by Lori Ryan
Eric and Merritt followed at a slower pace, each balancing drinks and napkins in their hands.
He’d been analyzing his newly discovered lack of brain power the entire time they waited to order, through their order, while they filled cups at the fountain drink station, and now while they hunted down a table. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking telling her they should meet like this so he could update her on the case. For one thing, there weren’t really any developments to share. For another, the slow burn of anger he usually felt when he saw Merritt McKenna was waning. He’d started to see her less as the woman who’d tricked him into bed and more as a sharp journalist who was good at her job and even better at balancing the demands of being a single mom.
He didn’t know where Collin’s dad was, but he knew he wasn’t in the picture. She had mentioned the night they met that her parents had her kid while she closed on the house they’d be living in. He’d gotten the distinct impression it was rare for her to take a night to herself the way she had.
Then again, his gut had been off about her before, so maybe he was just thinking what he wanted to where she was concerned. Maybe he didn’t want to think of her as connected to any man.
“Is Collin’s dad in the picture?” He blurted out before he could stop himself.
Merritt shot a glance to where Collin was checking out the video games and back to Eric and he wondered if she didn’t talk about the kid’s dad in front of him.
“He lives out of the country. He’s not exactly an involved parent.”
“Does Collin go to visit him?” Eric asked, not sure why he cared.
“No.”
He glanced at the kid. “Does he come visit Collin?”
“No.”
He nodded slowly. “So, when you say not exactly an involved parent, you mean…” He let the sentence hang there.
She gave him a wry grin. “Completely, totally uninvolved. His father knows he exists and that’s about the extent of it.”
“That must be hard.”
“I’m used to it.” She shrugged but didn’t say more and he had the feeling it bothered her more than she was letting on.
“Why the move here? Aren’t your parents in Denver? It seems like you’d want to stick near your parents instead of moving further away.” He thought he remembered her saying Denver.
Something flickered behind her eyes and he wondered what it was, but she covered the emotion quickly.
“This was a good job opportunity for me.”
Bullshit. He had looked and knew damned well she’d been higher up on the food chain at her old paper. She hadn’t worked for one of the Denver papers. She’d worked for a paper in Arvada, twenty minutes outside of Denver. So, Dark Falls was a bigger city for her to work in, but she’d had to take a cut in her position.
Collin ran up to the table as the pizzas arrived. One with pepperoni and one with broccoli and mushrooms because Eric hadn’t been able to convince him that he didn’t prefer his pizza with green growing things on it. Hopefully, the kid would let Eric steal a piece or two of the pepperoni.
He still couldn’t believe they hadn’t been to Andrighetti’s yet. Surely Merritt had friends in town who could show her all the good spots like this.
He thought back to the way he’d seen her juggling so many different demands. Maybe she hadn’t really met anyone in town yet.
“In your seat, little man,” Merritt said, pointing to the bench next to her when Collin started reaching for a slice while he was still standing at the head of the table.
He grinned at his mom and slid into the seat. “I just can’t wait, mom. It smells sooooo good.” He said it with the melodramatic air of a six-year-old and Eric stifled a grin. The kid was cute.
Eric slid a piece of pepperoni on Collin’s plate and then offered one to Merritt. She shook her head and went for the veggie, giving Eric the excuse to take the pepperoni slice for himself. After all, he’d put his hand on it. It would be rude to put it back.
The laughter in Merritt’s eyes said she’d seen his thought process.
Collin spoke around a mouthful of food. “This is sooooo good, mom.”
Eric wondered if sooooo was one of the kid’s favorite words. It seemed like it.
“We should take some home to Kitten. He’ll love it.” Collin bounced in his seat as he spoke.
“I don’t think kittens can eat pizza,” Eric said.
“He’s not a kitten.” The look Collin gave him told Eric just how stupid the kid thought he was.
Eric tilted a look at Merritt and found her laughing behind her pizza.
“Is it a fish?” Eric asked, making a game of it. “I’m pretty sure you can’t feed your fish pepperoni pizza.”
That sent Collin into a fit of giggles as he picked up his pizza again. “No. Who would name a fish Kitten?”
“Oh, a pig then. It must be a pig.” Eric snorted like a pig and took a bite of his pizza.
“Noooo,” Collin said, drawing the word out like he did with his so’s. “He’s not a pig.”
Eric put his pizza down, forearms on the table, all serious. “Wait, please don’t tell me you named a dog Kitten.”
Collin nodded, still laughing. “We did!”
Eric looked to Merritt. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“We did,” she said, laughing openly now as she said it.
“Tell me we aren’t talking about a Great Dane or anything big like that. Please not a Great Dane named Kitten.”
Collin and Merritt shook their heads in tandem and Merritt said, “No, he’s a mutt and he looks like a wet kitten.”
“He really does,” Collin said, bouncing again. “Not the cute kind either. He’s the ugliest dog you’ve ever seen.”
It seemed to be a point of pride for the kid.
“Awesome, did you have to look really hard for an ugly dog?”
Collin nodded. “We had to go to the shelter and walk through all these rows and rows of cute dogs but we wanted to get an ugly one that no one else would want.”
“We sure found one, didn’t we?” Merritt said.
“Uh-huh.”
For the next ten minutes, they all ate pretty solidly and Eric had to admit, it was fun being there with them. He could almost see why his partner wanted this. It would be nice to look forward to this when he wasn’t working.
Until it all went to hell and the lying started.
He swallowed the bite of pizza he’d been eating, not enjoying it as much as he had a moment before.
This might be what his partner wanted but it wasn’t for him. He knew what happened when you fell in love and couldn’t walk away from a person.
He’d been lucky with Tiffany. When he caught her lying to him, it had almost cost him his career but his heart hadn’t been on the line yet. He’d been able to walk away.
Not like his dad. His dad had been so head over his heels for Eric’s mom that he hadn’t been able to walk away from her. No matter how much she lied and cheated on him, his dad had stayed, trying to drink away the pain. It had put him in his grave.
Eric wouldn’t go there. He was stronger than his dad. Still, Merritt was gorgeous and seeing her laugh made him relax, getting sucked into the pink in her cheeks and the way her eyes crinkled up at the corners when she was really happy.
“Do you have a partner?” Collin asked.
“I do.” Eric sipped his beer and nodded. “His name is John.”
“Have you been partners long?”
Eric stifled a laugh, wondering where the kid was going with this. “Uh, about five years.”
Collin pursed his lips and nodded, going for a sage look, Eric thought. “You have to stay together, partners. Always have each other’s backs, don’t you?”
It was Eric’s turn to nod and he was serious now, thinking of the way he and John relied on each other. “You do. You have to trust them and stay with them. You watch them and they watch you.”
“Hey buddy,” Merritt said, digging in her purse
for some cash and breaking the heavy topic, “go play some video games while I talk to Eric, okay?”
“Cool!” Collin had grabbed the money and dashed from the table so fast, Eric pictured skid marks forming on the tile floor beneath him like in a cartoon.
“Sorry about that,” she said, watching him walk away. “His older cousins let him watch Turner and Hooch with them. He’s pretty focused on the idea of needing a partner to have your back.”
She smiled and tilted her head. “Do you have an update on the case for me?”
Eric wiped his mouth with his napkin as he nodded. “I do, but I’m afraid it’s not very exciting.”
She frowned at him.
“Sorry,” he said, putting up his hands in an apologetic gesture. “It’s the way cases like this are. There’s a lot of interviewing and knocking people off the suspect list. We interview people again and again and after a while, we get a break. It’s not like on TV where you get some cool DNA result or some amazing new piece of tech that solves your case.”
“But you do have suspects?”
He took a sip of his drink. “We had three known arsonists we were looking into. We’ve ruled out two of them and we’re working on tracking down the third one.”
“He’s missing?” she asked.
“I don’t know that I’d call it missing. He doesn’t have a current address on file, so we’re trying to locate an employer or track him through his old address. It’s slow, dry work.”
She frowned again. “Anything else? Something that will keep my boss off my back?”
He paused, thinking about what he could tell her and what he couldn’t. He sifted through what they had. It wasn’t much. They had the boot print but he didn’t want to tell her that. If their guy knew they had his boot print he might start using different shoes and it made it harder to connect their crime scenes together.
He didn’t want to tell her their arsonist was starting the fires in closets within the homes because that was the type of detail they could use to rule out false confessions. They had already had one guy come in claiming to be their fire starter. It slowed them down when people did that so they needed a way to rule them out fast.
“We’re looking at connections between the sites but so far, we haven’t found anything solid. Fingerprints aren’t really a help in this case.”
“Why not?” Her questions seemed genuine and he thought she must have an inquisitive mind to do what she did. He liked that she really seemed to want to know and wasn’t just being polite or making conversation.
“In the first few buildings, there was no point of entry for us to look at. He came in through broken-out windows or doors. He didn’t even need to touch anything to access the building. In some of the others, there were so many fingerprints, there was no way for us to run them all, since those buildings had been on the market with buyers and realtors coming through them. We’re checking the realtor angle to see if there’s any overlap there, but so far, nothing that’s panned out.”
He wouldn’t give her the names of the realtors they’d talked to so far. It could ruin someone’s life if you put out that they were a person of interest in a case.
“This most recent house was the one that was most likely to have any prints that were usable. The number of people in and out of the house was more limited since this house wasn’t on the market or abandoned, and he had to break into the home through the back door,” he said.
She sat forward. “Were there any prints?”
Eric shook his head. “None that were useful. Smudges and partials. Like I said, this ain’t TV.”
She took his comment in stride. “How did you guys connect the scenes together?”
He didn’t want to say. It was largely based on the patterns inside the fires. Where he’d started them and how they had spread, what accelerant had been used. He went with that, making a general statement about the accelerant before turning the question on her.
“How did you link them? You had this story before anyone else. What made you realize the fires were connected?”
She shrugged. “Just the locations. Abandoned properties catching on fire seemed like it could be connected. And I didn’t have to look for evidence that could hold up in court the way you did. I just needed enough to say it was possible the fires were connected and my boss was willing to go to print with it.”
“It should help your career. The fact that you were the first to spot these and write about them.”
She only shrugged in response.
Collin came up and tugged at Eric’s hand.
“Play the driving game with me!”
Merritt raised her brows. “Wow, is that really how you’re going to ask Eric if he wants to play a game with you?”
The boy looked at her and rolled his eyes. “Eric, can you pleeeease play the driving game with me?”
Eric looked at Merritt for permission. She gave a slight nod.
He took the kid’s hand and let him pull him toward the arcade area.
He didn’t know why he did it, but as he walked, he couldn’t help but turn to see if she was looking at him.
She was, and the way she flushed when he caught her told him she wasn’t just keeping an eye on her son. She’d been watching Eric walk away and that just did all kinds of things to him that it shouldn’t.
Dumber than a post.
Chapter Sixteen
It had felt like a date. Eric had to tell himself again and again that it wasn’t. It had been pizza with her kid for work purposes. Not a date.
Never mind that he’d had to fight the urge to kiss her when he walked her and Collin out to her car.
It had taken all he had to control himself when she stood there biting her lip like she didn’t know how to end the evening either. He’d wanted to kiss away the little mark her teeth had left in her lower lip, smooth it out with the heat of his tongue.
Eric unknotted the tie he was now wearing thanks to Jackwagon and stuck it in the coat pocket of his suit. He really needed to start calling the guy Bill or at least Lincoln or something in his head. One of these days, he was going to come right out and call the guy Jackwagon to his face by mistake and land himself in a heap of trouble.
“You okay?” John asked.
They were headed to talk to a guy who had worked as an assistant at a real estate association in town. Realtors from two of the places that dealt with the targeted properties had filed complaints against him. He’d left on not great terms and apparently had issues getting along with people.
“I’m good, why?” Eric shot his partner a look.
“You just seem off. You get that you’re supposed to be the one doing the talking sometimes, right? Even shrinks have their own shrinks.”
Eric wasn’t a psychologist, but he knew what John was talking about. Eric was always harping on the guys to talk about their feelings. He knew what not talking could do to a person, especially cops. So he checked in on his buddies, asked how they were doing, if they had anything they wanted to talk about. It’s what he did. They all called him the shrink because of it.
Eric lifted a shoulder. “I’m good,” he insisted again.
His partner’s look said he wasn’t buying it.
Eric plowed on with the case as they drove. “This guy had complaints from a number of realtors in his file. Said he didn’t know how to keep his hands to himself. He was written up a couple of times, but nothing they could fire him for quickly. It was little stuff like standing too close to a woman, but nothing that crossed the line in a real blatant way. There were some customer service complaints, rudeness, that kind of thing. It eventually added up to enough to let him go.”
John grunted and pulled over at the curb in front of the apartment building they had listed for Grant Starkey.
The man who greeted them at the door was young and good looking with blonde hair and brown eyes. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who had any trouble getting dates, which meant that if this was Grant Starkey and he did
touch women without their permission, it was probably more about power than sex. He got a fucking kick out of doing it.
Eric hated men like that.
“Grant Starkey?” John asked, pulling out his badge and ID as Eric did the same. “We’re from Dark Falls PD. We’re hoping we can talk to you about a current case.”
The guy’s smile faltered, but he swung the door open and gestured them into his apartment. It was a small studio with a table and kitchenette on one side and a bed and desk on the other.
The table had stacks of files and papers on it. It looked like he did more work at the table than he did at the desk.
“Uh, what is this about officers?” He rubbed his hands on his pants, then stopped himself and crossed his arms like he’d realized he was looking nervous.
Eric gestured to the chairs at the table. “Can we sit?”
“Oh, uh, sure, sure.” Grant crossed to the table and stacked some of the files into taller piles, though the effort was hopeless. There were too many to make any real room on the surface.
John led the conversation while Eric watched Grant and studied his responses. He was also taking notes. It’s how he and John worked. Whoever wasn’t doing the majority of the questioning took notes.
“We wanted to talk to you about your former employment at the Dark Falls Real Estate Brokers Association. We understand you left there after several complaints from the member realtors.”
Grant scowled. “That was a load of crap. My supervisor hated me. She pushed those women to complain. It was…” He crossed his arms again and seemed to struggle for words. “It was just crap. She didn’t like me so she made sure I was pushed out.”
John leaned back in his chair. “Yeah I hear ya. Our boss can be a b—”
“Hey!” Eric cut him off sharply, playing his role. John was going to act the part of the guy who could commiserate with Grant. Eric gave John a look to match his tone and John shrugged, looking to Grant with a sheepish you know what I meant to say look.
John pulled out his own notepad and looked at his list of names. “So, Marisol Pinero filed a complaint because your boss told her to?”