Vaughn tugged the key to his apartment building from the pocket of his hoodie and fought the deep-seated urge to puke. From the neatly swept sidewalk to the oversized planters boasting fancy yet tasteful winter greenery, everything about this place made his teeth hurt. At least in the shitholes and the slums of North Point, what you saw was exactly what you got. But here in the upstanding part of the south side, Vaughn was stuck with a bunch of fake cheer and rah-rah work ethic crap.

Fuck, this extortion plan couldn’t work fast enough to get his ass out of Remington and permanently planted on a beach, Mai Tai in hand and millions in his offshore bank account.

Vaughn slumped just far enough into his hoodie to look standard instead of suspicious. Making certain the glance he swiveled over the area surrounding the entryway was as casual as it was indifferent, he slid the key into the lock on the building’s front door and tugged the thing on its hinges. Five days had passed since his Playing With Matches adventure in North Point, and while Little Ray had given up some semi-decent attempts to find him (presumably in an effort to shoot him in the face, blah blah blah), Vaughn was far too smart not to stay four steps ahead of the idiot.

Even if he’d had to find a vacant apartment in the goddamn sweet spot of South Hill in order to do it.

“Oh, hello, Brian. Just coming home from work, dear?”

He looked up at the tiny, birdlike old lady belonging to the voice, hating his aw-shucks smile with every ounce of his being as he slipped it over his face. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Abercrombie. I sure am. Those third graders know how to wear a teacher right out.”

Normally, Vaughn cut a wide-as-shit berth around anyone and everyone around him, because truly, so many of them were just so fucking stupid. But elementary school teacher Brian O’Connell, a.k.a. the fictional renter of the poor schmuck whose apartment Vaughn was squatting in while the guy was serving overseas, had been an all-too-easy persona to pull over on the old bat. Since he might be stuck here for at least a little while, it was better to have the building busybody think he was such a nice boy than to be suspicious of him.

Mrs. Abercrombie pressed her inch-thick glasses higher on her nose, her hands fluttering over the front of her horribly floral housecoat. “I’ll bet you keep those kids busy right back! It’s so lovely to have such hardworking young people living in the building.”

Briefly, Vaughn wondered if old Mrs. A had an online retirement fund he could drain before he got out of this hellhole. “Not as lovely as it is to be here. You have a nice evening.”

He crossed the threshold of his stolen apartment T-minus three seconds from sugar shock, and oh yeah, this was more like it. Turning to flip the two-inch deadbolt he’d installed less than a minute after he’d stolen the place, then propping the solid steel door jammer beneath the doorknob and bracing it against the floorboards, Vaughn exhaled in relief. The security in the building itself was good but not great, which was exactly what he needed. Too little and he’d pull a fucking hamstring taking countermeasures, but too much, and he’d have to blow his wad to make sure he stayed under the radar. This place still used regular keys instead of higher tech key cards that could be tracked for usage, and the closed-circuit cameras at all the main entry/exit points were monitored by a private security company that Vaughn had hacked one-handed and half-asleep.

Which was exactly how he knew Mrs. Abercrombie went to Bingo twice a week at the church up the street, the medical intern down the hall was either not home or in a sleep coma, and the blonde with the fake tits in 6A? He didn’t even want to get started on some of the freaky shit that chick was up to in her free time. But he had eyes on everyone, which was the most important step in staying undetected.

If he saw every piece on the board, he could control the strategy to outmaneuver and outsmart every last one of the players.

Vaughn grabbed a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bag of Doritos from the once-tidy kitchen before parking himself at the work station he’d set up in the living room. Powering up his laptop, he threw a handful of chips into his cakehole as he scrolled through the list of alerts he’d set up for various databases, his dusty orange fingers freezing over the keyboard as one in particular caught his attention.

Remington Fire Department, Office of Arson Investigation.

“What the fuck?” His heart thumped out a steady stream of you’ve got to be shitting me. Vaughn had flagged the RFD’s database just to keep tabs on the two fires he’d been forced to set so far. He’d rigged the causes of both to look accidental enough on the surface, and really, it wasn’t like most people tended to give a shit about a meth lab run by gang members and a shitty Italian restaurant that had really been the front for the local Mob. Setting fires to make his nastier payback-related crimes harder to investigate was ironically a little nugget he’d borrowed from his good, dead buddy, Julian DuPree. Only since Vaughn had been far more meticulous along with far less emotional about the whole thing, he’d been certain both cases would be open and shut, at least as far as the fires themselves were concerned.

Yet the fire at Little Ray’s meth lab and the torch job he’d done at Fiorelli’s when that Mafioso prick had refused to pay up were currently marked as “active, pending further investigation”, and huh.

Guess it was time for more countermeasures.

Vaughn scrolled through the reports, his mind spinning like a Tilt-a-Whirl at a sideshow carnival. While he wasn’t worried he’d get caught—that would take an act of God and Congress put together—he did need to figure out what steps the RFD was taking so he could outwit any advances they might get lucky enough to make.

Eh, looked like they had precious little to work with. Knowing how difficult it would be to prove arson with all the gray-area maybes he’d left at both scenes, Vaughn would bet his left nut that the idiot fire marshal would still be knocking around theories a month from now. Actually linking those fires to him on top of it? File that under “never gonna happen”.

“Let’s see who else is doing background on these babies,” he murmured. With any luck, it would be that fucktard, Wisniewski. Ol’ Frank couldn’t even find his ass with both hands and a three-way mirror.

Clicking through the rest of the report, Vaughn landed on the sign-off page, and sure enough, Wisniewski’s name flashed up at him from the bottom of his laptop screen. But it was the one next to it that made him pause, and he narrowed his stare over the screen with a curse.

Shae McCullough, Engine Company, Station Seventeen.

He sent a rude noise through his teeth. Those firefighters at Seventeen were such a righteous pain in the ass. Kellan Walker had been a big part of the sting that had taken down DuPree, and now this chick McCullough was shoving her nose into an arson investigation.

The question was why.

Three keystrokes and just as many seconds had her personnel file splashed over Vaughn’s laptop screen, and holy shit on a swizzle stick, ‘pain in the ass’ didn’t even begin to cover this woman. She’d been written up a half-dozen times in her five-year tenure with the department, which was ironically also the number of letters of commendation she had to her name. Her latest misstep—insubordination, natch—had landed her ass-first in arson for what looked to be another week and a half. She’d obviously put all of her cases under a fucking microscope, and now Vaughn had to deal with her to ensure that the ones with his name on them stayed cold long enough for him to grab his payday and get gone.

He re-read McCullough’s file and sorted through a handful of possibilities. While popping her would probably be fun, it also carried a high likelihood of being both messy and suspicious. She was only pushing paper in arson for seven more days, after which the case would presumably get dumped in Wisniewski’s big, fat, lazy-as-hell lap. So really, all Vaughn had to do was distract her a bit, maybe rattle her a little bit more, and bam! He’d be on his way to becoming a permanently unsolved mystery, yet again.

Leaning all the way back in his desk chair, he uncapped his Mountain Dew, the bottle letting out a soft hiss that echoed his mood as he flipped the lid to the crumb-laden surface of his kitchen table-slash-desk. Yeah, this firefighter bimbo would be easy enough to scare off in the short-term, but if the RFD was going to eagle-eye the fires he was setting as payback in this extortion scam, then logic dictated that he needed to set less fires in order to stay under the radar.

Because the very last thing Vaughn needed was to have the cops up his ass again. Keeping that from happening had been his whole reason for wanting get-out-of-Dodge money in the first place.

He needed to get gone, because he sure as hell wouldn’t live through getting caught.

His survival instinct sparked, and he clack-clacked his way to the police department database, slipping into the file on the meth lab murders. He’d known the autopsies on Malik and the L-Man would come up hinky—there was no masking sufentanil, and while he could alter chemistry to create the perfect environment for a meth lab fire, he couldn’t change it completely, especially not in a pair of bodies that were deader than fucking chivalry. But the cops still looked like they had no leads and their heads in their asses, so at least that was some good news.

Still. With the RFD looking into both fires now, there were a couple potential moves on the intelligence unit’s chessboard that hadn’t been there yesterday. It was unlikely as shit that any of them would turn into anything that would lead the cops in Vaughn’s direction; then again, he’d felt the same way about those assholes when they’d been on DuPree’s tail.

His old pal James might have gone all straight and narrow like the pussy he’d always been, but he wasn’t a dumbass by any stretch of the imagination. And didn’t that just put the guy on a very short list.

Tossing back another swig of Mountain Dew, Vaughn cracked a grin as he wondered if the cops James worked with had a clue what the guy’s former life looked like. That he used to hack banks and business payroll databases to con people out of their hard-earned money. That he’d memorized and analyzed countless security details specifically to get around them during B&Es. That he’d been raised to recklessly lie, cheat, and steal like the common criminal he was.

Of course, James thought he’d reformed, and wasn’t that a kick in the pants. Damaged goods or no, the guilt of what he’d done—to his own mother, of all people—was probably messing with the guy’s head something fierce. But guilt was for the weak, and if there was one thing you couldn’t escape, it was who you were at your very center.

Underneath that holier-than-thou façade, James Capelli was a delinquent. Calculating and cold and good for nothing but crime.

After all, Vaughn hadn’t nicknamed that fucker the Wraith for nothing.

Vaughn’s heart picked up the pace, pressing louder against his ears in the quiet of his stolen apartment. Reformed or not, James was still smarter than nearly anyone Vaughn had ever met. Not smart enough to catch him, of course—duh. But if there was a chance the intelligence unit might catch wind of this extortion scheme, it would make the rest of his plans infinitely harder to throw into motion.

Which meant that after he was done throwing Shae McCullough’s concentration a couple of curve balls, his best strategy was to stop chipping away at his end game and crank the stakes up nice and high.

* * *

Capelli walked into the Crooked Angel bar and grill and checked every point of entry he could see even though he’d been in the place no less than a thousand times and had memorized the layout after his first visit. Not that the Crooked Angel had changed much over the last eight years, other than a subtle swap or two of some tables and booths, some updating of the sports memorabilia decorating the darkly paneled walls, and the addition of white lights strung overhead, presumably to soften the place up a little. But the habit of putting eyes on every viable entry point to calculate all the possible escape routes in case something went sideways was about as ingrained as inhale/exhale, and Capelli wasn’t a tech and surveillance specialist just for grins and giggles.

Make that a tech and surveillance specialist with a wide-open arson case, a double murder, and still no viable leads in sight, and thank God he was in a bar, because right now he really needed a drink.

“Hey, Capelli!” Isabella looked up from her seat at the intelligence unit’s regular table in the front of the softly lit dining room, her expression betraying her surprise. “I didn’t think you were coming out tonight.”

“I wasn’t,” Capelli said, nodding a quick greeting at Hollister, Hale, and Maxwell as he shrugged out of his jacket and slung it over the back of an empty chair. “But Sinclair kicked me out of the office.”

Isabella gave up a knowing laugh. “Yeah, he has a tendency to do that. Come on, I’m going to the bar anyway. I’ll buy you a drink.”

She led the way through the Thursday-night crowd at the Crooked Angel, walking past a handful of occupied four-top tables and the neon-covered jukebox before turning to look at him over one shoulder. “Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Sure. Name it.” Although Capelli hadn’t been expecting the request, his answer was automatic.

Unfortunately, so was Isabella’s ability to read people like the Sunday Wall Street Journal. “Stop beating yourself up over this case.”

Capelli’s steps were perfectly steady even though his pulse didn’t share the luxury. “I’m not beating myself up over this case,” he said, not too fast or too slow or too loud.

But one dark brow lifted to call his finely crafted bluff. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just try to pull that over on me.”

The palm she’d placed on her hip told him in no uncertain terms that arguing with her would get him nowhere, so he lifted a hand in an unspoken concession and stepped in to an empty spot at the bar.

“I’m working hard,” he amended, sticking to the truths he could easily tell. “But come on, Moreno. We’ve got a killer who likes to set things on fire, two bodies, and no leads. I know the L-Man and Denton weren’t exactly Boy Scouts, but…”

“Someone murdered them, and it looks like that same person has set more than one dangerous fire. It’s a thorny case with barely any evidence and you want justice so no one else gets hurt. Trust me, I get it.” Isabella’s stare moved, seemingly out of pure instinct, to the back of the Crooked Angel, where the firefighters from Station Seventeen were all hanging around the pool table in the alcove by the bathrooms. Capelli’s breath quickened without his permission at the sight of Shae standing between Kellan and Quinn Copeland, and Christ, couldn’t his physiology do him a solid just this fucking once?

She threw her head back and laughed long and loud at something Quinn had said, and looked like the answer to that question was a great, big, resounding no.

“Anyway.” If Isabella had noticed a change in Capelli’s demeanor or the direction in which his stare had wandered, her expression didn’t give her away. “All I’m saying is you spent the better part of the day poring over those reports from the fire marshal, and the better part of the week investigating and examining the other case details. I know it’s important. Just don’t forget to breathe a little while you’re at it, okay?”

A twinge of guilt settled between Capelli’s ribs before spreading out to form a dull ache. But it wasn’t as if he could actually tell her he put his nose to the grindstone more out of mental necessity than decency, that if he didn’t work, he’d play. So instead, he took the only option he had to end the conversation.

He lied.

“Okay,” Capelli said. “I won’t forget to breathe.”

Swallowing back the bitterness the words had left behind, he turned to catch the attention of the tall, dark-haired woman serving up martinis to two women a few bar stools down, and a few seconds later, she came over to greet them with a darkly lipsticked smile.

“Hey, you two. How’s the bad-guy business?”

Isabella returned Kennedy Matthews’s smile with one of equal size and wattage. “Booming. Lucky for us, we’re booming back. How are things here?”

“The liquor is flowing, the bar stools are full.” Kennedy gestured to the busy dining room around them, lifting a delicately pierced eyebrow. “As far as I’m concerned, everything’s right as rain.”

If Capelli thought about it, there were really no surprises in the fact that tough-as-spikes Kennedy ran a successful business. He doubted she’d take so much as a syllable of shit from a two hundred fifty-pound linebacker.

Kennedy turned toward the beer cooler built in beneath the top of the glossy wood of the bar. “You two want your usual?”

“Please,” Capelli said. He slid his wallet from his jeans to cover the round even though Isabella was sure to give him a ration of shit for it, and sure enough, as soon as he beat her to the punch, she gave him a pretty sour look. It turned into an ear to ear grin as soon as Kellan approached, though, and Capelli made a mental note to thank the guy later for the inadvertent save.

“Hey, there you are. Everything okay?” Kellan asked as he arrived beside them with Shae and Gamble not too far behind, and Capelli took a long and much-needed draw from the beer in his hand.

“Yep.” Isabella pressed up to her toes to brush a thankfully swift kiss over Kellan’s cheek. “Everything’s perfect. Capelli and I were just tying up some loose ends.”

“All work and no play?” Gamble asked. But before Capelli could offset the question with a no-big-deal reply, Shae surprised him with a tart laugh.

“Right, Gamble. Because that’s not all sorts of pot and kettle and bullshit coming from you.”

It took balls the size of Canada to stand up to a guy Gamble’s size—the dude was six-five if he was an inch, and between the tattoos, the muscles, and his six-year stint in the Marines, most of which was spent in Spec Ops if rumor served, Capelli was fairly certain he was the baddest badass in the bar (which was saying something, because hello, Maxwell was still over by the front door with Hollister and Hale.) Of course, that didn’t seem to bother Shae, which was just further proof that her audacity was, in fact, limitless.

Even more surprising was the fact that Gamble merely shrugged one shoulder in response. “You might have a point, McCullough. But it takes one to know one.”

“Now that, I won’t argue.” She paused to turn her attention to Capelli. “So did you get any more leads on the case?” she asked, and seriously, he would never figure out how she kept managing to unnerve him with little more than a curious stare.

“No.”

“No?” The pause that followed was loaded with surprise. “But I went through everything arson had on both fires and emailed everything over to you before I left tonight, just like you asked.”

That last part earned him a deeper frown. Despite her numerous protests, Capelli had dropped Shae back off at the arson investigation office after they’d left the scene in North Point yesterday. Yes, she’d been eager to help, and yes again, her input as they’d gone through the house had been shrewd and spot-on. But they’d done the job Sinclair had asked. As soon as the fire marshal had seen all the facts, he’d opened an investigation into the meth lab fire, and had agreed—albeit grudgingly—to re-examine the scene of the restaurant fire in light of what he and Shae had found. She had her work in front of her, and Capelli had his. Well, he would, once he finally caught a break in this frigging case.

The pieces were there. They had to be. All he needed to do was focus, to figure out which facts were important and how they fit together before this killer made a repeat performance.

And without Shae McCullough shaking his concentration or control.

“Sorry,” he said, realizing only belatedly that his one-word answer had pretty much killed the conversation. “We’re still running through the facts on our end to come up with some possible scenarios. The victims having sufentanil in their systems isn’t helping any of this make sense, though.”

Kellan’s chin snapped to attention. “Wait…did you say sufentanil? As in, the narcotic?”

“Uh, yeah.” Confusion warred with the adrenaline starting to tap dance through Capelli’s veins, and he lowered his beer to the bar. “How do you know what sufentanil is?”

“Because I’ve been up close and personal with it. That’s what DuPree’s thugs drugged me with last fall on the night you guys took him down.”

Although his voice remained quiet and steady, Kellan ran a hand over the back of his neck as he spoke, and Isabella’s shoulders tightened around her spine.

“I never knew that,” she said.

Kellan flashed her a glance that contained some sort of emotional shorthand Capelli couldn’t decipher before answering with a nothing-doing nod that seemed to put Isabella more at ease. “I had an extensive tox screen run after everything went down so any drugs in my system wouldn’t send up a red flag on my controlled substance screenings for the RFD. It came back positive for sufentanil, but I never thought to mention the drug specifically. Still, it’s not exactly garden variety, so…”

“That’s kind of a weird coincidence, isn’t it?” Shae asked, the excitement and curiosity in her stare doubling up and tagging Capelli right in the solar plexus.

“Not necessarily,” he said, his brain spinning fast enough to put his mouth at a serious disadvantage. “I mean, yes, Kellan’s right in that sufentanil isn’t very common. But it’s hardly a calling card, either. And anyway”—disappointment squeezed his gut as he lined up his thoughts, recalculated according to the facts of the DuPree case, lined them up again—“DuPree is dead, which makes the likelihood of him being tied to this crime statistically zero.”

Isabella planted her boots into the floorboards and straightened her spine to its fullest height. “Which is a good thing for several reasons, not the least of which is that we’re all off the clock. We’ll be back on the case first thing in the morning,” she said, the glint in her eyes broadcasting her determination. “But for tonight, I’d love nothing more than to ditch any and all thoughts of Julian DuPree.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Gamble said, lifting the dark brown bottle in his hand and clinking it against Isabella’s before taking a long draw that dropped the topic once and for all. Conversation drifted to the hockey game on the TV over the bar and Capelli paid attention well enough to follow along. But something niggled at the back of his brain, dancing just out of reach every time he got close enough to latch on to it, and the more he tried to focus, the bigger his frustration grew.

His brain wouldn’t allow him the luxury of compartmentalizing the way the rest of his unit-mates did, much less let him actually shelf his thoughts in order to relax. He was always calculating. Processing. Seeing numbers and schemes and ways around the rules, and if he didn’t channel that into something good like working this case, he’d land on his default.

Fuck. He needed to get out of here and work on this case. The sooner, the better.

Capelli eased out of the conversation strategically, adding less, taking a step back from the larger group that had formed at the bar, then another. The hockey gods did him a solid by dishing up a high-action game—the New Orleans Cajun Rage was having a hell of a Cinderella season, and Capelli sank his brain power into analyzing the stats real-time in order to predict the winning margin. Isabella and Kellan talked happily with his sister Kylie and her boyfriend Devon, who worked for a local private security company in the city. Gamble stood over by the jukebox with a curvy redhead, the two of them exchanging the sort of body language that suggested neither one of them was in danger of being sainted anytime soon.

Capelli hung back another degree. Shae had wandered to the other end of the bar a few minutes ago, and another surreptitious glance around the hustle and chatter of the Crooked Angel’s dining room told him she was either in the ladies’ room or she’d left for the night. Just as well, despite the treasonous tug in his rib cage saying otherwise. They might’ve worked surprisingly well together yesterday, but tonight she’d gone right back to pushing both her luck and his buttons.

He needed to focus, and it sure as fuck wasn’t going to happen with Shae McCullough in his dance space.

Nodding a wordless see ya later at Isabella and Kellan and the rest of the firefighters from Seventeen, then going through the motions again for Hollister, Hale, and Maxwell at the front of the bar, Capelli buried his hands low in the pockets of his jacket, swinging a covert glance over his shoulder as he started walking toward his apartment.

And ran directly into Shae on the sidewalk.