He glanced around at the faces looking back at him, expecting something more than a series of wide-eyed blinks. Then he reminded himself not everyone—very few people, in fact—understood the mechanisms by which explosions, and the resulting flames, operated, and he tried to put it in layman’s terms.
“It means the fire didn’t originate from the curtains lit by the candle. It means the fire originated by the front door and spread toward the air coming in through the open window. See,” he slapped the photo he’d been examining down on the conference table and turned it around so the others could see, tapping the image with his finger. “Whoever started this did so with a quick-burning and, my guess would be, brutally hot accelerant that was poured under the door and lit. It turned the place into a tinderbox in minutes. But it burned the longest and hottest by the open window where the air could fuel it, which is why the arson investigator mistook that for the point of origin.”
“So I was right,” Eve whispered, her eyes as round as hand grenades. “Someone wants me dead.”
“Jesus, Eve.” Ace scooted his chair closer to hers and threw a muscled arm around her shoulders. Bill tried very hard to ignore it this time, but when Eve reached over and clutched Ace’s hand, he recognized the green-eyed monster sitting on his shoulder for what it was.
For Christ’s sake, man! Cut that shit out!
Although, honestly, he wasn’t sure if he was mentally yelling at himself or Ace. And for a brief moment he was thrown back to earlier that afternoon, when Eve’d curled her delicate fingers into his waistband and the simple feel of her knuckles brushing his back had damn near lit him on fire. That small touch had been more erotic than some of his more memorable full-on make-out sessions, which just proved how far he hadn’t come in his long, oh-so-long, too-damn-long journey to forgetting about one Miss Evelyn Edens.
Well, shit on a stick…
“How in the world did you manage to get out of there alive?” Ace asked gently, giving Eve a squeeze and jerking Bill from his unwelcome thoughts.
“One of the fire escapes is beneath my bedroom window,” she said, her voice hoarse, which was just what Bill needed to crank down the heat on his ill-timed burst of libido. Well, that and the pictures that flashed through his head of how she’d been forced to make her escape. He grabbed the travel-sized bottle of Pepto-Bismol he’d shoved in his pocket and sucked back a healthy chug.
Come on, you sweet, pink elixir. Work your wonders…
“When the fire alarm woke me up, flames were already licking under my bedroom door.” She shook her head, her inky black hair swishing across her shoulders and Ace’s arm. Bill remembered how soft it had once felt swishing against his arm. And goddamnit! He gulped another chug of Pepto. “So I threw open my window, and…and climbed out,” she swallowed, her dry throat making a sticky sound in the relative silence of the big room.
Yeah, climbed out onto a rickety iron fire escape from the friggin’ eighteenth floor. Jesus.
“It was smart,” he admitted, wiping a drop of the pink medicine from his lips.
“What was?” Mac asked, brow furrowed.
“The way the fire was set. It’s almost like whoever did it knew the CFD was still employing the old investigative techniques. Or they just got lucky.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the Internet lists all sorts of ways to get past arson investigators,” he explained, moving to point a finger at the photo again, but Becky’s unbelievably ugly and unconscionably fat tomcat had hopped up on the conference table at some point and was now lying on the pile of photos, reclined back like a raja on a bed of pillows.
“Damnit, Peanut,” he groused, regretting the fact that he’d told Becky he would feed the bastard, not to mention consenting to scooping giant turds out of the litter box. Talk about a job no self-respecting man should ever agree to. Shoving an impatient hand under Peanut’s big fuzzy butt, he retrieved the photo. The tomcat’s crooked tail flicked once, but other than that, he didn’t move a muscle.
Damn scurvy feline. Walks around like he owns the place…
“As I was saying,” he flicked a couple of gray cat hairs off the photo, “the Internet lists ways to get past arson investigators, but most of those rely on the old point-of-origin dog-and-pony show. Could be whoever did this didn’t know there are more precise investigative methods out there today and—”
He stopped because Eve’s face, naturally pale, had turned as white as the potassium perchlorate he used when making explosive primers.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
“D-Dale,” she said, her pulse hammering at the base of her throat. Seeing it caused every cell in Bill’s body to go on high alert. Somewhere inside him a red light was flashing and an alarm was blaring.
“What about the bastard?” he demanded, sitting up straighter, barely recognizing his own voice.
“He’s a…” She licked her lips. “He’s a volunteer firefighter. And he…he does a lot of training with the CFD.”
And just like that, rage exploded inside Bill with the force of a bunker buster. Because even though he and Eve weren’t exactly simpatico, the fact remained that nobody, and he meant nobody, got away with attempting to turn her into a crispy critter.
“Let’s go get him,” he said, his molars aching with the force of his grinding jaw.
“But…but…” Eve blinked rapidly when he pushed up from the table, ready to put an extra hole in Dale WhoTheFuck’s head. “Shouldn’t we bring this to the police? Or…or the fire department? Or—”
“You mean the same police who’ve already closed the files on your cases?” he snarled, blowing like a raging bull. Luckily no one at the table was wearing red. “Or the CFD that incorrectly identified your condo fire’s point of origin? You think they’re going to listen to a couple of motorcycle mechanics?”
“Oh,” Eve said, clueing in to their perilous situation. “I see.” Then she shook her head. “But you’re friends with the police chief, right? Couldn’t you—”
“Yeah,” this time it was Mac who cut in, “and we want to stay friends with him. Which means we can’t have him orderin’ his subordinates to reinvestigate closed cases based simply on the hunches of a couple of guys from the local motorcycle club.”
“Okay,” she admitted, “but maybe Jeremy—”
“Love, your cousin would be as useless now as he has been all along,” Ace interrupted, and a delicate muscle began to tick in Eve’s jaw. “These aren’t his cases. Hell, this isn’t even his department.”
Used to be, Bill didn’t think Eve owned a temper. Now he’d go so far as to describe it as, not necessarily hot, but certainly warm. And after Mac told him how she’d stood up to her father earlier? Well, for some reason it just made her all the more desirable. Like he needed any more reasons. Damnit all to hell…
“We’re just going to go watch Dale for a while. See if he does anything hinky, anything that we can give Chief Washington as ammunition to reopen your cases,” Bill assured her, even though there was a large part of him that would’ve preferred storming into the man’s house and shoving a pistol against his temple until he spilled his guts. Then again, he wasn’t on the battlefield. This was a civilian issue that required a civilian response. Although…even in a civilian situation there was still some room for a little shock and awe if the need arose.
The anticipation of getting his mitts on Dale caused a smile to curve to his lips.