Deep Burn (Station Seventeen Book 2)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  Regret.

  “You and Vaughn have a history. One your team doesn’t know anything about.”

  Every part of Capelli froze except for his eyes, which shot directly to Sinclair’s. “I haven’t had any direct personal contact with the guy in eight years. I gave you everything I know about the guy when we tracked him three months ago, and you and I have already agreed that my former working relationship with Vaughn doesn’t have any bearing on the case in front of us.”

  Yeah, Capelli hated the truth, and no, he definitely didn’t want to go broadcasting his past like a breaking news alert. But if disclosing his past with Vaughn would help the team catch him, Capelli would’ve done it the second the guy had surfaced.

  “We did,” Sinclair said past his frown. Although he didn’t elaborate, he didn’t have to in order for Capelli to hear everything he hadn’t spoken but had somehow still managed to say.

  “None of what happened in the past will keep me from being able to track him so we can take him down,” Capelli said, and Sinclair’s expression in return brooked no argument.

  “If I thought it would, you wouldn’t be here. But even if we catch Vaughn today and your teammates are none the wiser about your knowing him, that still doesn’t mean your past isn’t going to come back to haunt you.”

  My past haunts me every single day. It’ll haunt me until I die.

  Capelli bit his tongue just in time to trap the words burning there. Damn it, he needed to get it together. To clamp down on his emotions, to find his composure now more than ever.

  He looked out the window facing the main intelligence office, eyes searching wildly until they landed on Shae, sitting at the end of his desk. She was focused on her laptop screen, her honey-colored ponytail brushing over one shoulder and her eyes determined. Bright.

  Pure.

  Unexplainably, Capelli’s breath moved in. Out. In again before he said, “I’m good. Really.”

  “If the case depends on it—”

  “If the case depended on it, I wouldn’t think twice about telling them everything.” The same went for if any member of the team’s safety was on the line, although he sure as shit hoped he didn’t need to say that out loud. “But it doesn’t. Either way, this thing with Vaughn isn’t going to get personal. It isn’t going to get in the way of us catching him.”

  “That may be.” The lack of edge in Sinclair’s voice backed up the words one hundred percent. “But I still think you should talk to them, Capelli. They know you. You need to trust that.”

  Slipping on as much of a smile as he could muster, he gave up a nod.

  “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

  It was the first time in eight years that Capelli had ever lied to the man.

  Chapter 18

  “Well, well! Look what the breeze blew in.”

  “Ah, hell. There goes the neighborhood.”

  “Damn, they’ll let every last troublemaker into this place!”

  Holy shit, it was good to finally be back at work.

  Swinging her duffle bag from her shoulder to the locker room bench in front of her, Shae didn’t even bother trying to check her grin.

  “Yeah, yeah. I missed you too.” She spun a look from Kellan to Faurier to Hawkins before adding, “You jackasses.”

  “Glad to see you’re back where you belong, McCullough,” Dempsey said, pulling a battle-tested navy blue RFD baseball hat over his dark brown hair with a smile. “We were beginning to worry you might’ve gone over to the dark side and decided to become a cop.”

  “Not a chance,” she said, although there was no disguising the pride in her chest or the weariness in her mind at having already put in over fifty hours this week, and it was only Friday morning. “Don’t get me wrong. Working in intelligence was exciting and everything, but I’ll take bunker gear over bullets any day. Plus”—her belly squeezed as she thought of the last six days she’d spent working tirelessly at the Thirty-Third, then did an outright flip at the thought of the corresponding nights she’d spent in bed with Capelli—“the team has a really good handle on the case I was assisting them with now. My hours at arson are complete, A-shift is up here at the fire house today, and…what can I say? I missed you Neanderthals.”

  Shae turned toward her locker, going through her pre-roll call routine as everyone around her joked and laughed and did the same. Okay, so the story she’d just given up had been technically accurate, but it had also definitely been the Cliff’s Notes version of the truth. While the intelligence unit had amassed enough background information on Conrad Vaughn this week to have a pretty decent picture of his handiwork from the last five years, the only traces they’d been able to find of his actual location or his next possible target had been just that. Scraps. Details outdated enough to be useless. Information that was either scrambled or incomplete. She’d researched and investigated as much as she could on the arson end, but without evidence linking Vaughn to the scenes, she’d hit a standstill. The guy had lived up to his nickname, giving them only brief, shadowy glimpses before leading them to dead-end after dead-end.

  Shae closed her locker, smoothing a hand over her RFD T-shirt and navy blue uniform pants. Yes, they’d been investigating two serious crimes, and hell yes, Vaughn was definitely the living embodiment of All Things Purely Evil. But he’d been church-mouse quiet all week, and while that sucked in terms of trying to pin him down, Shae couldn’t deny her relief at the underlying facts.

  They might not know where Vaughn was, but he hadn’t threatened her again, and he hadn’t burned anything to the ground this week, either.

  And if he tried, this time they’d be ready for him.

  “McCullough! You’re back.” Slater’s blue-gray eyes went wide, his boots shuffling to a stop on the locker room linoleum just an instant before he broke into a smile.

  “That’s the rumor,” she said, but not even her wry comeback could keep her genuine grin at bay.

  Slater’s expression slipped into more serious territory, and he lowered his voice even though everyone else had cleared out of the room. “I heard you were working on a pretty nasty case over at arson. Is everything okay?”

  A pang centered itself behind Shae’s sternum, fading to a dull thud as it spread out over her rib cage. Protocol dictated that she not discuss the particulars of the case with anyone other than members of the intelligence unit or fire department brass. Of course brass included Captain Bridges, and also Gamble, who had checked in with her in that quiet yet utterly badass way of his all week long. The truth was, there wasn’t much—if anything—to check on now. All that was left was to wait for Vaughn to turn up so intelligence could tie him to the Denton/Lawrence murders and put him away forever, then arson could close the two cases they had against him, to boot.

  And that would happen. Shae was one hundred percent certain of it. Because she and Capelli and everyone else in the intelligence unit had worked far too hard for it not to.

  Covering any seriousness her pause might have given up, Shae looked at Slater and nodded. “Working in arson is definitely an eye-opener, but somebody’s got to keep you guys on your toes around here. So tell me. What’d I miss?”

  “Let’s see,” Slater said, leaning a shoulder against the bank of lockers beside him. “A half dozen fire calls that were more smoke than substance, a hit and run that turned out to be a mannequin that fell off the back of a truck, and a healthy baby girl delivered in the back seat of a Chevy Malibu.”

  “Ohhh, please tell me Gamble had to take point on the baby.” While she could count on one hand the number of things that freaked the big bad lieutenant out, squirming, squalling infants were so at the top of the list.

  Slater’s soft laugh said he knew it, too. “Nah. Parker and Quinn made it with plenty of time. Speaking of which”—he shifted, just a small straightening of his spine and shoulders, but it was enough to snare every last bit of Shae’s attention—“I thought about what you said. You know, about managing the stuff that scares you. And I g
uess it turns out I’m not too crazy about blood.”

  “You wouldn’t be the only firefighter with that phobia,” she said. God, she’d heard dozens of stories of first responders who were terrified of blood, just like she’d been front and center at enough trauma scenes to know that in most cases, the fear was legit.

  Funny, the glint in Slater’s eyes looked far from scared, though. “Well, I decided to do something about it. I’m going to train as a paramedic. You’ll still be stuck with me on Engine during A-shift,” he added, likely in response to the fact that Shae’s jaw had just dropped down for a meet and greet with the floor tiles. “But the best way for me to conquer my fear is to face it head-on. Plus, if I’m trained in both fire and EMS, I can pick up more extra shifts, and Quinn has already been really cool about giving me some pointers.”

  An expression moved over the rookie’s face, something odd that Shae couldn’t readily name. But before she could be sure she’d seen it, let alone identify what it was or what had triggered it, Gamble cleared his throat from a few feet away.

  “McCullough. Slater. Roll call is in five. Thought you might not be interested in Bridges’s bad graces until at least lunch time.”

  She’d give him this—he’d delivered the words with edge to spare. But then his mouth curved just the slightest degree, and she couldn’t help it. Her grin came charging back at full steam.

  “Aw, you missed me,” Shae said, but of course, the big guy didn’t budge.

  “You’re pushing your luck.”

  She turned what wanted to be a snort into a cough, just in the nick of time. “You’re not really surprised, are you?”

  One nearly black brow arched up over an equally dark stare. “Roll call’s in four now. And McCullough?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  Gamble turned on his boot heels to face the doorway leading into the fire house, looking back over one gigantic shoulder just briefly as he said, “Good to have you back.”

  “No place I’d rather be, Lieutenant.”

  Shae’s cheeks warmed with happiness, but it was a sentiment that wouldn’t last if she didn’t make it to roll call on time. After a quick “let me know if I can help” to Slater on the paramedic training, she aimed herself down the hallway leading to the main hub of the fire house, including the meeting room where they held their shift-change meeting every morning at oh-seven-hundred, sharp.

  But she got no more than six strides from the locker room when her phone buzzed in her back pocket, and her cheeks warmed with something a whole lot naughtier than happiness at the sight of the text message on her screen.

  You make it to Seventeen okay?

  The words were ordinary. Ones any member of intelligence might use—God knew she’d gone the check-in route more in the last week than she had in all her years as a teenager combined. But the name next to the message sent a flutter through her like she was chock-full of butterflies, and okay, yeah. Fine. It was a little crazy, and a lot impulsive, but Shae didn’t care.

  She had it pretty bad for James Capelli. And his sort of bad was so. Very. Good.

  Sliding her cell phone more firmly against her palm, she texted back, Come on, Starsky. It’s a ten-minute drive. Even I have a tough time getting into trouble in a timeframe like that.

  I doubt it, came the quick reply, and oh, she liked him more than a little. But I’ll take that as a yes.

  It’s a yes, Shae thumb-typed back. But you don’t have to check up on me. I already texted Hale when I walked in the door.

  I know, and I know. Have a good day.

  Despite their simplicity, Shae knew the cadence with which he’d speak the words, could hear in her mind the serious care that would go into them, and suddenly, they weren’t simple at all.

  Shit, she was going to be late.

  Hustling down the hallway, Shae made it into the meeting room T-minus three seconds before Captain Bridges shut the door. Roll call became morning duties (okay, so she hadn’t missed mopping the floors) which then became three fairly minor back-to-back calls and some ladder drills (ah, but she had missed looking down at the city from a hundred feet up on the aerial.) Shae moved from one thing to the next, falling back into her routine with ease until the afternoon coasted into dusk, then dusk into full-on darkness…

  The all-call blasted her awake just shy of eleven P.M.

  Engine Seventeen, Squad Six, Ambulance Twenty-Two, Battalion Seventeen, primary units, Engine Nine, Ladder Forty-Two, Ambulance Nineteen, secondary units, structure fire, nineteen hundred block of Winding Ridge Terrace, requesting immediate response.

  Shae shook the sleep from her brain and stumbled in the direction of the bunkroom door, but after two weeks of uninterrupted sleep at night, she had to admit, clarity was a tough nut to crack.

  “You good, McCullough? Because this one sounds like it ain’t a Tupperware party,” Hawkins said, and she nodded, chucking her hair into a close approximation of a ponytail as she beat feet toward the engine.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, her heart kicking into fifth gear. There was decidedly less banter during calls that hauled them out of bed, for sure. But for two houses to be called to a scene, right off the bat like that?

  Shae would bet her paycheck this wasn’t some yahoo burning leaves in his yard.

  Stepping into her turnout gear, she yanked the heavy weight of her bunker pants over the sweats she slept in when she was on shift. The process jump-started her focus, the order of the steps oddly honing her adrenaline into sharp, streamlined calm.

  Coat, helmet, breathe in. Hood and gloves at the ready, breathe out…

  Her SCBA and mask were already in the rig, and anyway, they needed to get gone. Her muscles squeezed with familiar tension as she pulled herself into the operator’s seat, sending the engine into a diesel-fueled growl with one hand while hooking the other under her seatbelt and snapping the thing into place.

  “Address is in the GPS, McCullough. We’re a go,” Gamble clipped out, jerking his headset into place while she did the same.

  Shae’s inhale was surprisingly smooth considering how hard her adrenal gland was trying to commandeer her lungs. “Copy that. Engine Seventeen is a go.”

  She pulled out of the bay, her eyes on the road and her mind mapping out the path in front of them, and Gamble’s hands moved briskly over the dashboard unit that displayed real-time updates from the city’s dispatch center.

  “Okay, boys and girls. Let’s see what we’re dealing with here. Dispatch has multiple nine-one-one callers reporting heavy smoke and flames showing at a large residence in South Hill. Looks like it’s under construction.”

  “At least there won’t be any entrapment,” came Kellan’s voice over the headset, but Gamble eighty-sixed the guy’s silver lining with a grunt.

  “Not so fast, Walker. Looks like one of the call-ins was from a construction foreman who had a crew at the site. He told dispatch two of his guys are unaccounted for.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Kellan asked at the same time Shae’s pulse snapped in surprise. “It’s twenty-three hundred, for Chrissake. Who works construction in the middle of the night?”

  “That’s not even the worst part. Looks like this place is huge, and it’s already showing flames on the Delta, Charlie—shit. Everywhere. This fire sounds like a serious cluster fuck.”

  “Wait.” Finally, the fog lifted all the way off Shae’s brain and she lined up the location on the GPS with the map of the city in her head. “This is in the most upscale section of South Hill. Over where the mayor is…”

  Oh shit. Shit.

  “This is the exact location of that monstrosity the mayor is building,” she breathed, her voice tight with shock as it echoed through the headset.

  “The mansion that takes up the entire freaking block?” Slater asked.

  Shae made a hard left onto Madison Boulevard, her foot pressing harder over the accelerator as she passed the Plaza hotel and the swanky shopping district that accompanied it.

  “Affirma
tive.” It was also the mansion currently burning down at a very hot, very unnatural rate of speed with two people trapped inside, and something hard and cold turned over in Shae’s gut.

  “Gamble,” she said, channeling all her effort into keeping her lungs steady. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in… “I need you to tell dispatch to call the intelligence unit at the Thirty-Third. Tell them we’re all fine,” she added before she even inhaled again, because God, the last thing she needed was for Capelli or Moreno or anybody else on the team to lose their minds when they’d need them most. “But they need to get out to this scene ASAP.”

  Gamble’s brows shot toward his hairline. “I get that this isn’t exactly a grease fire, McCullough, but the cops? There’s no evidence this is a crime scene.”

  Shae knew it was a flyer. A gut feeling. A guess.

  But she also knew she wasn’t wrong. A fire this big, burning this fast, with two men trapped inside?

  It had Conrad Vaughn’s fingerprints all over it.

  “I need you to call Capelli. Please.”

  Whether it was the polite word or the decidedly impolite way she’d just bit it out, Shae had no idea. But something grabbed Gamble’s attention enough to make him lift the handset on the dashboard radio.

  “We’ll need to radio Bridges too,” she said, certainty and dread combining into a ball in the pit of her stomach. “I’m telling you, there’s something very wrong about this fire.”

  Any doubt to her claim was obliterated when they pulled up to the scene a few minutes later, and sweet Jesus, this fire was huge.

  “Gamble. McCullough.” Bridges was on the asphalt beside the engine the instant Shae had it in park. “Intelligence is on the way. But we need to find those two men trapped inside this house and start knocking down these flames, and we need to do it now.”

  “Copy that,” Shae and Gamble replied in unison. Her heart pushed her blood on a circuit so fast, each beat pressed against her eardrums in a thump of white noise. The “house” in front of them was more Taj Mahal than actual residence, with its white stone façade and endless windows, porticoes, and columns. The power had clearly shorted out, although searing orange flames were already showing in more than half the smoke-clogged windows, and seriously, how were they supposed to find anyone in these conditions?