“Wait . . .” Savannah paused, mid-bite. “I thought Westin’s daughter was in charge of Hope House.”
Cole nodded. “She is. Donovan and Zoe have been a thing for about six months now.”
Her fork found the edge of her plate with a clatter. “That’s who he gets all goofy-eyed over when he’s on the phone? Does he have a death wish?”
“You’ve met the guy, right?” he asked, half a smile twitching at his lips. They might be best friends, but Donovan wasn’t exactly a paragon of impulse control. He was practically the high lord of adrenaline junkies.
It was Savannah’s turn to eke out a nod. “Point taken. Still. Dating your captain’s daughter is . . .”
“Risky, yeah.” Cole scooped up the last strip of perfectly cooked bacon from his plate, his stomach groaning in protest but his brain too blissed out to listen, let alone care. “But the reality is, they’re both adults. Risky or not, they knew what they were doing when they jumped in.”
“Right. I forgot.” She popped the corner of her toast past her bold grin, chewing and swallowing before she said, “You’re Mr. Pragmatic over there. Just the facts, ma’am.”
He laughed, but no frigging way was he going to give her the last word.
“Make fun all you want, Nelson. Facts don’t lie. Now, do you want to go check out this warehouse or are you too worn out from your shift?”
Chapter Sixteen
Savannah alternated glances between the four-page report in her lap and the increasingly neglected buildings over her shoulder. Under normal circumstances, heading into a condemned warehouse in the worst part of Fairview wouldn’t be at the top of her list of fun and games. But she hadn’t been about to say no to tagging along on this walk-through, especially since after the fallout from yesterday’s back-to-back calls, she’d thought Cole would surely blow her off.
Instead, he’d not only made good on his promise and kept her from hauling off and committing career hara-kiri, but for just a minute, he’d let his calm, cool exterior slip, showing Savannah that he wasn’t devoid of feelings at all.
He just had a cast-iron strategy for hiding them.
Judging by the liquid-gold flash of emotion in Cole’s eyes when she’d asked him about fighting a good fight, he clearly had a frickin’ doozy somewhere in his past. As tempted as Savannah had been to push, she knew what it was like to want to keep your feelings close. Hell, she’d kept her family history on the down low for an entire year—mostly because she hadn’t wanted special treatment at the academy, but also because facing her choice to leave home had hurt. Sometimes a lot.
What was Cole hiding that would put that kind of fire in his eyes?
“The warehouse should be coming up in a couple blocks on the right,” he said, pointing to the GPS on his dashboard and yanking Savannah’s thoughts back to present-day reality.
“Oh! Um, yep. Ninety-seven hundred Wabash. There’s the hydrant we tapped.” She gestured to the ancient fire hydrant, looking more closely at their rough-and-tumble surroundings. The streets had grown exponentially dingier the farther they’d traveled from Church Street, with the trash-strewn sidewalks cracking and fading out to match. The only other buildings on the block were a vacant warehouse boasting huge blue-and-white commercial realty signs and some sort of storage facility that looked as unattended as it was unmaintained. They might be in a less-than-savory part of the city, but chances were, she and Everett wouldn’t see another soul on this little field trip.
Not that it stopped her from taking in the details. After all, a girl could never be too careful.
“Here we go,” Cole said, pulling the Jeep over in front of the visibly fire-damaged warehouse, popping the car locks closed with an audible click as soon as they’d both set their feet on the sidewalk. “Wow. Looks just like we left it.”
Savannah squinted up at the place, shielding her eyes from the sun. The heavy front door that Crews had forced open now bore a shiny steel chain with a padlock to match, and the windows on the ground level had been boarded up with plywood—although whether that was to keep squatters out or to temporarily repair damage from the fire, she couldn’t really say. The windows on the second and third floors told another story, clearly having been burned out and broken during the blaze. Heavy lines of soot streaked upward over the crumbling, mud-colored bricks, and as she and Cole moved toward the threshold, the smell of stale smoke met them like the world’s most bitter unwelcome mat.
“Pretty consistent with what’s here,” Savannah said, holding up the pages.
Cole nodded, pulling a key ring from the back pocket of his jeans. He slid the small silver key into the padlock holding the door shut, sliding the metal bar free from its housing. “Oz did the final write-up a couple of days ago. After twenty-three years on the job, he definitely knows what he’s looking at.”
She bit into the smart comment daring the tip of her tongue. She might dislike Oz more than ever, but going through the report over breakfast had taught her some new things about reconstructing the scene of a fire.
With a swift push, the warehouse door swung on its hinges with a heavy creak. “Careful,” Cole warned, eyeing the thing with caution. “The building is structurally stable enough for an investigation, but make no mistake. after the city inspector sees this report, he isn’t going to have any choice but to condemn the place.”
Savannah looked around. Most of the light spilled in from the open front door behind them since the front windows on this level had been boarded up, but in truth, the ruin appeared more minimal than she’d expected.
“The damage on the middle floors is that bad?” she asked, scanning the ash-covered but otherwise intact front room.
“Donovan said the fire was pretty tough to lock down on floors two and three. Plus the report says the entire electrical system is shot in addition to all the structural damage. But let’s go see for ourselves.”
Cole passed her the flashlight he’d taken from the Jeep. She clicked it on, focusing the beam on the interior door marked STAIRS as he pulled the front door shut with a bang.
In the darkness, Savannah’s flashlight cast eerie shadows over the wall. The bitter tang of smoke filled her nose, bringing her instantly back to yesterday’s fire call at the restaurant. Even though the location had been a complete one-eighty from this one, all the hot, pent-up energy of the previous day roared back through her veins, reminding her of the rush of fighting a fire.
“Keep an eye on these steps. It’s dark as hell in here, and the ash makes things slippery,” Cole said, barely two feet behind her on the stairwell. Savannah’s skin prickled with awareness as he followed her lead, gently placing his fingers over the small of her back when she faltered in the shadows.
“Sorry.” Thank God he couldn’t see the wash of heat that was surely covering her face from temples to chin. But who knew the endorphins from yesterday’s pair of calls would have such a delayed reaction, or that something as simple and strange as the smell of smoke would set her to remembering it all so clearly?
“No worries,” Cole said, and of course he was calm as ever. He followed her up the stairs, and by the time they’d reached the second-floor doorway, Savannah had wrangled her brain back from its labor strike. Mostly.
“Okay.” She took a deep breath, forcing herself to scan the report in her left hand as she swung the flashlight over the second-floor space with her right. “According to this, the point of origin for the fire was the AC unit in the far right storage bay on this floor.”
“2E, right?” Cole’s glance darted to the door at the end of the dreary, fire-eaten hallway, and wow, what a difference one floor up made in the damage department.
“Yeah.” Even though the sun filtered through the broken-out windows from the opposite side of the building, the interior of the warehouse still had an air of smoky darkness. A thick layer of ash and soot clung to everything around them, marring the few sections of drywall still standing and swirling irregular patterns over what was left of th
e cheap, waterlogged carpet lining the corridor.
Savannah’s pulse kicked up a notch. She had surveyed a handful of scenes post-fire, but they’d all been in controlled environment drills—never the real deal, and never as extensive as this. God, how could anyone figure out what some of these twisted, charred things left behind by the fire had even been, let alone how one of them might’ve sparked a blaze? The fire had scorched nearly everything in its path, warping the rest.
The clack of her Tony Lamas echoed in the stillness. The air grew hotter as she and Cole made their way to the storage bay at the end of the row, the direct sunlight splashing in from the windows making it only marginally easier to tell what they were dealing with.
“Yeah, this definitely looks like where the fire started,” Cole said, sending his stare around the room in a slow three-sixty. “See the scorch marks traveling up the wall here, next to the window where the AC unit was anchored in?”
Recognition did a slow trickle into Savannah’s brain. Believing that the hunk of charred metal at her feet had once been an air-conditioning unit was nearly impossible.
“Mmm-hmm. But what about this?” she asked, pointing to an oily stain on the floor.
“Looks like a chemical of some kind. I’d guess this is residue from something that was stored here when the unit caught fire.”
“Oh,” Savannah said, and come to think of it, that did make sense. “So the unit was working overtime in this heat wave we’ve been having. The wiring shorted out and caused a spark big enough for the insulation behind the walls to catch fire.”
Cole nodded. “The report does say that the AC unit was an older model. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve ever seen one of those dinosaurs malfunction and start a blaze. If the electrical in the building was out of date, too . . . the cause of this one is pretty much a slam dunk.” He squatted down lower, bracing his forearms over the thighs of his jeans as he took a closer look at the burned-out shell of the window unit, then the torched walls and equally damaged ceiling.
“A lot of the buildings in Industrial Row are old, right?” She flipped through the pages in her hand, knowing she’d seen the information somewhere. “Ah! According to this, the warehouse was built nineteen years ago. It doesn’t say if the electrical is original to the building, but . . .”
“Between an overheated AC unit and a crappy old outlet, that would be more than enough to do it.”
Still, Cole’s brow furrowed into a deep V, telling her in no uncertain terms that he was playing all the angles in his head even with the answers right there in front of him. Wanting to learn as much as possible from what little was left behind, Savannah wiped back a damp strand of hair that had escaped from her ponytail and rescanned the room. After three failed attempts to put a positive ID to anything that had been in the storage space, she turned her attention back to the AC unit beneath the window, turning through the pages of the report one more time to make sure it all added up in her brain.
“What?” she finally asked, unable to cage her curiosity, and Cole looked up from his spot in the center of the fire-ravaged room.
“The burn patterns on the wall are well documented in Oz’s report, but there’s no mention of these.” He gestured to the scorch marks covering the floor. “And I can’t figure them out.”
Savannah knelt down next to him, listening carefully as he continued. “This warehouse leases individual storage bays, promising climate control. But it’s cheaper to heat and cool each storage bay with individual window units. That way, the management company doesn’t have to foot the bill for heating and cooling empty space, in case some of the storage bays go unrented.”
“Pretty chintzy,” she said. “But under most circumstances, it’s not dangerous, is it?”
“Not in theory, no. Obviously, units can short out. Electrical fires are pretty standard fare, and with enough time and things to burn, they can get deadly fast.”
Savannah held up the papers in her hand, confused. “That’s exactly what this says, and the burn patterns on the walls are consistent with an electrical fire.” She pointed to the thin black column seared into the wall beside the window where the air-conditioning unit had once been anchored. The scorch marks stretched all the way to the ceiling, following what she had to assume had been the path of the actual wires behind the drywall before they’d ignited and been burned beyond recognition.
Cole stood, the look on his face as serious as she’d ever seen it—and that was really saying something. “Yeah, but those aren’t the burn patterns I’m talking about. Look at the damage here, in front of the window and farther inside the room.”
“It’s pretty extensive.” Her stomach squeezed. The fire had been hot enough to burn through the linoleum tiles, warping a five-foot radius of the subfloor and torching everything that had been in its path.
“It’s not extensive. It’s insane,” Cole corrected, not heatedly. “In order for a fire to leave damage like this, it needs to burn at both an extremely high temperature and an extremely fast rate. It’s difficult to make out the pattern here because everything is so fried. But squat down and look at the floor from this angle, with the sunlight on it. See the way the heat seems to have pushed out and up, into the center of the room where it ignited everything in front of it?”
Shock dropped Savannah’s jaw. “Almost like . . . some sort of explosion precipitated the spread of the fire.”
“Not almost.” He paused to lift his gaze from the blackened floor to pin her with a stare. “Exactly.”
“Okay.” Her temples pounded in complaint at the thoughts suddenly churning through her brain, and she slid her fingers over her forehead to try to make sense of at least one of them. “So what does that mean?”
“What it means is that Oz made a mistake.”
* * *
Cole stood in the hallway outside Station Eight’s common room, taking a swipe at the same section of linoleum he’d been mopping for the last fifteen minutes. To his left stood the hall of pictures leading to Captain Westin’s office. To the right, the engine bay, where Oz and the rest of the guys on squad were prepping for rescue drills. And here he was, right smack in between.
How fucking appropriate.
Four days and one and a half shifts had passed since he’d made the troubling discovery that Oz had misdiagnosed the cause of that warehouse fire. Or at least, Cole thought he’d misdiagnosed it. But therein lay the problem. With the extent of the damage, diagnosing whether the electrical had sparked first and caused the AC unit to somehow explode or vice versa was a true case of could-be-either, and regardless, the air-conditioning unit had been the cause, hands down. The manufacturer had been notified and was taking all the necessary precautions. The fire was accidental either way. No one had been hurt. The building would be torn down and rebuilt, probably nicer and safer and better than it had ever been.
Yet something about it sat in Cole’s belly like a box full of tire irons.
Don’t go trying to buy trouble. Since last week’s showdown in the engine bay, things had been surprisingly low-key between Savannah and Oz. They still traded glares like baseball cards any time they shared space, but Oz had kept his distance the same way Savannah had kept to her training and assignments. She’d even learned to forgo her knee-jerk responses for smarter, more calculated moves, and Cole had to admit it.
With every passing day, she was not only proving herself as a firefighter, but becoming part of the tight-knit crew at Station Eight. Which meant that in less than three short weeks, Cole’s spot on squad would be his for the taking.
Which also meant that Oz would be his LT. And there was no time like the present to clear the air with the guy once and for all.
Cole finished mopping the hallway, neatly storing the cleaning supplies before aiming his boots in the direction of the engine bay. Oz knelt down over an open nylon backpack by the squad vehicle, doing the inventory on the contents used for rope rescue.
“Hey, Lieutenant.” Cole hoped to ease
into the conversation and gauge Oz’s mood a little, but nope. The guy barely looked up from the stainless-steel anchor plates in his hand.
“Everett.”
Ten seconds passed, then twenty, and Cole sucked in a breath. Oz had never been much of a twirl-around-the-subject kind of guy. Getting right to the point was probably Cole’s best strategy.
But then he caught sight of the crescent-shaped shadows under Oz’s eyes, the weary lines that seemed to have intensified even more since the last time Cole had seen him, and something entirely different flew from his mouth.
“Are you okay?”
Now Oz did pause, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Did you come out here to check on my feelings, Everett? See if I need some hot chocolate or a hug?”
Shit. “No, I just . . . you look tired, is all.”
Okay, so it was akin to saying hey, man, you look like crap on a cracker, but the truth of the matter was that Oz did. Enough for Cole to risk raising the guy’s ire by saying so.
“Thanks for the pep talk, but I’m solid.” Oz slid his gaze back to the pulleys and carabiners in the rescue bag in front of him, and Cole knew that if he didn’t speak his mind now, he wouldn’t get another chance.
“Got it. Listen, I just want to make sure we’re right side up with what happened in Westin’s office last week. I know things got a little touchy.”
Oz’s hands became fists, his knuckles turning white over the nylon bag. “You should’ve cut Nelson loose early, like I said. I know you want that spot on squad, but she doesn’t belong here.”
Anger sailed through Cole’s chest, hot and unexpected. “Then let her prove it. If she’s not good enough, her actions will out her soon enough, just like they do with every other candidate.”
“At whose expense?” Oz hissed. “Yours? Mine? That’s not a risk I’m willing to take, thanks.”
“Just because she’s a woman?” Jesus. He was all for having Savannah prove her worth, but this guilty-before-proven-innocent stuff was just bullshit, no matter how much Oz outranked him.
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