Deep Burn (Station Seventeen Book 2)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  For a second, he was tempted, but not because of the doughnuts laid out in front of him in all their sugary, carb-laden, frosting-covered glory. It was the look on Shae’s face that nailed him, and Christ, he had no defense against anything she did, however small.

  And he really had to resist. Otherwise he wouldn’t.

  “No. Thank you,” Capelli added, making sure his expression conveyed that he meant it. “But I’m all good.”

  Hollister shook his head, although his tone was all laughter when he said, “Whatever, man. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “Well.” Sinclair’s gravelly voice scraped through the intelligence office from the spot where he stood by the crime scene board, grabbing everyone’s attention and sobering the mood in the room in less than a heartbeat. “Looks like a party in here.”

  “Just breakfast, Sarge,” Isabella said, moving purposefully to her desk while everyone else did the same.

  Shae—having nowhere else to go—stood between Capelli’s desk and Maxwell’s unoccupied work space, holding up her hands in a nonverbal mea culpa. “That’s kind of my fault. I stopped by to grab an update on the break-in and bring in some doughnuts, but—”

  Sinclair cut her off with a small but definite shake of his crew cut. “Actually, I’m glad you’re here, McCullough. It saves me a call. I trust you can all eat and listen at the same time,” he added, sending a stare around the office, and damn, Capelli would recognize that all-business, no-bullshit expression even in the dark.

  As would everyone else in the room, apparently. “If you’ve got news on the case, we’re all ears,” Hale said.

  “Good. First things first. I just got off the phone with Captain Bridges and Frank Wisniewski over at arson, and we’re all in agreement that in light of last night’s threats and the strong possibility that they’re related to our joint investigation, Shae should complete the rest of her work on the arson case here at the Thirty-Third under my supervision.”

  “Oh.” Shae blinked in obvious surprise, and hell if that didn’t make them a pair of fucking bookends. “If you think that’s best and my captain agrees, then I’m okay with working here in intelligence.”

  “You’ll be partnered up with someone at all times, and we’ll take a few extra security measures for the next couple of days at least,” Sinclair said. “They’re mostly precautionary, but on the off chance this guy decides to get squirrely again, I don’t want you working your end of the investigation solo. I trust that won’t be a problem.”

  Shae must have heard the lack of wiggle room in his voice—God knew Capelli did—because rather than push back like she was normally inclined to, she gave up a slow nod. “I just want to help catch this guy.”

  “Which brings me to my next order of business,” Sinclair continued. “Our crime scene unit is done in your apartment and the building manager installed a new deadbolt on your front door.” He held up a pair of shiny silver keys. “So you’re free to go home later today.”

  Capelli’s pulse tripped. “Did CSU find anything workable that we can follow up on?” Damn, he was itching for something, anything, to key into the system and analyze.

  But Sinclair killed the spark of hope with a single shake of his head. “Unfortunately, no. No prints on the note or the front door. The canvas came up empty, and even though it took a hell of a lot of time and manpower to go over the place, the rest of the apartment is clean. Whoever did this went to a lot of trouble to stay in the wind.”

  Hale lowered her doughnut to her desk and frowned, but only for a second before her glass-half-full mentality kicked into high gear. “We do have the rest of the surveillance video to go through. It’s still possible we could get a hit off that, maybe grab an image to run through the DB for facial recognition.”

  “Good.” Sinclair gestured to the laptop propped open amid the sea of papers on her desk. “You and Hollister keep going over the footage to see if anything pops. Moreno, I want you and Capelli and Shae on the ME’s report and the fires. See if we can find a connection that links all these pieces together.”

  “Copy that,” Moreno said, and Capelli and Shae nodded their agreement.

  “Maxwell’s grabbing all the files from arson that haven’t been put into the system yet on his way in, and he’s reaching out to his contacts in the gang unit on anything we might have missed on the Scarlet Reapers. Let’s get to work, people. And by the way…McCullough?”

  Sinclair’s stare arrowed in her direction as he walked across the office. Picking up a double-glazed cruller from the box on Hollister’s desk, he tipped the pastry at her with a rare showing of his smile. “Looks like you’ll fit right in.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  Dodging the pretty flush commandeering her cheeks, Capelli pushed his brain into go-mode. He turned toward his desk, firing up his computer and hitting the remote switch to illuminate the crime scene board.

  “Okay, you two,” Moreno said, pulling her chair over to Capelli’s desk on the right-hand side of the now-bustling office. “We’ve got a pretty big mountain in front of us. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up.”

  Shae nodded, her green eyes chock-full of determination as she hooked a hand beneath Maxwell’s spare chair and settled in next to Moreno. “I already sent you everything I had on both fires, and Maxwell’s grabbing the rest, so…”

  “The first thing we should do is get you up to speed on our end,” Capelli said.

  Isabella offered up a rundown of the facts, which he backed up with details from the case files, and both combined to sharpen the already elaborate images in his head. Shae tucked her brows as she listened, asking a handful of questions in between bites of her breakfast. While her brain didn’t seem to operate by any organized rhyme or reason, her questions were straightforward and smart, and the facts that she threaded in from both fire scenes slid into Capelli’s mental batch files, looking for a home.

  “Let’s look at the facts chronologically,” he said to Shae. “What do we know about this restaurant fire, other than the fact that it looks like the same sort of arson as the meth lab fire?”

  “Not much,” she admitted. “The fire marshal went back out to the site yesterday for more detailed photos and another walk-through now that the fire is officially under investigation. He reached out to the owner—a guy named Nicholas something. Bonetti? Biello?”

  “Bianchi,” came Maxwell’s voice from the doorway as he entered the intelligence office in all his gruff, tough, leather-jacket-and-knit-skull-cap glory.

  Capelli’s heart thumped out a warning rhythm as the name Nicholas Bianchi registered in his brain, and damn it, just when he thought this case couldn’t get any more twisted.

  “Yeah! Nicholas Bianchi. That’s the guy.” Shae pressed back in her chair, splitting a glance between him and Maxwell and Moreno, whose expression had just ventured into more serious territory. “He came up clean on all the public records for the building. Taxes filed on time, no health and safety violations for the restaurant. Although from the look of what was left of the grease trap in his kitchen, I’m not quite sure how. Do you guys know him?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Maxwell said, lowering the box of file folders in his grasp to one corner of his nearby desk before turning to meet Shae’s brows-up stare. “Nicky Bianchi’s part of the local mafia, which is largely run by his uncle, Luca. They tend to stick to the racketeering basics—money laundering, loan sharking, with a little bit of gun-running here and there for grins.”

  Isabella nodded, picking up Maxwell’s lead. “The Bianchis are well-connected, which explains the restaurant’s inspections being aboveboard, and their security and counter-surveillance are ironclad enough that the Feds haven’t been able to make anything stick to either Nicky or Luca.”

  “Local mafia. Ooookay,” Shae whispered. But Capelli had to give her credit. A heartbeat later, she was right back to that chin lift/eyes glinting thing she did whenever she was about to dig her heels in, a
nd fuck if it didn’t make her twice as hot and about nine times more dangerous. “Well, Bianchi might be shady, but he barely had any insurance on the restaurant. He lost his shirt when Fiorelli’s burned down.”

  Huh. The information made Capelli’s forehead crease behind his glasses. A few keystrokes had the case file Shae had sent him yesterday up on Capelli’s laptop, and with a handful more, he’d gotten the information to the center monitor on the array over his desk.

  “So this definitely wasn’t arson for profit, then,” he mused out loud. Not that he was ultimately shocked—Nicky Bianchi might be thirty-one flavors of criminal, but he liked to stay under the radar. The payday from a scam like that wouldn’t be worth the spotlight of the investigation.

  “No. I don’t think so,” Shae said, then backtracked with, “unless whoever set the fire is really freaking bad at insurance fraud.”

  Moreno shook her head. “Bianchi runs scams for a living. No way is he screwing up insurance fraud. There has to be another motive for the fire.”

  “Yeah,” Capelli agreed. “The question is, what?”

  “How about revenge?”

  Shae’s query sent a pang through his rib cage, his spine unfolding against the back of his desk chair. “Revenge,” he repeated. “You’d have to be a pretty heavy hitter to try and take a shot at a guy like Nicky Bianchi. Plus, he wasn’t anywhere near the place when it burned.”

  “According to the transcripts from dispatch, the first nine-one-one call came in just after five in the morning. I think it’s safe to say nobody was near Fiorelli’s when it burned. Well, except for the arsonist, anyway,” Shae tacked on.

  Okay, so she probably wasn’t wrong about that. The pier wasn’t exactly home to a whole lot of early risers. Still… “The Bianchis own more than half a dozen businesses, and the rest of them have gone untouched. Why would our arsonist target just this one, especially when it was empty, if he wasn’t trying to get at Nicky?”

  “I don’t know.” Shae tucked her bottom lip between her teeth in a move that was far sexier than it had a right to be. “But somebody torched Fiorelli’s badly enough for the fire marshal and the city building inspector to condemn the place all the way down to the bricks. That seems kind of personal, and if you ask me, there aren’t a whole lot of things more personal than revenge.”

  “It isn’t too far outside the realm of plausibility,” Isabella said slowly. Although the logic pumping through Capelli’s veins tempted him to disagree, he also knew Shae was likely to go all pit-bull-with-a-porterhouse until he gave her a damn good reason not to. Even then, it was a coin flip as to whether or not she’d actually let the idea go.

  His mind whirled and spun, methodically processing facts and probabilities just as it always did, whether he liked it or not. This time, though, his brain snagged on a thought that took his heartbeat along for the ride.

  Wait. What if—

  “Hang on.” Pushing his glasses higher over the bridge of his nose, Capelli slid closer to his keyboard. He routed all of Fiorelli’s public records from the city’s database to one of the screens on the array, then all the business records attached to anyone with the last name “Bianchi” to the monitor right next to the first, scanning the documents as quickly as his eyes would allow.

  Which of course wasn’t fast enough for his impatient and four-steps-ahead-of-everything-else brain, and come on—come on, come on—ah! There. That was precisely what he’d been looking for.

  And nothing he’d expected.

  Capelli’s chin whipped upward at the sharp burst of realization that fell into place all at once. But despite his rising adrenaline, he was one hundred percent sure of where the facts had just led him, so he turned to look at Shae and said the only thing he could.

  “You know what, McCullough? You’re absolutely right.”

  Chapter 14

  Of all the things James Capelli could have possibly said to her, this one stunned Shae the most. But truly, their attempt to work together last night was case in point that he lived to argue with her and her theories. No way was he really sitting here, wearing that fiercely serious expression that somehow managed to torque her up and turn her on all at the same time, telling her she was right about this case.

  Was he?

  “I’m right,” Shae ventured, painting the words with a heavy layer of what’s-the-catch.

  But Capelli’s nod was all certainty. “You are. Look.”

  Fingers flying over his keyboard, he scrolled through a handful of very official-looking documents on two of the screens on the lower section of the crazy six-way monitor-type thing mounted to the wall over his desk. “Nicky Bianchi is the sole owner of Fiorelli’s. He bought the place from his uncle two years ago, and even though the restaurant seems to do very little business, from the look of things, their books have been oddly flush the whole time.”

  “You’re not actually surprised the place is a front, are you?” Maxwell asked, and okay yeah, even Shae—who didn’t know extortion from embezzlement, thank you very much—had figured out that the restaurant couldn’t possibly be a legitimate business.

  “Hell no,” Capelli said. “But it is the only front in Nicky’s name. The rest of the Bianchi family’s businesses either belong to Luca or they’re registered to various shell corporations.”

  Isabella blew out a breath of understanding. “So Fiorelli’s was Nicky’s baby.”

  “Could be Luca needed someone to run the place. Or maybe it was a test to see if Nicky’s ready to move up the ranks.” Capelli gestured to the on-screen document, which looked like a deed to Shae, although her head was spinning hard enough for it to be a guess. Meth lab murders? Local mafia? This was getting outer limits.

  Maxwell nodded, his dark eyes sharpening with the same sort of realization Capelli had reached a minute before. “Either way, if someone wanted to hit Nicky in a sore spot, burning the place down would be a pretty good way to do that.”

  “So we’re looking at someone who had a beef not just with Bianchi, but the Scarlet Reapers too,” Isabella said.

  Annnnd cue up a whole lot of goose bumps. “You think the guy who was in my apartment has it in for gangsters and gang bangers?” Shae asked.

  “I think the guy who was in your apartment doesn’t want to get caught,” came Capelli’s quick answer, but it didn’t escape her notice that his shoulders had just gone all lock and load around his neck. “Whoever did this is really meticulous. Enough that the fire was nearly ruled accidental.”

  “The local mob usually steers pretty clear of gangs, and vice versa,” Maxwell said. “It’s a turf thing. The good news is, the list of people associated with both is bound to be short.”

  But something in the detective’s tone made her gut sink toward her boots, and before she could stop herself, Shae asked, “And the bad news?”

  Maxwell crossed his arms over the broad expanse of his chest, his expression growing as budge-free as his body language. “Capelli is right. Whoever’s committing these crimes is smart. We’re going to have to dig pretty deep to catch him.”

  Shae’s heart raced, her chest filling with too many emotions to name, let alone single out. Common sense dictated she should be scared out of her gourd at the thought of this maniac watching her yesterday, and yep, there was the familiar bloom of adrenaline she always felt when a call came in at Seventeen. But she wasn’t a pushover, and scared or not, they were finally making headway on this case.

  So she took a deep breath and said, “Then let’s dig deep and catch him.”

  “Damn, girl.” Isabella sent an appreciative grin across the office space between them. “Sinclair wasn’t kidding about you fitting right in.”

  The words bolstered Shae’s confidence another notch. Yeah, she was a little freaked out. Any normal person would be. But she could do this. She had to. “Thanks, but I just want to help.”

  Maxwell pushed up from his desk, reaching for the jacket he’d barely shrugged out of and shouldering his way into the dark b
rown leather. “I was going to head down to the Fifth to talk to Matteo Garza over in the gang unit this morning anyway, so this is good. He might have some intel on who’d have it out for both the Scarlet Reapers and the Bianchis. You feel like taking a ride, partner?”

  He looked over at Hale, who had to have been able to hear every bit of their conversation despite having been lasered in on her laptop. “Sure,” she said, proving the point. “I hate to say it, but this video looks like a bust. Plus, someone’s gotta have your back.”

  “I’ll take the rest of the video, just in case. Text me if Garza comes up with a name,” Capelli said as Hale followed Maxwell toward the door.

  “Copy that.”

  Sliding a glance at Hollister, Isabella said, “You know, we could go have a chat with Carmen.”

  At the whaaaa? that had to have made the move from Shae’s brain to her face, Isabella added, “Carmen’s one of my CIs. She works at Three Brothers Pizza, down on the pier. It’s not far from where Fiorelli’s was. She doesn’t have any connections with the Bianchis that I know of, but still. She might’ve heard something.”

  “Great,” Hollister replied with all the enthusiasm of someone about to be tossed into a Turkish prison. “Because Carmen’s so much fun. Especially in the morning.”

  Isabella made a sound that was half-laughter, half-snort. “You really need to stop flirting with my CI.”

  A startled glint darted through Hollister’s eyes, gone before Shae could be truly certain she’d seen it. “Are you kidding?” the detective asked, managing to look both bored and cocky at the same time. “What Carmen and I do isn’t flirting. It’s an MMA event.”

  “Okay, pretty boy.” Isabella checked her badge and the gun in the holster at her hip, shaking her head with a wry smile. “Let’s go get your ass kicked in the name of intel, then. Come on.”

  Shae watched the two of them head toward the front of the intelligence office, their banter fading into the hallway beyond, and a weird, unexpected pang spread out beneath the center of her dark red sweater. She pressed a hand over her breastbone as if she could literally snuff out the ache, realizing just a beat too late that Capelli’s eyes weren’t on the monitor in front of him, but firmly fixed on her instead.