Her eyes flashed with the sort of undiluted intensity that made him want to simultaneously run screaming and pin her to the nearest flat surface to fuck her senseless, and hell if that wasn’t the crown jewel of reasons to stay away from her. Not only could he not predict anything Shae would say or do, but he couldn’t predict anything he’d say or do or even feel when he was around her.
“No,” Capelli said again. He turned to move around her once and for all, but her hand shot out to wrap around his bicep.
“Please,” she said, and truly, he couldn’t tell what stunned him more—the word itself or the need with which she’d spoken it. Some emotion he couldn’t be sure he’d seen, much less identify with any certainty, darted over Shae’s face in the glow of the ambient light being cast down from the bar behind them. “I want to help. Not just tag along for a day or send you reports from arson, but really help. So could you please do me this one fucking favor just for tonight and let me?”
“Okay.”
The word sailed out of his mouth before his brain could lock it down, and speaking of not being able to predict what he’d say in her presence. Jesus Christ, was he insane?
“Really? You want to work together? Tonight?” Shae asked, and if her wide-eyed stare was anything to go by, the two of them were a matched set in the surprise department. But as much as the idea made Capelli’s defense mechanism want to self-destruct, from a logical standpoint, teaming up with her again wasn’t the worst plan ever. For whatever reason, his normally ironclad system wasn’t working. His brain was working too much.
He needed to figure out what he was missing in this case, and as cracked as it was, reason dictated that working with Shae might at least help more than it hurt.
She didn’t wait for him to realize out loud that he’d agreed, much less give him a chance to recant. “Yes! You won’t regret this. So do you want to go back to the precinct?”
Shit. Clearly, he hadn’t thought this through. “It’s after hours,” he said slowly. “I was actually going to work from home.”
Shae didn’t skip so much as a beat or a breath. Naturally. “That works too. I can just follow you there if you want.”
She pulled a set of car keys from the pocket of her jeans, but Capelli shook his head. “I live eight blocks from here, so I walked.”
“Oh.” Her brows lifted. “Alright, then. Why don’t I give you a ride? I’m parked a block over, on Delancey.”
“Okay.” They started to walk, the chilly night air settling in around them, and he eyed her thin gray sweater with a twinge of concern. “I realize you’re not a big fan of outerwear, but aren’t you freezing?”
Shae looked down at her body as if it had just now occurred to her that a coat in January might actually be a decent idea. “I guess I didn’t really think about it when I left my apartment.”
“You didn’t notice the whole thirty-five degrees thing and go back to grab a jacket?” he asked, unable to keep a wry tone from lacing over the words.
She lifted her obviously coat-free arms and laughed. “No offense, but for a guy who works in the intelligence unit, you kind of suck at the whole detective thing. Anyway, like I said the other day, the cold doesn’t really bother me. I guess my internal thermostat is just a little left of center.”
“Kind of like the rest of you?”
She hitched in surprise, just for a fraction of a beat, and dammit, could he have put his foot in his mouth any more thoroughly?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
But she cut off the rest of his apology with a deep, unexpected laugh. “I don’t make any apologies for who I am, Capelli. So please, don’t make apologies for noticing.”
The no-bullshit way she claimed her personality was as palpable as a touch, slicing through him with an odd brand of jealousy he didn’t see coming. They walked the rest of the block in silence, their footsteps creating a steady rhythm on the pavement. Shae hit a button on her key fob, and the lights on a mud-splattered Jeep Liberty flashed through the nighttime shadows.
“Sorry it’s in need of a bath,” she said, although the grin on her face was far from apologetic. “I did a little off-roading over the weekend and haven’t had time to hit the car wash yet.”
“A little off-roading,” Capelli repeated, and who knew her grin could grow even bigger.
“Okay, so I might have spent six hours on the trails out at Spearhead Valley. But it’s too cold to go rafting, and my mountain bike has a flat. Off-roading was the next best thing.”
Capelli took in the state of her Jeep, unsure whether to be a little bit stunned or a whole lot impressed. “It sure looks that way. Hey”—he lasered in on her windshield, where a bright white slip of paper stood out in stark contrast against the dusty glass—“looks like someone left you a note.”
“Ah, it’s probably just some ad. I swear, that new pizza place over on Fourth Street is wallpapering the city with them.” Shae pressed up to her toes to pluck the single sheet from beneath the windshield wiper, but her movements froze less than a second later.
A shiver touched Capelli’s spine beneath his jacket, lingering at the base of his neck. “Shae? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head with a self-deprecating sound that fell just shy of a laugh.
Nope. Not tonight. “Try again.”
Releasing a sigh, she handed over the note, and a bubble of adrenaline rose quickly in his chest at the sight of the bold block letters printed across the page.
I SEE YOU.
“Jesus,” Capelli bit out. Taking an instinctive step toward Shae, he swiveled a methodical stare over their surroundings, vaguely aware that she was doing the same. Nothing looked unusual—all four streetlights on the block were fully functional and shining away. Nobody lurked on either street corner or in any of the cars parked quietly on the street, but still, his heart thumped in steady warning. “We need to call intelligence.”
“What? No.” Her fingers wrapped around his wrist before he could get more than halfway to his pocket for his cell phone. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s probably kids playing some stupid prank. Fifty bucks says there’s one on every car out here.”
A lightning-fast re-check of the other vehicles on either side of them proved her wrong.
“Can you think of anyone who might want to scare you? Anyone you might have pissed off?” Capelli asked.
Despite the situation, Shae’s lips folded over a smile, and she lifted a brow at him in the streetlight spilling down from overhead. “I irritate a lot of people—including you, might I add. But no, Mr. Paranoia. I don’t know anybody who would even think of trying to scare me on purpose. I’m telling you, this is just some random idiot getting his chuckles on.”
“Chuckles or not, protocol dictates a call-in on something like this,” he said, taking another look at the admittedly generic, possibly pseudo-threat in his hand.
“And how many times do call-ins on notes like this turn out to be actual, real-deal threats?”
Capelli hesitated, unable to do anything but. “Not too often,” he admitted, although he kept the single-digit figure of the percentage to himself.
Not that the non-disclosure mattered, because not only had Shae proven her point with the question, but the expression on her face said she knew it. “Look, I might love a good adventure, but I don’t have a death wish, Capelli. If I thought for a second that this was a legitimate personal threat, I’d call intelligence myself. Besides, I’m about to spend the next few hours with you, right?”
“That’s the plan,” he agreed slowly.
“Okay. So if anything out of the ordinary happens, we can both call in the cavalry, and if it doesn’t, we’ll know this was nothing. But truly, I don’t want to waste intelligence’s time over something stupid when we could be making real headway by working on this case.”
Logic and determination. Talk about hitting a guy where it hurt. “Fine,” he said after a second that felt more like ten.
“But we’re going by my definition of out of the ordinary, and I’m walking you to your car later, just in case.”
“Sounds fair.”
After one last look around them that yielded nothing other than a whole lot of nothing, Capelli reluctantly slid into the passenger seat of her Jeep. He placed the menacing note in his lap, careful not to touch it any more than he already had, just in case. Five minutes’ worth of easy directions had them in front of his apartment building, where there was thankfully a vacant spot in reach of the security cameras by the front entrance.
“It might be a little tight,” he said, eyeballing the space and considering the dimensions of her Jeep.
But Shae just laughed, the throaty sound making him wish the space between them was both bigger and nonexistent all at the same time. “Nope. I’ve got this.”
Twenty seconds and one extremely skillful parking job later, Capelli stood totally corrected. “Guess I forgot about the whole driving the fire engine thing,” he said, allowing a smile of his own to poke at the corners of his mouth.
“And that’s just one of my many talents,” she quipped back, and okay, yeah. Time to go. Now. Before the dark, wicked back rooms of his brain could conjure up exactly what she might be good at in vivid, cock-hardening detail.
“Right.” Clearing his throat twice for good measure, Capelli got out of the Jeep and led the way toward the glass double doors of his building. Nine steps through the lobby. Six steps past the mailboxes. Do not look at her flawless ass in those jeans. Focus. “So, um, do you live nearby?”
Blessedly, Shae didn’t seem fazed at all by the subject change. “About ten minutes from here. But I move to a new apartment every couple of years.”
“You haven’t liked any of the places you’ve lived?” he asked in surprise, but she shook her head to cancel it out.
“The apartments are just fine. It’s staying in one place I’m not a fan of.”
“So you move all over Remington?”
“Mmm hmm.” She looked at him with wide-open honesty for just a second before following him into the elevator. “I like having options. How about you?”
The quiet sounds of the elevator moving upward became the backdrop for his pulse pressing against his eardrums. “I’ve lived here for eight years.”
More specifically, eight years had passed since Sinclair had walked him down the exact hallway he was now walking down with Shae and pressed the key into Capelli’s palm. He hadn’t been able to afford the place—shit, everything he’d owned that hadn’t been seized by the RPD had fit into the duffel bag that had been on his shoulder. But Sinclair had worked out some sort of legal judo with the landlord that neither man would talk about, let alone let him repay, and Capelli had been an upright tenant ever since.
“Are you sure?” Shae asked, her smile cutting through his thoughts with an odd sense of calm as they crossed the threshold and moved through the small, tidy space of his apartment. “Because no offense, but this place is neat enough to give me hives. Don’t you have any clutter? Dirty dishes? Anything even remotely resembling imperfection?”
Startled, Capelli froze halfway out of his jacket. “I’m far from perfect.”
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” she said, her shoulders lifting in a shrug delicate enough to belie their obvious strength as she moved to sit down on the couch a handful of feet away. “You’re just really organized.”
It was a perfect segue, not to mention an even better dodge and deflect, and he took it even though part of him didn’t want to. “Speaking of which”—he finished shrugging out of his jacket, hanging it up neatly before grabbing his laptop from the nearby side table where he’d left it this morning—“we should get started on the case.”
“I’m going to take a flyer and assume you’ve got a method.” Shae’s openly excited smile took a chip out of the tension that wound its way through his shoulders every time he thought of this case, and he nodded, sitting down beside her.
“Analyze, then hypothesize. The facts will get us where we need to be.”
“So all we need to do is figure out the right way to see them,” she said, causing Capelli’s brows to pop at how quickly she’d caught on to his process.
“Yeah.”
She leaned in, her smile growing even bigger, and fuck, she was unreasonably pretty when her face lit up like that. “I’m ready whenever you are, Starsky. Go ahead and start from the beginning.”
Chapter 10
Because he had no choice other than give in to the small yet primal part of him that wanted to push this case aside and taste every inch of Shae’s smart, sassy mouth, Capelli tamped down on anything not coming directly from his brain and methodically went through everything they had already established at the scene of the fire. She surprised him by listening carefully, peppering in a few technical details that the fire marshal had added to his official report before he’d handed it over to her for the investigation, then gesturing to his laptop.
“Okay, so what else do we know?” she asked, and Capelli released an exhale in a slow leak.
“It’s what we don’t know that’s dead-ending us.” He tapped his laptop to life, pulling up the photos of the crime scene along with the detailed report from CSU to keep his thoughts in order. “We have no suspect, no murder weapon, no witnesses, and no possible motive.”
“And no obvious link between these two fires, other than the fact that they both appear to be arson,” Shae added, although funny, none of it seemed to throw her.
“No. CSU wasn’t able to pull any physical evidence from the bodies or the scene that could be definitively linked to the murders,” Capelli said, scrolling through the images that the ME had sent over. “The sufentanil in both victims’ systems was a big find, obviously, but not really unique enough to get us anywhere useful. It’s almost as if these crimes were committed by a ghost.”
Shae was quiet for ten seconds, then twenty before he realized her eyes were solidly fixed on the detailed photograph of Denton’s injury splashed over his laptop screen.
“The gore doesn’t bother you?” she asked, and he remembered—too late—the way she’d paled at the sight of the bloodstains on the floor yesterday.
Something twisted beneath the center of his long-sleeved Henley. “I have to look at it as evidence,” he said with care. “The anatomy and the nature of the wounds are clues just like everything else. They’re pieces to the puzzle, so I have to look at them from every possible angle if I want to solve the case.”
Shae stared at him for a minute, those green eyes burning pinpoint after pinpoint into his skin until he couldn’t stand but to ask, “What?”
“You’ve either got a hell of a work ethic or a bulletproof defense mechanism. I’m just trying to figure out which.”
The thought of her having noticed enough of him to be able to peg either made him strangely uncomfortable and even more strangely turned on. “You were really calm with Slater,” he pointed out, and at her raised brows in response, he added, “He told Hale you worked the scene like a pro, even though Denton was in bad shape. But it clearly bothers you.”
“Oh, it scares the crap out of me,” Shae said without pausing for so much as a beat or a breath. “I still have to do my job, though. Anyway, I’m kind of a firm believer that fear is just an opportunity to knock a little courage into a person.”
“I never thought of it that way.” Capelli sat back, weighing the concept of fear versus courage in his mind.
But she continued, unfazed. “I can’t afford to think of it any other way. I learned a long time ago that being afraid isn’t such a bad thing. It lets me know I’m not too far gone, you know?”
The reality of her words arrowed through him, sticking his breath in his lungs. He needed a redirect, and he needed it right now. “There is something odd about the wound, actually,” he said, focusing on the facts to ground himself.
“Oh?” Shae asked, turning her attention back to the image on the screen.
&nbs
p; “Yes.” Capelli scrolled past the photograph, landing on the ME’s report. “Denton’s cause of death was obviously blood loss. But he bled out from a very precise cut to the carotid. All of this larger damage was done post mortem.”
“How can you tell?” she asked, and as gruesome as it was, he was grateful for the technical question. At least he could speak to the facts with ease.
“Tissue damage looks different when wounds are inflicted after death. The science isn’t like a stopwatch, though, so it’s impossible to know with certainty exactly how much time passed between the wound that killed him and the rest of the damage. But the ME definitely put his time of death before the majority of the throat slashing.”
Shae sat back against the couch cushions, obviously caught up in thought. “So the person who did this hacked into Denton to cover his tracks.”
“Either that or the murder was extremely personal.”
“Like some sort of message?” she asked, and he nodded.
“Could be.” The intelligence unit certainly saw their fair share of revenge crimes, and some of them were exactly this nasty. “But nobody seems to have a vendetta against the gang that Denton and the L-Man were a part of, so right now, it doesn’t make any sense. Then there’s the sufentanil in their systems…none of it adds up.”
That odd prickle he’d felt on the back of his neck at the Crooked Angel came back in full force, but the more he tried to focus on the feeling and pin it down for examination—damn it—the harder it was to grasp.
“It does seem really weird that both victims were knocked out by the same drug as Kellan.”
“‘Weird’ is one way to put it,” Capelli agreed. Frustrating. Infuriating. Completely fucking unexplainable. “But it still could be a coincidence.”
Shae’s laugh sounded oddly like a dare. “You don’t believe that, though. Do you.”
Deep Burn (Station Seventeen Book 2) Page 12