Deep Burn (Station Seventeen Book 2)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  No matter how much she felt like Capelli had examined the facts and only the facts, then completely dismissed her and the reason for her actions with that one little melted chocolate stare.

  “Now you really are losing your marbles,” Shae muttered, snapping her towel from the hook outside the shower stall. Sure, Capelli was more methodical and observant than most—and seeing as how her closest friends were a bunch of first responders of varying specialty, that wasn’t exactly small potatoes. She wouldn’t expect the guy in charge of tech and surveillance for Remington’s most elite police unit to be a dumbass, though, and anyway, his eyes weren’t all that melty.

  Okay, right. She officially needed a giant fucking Hershey bar and a pair of orgasms, stat.

  Finishing up her dry off/get dressed routine, Shae shouldered her duffel and headed out of the shower room. The house was fairly quiet, although after a really pear-shaped call, that wasn’t unusual. Her boots called out a series of soft thumps on the linoleum as she made her way to the locker room to stow her bag, then another as she redirected herself to the laundry room with this morning’s sweaty and smoky uniform in tow.

  She clattered to a stop on the threshold at the sight of Slater with his hands braced on either side of the washing machine and his head hung low over his chest.

  “Hey,” she said quietly, and although he lifted his chin, he didn’t turn to look at her.

  “Oh, hey. I was just, ah, you know. Doing some laundry.”

  Although a pile of navy blue cotton sat directly in front of Slater on top of the washer, the machine itself was silent, the plastic container of detergent next to his hand sealed up tight. Something shifted behind Shae’s breastbone, and she stepped up next to him to put her clothes on top of the dryer.

  “Popular choice. You want to combine forces? We can probably fit all of this into one load.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Slater nodded. But instead of stepping back on the linoleum to move his clothes and open the washing machine door, he stuck to his spot and said, “I really fucked up today.”

  Usually she was the one surprising people, so it took her a second to recalibrate. “You didn’t fuck up, Slater.”

  He arched a black brow toward his nearly shaved hairline in a clear expression of doubt. “I froze, McCullough. I heard the captain’s order on the radio. I knew what I was supposed to do when I found that victim, and I couldn’t make myself do it. There was so much blood, and the guy’s neck was just”—the color drained from Slater’s normally light brown complexion—“I’ve never seen anything like that. I knew I was supposed to call in directly to Bridges for orders, but I didn’t. Instead, I panicked.”

  Shae knew she could give him a bunch of there-there platitudes like any regular person would. Hell, the call had been hairy enough to warrant a bucketload of them. But since she was about as far away from regular as a girl could get, she gave in to the wry smile tempting the edges of her mouth instead. “I hate to break it to you. That just means you’re human.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t afford to let my emotions railroad me on a call.”

  “No, you can’t,” she agreed, because as much as she didn’t want to kick the guy when he was down, she wanted to bullshit him even less. “But you also can’t forget you have them, because you do. And if you ever aren’t scared on call, that’s when you need to hang it up.”

  Slater’s chin snapped to attention. “You were scared today?”

  Shae laughed, and judging by the rookie’s expression, she’d reclaimed the upper hand in the surprising-people department. “I saw exactly what you saw, Slater, so in a word? Hell yes. I have emotions all the time—especially on calls. The only difference between me and you is that I’ve learned how to manage mine during a fire. You think I never need backup?” she asked. “Or that Walker or Gamble don’t?”

  “Well…no. I guess not,” Slater admitted slowly.

  “That’s exactly why we do everything in pairs.” She softened her voice, but not her resolve. “Because ninety percent of our job is unpredictable, just like today. Any given call could go about a thousand different ways. This one was rough. One of the worst I’ve seen in a long time. But you’ll figure out how to manage your emotions on calls. Good firefighters always do.”

  The sound of a feminine throat clearing captured their attention from behind them, and Shae’s stomach tilted a little bit closer to her knees at the sight of their fire house administrator, January Sinclair, standing in the open doorway.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” said the petite blonde, tucking the stack of file folders in her grasp against the hip of her dark gray pencil skirt. “Captain Bridges would like to see you in his office, Shae.”

  Even though she’d been expecting the request, her pulse still pushed a little faster in her veins. Slater opened his mouth—presumably to make a protest of some sort—but this wasn’t exactly Shae’s first rodeo, so she gave up a tiny headshake to let him know she’d be fine. Turning to follow January down the long stretch of hallway that connected the two wings of the fire house, she straightened her shoulders and smoothed a hand over her fresh uniform before stepping over the threshold of Captain Bridges’s office. He sat stiffly behind his desk, his normally calm demeanor painted over with a serious layer of I’m-not-happy, and Gamble looked equally twisted out of shape from his spot in one of the two chairs across from the captain.

  “McCullough. Shut the door,” Bridges clipped out with a tight nod. Unease filled Shae’s stomach—nothing good ever came from the old shut-the-door request that wasn’t a request—but she did as she was told before moving to stand beside the empty chair next to Gamble.

  Bridges didn’t tell her to sit before folding his hands over his desk, and okay, wow, he really was mad. “This is familiar territory for you, so I’m not going to go through any pleasantries. Disobeying a direct order from a superior officer is not only unacceptable, but it’s completely irresponsible. Your actions were dangerous and made without regard for your engine-mates.”

  Shae’s cheeks flamed with indignation. He couldn’t be serious. “I went back into that house specifically for one of my engine-mates,” she protested.

  “And what if someone else had to go in after you because you’d recklessly run into a situation you couldn’t handle?”

  The thought made her pause, but only for a millisecond. “But I did handle it. Slater and I were just fine.”

  Funny, that little fact didn’t make a dent in Bridges’s anger. “You’re far from fine. You dove headfirst into a snap decision that wasn’t yours to make instead of standing down while I assessed the situation and handled it accordingly. You acted foolishly, without one iota of thought or respect for the chain of command,” he said, and the words arrowed all the way through Shae’s chest, rocking her heartbeat and her waning calm.

  She managed to inhale, although she had no fucking clue how. “With all due respect, sir, I’m not stupid.”

  “You may not be, but your actions were.” A frosty silence filled the space of his office for a minute, then another, before Bridges added, “Do you think Slater doesn’t learn from you?”

  If he’d asked her to stand on his desk and sing show tunes, it might’ve shocked her less. “No, sir.” Her conversation with Slater two seconds before she’d arrived in this room was case in point that the rookie was paying attention, and well.

  Gamble triple-knotted the you’re-in-deep-shit factor of the conversation by leaning forward in his chair to chime in. “I could’ve kept Slater with me on lines, or I could’ve waited for a different call to send him on S&R with Walker. But I didn’t. I picked you, McCullough. I trusted you to take him in there and show him how to be a good firefighter.”

  The implication that she wasn’t slid over her like an ice bath. “How does having his back at all costs not teach him exactly that?” she asked, but Bridges knocked her question down, hard and fast.

  “Because you disobeyed a direct order, Shae. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have Slat
er’s back. I’m saying you should let me have yours and trust that I’ll do my job, which is to make the best choices to keep all of you safe.” He paused, his voice growing quieter but no less intense. “This is a dangerous profession, McCullough. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that we lost a firefighter in this house nearly four years ago.”

  The words stunned her so thoroughly that for a second, she couldn’t speak. Of course she remembered Asher Gibson. He’d been their candidate before Kellan had arrived from the academy and Dempsey had moved over to squad, one of her engine-mates and a part of the Seventeen family just like everyone else. The day he’d died in that house fire had leveled them all. Including Shae.

  “Yes, sir,” she managed, her mouth dust-dry, but Bridges didn’t scale back on his censure.

  “There’s no room for freelancing in this fire house. You might’ve gotten Slater out of that house today, but what you taught him was that it’s okay to fly by the seat of your bunker pants and break the rules. Now I have to worry about you and him going commando every time the all-call goes off.”

  Shae’s breath jog-jammed, squeezing her lungs as Bridges’s words sank deep under her skin. “You don’t have to worry about me, Cap. I’m a good firefighter.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not what I saw today,” he said, sitting back in his desk chair to spear her with a stare. “I’ve got no choice but to write you up and take you off active duty for two weeks, effective immediately.”

  No. No fucking way. She’d go crazy in the first two minutes. “You want me to sit on my hands for two weeks?”

  At least here, Bridges gave up a pause, albeit a microscopic one. “Not entirely. You’re on restricted duty for the rest of today’s shift, helping January here in the office until she goes home for the night. Then first thing Monday, you’ll report to the arson investigation unit and let them put you to work there for two weeks.”

  “Arson investigation,” Shae repeated. On one hand, it was better than two weeks’ worth of being benched completely. On the other… “You’re sending me to the place where paperwork goes to die?”

  Now Bridges didn’t hesitate. “They do solid work over there, and clearly, you need to slow down and be reminded what proper protocol looks like. Two weeks of procedure and paperwork will do you some good.”

  She opened her mouth, the impulse to argue sparking on her tongue. But the hard set of the captain’s jaw told her he wasn’t going to budge, and Gamble’s dark, serious stare only reinforced her shitty odds.

  No matter what she said, she was going to be wrong. Too hot-blooded. Reckless. Impetuous.

  So as much as she hated it with the intensity of a thousand burning suns, Shae had no choice but to scrape up what little was left of her pride and say, “Great. I’ll go find January and get started.”

  Chapter 4

  Capelli sat back in his desk chair, staring at the precise piles of data he’d compiled in total disbelief. Statistically speaking, the odds that this much information wouldn’t yield so much as a glimmer of a lead had to be astronomically high. Yet this case seemed bound and determined to defy any sort of normalcy, so really, he shouldn’t be surprised.

  Christ, they had nothing. And if there was one thing Capelli hated above all others, it was a puzzle he couldn’t analyze and figure out.

  Especially when said puzzle came with two dead bodies attached to it.

  “Okay,” he murmured, looking at the copy of the main case board screen he’d pulled up on his monitor. The intelligence office was quiet and semi-dark, with Isabella having left to swing by the sufentanil for dinner and Hollister, Maxwell, and Hale calling it quits to celebrate their Friday night at the Crooked Angel not long after that. Sinclair was still in his office, which wasn’t really a fair barometer, because Capelli had a hard suspicion that the guy actually lived in his office rather than the apartment he rented a few blocks away. But the quiet would give Capelli a chance to get some work done, and the work would keep him busy.

  Weekends were the hardest, with all their idle time.

  He forced his eyes to focus on the screen and his pulse to remain status quo. Scanning the monitor on the desk in front of him, he tapped the touch screen to maximize the crime scene reports, re-reading each one even though he’d memorized them by default the first time through. He was better with numbers and images than words, though, and sometimes the repetition offered up a new angle.

  At this point, anything would be better than the nothing he had, so he planted his elbows on his desk and read.

  The excessive amounts of water needed to put out the fire had pretty much rendered any evidence that might have been left behind useless, for both the murder and the meth lab. Not that their crime scene techs hadn’t gone through and collected what little they could anyway, but Capelli knew far better than to think that between the soaking and the fire that had required it, any fingerprints or viable DNA samples—or, okay, any clues at all—had survived. Getting anywhere with the Scarlet Reapers had been a bust, too. Their leader, an absolute mountain of a dude who ironically went by Little Ray, had been unequivocally unhelpful when Maxwell and Hale had reached out for a little knock and talk after they’d left the scene of the fire.

  They might get lucky with physical evidence on the bodies, but for now, if Capelli wanted to get anywhere, he’d have to rely on background checks (nothing), chatter from confidential informants (nada), and the information gathered from the interviews done at the scene (nil.)

  Well, shit. Good thing he loved a challenge.

  Closing his eyes, Capelli pictured the scene reports in his mind, marshaling the words into order so he could look at the details in his mind’s eye, like a photograph. Slater’s account had been pretty basic—yes, he’d assessed the fire and seen the chemicals, no, he hadn’t seen the victim until Bridges had made the call to fall out. After that, the only detail he’d been able to recall with any accuracy was the blood that had been everywhere, along with the fact that Shae had run back into the house to grab the victim and lead Slater to safety.

  Now Capelli’s pulse did jump, rendering him stupid for the second time today. While the reaction wasn’t entirely unnatural considering Shae’s lack of regard for anything resembling a rule or the all-emotions, all-the-time way she’d abruptly ended their conversation before walking away from him at the scene, it was still dangerous.

  Actually, check that. His uncharacteristic reaction wasn’t really the problem.

  The impulsive thoughts about the even more impulsive firefighter who had caused it, not once, but twice today? Now those were downright fucking dangerous.

  I don’t just see facts, Capelli, came that infuriatingly sexy, borderline overconfident voice from the spot where his memory had stored it with care.

  I see everything.

  “You’re here awfully late.”

  Sinclair’s words delivered him back to the intelligence office with a hard jolt. But since Capelli had been programmed ages ago never to show surprise, he opened his eyes slowly, keeping his face blank and his body angled toward the computer monitor for just a beat longer before turning to give his boss a run-of-the-mill smile.

  “You taught me well. Not that I gave you much choice.”

  “Hm.” The corners of Sinclair’s mouth twitched in the smallest suggestion of amusement, an expression he kept in place as he said, “Well, I’m not giving you much choice now, either. It’s late, and it’s Friday to boot. This case isn’t likely to get much warmer until we get those reports from the ME’s office and CSU, and even then, leads are going to take both work and luck. Go home, Capelli. Decompress. I don’t want to see you again until Monday morning.”

  Without letting his own smile slip, Capelli weighed all the logical reasons he could craft into an argument for staying. But Sinclair knew him better than pretty much anyone, just like Capelli knew from countless past attempts that there was a zero percent chance the guy would ease up on his demand, no matter how good of an argument he made. Which
meant Capelli’s only viable option was to ghost.

  Greeeeat.

  He pushed back in his desk chair, his movements perfectly measured even though his heartbeat worked overtime in an effort to unsteady them. “You’re the boss.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” Sinclair said. Turning on his heels, he moved back toward his office, tacking on a quiet but serious “good night” before disappearing through the door. Capelli resignedly went through the motions of powering down his machines, making certain to leave all traces of the case behind him on his desk for Sinclair’s benefit. He didn’t really need the files anyway—thank you, eidetic memory—and even if he did, he could use his laptop at home to pull them from the RPD database faster than most people could order a pair of pizzas. What he did need, though, was to keep his over-active brain from wandering. Making all sorts of suggestions he’d be tempted to consider. Sliding back into the past.

  Don’t go there. Not even in your head.

  Check that. Especially not in your head.

  Grabbing his jacket from the back of his desk chair, Capelli shouldered his way into the thing and headed through the glass double doors leading out of the intelligence office. His past wasn’t a secret (public records were funny that way), nor was his history with Sinclair. While no one in the unit ever started a conversation with “hey, remember that time Sinclair arrested Capelli on multiple felonies and instead of throwing his ass in jail where it belonged, he gave him a job instead?” they never really dodged it either. Mostly because it was the truth.

  Disclosure was a presentation of facts. And facts were everything.

  That Capelli’s had turned him into a white knight and a black king at the same time just made his personal chessboard extra-fucking-special.

  He walked the same path as always out of the intelligence office—down the second-floor hallway to the open stairwell, sixteen steps to the main floor of the precinct, ten paces to the front door. As if there were some switch in his subconscious connecting work and the rest of the outside world, his stomach began to rumble the minute his boots had crossed the threshold of the Thirty-Third. Capelli did a mental scan of the contents of his fridge, and yeah, unless he wanted to eat mayonnaise or some leftover vegetable Lo Mein of dubious quality, he was going to have to grab some groceries on the way to his apartment.