Deep Burn (Station Seventeen Book 2)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  There were only six, but God, they spoke volumes. The place was a total loss, the walls bearing all the telltale signs of an electrical fire, with scorch marks running the length of the wiring that had been underneath the drywall and burn patterns that had rendered the outlets and switches nearly unidentifiable. Nearly all of the building-killing damage was centered in the back of the restaurant, which wasn’t exactly a giant shocker considering the description of the grease trap above the fryer. Not that much seemed to be left of the thing, or most of the kitchen and adjacent office and half the dining room, either. But something about the scorch patterns and the sheer extent of the damage seemed both odd and familiar, swirling and poking and tugging at Shae’s brain until finally, all the dots connected in a hard, magnetic snap.

  “Hey, Natalie?” Shae asked, looking up at the redhead with her heart halfway to her throat. “Do we have the reports from the house fire that Seventeen responded to on Friday?”

  Natalie blinked at her from across the cramped office space. “Not yet. The fire marshal wanted to give the RPD’s crime lab plenty of time to go over the scene. He isn’t even scheduled to go out there for his inspection until tomorrow morning. Why?”

  “Because there are a lot of similarities between that fire and the one that went down at this restaurant by the pier two weeks ago, and something about the restaurant fire looks weird to me.”

  “Okay,” Natalie said, the crease between her auburn brows marking her doubt. “Define ‘weird’.”

  Shae lifted the photograph from her desk, flipping it outward in display. “See the burn patterns here, along the walls? And all this crazy damage in the kitchen?”

  Natalie leaned forward in her desk chair, her brown eyes narrowing as she took a minute to examine the picture. “There’s more damage than your average restaurant fire, but that doesn’t automatically make it arson. In fact, those scorch marks are textbook for faulty electrical.”

  “Exactly.” Despite what should be a slam dunk, Shae’s heart beat faster against the crisp white top of her uniform. “But if the crappy wiring sparked a fire”—she turned the picture to trace the burn marks by the fryer with one finger—“and that’s what ignited the grease trap, which made the place burn so hot, so fast”—she whipped the second picture in place of the first to hammer home the extensive damage to the kitchen—“then why does the office, which is clear across the room from the grease trap and the point of origin of the fire, look like it sustained the most damage?”

  “Fire doesn’t really discriminate,” Natalie said with a matter-of-fact shrug. “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that. Put enough stuff in a small space like an office, and flames won’t have any trouble ripping through it, just like they did through the rest of the restaurant.”

  Shae lowered the photos to her desk, her thoughts going Mach 2. “True. But the fire would’ve had to travel across what? Eight, ten feet of ceramic floor tiles in order to reach the office?” Not impossible, but also not likely without foul play or fairy dust, especially since the dining room looked just as torched.

  A feeling that Natalie didn’t seem to share, if her expression was anything to go by. “The fire might have spread over the walls and ceiling. Without a full set of pictures, it’s tough to say exactly how the fire moved from one room to the other. The point of origin is pretty clear from that shot of the switches and outlets, though. This was definitely an electrical fire.”

  That may be, but… “You’re assuming the fire started in only one place,” Shae said, prompting Natalie to laugh.

  “Multiple points of origin can’t happen by accident. It’s impossible.”

  Adrenaline perked in Shae’s veins, her pulse pressing faster against her eardrums. “Right. So what if this fire wasn’t an accident?”

  Natalie’s shoulders met the back of her desk chair with a thump. “You’re telling me you think this restaurant fire was set on purpose, and there’s some kind of tie-in with the fire you responded to on Friday.”

  “I’m telling you I think it’s possible,” she corrected, mostly because Natalie was looking at her like she’d lost her faculties. But Shae’s gut was screaming of things not right, and she’d been at the scene of that house fire firsthand. She knew what she’d seen, just like she knew in her gut that she wasn’t wrong about this. “Listen, I get that it’s kind of low on physical evidence. But I’m telling you, between the intensity and the extent of the damage, there’s something off about these two fires. Don’t you think it warrants at least a little digging?”

  After a second that felt like an hour, Natalie said, “We could ask Frank.”

  Yessss. Excitement bloomed behind Shae’s breastbone. Straightening the photos as best she could in less than a breath, she scooped up the file folder and followed Natalie across the hallway. Frank’s office was a carbon copy of Natalie’s, minus the pretty pot of African violets on her windowsill and times about thirty on the number of file folders towering from the box marked “incoming” on his desk.

  “Everything okay, Delacourt?” he asked, although since he hadn’t moved his eyes from his computer screen or so much as paused in whatever he was typing, Shae had to admit, she had no idea how he even knew they were standing in the doorframe.

  “I’m not sure. Shae found something in the report for that restaurant fire from a couple weeks ago—Fiorelli’s, down by the pier? We wanted to get your take on it if you’ve got a second.”

  Frank’s mostly gray brows tugged downward to match his frown, and while he still didn’t stop typing, he did at least slow down. “Shoot.”

  Realizing she had a very thin window for what little of his attention she was going to get, Shae didn’t mince words. “I think this fire—and one that happened on Friday in North Point—is arson.”

  “Arson.” Frank exhaled slowly, pushing back from his keyboard to cross his arms over his barrel chest. “And what makes you think these fires were set deliberately?”

  She launched into the same explanation she’d given Natalie, describing the weird behavior of the fire at the meth lab-slash-murder scene in comparison to the even weirder damage patterns in the photos of the restaurant fire. The re-telling only cemented Shae’s resolve, and by the time she’d gone through all the details, she was more convinced than ever that something nefarious was going on right under their noses.

  “Some of this does make sense in theory,” Natalie started, but Frank dismissed the idea with a wave of one beefy hand.

  “And in reality, all of it can be refuted by more reasonable explanations. No offense, McCullough.” His genuinely apologetic expression didn’t make Shae want to scream any less. “I know you’re used to a lot of action. But the reality is, we’re not exactly like an episode of CSI over here. Arson is a lot more out of the ordinary than most people think. The chances that you stumbled onto not one, but two of them in your first few hours here…let’s just say I’m impressed with your imagination.”

  A shocked huff crossed Shae’s lips. He couldn’t be serious. “So you think I’m just making this up?”

  “In the thirty years I’ve worked in arson investigation, do you know how many firefighters I’ve had assigned here short-term?” Frank asked, the odd re-direct shocking her enough that she shook her head by default.

  “No.”

  “Probably a hundred, maybe even two. And do you know how many of them were sure they’d found a case of arson on their first day here?”

  Shae’s face flushed, but still, she pressed her boots into the thinly carpeted office floor to stand her ground. “I’m not imagining things.”

  “Neither is the fire marshal,” Frank said, pointing to the file folder in her hands. “He did a site inspection of that restaurant. If he says the fire was accidental and caused by faulty wiring and the evidence we have backs that up, then that’s what happened.”

  “But it might not be that cut and dried. If you’d just look at the burn patterns again—”

  Frank cut her off with
a shake of his balding head. “Listen, McCullough. I appreciate that you’re giving these files a hard look, but we’re up to our eye teeth in them. Leaping to conclusions on little more than impulse isn’t going to get you far on this job, and you’ll need a hell of a lot more than a couple ‘what if’s all spit-balled together for me to green-light an investigation that goes against what the fire marshal has already said. So do me a favor, would you please? Stick to reality so we can get some work done around here. You’re dismissed.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Natalie whispered once Shae finally got the command to her legs to about-face and move back into the hallway. “Arson’s just notoriously hard to prove, and we tend to go by the whole ‘simplest explanation is the best explanation’ mindset around here.”

  “Thanks for trying,” Shae managed, trying like hell to calm the frustration cycloning through her rib cage. She had two weeks to go here in arson. Common sense dictated that she should fill out the report and move on; after all, Frank wasn’t necessarily wrong. A reasonable argument could be made that these fires had both been accidents, and that they were both completely unrelated to boot.

  Oh, screw reasonable. There had been two bodies at that house fire, and just because the odds weren’t in her favor, that didn’t make her wrong. Shae might not be able to prove it with a thousand irrefutable facts, but these fires didn’t feel unrelated, and they sure as hell didn’t feel like accidents. If Frank wouldn’t listen to her, she’d just have to find someone who would.

  Which was exactly why, instead of filling out her report like Frank had clearly told her to, Shae waited until Natalie’s back was turned, then slipped the entire case folder into her laptop bag.

  Capelli was a complete and total idiot. More specifically, he was an idiot with a raging hard-on that had refused to leave him in peace ever since he’d heedlessly touched Shae McCullough’s mouth three days ago.

  And didn’t that just make the fact that he’d been sitting in the intelligence office for the last four hours reeeeeally fucking awkward.

  Capelli turned toward his laptop monitor, mashing back on the thought. Yes, Shae had flirted with him, and even though it had defied every ounce of logic he owned, for a hot, reckless minute, he’d flirted right back. But a woman that wild and impulsive was like top shelf tequila. The first shot might be a rush, but the rest of the bottle got real dangerous, real fast. Capelli had to keep his head on straight and his control locked down, for this case and for his sanity.

  Because if he got a taste of Shae McCullough, he knew goddamn good and well he wouldn’t stop until he’d taken her back to his place to drink down every wicked inch of her.

  Starting with that curve in her lower back.

  Slapping his hands over the keyboard in front of him, Capelli forced himself to open the active investigation file for the Denton murder—not that any of the information had changed since he’d last looked at it an hour ago. They still hadn’t seen official reports from either the ME or the crime scene techs, and although he had gotten the preliminary photos of the scene from the latter, the images had left him just as empty-handed as ever.

  Still, perfect murders were a statistical impossibility. There had to be something that would get Capelli from point A to point B, some scrap of detail that would lead his brain to a set of facts he could parse out and put together in a logical fashion. All he needed was to find it, to uncover the right set of details to get him on the path to solving the puzzle and doing good…

  Sinclair stuck his head out of his office, clearing his throat and pegging Hollister with a look from across the room. “Caught a robbery/assault at a pawn shop over on Norton Avenue. Maxwell and Hale are still stuck in court on that domestic homicide from last summer. You and Moreno up for a little adventure?”

  “Always,” Hollister said, grabbing his jacket while Isabella did the same.

  “Good. I’ll have dispatch tell the unis at the scene that you’re on your way.” Sinclair’s ice-blue gaze moved over the quiet desks and otherwise empty office space to land on Capelli. “Looks like you’re holding down the fort.”

  “Copy that.” He had plenty on his plate with this homicide investigation, thin as it was. He murmured a pair of “see ya later”s to Hollister and Moreno, but before he could settle in and get to work, the sound of an all too familiar voice hit him directly in the solar plexus.

  “Hi, Isabella.” Shae stood just inside the glass doors of the intelligence office, and oh sure, now she had her hair pulled back in her trademark ponytail.

  Moreno pulled up short, her brown eyes wide with surprise. “Oh! Hey, McCullough. Is everything okay?” She dropped her voice, but not enough that Capelli missed her adding on, “Kellan told me Bridges took you off active duty for a couple of weeks.”

  Capelli’s pulse tapped faster with shock and something a little deeper that he couldn’t quite identify. She’d been benched? Christ, that explained why she’d been in the grocery store instead of on shift Friday night.

  Along with why her smile had gone tighter than a tourniquet when he’d mentioned it.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Shae said. “At least, I am as far as that’s concerned.” The way her lips pressed into a thin, white line as soon as she’d finished speaking didn’t agree, but Capelli wasn’t about to point that out. He was halfway to eavesdropping as it was, and Shae McCullough’s state of mind was none of his damned business. “But I was wondering if I could talk to you about that fire down in North Point.”

  “Ah.” Isabella swung a harried glance toward the door, where Hollister stood waiting. “I’m actually headed out on a robbery call. Did you remember something about the scene that you wanted to add to your report?”

  Shae shook her head, but funny, the negative did damn little to erase the determination creasing her gold-brown brows. “No, I…it’s kind of complicated. I think it’s important, though.”

  “Okay,” Isabella said, clearly torn. “Capelli’s up to speed on the case. Why don’t you talk to him about it, then I’ll catch up when I get back?”

  Shae’s shoulder blades snapped together beneath her quilted navy blue RFD jacket, her perfectly heart-shaped lips parting at the suggestion, although Isabella didn’t seem to have caught the reaction. Of course, Capelli had not only seen it in spades, but his stupid, treasonous, no-thoughts-left-behind brain would probably replay the subtle movement of Shae’s mouth over and over again in vivid detail for hours after she left.

  Fuck. He really was an idiot.

  “Sure, yeah,” Shae said slowly. Her tone painted the words with all the enthusiasm of someone agreeing to a double-decker root canal, and truthfully, Capelli was with her. He needed to be putting together plausible scenarios based on the facts of this case. Being distracted by Shae’s bold, bright green stare and insane curves? Not going to help, thanks.

  But balking would only pique Isabella’s attention—and not in a good way—so he aimed a perfectly polite look at Shae instead.

  “Come on in and have a seat,” he said, pushing up from his desk to grab the extra chair from beside Maxwell’s work space. Capelli placed the chair close enough to his for them to talk, yet far enough to keep her at arms’ length, literally, and she gave their surroundings a nice long look-see before settling stiffly across from him.

  “Quite the setup you’ve got here,” she said, gesturing to the array mounted over his shoulder and the crime scene board to her left, which was currently switched off. But the sooner they got down to business, the faster he’d be able to systematically go through what little he had on this murder to piece together the most likely viable hypothesis.

  So he replied, “Thanks. You had something on the fire?”

  Again, her shoulders hitched, but only for a second before her eyes sparked with fierce resolve. “I think your murderer is also an arsonist, and I don’t think the fire he set on Friday was his first one.”

  Capelli’s pulse stuttered at the multiple whammies in her statement, his brain scrambling
to order the parts of her accusation by importance.

  First thing’s first. “Do you have any proof of that?”

  Shae paused. “That’s where this gets a little complicated.”

  “That’s a no,” he said, and dammit, he needed leads he could use, not a bunch of wild what-ifs that couldn’t even be substantiated.

  Shae, however? Not backing down so easily. “It’s not necessarily a no. If you’d just hear me out, I have a theory—”

  “A theory.” Jesus, this was getting crazier by the minute.

  “Yes.” One hand slid to the hip of her navy blue uniform pants, locking in tight. “A theory. You know, a coherent group of general propositions that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction?”

  Capelli’s jaw would have unhinged in shock if the rest of him hadn’t just been so unequivocally turned on. “I know what a theory is.”

  “Well, good, because I have one, and even though I can’t back it up with concrete facts per se, I still think it’s important.”

  For a hot second, he considered pushing back. Shae was smart—anyone with a double-digit IQ could see that—but she wasn’t exactly prone to logical thoughts. Besides, he wasn’t a fucking rookie, flying by the seat of his damned pants and praying for a happy landing. He had a method for figuring out cases. One that considered all the facts and the probabilities that went with them in order to get to the most likely scenario. One that he’d crafted over time and proven again and again. One that worked.

  Except.

  Capelli was painfully short on facts (or, shit, anything) and this case was growing cold, fast. Weighing the current situation in his head, he arrived at the option most likely to give him the outcome he was after.