though Lott’s statement was ugly and sexist, it was unfortunately not unique in their male-dominated world. Men would be men. And even men who loved and respected women occasionally indulged in a little caveman conversation when they thought they could get away with it.

  But Lott wasn’t talking dirt about just any woman. He was talking about a woman who’d once meant everything to Duncan.

  He responded with a brusque efficiency to keep himself from putting a fist in Lott’s face. “Canvass the neighborhood. See if there have been any reports of someone skulking around. Maybe somebody’s seen our guy and didn’t realize it.”

  Lott nodded and left, leaving Duncan to his rage. He clenched his fists, gritting his teeth against the need to rant. The depth of emotion caught him off guard. It had been fifteen years since he’d last laid eyes on Hilda Bennet. Those nascent feelings should have been long dead. Especially since it was possible she didn’t even remember him. He thought she had for a moment, when she’d used his name, but then Ash had clarified. Duncan had been surprised by the quick jolt of disappointment.

  What they’d had back then…well…he was just surprised she’d been able to put it so completely behind her.

  Duncan shook his head, snapping pictures of the boot prints with his camera. He took extra care with the exterior photos, as he would on the inside once he’d received the all clear. In this case he didn’t want anything missed. He already had a bad feeling about the fire he was about to investigate.

  Duncan moved closer to the house, examining the sill of the window closest to the boot tracks. It was dripping wet, covered in a wet glue of ash and water, but the window showed no signs of jimmying. Not a robbery then.

  He grimaced as he considered the alternative. A woman like Hilda Bennet drew a lot of attention. She was beautiful, poised and confident. A tempting target for any man.

  Duncan was afraid she’d caught the eye of the wrong kind of man.

  He walked along the dripping carcass of the screened porch, visually cataloguing the fire’s fingerprints and snapping pictures along the way. With the home owner’s permission, he’d come back in the daylight and do it all again. He’d been razzed about the practice by his peers…the extra time and work of doing it twice. But Duncan liked to catch the scene when it was still fresh, its features newly tainted by the killing fire. He rarely caught anything in those first hours that wasn’t there later, when he took the photos again, but when he did it had been key to discovering the fire’s origin.

  In this case, Duncan was looking for something specific...something as damning as a fingerprint…that he hoped would put another piece in the complex puzzle of a case he was building.

  He climbed three steps to the floor of the porch, testing each board carefully with his weight before moving forward.

  The house groaned as if in pain and Duncan experienced the same sadness he always did when encountering a freshly burned building. Fire killed with brutal efficiency. It maimed the same way. Leaving behind twisted and mangled corpses that would never be the same.

  He stepped to the slider leading into the house, stopping at the threshold, and closed his eyes to catalogue the things his vision blocked. The heavy scent of smoke and wet char overwhelmed his senses, blocking out everything under its weight. He let the stench roll over him, lose its power, and then focused on what was left.

  No rotten egg smell of a gas leak. And as far as he knew there’d been no explosion. No pervasive stench of petroleum products, meaning the house probably wasn’t doused in gasoline.

  “Dunc?”

  He opened his eyes and turned to his friend. “Yeah?”

  “The Battalion Chief wants to talk to you. And there’s Ms. Bennet…” Ash let the question slide away unasked. He knew Duncan well enough to know he’d want to question her before too much time had passed. But she’d suffered enough shock for one night. Duncan knew he was running out of time. He would either have to speak with her or cut her loose. He made a quick decision. “I’ll be right there.”

  He waited for Ash to tromp away through the soggy grass before closing his eyes again. He listened as the battered structure groaned and settled, its blackened bones seeking a new level of stability. He noted the drip, drip, drip of water draining off its fire-pocked surfaces. He mentally catalogued the sounds of the fire crews at the front of the house, retracting their hoses and sharing banter.

  He listened to the sounds of a severely wounded house.

  His heart tightened under the sounds. It was the one thing about his job that he hated. By the time he arrived on the job, the victim was nearly always in its death throes.

  With a sigh, Duncan forced himself to turn away and head back toward the front. He’d question Hilda briefly, have Ashland drive her home, and then he’d face off with Chief Dobbs. Because there was little doubt what the man wanted to talk to him about.

  * * *

  He’d watched as Yves crouched in the yard, running the fingers of one hand over the frozen ground. A moment later the other man had straightened, his gaze sliding around the yard. Pressing more deeply into the shadows at the back of the yard, the watcher felt his pulse spiking as irrational anger surged.

  Yves was like a Chihuahua on the back of his leg. Teeth buried deep, shaking hard. He was always a few steps behind, challenging him to climb to even greater heights of artistry, making him long for the notoriety his art deserved. Forcing air into his lungs, he made himself exhale softly. And felt better.

  Yves might suspect that the recent spate of fires were arson, but he hadn’t been able to prove it yet. And the cocky young investigator wouldn’t prove it. Because he’d met his match this time. And, after the watcher climbed deep inside Yves brain and played with his confidence for a while, he’d make him pay for being a son of a bitch.

  He’d pay in the only way that made sense.

  That day was coming. Soon. But before he could feel the joy of Duncan Yves’s destruction, the Artist had work to do.

  And a fine body of work it would be.

  * * *

  Hilda huddled under her blanket on the back of the ambulance. An EMS tech had poked and prodded her, shining light into her eyes and holding up fingers for her to count. She’d told the well-meaning tech several times that she was fine. She smelled like a campfire and had a knot on her head, a few minor burns, but other than feeling like her world had been ripped out from under her, she was fine.

  At least physically. Emotionally she was a bit battered. The feeling of shock she was currently operating under had less to do with the fire and more to do with the man whose sweats she was currently wearing. His delicious scent, mixed with the clean smell of fabric softener, was yanking her down a very wi
de memory lane. More of a memory super highway, actually.

  There was very little about Duncan Yves that she’d forgotten. Though she’d managed to shove him pretty far back in her mind, he’d forced himself back front and center too many times to count over the years. She couldn’t even calculate the number of times he’d intruded on a date, showing himself to be so much better than the guy she was with. Or the times something bad had happened and her first thought was that Duncan would find a way to fix it.

  On a more rational level, Hilda knew he couldn’t possibly be the god she’d made him out to be in her mind. But her memories of him, coated in the ideological paint of youth, had put him so high up on a pedestal he wore the clouds for hair.

  The thought made her smile.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  Hilda jumped as his sexy voice intruded on her thoughts. She turned to him with a stiff smile. “It’s okay. I’ve been busy getting poked and prodded.” She blushed as she realized how her words sounded but he didn’t seem to notice.

  His handsome face was stern, just like she remembered it, serious as a heart attack, and the rising sun was doing something magical to his sexy eyes. “I’d like to ask you a few quick questions and then I’ll let you go for now.”

  She nodded, nervously biting her lip. As soon as she realized she was doing it she stopped. But not before Duncan’s gaze narrowed on her.

  “Can you tell me where you were, what you were doing when the smoke alarms went off?”

  “I was asleep. The alarms woke me up.”

  He nodded. “Do you remember an explosion?”

  “No. But I was really deeply asleep so…” She watched him closely, trying to figure out what he was really asking. But his handsome features gave nothing away. He was the original poker face.

  “Could you have left anything on the stove? Were you using candles?”

  Hilda thought about it, frowning. It was the question she’d been dreading and before she could stop herself she was biting her bottom lip again. “I…” She wrapped her arms around herself and looked away, not wanting to admit out loud what she feared most.