by Gina Wilkins
“He usually waits a few weeks between hits. You should have time to take a break while the other investigators pursue leads.”
“That’s the thing—we have no leads,” Dan growled. “The guy’s slick, I’ll give him that. He’s not leaving clues.”
“He’ll screw up—and when he does, you’ll catch him.”
“Yeah, but that means he’ll have to strike again first. We’ve had one death because of this guy so far. I don’t want anyone else endangered, including our firefighters.”
“You’ll catch him,” Lindsey predicted again.
“Damn straight. But not if I’m off on a vacation. Besides, who takes vacations this time of year?”
“People who are tired and need a rest?”
Dan only shrugged and filled his mouth with another forkful of cake.
“This has been nice,” he said a few minutes later, when his plate had been cleaned and the last sip of iced tea drained. “You and I haven’t had a chance to sit down and talk much lately—not without you holding a notebook in your hand, anyway.”
“No. You’ve been so busy we’ve hardly seen each other since B.J. was home for Dad’s funeral.”
The mention of her late father made Dan’s smile dim a little. “So, you’ve been doing okay? Living here by yourself, I mean.”
“I’m fine,” she answered gently. “I miss my dad, of course, but he was so ill and so debilitated that I knew he was ready to go. And I’ve been on my own before, you know. I lived alone for three years before I moved back two years ago to take care of Dad.”
“You let me know if you need anything, you hear? I promised B.J. I’d keep an eye on you.”
Her teeth gritted. “Thanks, but I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.”
“Of course you are.” He glanced at his watch, which kept him from seeing the way her brows dipped in response to his slightly patronizing tone. “As much as I’ve enjoyed this, I’ve got to go. I have things to do at the station.”
She walked with him to the door. “Try to go home at a reasonable hour tonight,” she advised him. “You won’t be doing anyone any good if you collapse from exhaustion.”
He chuckled and reached out to ruffle her hair again. “You sound just like my sister.”
“Well, I’m not your sister, and if you do that to my hair one more time, I’m going to sink my teeth into your hand.”
The snarled threat only made him laugh. “Now you really sound like my sister.”
Clenching her teeth tightly together, she opened the door, then forced herself to say pleasantly, “Bye, Dan. Thank you again for the birthday present.”
“You’re welcome.”
Some impulse made her speak, just as Dan started down the front steps. “I’m thinking about selling the house.”
He stopped and turned to look at her in obvious surprise. “No kidding? Why? Is it too much for you to keep up?”
“No. I can handle the maintenance. I’m considering looking for a job in a bigger city. Dallas or Atlanta, maybe.”
“Oh.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, looking as though he didn’t quite know how to respond. “Well…I can see where you’d have better career prospects in a bigger market, but…you’d be missed here.”
She noted that he didn’t say who would be missing her if she left. “I haven’t really made a final decision yet. I’m just mulling it over.”
“I see. Well, you do what you think is best for your future. I’ve gotta go, okay? See you around.”
“Yeah.” Lindsey leaned against the doorjamb and watched him climb into his car. “See you around, Dan.”
Sometime later she carried the unicorn into her bedroom and set it on the dresser. Her childhood collection had been packed away since she’d left home for college—not that Dan would know that. It had been years since he’d seen the inside of her bedroom.
He probably still pictured ruffles and teddy bears, she thought glumly.
Stupid man.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror attached to one of her closet doors. A low groan escaped her as she studied the grubby clothes that dwarfed her petite figure, and the fuzzy house shoes that would have looked more at home at a teen slumber party. She ran a hand over her spiky hair and glared at the smudge of dust on her unpainted cheek.
“No wonder he still thinks I’m twelve,” she muttered. She winced when she remembered his ex-wife, with her perfect hair, perfect face, perfect teeth, perfect breasts. Lindsey turned sideways and poked out her chest, eyeing the results in the mirror. “Pitiful,” she grumbled. “Just pitiful.”
She mentally replayed the way she’d bantered with Dan, swapping put-downs and bad jokes, pretty much the way she and her brother carried on when he was home. When they met on a professional basis, she and Dan usually ended up yelling at each other—and she’d admit that she usually started it. Maybe it was just a teensy bit her fault that he hadn’t seen her as a sexy, desirable woman.
If she gave up now and moved away, putting her dreams behind her, would she always regret not giving it one more try? She’d never been a quitter, and had never been hesitant to go after something she wanted—except for Dan. What did she have to lose—except her dignity, her pride and her ego?
The grubby woman in the mirror suddenly looked a little pale, but there was a new look of determination in her green eyes.
Dan Meadows was about to find himself with a brand-new problem on his hands.
Chapter Two
“What are you doing here already?” Dan’s secretary said, glaring at him from his office doorway.
He looked up from the paperwork littering his desk and said, “Excuse me?”
“I heard you didn’t leave here until after ten last night. Now here it is not even eight in the morning and you’re already at it again.” Hazel Sumners shook her head in exasperation. “You are not Superman, Dan Meadows. You need rest.”
He heaved a gusty sigh. “I’ll have you know I got nearly eight hours’ sleep last night. That’s plenty of rest for a grown man.”
“Rest involves more than a few hours of sleep,” she scolded. “How about leisure time? You know—fun? You didn’t even take time off for Lindsey’s birthday party Friday night.”
“I saw Lindsey on Saturday,” he retorted. “I didn’t totally ignore her birthday.”
“That isn’t the point. You should have been at that party having a good time with your friends. You should have taken off Saturday afternoon to go fishing with Cameron, and a few hours yesterday for church and a nice Sunday dinner somewhere. But what did you do? You worked, except for having a quick sandwich with Lindsey.”
“How did you—”
“I saw Lindsey at church yesterday morning, and I asked her if she’d seen you during the weekend. She told me you popped in to tell her happy birthday and then came right back to the office.”
“Do you ask everyone about my business, or just a select few?” He kept his tone mild, but he couldn’t help being a bit annoyed that Hazel had been monitoring his actions so closely. Her job was to keep up with his work schedule, not his personal life.
“Your friends are worried about you, Dan—and so are your co-workers. You’re working too long and too hard, and if you don’t slow down you’re going to crash just as hard.”
It was with some effort that he held on to his patience. “I’ll take some time off as soon as we catch whoever has been setting fires around here.”
Still scowling, she shook her spray-stiffened, salt-and-pepper head. “This is just like those break-ins that took all your time last summer. You said that as soon as you solved those, you’d take a vacation. But Delbert Farley’s been in jail for weeks now and you’re still working just as hard as ever. Catch this firebug and something else will come up. And before you know it, your whole life will have passed you by.”
“Thank you so much for that cheery prediction. Now perhaps you could go answer the phone before it rings right off your desk?”
&nbs
p; She turned and stalked away, mumbling something about foolish, stubborn men.
Unable to resist the cliché, Dan shook his head and muttered, “Women.”
What was going on with them these days, anyway? Lately it was either his secretary ragging him about his working hours, or his women friends nagging him to take a vacation. Concerned grandmas complaining about the blessedly few serious crimes that took place in Edstown, or his sister calling him to fuss about not making enough time for his family. Not to mention Lindsey—nipping around his heels one minute for every detail about his ongoing investigations…and then announcing out of the blue that she was considering moving away.
What was she thinking? Sure, she’d managed well enough in Little Rock for a couple of years before she’d moved back here. But she was a small-town girl at heart, not one of those tough, big-city reporters. And frankly he wouldn’t want to see her turn into one.
Not that she cared about that, of course. She hadn’t asked for his opinion. She’d simply stated that she was thinking about putting her house up for sale. It was actually none of his business—even if he had promised her brother that he would keep an eye on her now that their father had passed away.
He’d known even as he’d made the promise that it was only a formality. Though ten years younger than Dan and B.J., Lindsey was still a grown woman, fully capable of making her own decisions. If she chose to move to Dallas or Atlanta—or Antarctica, for that matter—there was little anyone could do to stop her. Certainly not someone who was nothing more to her than a long-time friend of her older brother.
Oddly enough, considering how often Dan complained about her hanging around so much in her professional capacity, he would miss her if she moved away.
Forcing his concentration back to his work, he glanced at the files littering his desk. They contained summaries of the fires that had been set around town—starting with the old dairy barn last summer. A few weeks after that, a recently vacated rent house had burned, under strikingly similar conditions. An old garage a few weeks after that. And then the tragic cabin fire—the one in which Truman Kellogg had died.
Kellogg had been asleep when the fire started and he’d died in his bed—probably never woke up, mercifully. None of the other suspicious fires had involved buildings that were occupied. Of course, there was the possibility that the arsonist hadn’t known anyone was there: Truman had rarely visited his vacation cabin and then usually only during summer months.
There had been other details about that fire that differed from the others, but it was hard not to be suspicious about it, considering everything that had been going on in the past few months. Neither Dan nor the fire chief had ruled out arson in Kellogg’s death, though they had no proof that the fire had been deliberately set—not like the others, in which there were obvious signs of arson yet no clue about the arsonist.
There’d been a long gap between that fire and the next one—the abandoned warehouse last week. Long enough that people had begun to hope the fires had ended. At least no one had died in the latest fire. Dan was determined to catch the guy before anyone else died.
“Chief?” Hazel’s voice came through the desk intercom, her clipped tone letting him know she was still annoyed with him. “The mayor’s on line one.”
Dan reached for the phone, knowing that this caller wouldn’t be nagging him about taking a vacation. The mayor would be quite content for Dan to work twenty-four hours a day if it meant putting a quick and quiet end to this increasingly troublesome arson problem.
“Do something with it.”
In response to the reckless order, Paula Campbell put her hands on her ample hips and studied Lindsey curiously. “And just what would you have me do with it?”
Eyeing her reflection in the beauty-shop mirror, Lindsey shrugged. “I don’t know. Cut it. Curl it. Fluff it. Just do something so I don’t look like a twelve-year-old boy.”
Paula chuckled and reached for a towel and a cape. “No one would mistake you for a boy. Not with those pretty, big green eyes of yours—or that perfect skin. But if you want a softer look than that shaggy style you’ve worn for so long, we can certainly take care of that. You want to flip through some style books?”
“No. I trust you to know what looks good. Just make it a style I can maintain without a lot of fussing, okay?”
“You got it.” Intrigued by the challenge Lindsey had just presented, Paula set to work with enthusiasm. “What’s inspired this makeover, anyway? Someone you’re trying to impress? Some male?”
Painfully aware of the women listening openly from the three other stations in the four-operator salon, Lindsey responded with a laugh that she hoped was credibly casual and derisive. “Yeah, sure, I’m hoping Brad Pitt will leave his wife and find me on the streets of Edstown. Can’t a woman change her hairstyle without being accused of trying to catch a man? I’ve just had a birthday—isn’t that reason enough to want to make a change?”
“Well, sure—especially a momentous birthday like thirty or forty or fifty. But you just turned twenty-six, not exactly one of those numbers that usually send women running for a makeover or a facelift. So I figured it must be a guy.”
“Too bad your new boss is already taken, heh, Lindsey? That Cameron North is one fine-looking man,” the woman being tinted and permed in the next chair murmured.
Lindsey smiled. “He’s definitely good-looking—and definitely taken. He and Serena are the most blissful newlyweds I’ve ever been around.”
Lila Forsythe sighed wistfully from beneath her helmet of hair rollers. “Their story is so romantic. The way she saved his life—the way he fell in love with her before he even recovered his memories. Serena’s mother thinks it was love at first sight, you know. That’s why she wasn’t worried that they got married so quickly.”
“Love at first sight.” Paula snorted as she spun Lindsey’s chair around so she could lower her to the sink for a hair washing. “I’ve hardly ever seen it work out. Maybe Serena and Cameron will be the exception.”
Lindsey kept her mouth shut. She had no intention of confessing that her own experience with love at first sight had lasted twenty years and counting. She could just imagine Paula’s response to that scenario.
She only half believed it, herself. Maybe she was just in the habit of being in love with Dan Meadows, rather than actually in love with him. But if she left town without at least trying to find out for sure, she suspected that the question would haunt the back of her mind for the rest of her life.
Dan thought of Lindsey again during lunch, which consisted of a deli sandwich at his desk. Hazel had brought him the sandwich when she returned from her own lunch break, and had then spent five minutes lecturing him about his work habits before he’d sent her away so he could eat in peace.
He’d spent the past two hours in an intensive meeting with the fire chief and two arson investigators from Little Rock. A pile of new notes littered his desk now, but the meeting had actually accomplished very little. The consultants had looked over every scrap of evidence on the Edstown fires, including a long visit to the most recent crime scene, but the conclusions they’d drawn hadn’t been much different from what Dan and Fire Chief John Ford had already figured out. Someone around here was deliberately setting fires and covering his tracks so well there was no way to tell who he was. Yet.
Pushing a hand through his brown hair—which felt shaggy to him, reminding him he needed to make time for a cut—he wondered how long it would take Lindsey to come snooping around in an attempt to find out everything that had been said in the meeting. He’d have to be suitably vague—resulting, he hoped, in an article that the locals would find reassuring. He was sure they’d be glad to know that arson experts had been consulted—he just wouldn’t tell them the experts hadn’t provided much assistance so far.
Sure enough, it was less than an hour later when Hazel buzzed him. “Got a reporter here from the Evening Star, Chief. Are you in?”
Hearing the dry humor in he
r voice, he knew the reporter was aware that Dan was in. He could still say no, of course. But he might as well get this over with. “Yeah, Hazel, send her in.”
He pushed his hand through his hair again and made a halfhearted effort to straighten his desk, making sure no confidential paperwork was visible. He wouldn’t put it past Lindsey to snoop through them when he wasn’t paying close attention.
But it wasn’t Lindsey who ambled into his office a couple of minutes later. This was a man—young, tall, lanky-limbed, a lazy smile gracing his squarish face and reflecting in his cool-gray eyes.
“Well, hey, Riley,” Dan drawled, telling himself he wasn’t really disappointed that it wasn’t Lindsey. One reporter was just like another one, he assured himself. “Is Lindsey busy bugging the fire chief? The mayor, maybe?”
“Lindsey took the day off.” Riley O’Neal arranged himself loosely in one of the chairs on the other side of Dan’s desk. “Cam sent me to find out if there are any leads on the arson story.”
“Lindsey took the day off?” Dan repeated, surprised. “Is she sick?”
“Not as far as I know. Some people have lives outside their jobs, you know.”
The barb was delivered with a grin. Like everyone else in Edstown, Riley was well aware of the police chief’s workaholic tendencies—although it was hardly a trait Riley shared. Riley’s philosophy was to do exactly as much work as necessary to survive, and to spend the rest of his time taking it easy.
Thirty years old, Riley had been working on a novel—or claimed to have been—since he’d graduated from college. He hadn’t grown up in Edstown, but his maternal grandparents had lived here, as did a favorite uncle who still maintained a home here. Riley had visited often enough as a boy that nearly everyone knew him even before he took the job with the local newspaper. He asserted that he liked the slower pace of small town life. Made it easier for him to find time to write, he’d explained.
Dan had always considered Riley a bit of an eccentric, a borderline loner, and a wiseass to boot—but for all of that, he rather liked him. Besides, Riley wasn’t nearly as pushy a reporter as Lindsey was, which made it easier to deal with him when Dan wasn’t in the mood to cooperate with the press.
