Deep Burn (Station Seventeen Book 2)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “You miss Seventeen, don’t you.”

  For a breath, she said nothing, just sat there in her chair with that squeeze still lingering in her rib cage. But bullshitting her way out of the conversation seemed stupid—not to mention useless, since Capelli’s words hadn’t held so much as a hint of a question.

  So she didn’t even bother trying. “I guess the biggest hazard of loving your job is that there’s no place you’d rather be than up to your eyeballs in work. I’m happy to help you guys find whoever set these fires and killed those two men, but…yeah. I miss Seventeen.”

  Upon hearing her thoughts out loud, Shae punctuated them with a self-deprecating laugh that seemed to take Capelli by surprise. “Which, come to think of it, probably makes me sound a little weird.”

  “Actually, that doesn’t sound weird at all.”

  His answer had been simple—seven words, less than a dozen syllables, all of which Shae had heard conservatively a billion times in her twenty-seven years on earth. And yet the way he was looking at her with nothing but pared-down honesty in those melty brown eyes made her feel like he got it.

  Like just for a second, he really saw her.

  But then Capelli was clearing his throat and enough heat had crept over her cheeks to let her know in no uncertain terms that she had to be visibly blushing, and God, this whole crime and punishment thing was seriously throwing her off her game.

  “Right. So did you want to split the rest of this surveillance video?” he asked, and Shae nodded, all too ready to dive in.

  “You got it, Starsky. Let’s catch ourselves a bad guy.”

  Capelli looked at the time stamp in the bottom corner of his laptop and cursed. Not because it was particularly late—although Hale, Hollister, Moreno, and Maxwell had all trickled out of the intelligence office one by one over the course of the last hour—and not because he’d had a terribly frustrating or unproductive day, either. No, Capelli’s muttered F-bomb came courtesy of the fact that he actually had gained some ground on this case today.

  Just in time for Sinclair to kick him out of the office for the entire freaking weekend.

  “Everything okay?” Shae asked, her voice pulling Capelli back to the right-now reality of the softly shadowed intelligence office. She’d been reading so quietly in the work space she’d created for herself at the end of Moreno’s desk that he’d temporarily forgotten he wasn’t alone.

  And wasn’t that just one more reason to stay focused on this case, because damn it, he’d never forgotten anything—temporarily or otherwise—in his life.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said, swallowing back the bitter aftertaste of the lie. But he couldn’t exactly pop off with “I just don’t want to go home and try to find something to keep my freakishly overactive brain busy so I don’t end up defaulting to very bad things”. Even if it was painfully accurate.

  “Sorry we didn’t get anything off the video,” Shae said. “I looked really carefully, but the only person who wasn’t a resident was that flower delivery guy who totally checked out as legit with the company.”

  Capelli shrugged. “Don’t feel bad. My pizza guy did too. That footage was kind of a long shot, anyway. The movement we made on the arson side was good, though, so that’s something.” He let go of a slow exhale, reviewing the information they’d added to the crime scene board today one more time before shutting the thing down and packing up his laptop. “We should probably call it a night.”

  He knew from experience that if Sinclair booted him enough times in a row, it would lead to the sort of conversation that involved phrases like you’ve racked up a lot of vacation time and maybe you should take a few days off. Leaving pre-emptively would go a long way toward keeping him under the radar, and anyway, he could work almost as easily from home as he did from here. Thank God.

  “It is getting kind of late, huh?” Shae said, but funny, she didn’t pair the observation with any sort of movement.

  “Almost seven,” Capelli answered carefully. “We’ve been here for nearly twelve hours, and it’s Friday night. Don’t you want to go home?”

  Her shoulders stiffened by a fraction beneath her dark red sweater, but still, she nodded. “Oh, yep. Mmm hmm. Absolutely.” Closing her laptop, she pushed to her feet, hugging the thing to her chest as she glanced at the door. “So, um, all I have to do is ask the desk sergeant to have an officer walk me to my car, then text Hollister and Moreno when I get home and lock the door, right? That’s it for the safety protocol?”

  A hard pang spread out in the center of Capelli’s gut. “There haven’t been any more notes today, and all the patrols of your building have come up clean.” They still hadn’t found any hint of whoever had been in her apartment, but… “It looks like this guy was just trying to scare you, so yes. All you need for the protocol is an escort to your car and to check in once you’re safely inside. But I can walk you out if you want. I’m headed home anyway.”

  “Right. Okay,” Shae said. Lifting her chin, she turned to slide her bag from beneath Moreno’s desk. To anyone else, she probably looked completely status quo, just a woman packing up to head home after a long week. But her movements were just a little too forced, her lips pressed together the tiniest bit more tightly than usual, and after a few seconds of analysis, the truth slammed into Capelli with all the grace of a brick.

  “Shae, are you scared to go home?”

  “No.” Her answer arrived without hesitation, her tone surprisingly marking it as the truth. “I know you guys wouldn’t let me go back to my apartment if it wasn’t safe. So I’m not scared that this guy is waiting to pop out of my closet like some B-movie villain.”

  “That is highly unlikely,” Capelli agreed. He’d gone over the reports from CSU himself. Sinclair had had her apartment triple-checked all the way down to the baseboards and hinges. No surveillance equipment, no signs the guy was really watching her or would be back. The place was completely clean.

  And yet… “You still seem like you don’t want to go home.”

  “That’s probably because I don’t.”

  For the billionth time, her honesty floored him, and for the billionth time, she didn’t seem shy about coming out with the truth.

  “I guess I’m just not too excited about the idea of being alone right now.”

  “Oh. Well, you could go to the Crooked Angel,” Capelli ventured. “I’m sure everyone’s there. Having a beer or two might take your mind off things.”

  “Maybe.” Shae lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug before slipping the strap of her laptop bag into place. “But it would just delay the inevitable. At some point, I’m going to have to go home and scrub the fingerprint stuff off the doorframes and the coffee table, you know?”

  Capelli’s pulse knocked a steady rhythm against his throat. He didn’t want to go home. Shae didn’t want to be alone in her apartment.

  Really, there was only one logical solution.

  “As luck would have it, I’m pretty handy with a spray bottle and a sponge.” He waited for her breath to catch—there—and God, the turnabout of being the one to surprise her felt more darkly satisfying than it should.

  “You want to come help me clean my apartment?” Shae asked, her brows lifted in that bold, borderline sassy expression she wore so often, it was a wonder the thing wasn’t permanently etched on her pretty face. But Capelli didn’t just notice her moxie. He noticed everything, right down to the relief buried beneath her words and her bulletproof smile, and hell if that didn’t make him feel a little bold, too.

  “Sure.” He grabbed his jacket and laptop bag, tipping his head toward the front of the intelligence office in a wordless after you before following Shae to the door. “You’re going to have to feed me though. I have standards.”

  Shae laughed. “I hope your standards accommodate either Pop-Tarts or frozen dinners.”

  Capelli sent up a silent prayer that she was kidding. “Why don’t we cross that bridge when we get to it?”

  They m
ade their way downstairs and past the desk sergeant in comfortable quiet. Capelli’s senses sharpened once they crossed the precinct’s main threshold, his careful stare measuring all the places someone could hide, either in the shadows or in plain sight. Thankfully, the path to Shae’s Jeep and the vehicle itself were clear of anything out of the ordinary, and she popped the locks before turning to look at him in the ambient light shining down from the streetlamps illuminating the parking lot.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  It was, Capelli supposed, her way of giving him an out. But the thought of his quiet, empty apartment, of how much work he’d need to scrape up just to keep his brain on the straight and narrow, of the tough but grateful look on Shae’s face right in this moment, and the truth flew out of his mouth unchecked.

  “Yeah, I really do.”

  A few quick minutes had him in his car, following her through downtown Remington. One uneventful ride and one equally uneventful trip through the lobby of her building later, he and Shae were in the elevator, headed up to her apartment. She held the keys Sinclair had given her this morning in one hand, her shoulders level and her gaze alert as they stepped into the third-floor hallway, and Capelli followed as she led the way to her apartment door.

  “Ugh,” she murmured, the corners of her mouth turning down at the sight of the black fingerprint powder generously smudged over both the doorframe and the surface of the door itself.

  But Capelli had promised to help, and fuck, as crazy and irrational and unexplainable as it was, he wanted nothing more in this moment than to erase that frown from her face.

  So he looked Shae in the eye and said, “We should probably make a quick check of the place first, just as an extra precaution. Then we can gather up the right supplies and come up with a plan to start cleaning. Sound good?”

  The straightforward response seemed to ground her, the gamble he’d taken to tempt her go-go-go side into action thankfully paying off.

  “Okay, sure.” Sliding the key into the shiny new lock, Shae turned the deadbolt with a heavy click. A flick of the light switch next to the door revealed a whole lot of quiet (albeit messy) apartment, and after a quick look in her pantry, hall closet, and powder room, they moved down the corridor toward what had to be her bedroom.

  Whoa. Capelli surveyed the clothing-strewn yet definitely intruder-free space, poking his head into her closet and adjacent bathroom for the sake of being thorough. A small but unambiguous frown formed at the corners of Shae’s mouth, so at odds with her usual happiness that his mouth was open before his neurons had even stopped firing to make it happen.

  “You didn’t say this guy trashed your bedroom.” Capelli pointed at the piles of T-shirts and jeans and hoodies flung to the four corners of the room. It took some extra effort not to linger on the four—no, five—lacy, satiny bras that accompanied each pile, and he forced himself to meet her confused stare.

  “Nobody trashed my bedroom. It always looks like…”

  Wait for it…wait for it…

  Bingo.

  Shae’s eyes lit with realization, her frown falling away. “Oh my God. Are you…did you just make a joke?”

  He grinned, unable to contain it. “Too soon?”

  “No.” She began to laugh, not hard, but enough to loosen her shoulders from their rigid line around her neck. “Actually, your timing is perfect. Although I’d like to point out for the record that contrary to what it looks like, I do have a very detailed filing system in here. Smartass.”

  Capelli lifted a brow even though his grin refused to lose steam. “I’ll take your word for it. You want to get started on cleaning this place up?”

  “Yeah, come on.”

  Turning on her boot heels, Shae led the way back down the hall, pausing to put her laptop bag by the front door before heading into the nearby kitchen and gesturing to a low cabinet.

  “I’ve got a bunch of cleaning stuff under the sink in here. Do we need anything special?”

  He switched gears, rolling through the facts in front of him to come up with the most effective process in his mind. “Well, fingerprint powder is dark and tends to make a bit of a mess because it’s graphite-based, but lucky for us, it’s fairly easy to remove from most surfaces.”

  With a quick glance, he took in the open floor plan of her living area, setting his laptop bag beside hers and taking off his jacket before kneeling down beside her to look at the collection of soaps and spray bottles.

  “It looks like CSU only dusted a handful of places for prints,” he continued. Given the content of both notes, the crime scene unit had likely spent the bulk of their time checking her apartment for hidden cameras. Not that Capelli wanted to come out with that. Shae was tough, but she clearly had limits.

  Hooking a finger beneath a red and white spray bottle, he liberated it from the bunch beneath her sink, and yeah, it would almost certainly do the trick. “This all-purpose cleaner contains ammonia, so it should work really well on pretty much everything. We can test it out on the door and go from there.”

  One honey-colored brow raised. “Do I even want to know how you know what cleaning products will work best on fingerprint powder?”

  Capelli would put the odds of a yes at conservatively six billion to one, but instead he went with the safer and simpler, “Probably not.”

  Grabbing the cleaner and the roll of paper towels sitting on the countertop, he moved back toward the front door. He marshaled the tasks in front of them—brush off any loose fingerprint powder with a dry paper towel, soak the affected area with cleaner before scrubbing—then handed over a few squares from the paper towel roll.

  “So just remove whatever dry powder you can to make less mess, then spray, and wipe away the rest.” Capelli demonstrated on the inside of the front doorframe, which came back blessedly clean with just one pass.

  “Gotcha.” Her forehead creased, and of course, she jumped right in on the other side, as determined as ever. “Sorry you’re blowing your Friday night on Mr. Clean detail.”

  “I’m not.”

  The admission was more than he’d meant to loosen—which naturally meant that Shae caught every inch of it.

  “Seriously? What is it that you do to unwind at the end of the day?”

  Capelli sprayed. Scrubbed. “I work.”

  “That’s some pretty serious dedication.” Shae took the bottle from his hands, working on the other side of the doorframe. “How come you’re not a cop if you love working for intelligence so much?”

  “I…” His heart catapulted into his sternum at the unexpected question, but he covered up both the sensation and the topic with a slow inhale. “I guess I don’t have the same sense of adventure as you. Plus, I prefer tech and surveillance.”

  “The job does seem to suit you,” Shae agreed, her lips twitching into a small smile. “Anyway, you probably have like nine Ivy League degrees in IT, just begging to be put to good use.”

  Again, warning bells clanged in Capelli’s head. Divulging personal information was something he avoided at all costs—the less he came out with, the less vulnerable he was to a person having any sort of leverage against him. But Shae hadn’t hesitated to put her feelings smack in the middle of the spotlight by admitting she didn’t want to be alone tonight, and anyway, she wasn’t the volatile woman he’d originally taken her for. She was surprisingly, painfully decent. The odds were fairly low that telling her a few cherry-picked details about his personal life would end up coming back to bite him.

  “Actually, I never went to college.” The words slid out far more easily than Capelli had expected, even when Shae’s lips parted in obvious surprise.

  “You didn’t go to college?”

  “That shocks you,” he said, reaching for the spray bottle.

  She handed it over with a nod, turning to clean the section of the doorframe she’d sprayed down a few seconds before. “You’re just ridiculously smart.”

  “Intelligence and higher education aren’t mut
ually exclusive,” Capelli pointed out. “You’re smart too, and you never went to college.”

  “I tend to be the exception to most rules,” she said, her self-deprecating smile sending a spark of heat through his belly and making him crack one of his own.

  “Well, I guess we can be the exception to this one together.”

  They worked quietly for a few minutes, finishing with the front door and moving farther into her apartment before he continued. “My family didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up, and I was raised in a pretty rough part of the city. College was never really an option for me.”

  “Oh.” The slight hitch of Shae’s shoulders was the only sign that he’d gone for a double in the surprising-her department. “That must have been hard.”

  “Yeah,” Capelli said, because Christ, it was accurate. Well, all except for the ‘family’ part. Of course the money was only a fraction of why a normal life had never been on the table for him, especially once his mother had figured out exactly where his talents lay. But since that was a set of sinkholes he needed to steer far, far clear of, he stuck to a different group of facts.

  “I’ve always been good with numbers and technology. Most of the time, I knew more than my teachers. They had no idea what to do with me,” he said. He still remembered the keen disappointment he’d felt when his eighth grade math teacher, Mr. Ackerman, had finally admitted that the advanced calculus course Capelli had aced as a thirteen year old was all the school system could offer. “But I still liked to learn, so I’d hit the public library a lot, and I got a secondhand computer from a consignment shop near there. I taught myself as much as I could.”

  Shae lowered the spray bottle to her coffee table with a thunk. “So everything you know about computers and surveillance systems and all that crazy high-tech stuff you do for intelligence is self-taught?”