An hour later, I was outside shaking Deputy Glick’s hand while Rebecca locked up the building behind us. “Hope we managed to ask a few new questions,” I told him as we parted.

“I’ll mention your findings to the sheriff,” Glick replied as he hooked his thumbs into the top of his utility belt. “But I ain’t gonna make any promises. Far as we’re concerned, we got our man.”

“Well, investigation’s not over yet.”

He nodded. “You find anything you think might sway us, you let me know, alright? Zeke’s a good man, and I’d hate to see him go down for something like burning his own building out. Not a lot of people come back from something like that, especially in a small town.”

Rebecca joined me as Glick lumbered off to his squad car and climbed back in.

“Hungry?” I asked.

She took her phone out of her back pocket and checked the time. “Geez, it’s that late?”

We’d spent the last hour or so with Rebecca following me around like the perfect assistant, answering any questions I might have, pointing me to places where the photos or schematic were unclear. She and I fell into an easy routine right off the bat, which was remarkable since we’d just met only a couple hours before. But, as I was quickly realizing, she was a remarkable woman.

Fire inspection work, though, was surprisingly taxing on both the brain and the stomach no matter how wonderful your assistant was. “Yeah,” I agreed, eager to both eat and to sit down with this beautiful woman I was so drawn to. “Want to grab a quick bite and go over everything else at Dixie’s?”

She nodded and smiled a little. “Yeah, sure.”

We went over to my pickup and tossed all my gear into the cab, keeping only the file on the fire. I hadn’t come out armed today, since this wasn’t a security detail. With fire inspection work, I preferred to not carry a sidearm. I needed people to look at me as something other than a cop or a bodyguard. I’d realized a lot of business owners saw a gun on your hip as somehow synonymous with a badge in your pocket, and being unarmed helped to put them at ease while I was asking questions about the events.

“Let me just make a quick call while we walk,” I said, pulling my phone out and dialing Lacy Richter’s cell.

Our IT girl picked up on the second ring. “What up fuzz-breath?”

“Ha. Funny. Listen, I’m on a new case for a Rebecca Stokes, investigating the fire at Zeke Rogers’ hardware store, and I need you to do me a favor.”

“Wait, Rebecca Stokes? Like Ms. Stokes? My old English teacher?”

I glanced sideways at Rebecca. “You taught English to my computer girl?”

Rebecca laughed. “Taught most of the kids in Enchanted Rock. Hell, Lacy’s cousin Mary is in my class right now, too.”

“Lacy’s cousin? Oh, right!” I said. “Mary!”

That was part of the lie, too. We’d doctored up some information to make it look like Genevieve was Mary’s long lost aunt so we could keep her out of foster care after her pack died in a fire. We’d brought her up here and she’d been living with Peter ever since. They weren’t cousins, not by blood at least, even if they had become friends over the ensuing months.

“Yeah,” I replied to Lacy. “Your old English teacher. I need you to go over to Zeke Rogers’ place and grab his laptop or computer, whichever he has, and take an image of the hard drive, then do a complete analysis of it while following all the forensics protocols. Anything we do has to stand up in court.”

“Got it, of course my work will stand up. What are we looking for, anyway?”

“Anything that looks like it may be linked to Zeke researching fires or arson. Whoever tried to burn his place down did a pretty decent job of it and didn’t make any rookie mistakes. If he’s our man, he probably had to look up a few things before he decided how he was going to do it.”

“Sure his PC will be there?”

“You think Peak and Glick tried to go through his browser history?”

“Point, dog-breath. What about his phone?”

I turned to Rebecca. “What about his phone? Can we take a look at it?”

She shook her head. “Flip phone. Called all smart phones new-fangled and wanted to know why he needed to tweet every crap he took. I cleaned up his word-choice, of course.”

“No phone,” I said to Lacy, grinning at Rebecca’s comment.

“Got it. Send me an address and meet me there?”

I twisted the receiver away from my mouth. “Can you meet Lacy at your uncle’s place after we eat and let her in?”

She pulled out her phone and checked the time again. “Uh, I’ve got one errand to run, then I can be there. How does four sound?”

“Rebecca will meet you there at four. I’ll text you the address in a minute.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“Not off the top of my head. If I do think of anything, I’ll let you know.”

“Still blows my mind that little Lacy Richter is working for you guys,” she said as I tucked my phone back away.

I smiled. Lacy and her grandmother were some of the few humans who actually knew what we were. There were certainly more than her, but it wasn’t exactly common knowledge around town. “She’s a good kid,” I said.

“God, she’s probably—what? Twenty years old by now?”

“Twenty-one in just a few months.”

“Oh, my God, I feel so old! Lacy was a student in one of my first classes. I can’t believe I’ve been back in town that long.”

I grinned down at her. “If it makes you feel any better, I think the same thing. About me, I mean.”

She laughed as she returned my look, bit her lower lip a little, and looked away. “Well, it’s not like I’m getting old. Not really. But it does seem like time is just flying by.”

“Time does that,” I said. “The more you focus on just living life from one day to the next, the more it seems to slip by. Had a friend in the service who used to say it was like a roll of toilet paper.”

Rebecca laughed. “Toilet paper?”

“Yeah,” I said with a chuckle. “You know, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes?”

She laughed again. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

And then there we were, out in front of Dixie’s. Dixie’s was our go-to place for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Not that it was Michelin-rated food, or anything, but the burgers were the best in town, and everything on the menu was cheap. Down the street from us was the Curious Turtle, as well as the little post office place where you could rent a PO box. I think Lacy’s boyfriend Terry still worked down there.

We stepped inside the diner and found a table. This time of day, the lunch rush was long over, and the dinner rush hadn’t started yet.

One of the waitresses nodded at us, a little smirk on her lips, as we took a seat. “Be right with y’all.”

I set the warehouse fire’s file aside, picked up the menu, and began to scan it as I tried to decide what I wanted. It wasn’t lost on me, though, as I went from burger to steak to pork chops to meatloaf, that I was currently having lunch with one of the most beautiful women I’d ever met. The kicker, though? She was the girl-next-door type, a teacher.

In my experience, women like that didn’t like a guy like me. They wanted them home at night, not out in harm’s way, facing fires or gunmen or God only knew what. Could anyone blame them, though? The world was dangerous enough without willingly putting yourself in harm’s way every day of your life.

The waitress brought us water, and we both ordered coffee, no sugar, no cream.

“You know,” I said as the waitress turned to grab our orders, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who drank her coffee black.”

“Guess you have now,” she said, smiling as she glanced up at me over the menu. “It was how my father taught me to drink it, that’s all, and Uncle Zeke has always drank his the same way. Why ruin tradition? What about you?”

“I didn’t even drink coffee before I went into the service. My parents were more tea drinkers. My dad actually drank green tea every morning, if you can believe it. Real health nut, said it was good for the prostate or something.”

She laughed.

“But it just tastes, I don’t know, funny. Couldn’t ever do it. So, when I became a PJ, I started drinking it to get moving in the morning.”

She cocked her head in confusion. “PJ?”

“Sorry. PJs are Pararescuers in the Air Force. We’d jump into hostile zones and recover pilots who went down, destroy the remains of the aircraft or helo.”

“You jumped out of planes for a living?” she asked, her eyes as big as coffee cups.

I laughed. “Believe me, it’s not as scary as it sounds. They give you a parachute and everything.”

Our waitress came back with our coffee and took our orders, then bustled back behind the counter. The whole time, though, she was giving me a little knowing smirk.

I watched over the top of my coffee cup as Rebecca dashed a tiny bit of table salt into the ebony liquid, the slightly acidic taste of the bitter drink washing over my tongue.

“Salt?”

“Cuts the bitterness. Uncle Zeke drinks Folgers, and it tastes like dirt with how much grounds he pours in.”

I’d never heard of such a thing. I took the salt and shook it once into my cup. “Just a dash?”

She nodded, smiling. “Just a dash.”

I took a sip of my doctored coffee, smiling a little. The bitterness was almost completely gone. I mean, it wasn’t suddenly a world-class brew or anything, but it was miles away from the burnt-tasting cup of mud it had previously been. “Thanks for the tip,” I said, raising the cup in a little cheers.

She returned the gesture. “Welcome.”

“Now,” I said, “I guess we should get down to business.”

“Right, what else do we need to look at?”

“All the incidentals and who we need to speak to. See if there’s anything they might have missed.”

Then we began.

Alarms had gone off in the storage area, but no one had heard it. A passerby smelled the smoke, saw it coming out of the alley, and realized what was going on. They called 911, got the volunteers back down from the mountains, which took a good thirty minutes according to Deputy Glick. Then two of the guys, Chief Beckett and Derrick Newhouse, showed up at the fire. No suspicious vehicles or civilians were spotted, and Chief Beckett was the one to first spot signs of arson. The open window, the burnt remains of the time-delayed device. Nothing overly fishy stood out to me.

Rebecca shook her head as I finished up.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Sorry, this whole thing just blows my mind. Beckett and Newhouse were the ones on the scene, Uncle Zeke’s in jail. It’s just so unexpected, that’s all.”

“What’s so wild about the fire department showing up to the fire? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”

“Well, Beckett and Uncle Zeke were old poker buddies a while back, till Chief Beckett and him had a falling out and Beckett stopped showing up altogether.”

“Wait, they had a falling out?” That was news to me. “Over what? Money?”

She just shrugged. “It happened when I was still in high school, living with Uncle Zeke. They used to have a Saturday night poker game, and Beckett just stopped showing up sometime later. Never seemed like any kind of bad blood, or anything, just Beckett never really came around anymore after that.”

I nodded, wrote down Beckett’s name, and underlined it.

She leaned forward and followed the tip of my pen with her eyes. “Come on, you don’t think Beckett could’ve done anything, do you? A fire chief setting fires?”

“No,” I agreed, “but this is as much about asking questions the prosecution can’t answer as it is about clarifying the evidence we already have. We need people with motives to try and set your uncle up. Now, what about Newhouse?”

“Well, Newhouse and I are friends. We’d known each other, kind of, back when we both went to ERHS. After he got back into town, we started hanging out every now and then.”

My mouth went dry and my pulse began to quicken at the word “friends.” Derrick Newhouse wasn’t a bad looking guy, but he was a firefighter, which meant he was in good shape and spent his life helping other people. Worst of all, he wasn’t a bad person, either. I’d gotten to know him over the last several months since he’d come back into town and joined the firehouse. But, for whatever reason, even the thought of Rebecca and him together was more than my wolf-brain could handle.

“But we’re just friends,” she said. “It’s not like I’m sleeping with the guy or something.”

I bit the inside of my mouth. What the hell was happening to me? I’d never had this kind of thing happen when any other woman mentioned a guy’s name before. I turned my eyes back to the file, but grudgingly didn’t write Derrick’s name. “So, not a suspect or anything.”

“What? God, no! Derrick wouldn’t have anything to blame Uncle Zeke over.”

I let out what I hoped was an imperceptible breath of relief. Derrick having dated her in the past would’ve invoked the silent code of firemen. Don’t date another fireman’s ex, don’t date their widows. And definitely don’t try and steal their girl.

“What else, then? What do we have?”

“The Florentino family.”

“Right. We had a little meeting at the office before we left, and Richard is looking into the Florentino family connection. His fiancée hasn’t said anything to him about it, but maybe Zeke’s mystery mobster hasn’t gone by the gallery yet. Business owners might not be talking to each other out of fear of what happened to Zeke happening to them, which is why it’s not common knowledge on the street. A fire like that, even if it’s not set by the Florentinos, might have sent a message to the other people in town.”

Our waitress returned to our table, two plates of food in hand, just as I finished speaking. I closed up the file and put it aside again, making space in front of me for my food.

“How in the hell can you eat that much food?” Rebecca asked as she gazed in awe at my plate.

I just grinned and cut into my steak. “I’m still a growing boy. Besides, this is nothing. You should see my co-worker Frank’s diet. He eats like a bear.”

“Now what?” she asked as she cut her burger in half.

“Now,” I said, “I go to the firehouse to talk to Chief Beckett and get the logs from that night. And you go to your Uncle Zeke’s to let Lacy in.”

“This job of yours is so glamorous,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

“Believe me,” I said, “the last thing you want is for this case to get glamorous. Glamour is when things start to get tricky.”