“We also need to pay a visit to the Widow Tomlinson. Sounds like she won’t be so grieving. This one shouldn’t be as hard as Mrs. Weems. It’s my turn, isn’t it?”
“It is. You did good with Mr. Hart, by the way.”
One corner of her mouth lifted. “You’re just saying that so I’ll give you my turn.”
His brows lifted. “Did it work?”
“No.”
“Damn.” Then his eyes narrowed. “Firefighters at your six.”
Olivia looked over her shoulder at Barlow and three firefighters coming their way. David was one of them. That her breath backed up in her lungs and her stomach rolled was an annoyance she’d just have to get used to. David Hunter was handsome. Gorgeous. Total eye candy. And a jerk. So live with it and do your job.
By the time the men reached them, she was steady.
“I’m Cunkle and this is Sloan,” one of the firefighters said. “We’re with Company Forty. And this is Hunter. He’s with Company Forty-four. Barlow said you wanted to talk to us.”
“We do,” Kane said. “Tell us what you saw inside.”
“Fire was fully engaged,” Cunkle said. “The office walls were burning and the ceiling crashed in. Sloan and I pulled the walls down and there he was.”
“He wasn’t alive. He’d been shot.” Sloan pursed his lips hard. “Face was gone.”
“What about his desk?” Olivia asked. “What did you see?”
“A bunch of papers, splattered with his blood. They hadn’t completely burned, so I checked with my flashlight. They were hard to see, but they looked like sex pictures.”
“Sex pictures? You mean, like porn?” Olivia asked and Sloan shook his head.
“No. Looked like the guy was him. Pudgy, lots of white skin. Really white.”
“This time they brought their own fuel,” Barlow added. “They found gas cans.”
“Pour patterns were similar to the ones we saw in the condo,” David said. “They spread the gas on the floor in a line, then dumped what was left into a puddle. Looks like they came from the east and west sides of the warehouse and met in the middle.”
“And the ball?” Olivia asked and he met her eyes, his unreadable.
“Propping open a side door, just like you thought they’d done in the condo. The ball is covered in gel. I got a picture of it. Look where the ball touches the floor.” He handed her his camera and Olivia turned it so both she and Kane could see the view screen.
“What am I looking at?” she asked and David looked over her shoulder, his chin almost touching her ear. Her lungs stopped working as he pointed at the screen.
“There. Piece of a fuse. They used the ball to hold one end of the fuse in place.”
David moved back, and Olivia breathed again. “When can we go in?” she asked.
“An hour or two,” Barlow said, “when it’s cooled. I’ll call you.”
“Thanks,” Olivia said, then gave Barlow a small smile. “Thanks for calling Brie’s dad. He’ll take good care of Bruno, and that’ll make Mr. Hart more cooperative.”
Barlow nodded. “Hart’s got an alibi?”
“Yes, but we’ll check him out. First stop is the widow. She had motive to kill Tomlinson and to burn the place down. Supposedly she copied her husband’s files, so we’ll see if we can get customer and employee lists from her.” She turned to the firefighters. “Thanks for the information. We’ll be in touch.”
She walked away without a word to David Hunter, feeling him watch her back. Kane matched her stride, checking over his shoulder.
“He’s watching you, Liv.”
“He’d better stop,” she said through her teeth, then made herself chill. “I’ve been thinking. What if Barlow was right yesterday morning, that this has nothing to do with the SPOT environmental group?”
“That the glass ball is just a smoke screen?” Kane asked.
“Yeah. What if somebody really wanted to kill a person they hated and set the first fire to establish a false pattern? That killing Tomlinson was their plan all along?”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing. Sounds like Tomlinson’s wife really hated him.”
“Let’s find out how much.”
Sloan and Cunkle went back to their duties, leaving Barlow standing next to David. For a moment neither of them said anything, then Barlow said, “Ouch.”
“What?” David muttered. “She was nice to you.”
“For the first time in a couple years, but I wasn’t talking about me.”
David hesitated, then shrugged. “Who was Doug?”
Barlow shot him a surprised look. “My friend, then and now. Used to be engaged to Liv. I introduced them, actually.”
“He left her.”
Barlow sighed. “He did. And I helped, which is why I’m persona non grata.”
David thought of Paige’s words. He was in it, too. “How did you help?”
“Doug had a fiancée long before Liv. They’d been college sweethearts, then she left him. He never got over her, but he met Liv and I thought they had a shot together. Time passed, they got engaged. They set a date. I was going to be the best man. Everything was fine. Then, a couple weeks before the ceremony, Doug’s old fiancée showed up. She begged Doug to take her back.”
“And he did?”
“Not right away. He came to me, asking for advice, and unfortunately I got involved. One of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.”
David frowned. “You told him to dump Olivia?”
“No,” Barlow said forcefully. “I just told him to imagine himself at eighty and see who he thought he’d be happiest with. He went off for a few days, thought it through, then chose Angela. Olivia was”-he sighed-“a lot more crushed than I ever thought a woman could be.”
I don’t play second-string. “How did she find out what you’d done?”
“That would have been me telling her, another stupid thing I did. See, a week after Doug left her, her father died. He was a cop, too, apparently. In Chicago.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m friends with Olivia’s half sister Mia. They share a father.” David’s shoulders sagged. Now the second-string statement made even more sense.
“You knew Liv’s father?”
David thought about Olivia and Mia’s father, the animal that he’d been. Which always brought back memories of Megan’s stepfather and what he’d done to Megan and her family. Which always made him mad enough to kill. Carefully, David relaxed his fists. “Not personally. Thank God.”
Barlow looked down at David’s hands, then back up, warily. “That bad, huh?”
“Olivia’s father was a miserable sonofabitch who didn’t deserve the air he breathed. Mia didn’t know Olivia existed before their father died. Olivia only knew another family existed, that her father had chosen to live with them and not her and her mother.”
Barlow briefly closed his yes. “Shit. And then Doug left her for someone else.”
And then I said another woman’s name when she was in my bed. “Hell.”
“I saw Liv the day she found out her father had died. She was packing to go to the funeral in Chicago. I didn’t know about her dad, and I thought she was packing to leave permanently because of Doug. I tried to get her to calm down, telling her not to do anything drastic, and somehow, I told her what I’d done.”
“What did she do?”
“Just looked at me, with those big blue eyes. Like I’d stabbed her in the gut.”
Like she looked at me when I said “and.” He sighed. “I know the look.”
Barlow’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do to her?”
David was tempted to say it was none of his business. But I might need some help. God knew he wasn’t being too successful on his own. “She thinks I wanted someone else, but she doesn’t understand. I wouldn’t have hurt her for the world, but I did. Then I tried to fix it, and…”
“And you dug yourself in even deeper,” Micah finished. “Are you going after her?”
David’s gaze shot over to where she and Kane stood with the warehouse manager. “What, you mean right now?”