by Gina Wilkins
“Surfing,” Lindsey murmured.
“That’s it. Eddie spends most of his time in this room with the door closed. I knew it wasn’t good for him, but at least I knew where he was, you know?”
So Eddie could have been in here writing in that notebook without Opal realizing it. Dan glanced at the closed drawers of the desk. “Do you have a sample of your son’s handwriting?”
“Probably in one of them drawers. You’re welcome to look and see. Eddie won’t like us going through his stuff, but I can’t worry about that now. I need to find out where he is and make sure he’s all right.”
Lindsey stepped discreetly out of the way as Dan opened the top drawer of the desk. The first thing he saw was a stack of local newspapers, the Evening Star. Glancing through them, he noticed that each edition featured a headline about the recent fires. His interest level immediately rose again.
Beneath the newspapers was a manila folder filled with what appeared to be schoolwork. Handwritten papers. “I’d like to borrow this folder, if you don’t mind. I promise to return it to you.”
Opal studied him with a frown. “How will samples of Eddie’s handwriting help you find him?”
“I’m just pursuing all possible leads. I’ll also need a recent photograph of Eddie and a list of his friends, girlfriends, anyone he might have talked to about his plans.”
“I’ll give you anything you need to find my boy,” she said fervently, seemingly satisfied that he was taking her report seriously.
Dan gave the rest of the room a perfunctory once-over, finding little of interest among Eddie’s sparse belongings. Certainly nothing that pointed directly toward arson. He glanced at the computer, then decided to wait before taking that for evidence. For one thing, he was barely computer literate. He’d have to turn it over to a computer expert to find out if there was anything significant stored there—and that was best done with a warrant.
Twenty minutes later Dan and Lindsey left the worried mother’s home, both assuring her that they would do everything they could within their respective jobs to help her find her son.
“You think Eddie had something to do with the fires, don’t you?” Lindsey asked as soon as she and Dan were in his truck again.
He fastened his seat belt and started the engine. “I think there is some reason to speculate that Eddie might have a fascination with the fires,” he replied, thinking of the stack of newspapers. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he had anything to do with them.”
“Did you recognize his handwriting? Was it the same as in the notebook?”
“I haven’t had a chance to compare handwriting, obviously. But remember, Lindsey, there was no confession in the notebook. Only what might have been called an obsession with fire imagery. Some teenagers are preoccupied with music and poetry about death. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re homicidal or suicidal.”
She nodded and gazed through the windshield, apparently lost in thought. Waiting at a stop sign at a busy intersection, Dan studied her while she was looking away from him. She had a lovely profile, he couldn’t help noticing. Long, thick lashes. A small, straight nose. Delicate cheekbones and a firm little chin. She held her lower lip between her teeth as she contemplated her thoughts. He frowned, thinking of the marks she would leave in her tender skin.
When she was little and hurt herself, she would come to her big brother to “kiss it and make it better,” he remembered from out of the blue. Sometimes, if Dan was there, she would want him to kiss her “boo-boo,” too—just to make sure it healed completely, she’d told him somberly. He’d found it amusing when she was six. Eight. Ten.
The last time he’d kissed her she’d been twenty-one. He’d brushed his lips over hers in a birthday kiss that he’d meant to be brotherly and affectionate.
He could still remember the physical jolt he’d felt when their lips had met that night. Although he’d done his best to conceal it, his reaction had been startlingly intense—and very male. Secretly shaken, he’d found himself watching her more closely for the remainder of the evening, aware for the first time that she had become a beautiful young woman.
She’d been twenty-one; he’d been ten years older. He’d felt vaguely like a dirty old man for even noticing her physical attractions. She was just a kid, he’d told himself in exasperation—B.J.’s cherished and sheltered little sister. What was he thinking?
It was only a matter of days after that night that he and Melanie had eloped. For all the wrong reasons.
Lindsey glanced his way, one eyebrow lifted in question. “You taking a nap, Chief? The intersection’s clear.”
It sounded so much like something the old Lindsey—his pal and sometimes nemesis—would have said, that he instinctively relaxed a little. “Sorry,” he murmured, pressing the accelerator. “Guess I got distracted.”
“Me, too. I’ve had a thought—and it could be crazy, but I might as well run it by you.”
“What is it?”
“What if, instead of setting the fires, Eddie stumbled onto something that told him who was starting them? If he’s that fascinated with the subject, maybe he was snooping around on his own.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Dan conceded, though he’d hate to think a punk kid had come closer to solving a series of crimes than an entire team of trained investigators. Of course, he would also hate to think that same kid had managed to commit those crimes without leaving any clues for the trained investigators to find.
“What if he did? What if something he found out put him in danger? Maybe he ran because he was scared. Or maybe worse—maybe somebody already silenced him.”
“Now you’re letting your imagination run away with you,” Dan chided. “For all we know, Eddie’s staying with a girlfriend, hiding out until his mother’s willing to give him whatever he wants just so he’ll come home.”
“That’s another possibility,” Lindsey acknowledged, sounding a bit reluctant to let go of her more dramatic scenario.
“So what are you going to say in your story?” he asked, trying to keep his own voice casual.
“Only that Eddie’s mother reported him missing, and that no one has heard from him since Monday. Of course, I’ll probably call some of his school friends, and his father—you know, try to round out the story with some quotes.”
“You won’t mention any possible connection to the arsons?”
“Of course not. How many times must I repeat that I’m an ethical journalist, not a tabloid tattlemonger? I don’t know why you can’t seem to get that through your thick skull.”
For some crazy reason, he was always more comfortable with Lindsey when she was calling him insulting names. He grinned at her as he parked his truck next to her car. “I know the difference. And if you weren’t so prickly and stiff-necked, you would know I wasn’t trying to insult your professional integrity.”
“What are you going to do now?” she asked after a momentary hesitation. “About Eddie, I mean.”
“I’m going to do my job—just as you’re going to do yours.”
She reached for her door handle. “Then I suppose we should both get on with it.”
“Lindsey—”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Yes?”
“If you want to stop by my office later today, I’ll let you have a look at the notebook. Off the record, of course.”
Her green eyes widened almost comically in surprise. “You’ll let me see it? Why?”
Damned if he knew. “Maybe I’d like your opinion,” he suggested, although he’d already had so-called experts examine the book and had others scheduled to look at it later that very afternoon.
Maybe Lindsey was as frustrated by the distance between them as he was. She accepted his offer quickly enough. “I’ll be here later, then. What time?”
“It will be late before I’m free—around eight, I’m afraid. Too late?”
“Of course not. Want me to bring some sandwiches or something? You’ll be hungry by then.”
“Highly irregular, of course,” she murmured with a shadow of her usual impish smile.
He was well aware of that. Sharing evidence with a reporter was hardly standard operating procedure. But this wasn’t just any reporter, of course.
This was Lindsey.
Chapter Eight
Savory scents lingered in Dan’s office even after the pizza Lindsey had brought in with her had been reduced to a grease-stained box and a few nibbled crusts. Sitting side by side behind the desk, Dan and Lindsey had pored over every page of the notebook, as well as all the papers in the manila folder Dan had borrowed from Eddie Stamps’s bedroom.
“Look at the letter a.” Lindsey pointed to a word in the notebook and another word on one of the essay test papers. “The little crook at the top? It’s very similar in both examples.”
Dan looked carefully from one page to the other, for perhaps the hundredth time. “I think you’re right. I tend to believe Eddie Stamps wrote both of these.”
Lindsey nodded. Eddie’s writing for his schoolwork was almost obsessively neatly printed. Emotionless. The writing in the notebook was very different—scrawled, splotched, angry-looking. And yet, she sensed that what they were seeing was two sides of the same person rather than two different writers.
Everything she knew about Eddie indicated that he was a young man who kept a great deal locked up inside him. He said little, participated in few school activities and had few friends, though the ones he had were very loyal to him. They thought he was “cool.” Very smart, even though his grades in school were only adequate—but that, they agreed, was because he was bored by meaningless classroom work.
They all still denied knowing his whereabouts.
“Someone with this much pent-up rage and confusion could be setting fires in a twisted effort to express those emotions, couldn’t he?” she mused aloud, tapping the notebook.
Dan set down the canned soda he’d been sipping. “That’s what the expert from Little Rock said.”
“But what about the fire that killed Truman Kellogg? If the same person set that fire, could it have been an accident that someone died in it? All the other buildings were empty when they were burned—could the arsonist have believed Kellogg’s cabin was vacant, too?”
“To be honest, at this point I don’t know what the arsonist believes,” Dan confessed. “The consultants who have studied or heard about this notebook agree that it was written by someone who is seriously disturbed, very angry and about to explode, but they stop short of saying this is definitely the arsonist. As I’ve said before, he could just be fascinated by the fires, perhaps envious of the arsonist’s boldness. We could even be dealing with a potential copycat. But there’s no evidence here that indicates a calculated murder.”
He squeezed the back of his neck as he spoke, as if the muscles there were stiff and sore. Lindsey couldn’t help focusing on the lines around his mouth and the faint hollows beneath his eyes. He was tired, she thought. Troubled.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him look truly happy.
She tossed the paper she held onto the desk. “You’ve done all you can today. You’ve talked to practically everyone who ever spoke to Eddie, and you’ve studied these papers until I’m sure you have every word memorized. And somehow you’ve handled all your other responsibilities at the same time.”
“That’s my job,” he said, looking uncomfortable with her comments.
“Yes. But you’ve put in more than your required hours today. Go home.”
“I’ll go home soon,” he answered distractedly, reaching for a file drawer in his desk at the same time. “I just want to…”
Lindsey put her hand over his and pushed the drawer closed again. “There are no answers in that drawer,” she told him firmly. “If there were, you’d have found them long ago. Go home. Get some rest.”
She kept her hand over his just to make sure he didn’t try to open the drawer again. It had been a purely friendly gesture, offered out of concern for his health. How many times had she touched him in the past couple of years? Dozens? Hundreds? Yet this time…
His hand was so warm. Big. Strong. Roughened by weather and hard work. She almost shivered, and that was just from the feel of his hand beneath hers. She couldn’t help wondering how she would react to having his hands all over her.
Scenes from too many uncomfortable dreams flashed through her mind, causing her cheeks to go warm and her pulse rate to accelerate. She snatched her hand away and held it behind her, her palm still tingling as if she’d touched a live wire. She raised her gaze to Dan’s face, finding him watching her with a somber expression she couldn’t begin to interpret.
He’d pushed his hand through his hair so many times it looked as if he’d combed it with an egg beater. A boyish lock fell over his forehead, and she simply couldn’t resist stepping closer and extending that still-tingling hand to brush it back.
“You look so tired,” she murmured, wishing she had the nerve to take his face in her hands and smooth away the weary lines. But she wasn’t quite brave enough for that.
How could she be so bold in her job and so timid when it came to Dan?
“Lindsey.”
She realized that she’d gone still, with her fingers still threaded in his hair. Maybe she had more courage than she had realized. “Mmm?”
“What are you doing?”
“I seem to be following my impulses.”
“You know that can lead you into trouble.”
She found it interesting that his voice sounded suddenly huskier. “Probably.”
Reaching up, he captured her hand in his, pulling it away from his hair. It surprised her when he didn’t immediately release her, but sat instead with her hand clasped in his. “Lindsey—”
She managed a weak smile when his voice trailed away. “Am I scaring you, Dan?”
He looked down at their linked hands. “To the toes.”
She thought about that for a moment, then smiled again. “Well…at least you’ve finally figured out that you’ve got something to be nervous about.”
She watched him swallow before he said, “I think we both need to get some rest.”
“Do you think exhaustion is affecting my thinking?”
Dan looked down at their entwined hands. “Maybe it’s affecting mine.”
“Then maybe I shouldn’t be nagging you to rest.”
He lifted his gaze to hers again. He looked as though he were about to speak, but then seemed to change his mind—perhaps because he didn’t know quite what to say. Instead, he gave her hand a light squeeze, released her and pushed his chair back so he could stand. “It’s getting late, and we both have to be at work early in the morning. You’ll let me know, of course, if you come across anything that might be relevant to my investigation.”
So he’d retreated into business again. She supposed that seemed safer to him. Maybe he was no longer denying, even to himself, that she was interested in more than a professional relationship with him, but he wasn’t ready to openly face that now. It was entirely possible he never would be.
But at least she could say she’d tried to let him know how she felt. She wouldn’t have to live her whole life wondering what might have happened if she’d only taken a few more chances.
Maybe she’d made a little progress this time, she thought as she watched him busily straighten his desk. She could still feel the warmth of his hand around hers, could still see the expression on his face when their eyes had met and held. He was definitely becoming aware of her. What she couldn’t predict was whether he would ever reciprocate the feelings she had for him—or even openly acknowledge them.
For the past few days she’d chastised herself for her cowardice when it came to her relationship with Dan. Now she was beginning to wonder which of them was really more afraid.
It should have been a beautiful night in Edstown—a full moon glowed in a starry sky, a hint of approaching sprin
g was in the crisp air. The townspeople should have been peacefully sleeping, safe and secure in their beds.
Instead, the small-town peace was shattered once again by sirens and shouts, the roaring and crackling of a blistering fire, and the rushing and splashing of the water being used to combat it. Bleary-eyed from weariness, Dan stood to one side of the scene, feeling angry and useless as he watched the firefighters do their jobs. The arsonist had struck again, choosing as his new target an insurance sales office that had been vacated for the night, and Dan was no closer to making an arrest than he had been six months ago.
Even now his officers were canvasing the area, trying to find anyone who might have seen something useful prior to the fire starting. Unfortunately, this was a commercially zoned block filled with small businesses that had been shut down for the night. There were no restaurants or stores open late to draw after-work patrons, and this wasn’t a street that led into a residential neighborhood. The arsonist had chosen his mark well—as he had from the beginning of his rampage.
Dan wasn’t surprised that Lindsey had shown up. Someone must have called her—probably one of her “sources” in the fire department. Even though dawn was still a couple hours away, she looked wide awake and charged with energy, dashing from one vantage point to another while scribbling in her notebook.
Like the firefighters, Lindsey had a specific job to do—to report everything she observed and to take quotes from those involved with the action. He wished his own responsibilities were as clear cut.
“Damn it, Dan, are you going to let this jerk burn our whole town before you stop him?”
The belligerently growled question made Dan sigh and turn slowly. “Hello, Mayor.”
Looking as though he’d just crawled out of bed, the mayor was rumpled and disgruntled, his glaring brown eyes bleary from lack of sleep. “Why are you just standing here?” he demanded. “Why aren’t you doing anything?”
“What would you have me do?”
“Arrest someone, damn it!”
Even though he knew the reckless words were prompted by stress and desperation, Dan couldn’t help responding. “Who should I arrest? An innocent bystander? The fire chief? You? I don’t have probable cause to arrest anyone at this point. All I can say is that I’m actively pursuing what few leads we have, and I’m confident an arrest will be made soon. Once this fire is under control, investigators will be combing every inch of the scene. Maybe something will turn up then—”
