Capelli folded the blanket under which he’d slept, double-checking to make sure the corners of the dark green fleece lined up before he placed the thing over its usual spot on the back of his couch. He’d given his bed to Shae even though she’d given him some shit for it, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been in the swankiest, most extravagantly lush suite in the Remington Plaza Hotel.

Between his going-nowhere case, the threats made to Shae, and the revelation she’d made afterward in his kitchen that had knocked him figuratively yet thoroughly right on his ass, he hadn’t slept a goddamn wink.

Letting out an exhale, he eyed the hallway leading to his bedroom, where Shae was still getting dressed. CSU had cleared enough of her apartment overnight to allow Quinn to run by to grab some clothes and drop them off on her way to her shift at Seventeen, which the paramedic had done a few minutes ago. Shae had seemed like her usual self with both him and Quinn this morning, which was to say she’d swung through about four different emotions before she’d finished her first cup of coffee. None of them, however, had even been in the same stratosphere with the way she’d looked last night as she’d sat at his kitchen table and told the story of her best friend’s death.

Of all the words Capelli was certain would never describe her, vulnerable was easily in the top five. Yet the second that story had crossed Shae’s lips, she’d gone and shocked the hell out of him yet again.

She wasn’t just impulsive for the thrill of it, or worse yet, because she didn’t take a damn thing seriously. She had reasons for taking risks—no, check that. She had logical, well-founded reasons, ones Capelli had been able not only to rationalize, but really understand. Beneath all that brash exterior he needed to avoid like it was at the center of a five-alarm fire, Shae was a purely, deeply good person. All she wanted was to help people on their very worst days, while once upon a time, he’d engineered the most underhanded scams in Remington, conning hundreds of unsuspecting people out of their pensions and paychecks all so his drug-addicted mother and her boyfriend du jour could party like rock stars for a living.

And didn’t that just make him a degenerate of the highest order, because fuck, despite how good Shae was and how very good he wasn’t, Capelli wanted her anyway.

“Whoa.” Shae’s voice jolted him back from his trip down memory lane. “Are you okay? You look like someone just walked over your grave.”

“I’m fine,” came his default, and great. Add “liar” to his résumé. “And I don’t have a grave. I’m standing right here. Obviously.”

She laughed, and the part of him he’d been trying so hard to keep on lockdown prowled faster in his chest. “Lord. Are you ever not stone cold serious? I meant figuratively. Because you look upset,” she added with an obvious—yet not unkind—lift of her honey-colored brows, and damn it, this woman wrecked everything about him.

“Right. Sorry. I must need more coffee.” Or a lobotomy. Christ, he needed to get it together. “Anyway, it’s still a little early, but I’m sure Sinclair’s already at the Thirty-Third. We can head over for an update on the break-in at your apartment before you go to arson today.”

“Sounds good. To be honest, I’d really like to get back to normal and nail the asshole responsible for these crimes.” Halfway to the door, Shae paused. “Thanks. You know, for putting me up last night. And for…listening.”

“You’re welcome.” Capelli’s gut squeezed, but his words were perfectly level. They had to be.

For both his sake and Shae’s.

They made their way downstairs and out the front door of the building, into the slightly gray, definitely chilly morning. He watched Shae’s back as much as his own as their feet hit the pavement, scanning all the potential places someone might lurk or even just hang back and pretend to casually observe. She returned the favor, her green eyes moving over their surroundings in a methodical sweep, but thankfully, the quiet side street and everything on it—including her Jeep and his Volkswagen Golf GTI—were all systems go.

“I’ll meet you at the precinct,” Shae said, sliding into the driver’s seat and giving him a wave before pulling away from the curb. Capelli lingered for another minute, pretending to read a message on his phone. The street remained completely as expected, a handful of people in various states of hustle and go on the sidewalk, light traffic that would soon grow heavy as rush hour got going in earnest. Nobody pulled out after Shae, and no one loitered around, watching him in the same covert manner he watched the street.

Which meant that either things were entirely normal, or whoever had eyes on Shae was just that good.

After all, it wasn’t paranoia when someone was really watching you.

Shaking off the thought, Capelli got into his Volkswagen and drove the handful of miles between his apartment building and the Thirty-Third. Shae’s Jeep wasn’t in the parking lot next to the precinct, though, and he ran through a quick set of possibilities for why she wouldn’t have arrived ahead of him since she’d had a five-minute head start.

Nothing good came out of his mental list. At. All.

But just when Capelli was about to consider true concern, a text popped up on his cell phone.

Hey, Starsky. I stopped to run a quick errand. I’ll be there in ten. Stop making that serious face.

She followed it with a bunch of smiley faces and other assorted emojis to match, and the whole thing was so freaking Shae that he had to huff out at least a soft laugh before texting back with a quick “copy that”. Yes, she’d been threatened, very likely by whomever had committed the crimes they were trying to solve. But she had the entire intelligence unit freshly programmed into her cell phone, and she was smart. Tough.

Sexy. Definitely sexy, with those pretty blue-green panties and all that hot, smooth skin…

“Walk,” he bit out under his breath, forcing his boots into motion fast enough for them to crunch the gravel beneath. Counting his steps and marshaling his breath to a slow, even rhythm, Capelli walked through the parking lot—twenty-nine paces—up the eight stairs to the main entryway leading into the Thirty-Third, and after a quick scan of his RPD badge and an exchange of “hey-how-are-ya”s with the desk sergeant on duty, he was on his way up to the intelligence office. To his surprise, Hollister and Hale were already at their desks, and (not to his surprise) Sinclair was in his office, his door closed and his phone pressed firmly to his ear.

“Hey,” Hale said, lifting her gaze from her laptop with a smile far too cheerful for the pre-eight A.M. hour. “You’re here early.”

“I wanted to get started on the surveillance videos from Shae’s apartment. See if we can’t catch a break off one of them that might lead us to our murderer.” Or at least off of square one, where he seemed to have taken up permanent residence.

“Great minds,” Hale replied, scooping up a coffee mug claiming Glitter is the New Black in sparkly pink script and taking a long sip before continuing. “Hollister and I have been at it for almost an hour. Sadly, there’s not much to write home about. Building management only has cameras at the front door and in the elevators.”

Shit. “So if the intruder posed as a maintenance worker in order to gain access through a side door, then took the stairs once he was inside, these feeds won’t show so much as his shadow.”

“Our guy is smart. It’s highly possible he managed to avoid the front door,” Hollister admitted, looking up from his laptop.

“Alternate point of entry is what I would do to gain access without being noticed,” Capelli said. “Those key cards that residents and building employees use to get in and out can easily be duped, and even more easily stolen. Either way, the only trail left behind is of the person who had the thing swiped, not necessarily the person who actually swiped it.”

Hale nodded and reached for the phone on the corner of her desk. “I’ll put in a call to the building manager and see if any of his employees are missing a key card, or if any residents have reported theirs stolen. It’s a long shot, but—”

“Oooo, did someone say long shot? Because I’m always up for a challenge.”

Shae’s voice sounded off from the door of the intelligence office, which she’d bumped open with her hip because her arms were full of two long, flat boxes. But before Capelli could move so much as a muscle to help her, Hollister bolted out of his chair.

“Are those what I think they are?” he asked, his face in full-on glee mode.

Shae handed over the boxes with a grin. “Yep! I brought breakfast.”

“This isn’t just any old breakfast,” Hollister said, and if Capelli didn’t know any better, he’d swear the detective had just drooled on his T-shirt and his shoulder holster. “These are doughnuts from the Holey Roller, home of the Killer Cruller.”

“Jesus, Hollister. You are such a mercenary when it comes to food,” Hale said, sending her gaze skyward.

Hollister took the boxes from Shae. “Clearly, you’ve never experienced the joy that is that cruller. Anyway, I’m a single guy. Of course I’m mercenary when it comes to food.”

“Capelli’s a single guy, and you don’t see him throwing elbows to get at these,” Hale pointed out.

“That’s because Capelli is a health Nazi. Also, possibly insane.” Hollister waggled his reddish-brown brows, and Capelli tried on a wry expression to cover the unease building in his chest.

“I’m standing right here, you know. With perfectly functional hearing and everything.”

Before Hollister could pop off with a smartass answer to match Capelli’s smartass comment, Isabella hustled through the door. “Oooh, doughnuts from the Holey Roller,” she said, not even shrugging out of her jacket or putting down her travel mug of tea before joining the fray. “What God among mortals stopped for these?”

“I did.” Shae pulled the lids off the boxes—which now sat smack in the middle of Hollister’s desk—and sent a glance over the group, starting and ending with Capelli. “I just wanted to say thanks for everything you guys did last night.”

Capelli shook his head, utterly baffled at how any one person could be so brassy and so genuine all at once. “Doughnuts for a bunch of cops? Don’t you think that’s a little ironic?”

Shae’s cat-in-cream smile told him the choice had been one hundred percent intentional, and Hollister tagged him with a look that suggested he was certain Capelli had taken leave of all five of his senses.

“Dude, shut up. There are apple fritters in here,” he said, holding up a gigantic, golden brown pastry as proof. “Plus, even though we were just doing our jobs, I think it’s pretty cool of Shae to enable our sugar high.”

Capelli realized—a second too late, of course—how much edge his words had carried. But Shae just laughed that sexy, maddening laugh that managed to stir him up and smooth him out all at the same time.

“Thanks, Hollister, but believe me, we’re square.” Reaching down low, she plucked a glazed cake doughnut from the box on Hollister’s desk. “Come on, Capelli,” she said, her expression as sweet and as downright sinful as the pastry she offered up. “It’s a doughnut, not the precursor to Armageddon. Live a little.”

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, and 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.”