I sat there, phone in one hand, DA Wachowski’s business card in the other, weighing my options, gritting my teeth against the inevitable.

The longer I waited, I knew, the worse this was going to look.

But, at the same time, what if Rebecca was right? What if she did know her Uncle Zeke better than I could ever hope to? Maybe I was being too cocky with this whole thing, thinking that the evidence told the whole story. That somehow I’d be the one who was going to get everything right, and do a better job than anyone else that had already looked at the case.

My cases before had been clear. At least, they’d seemed that way when I’d had them. You find the evidence, they point you a certain direction. You weighed whether or not someone could have the knowledge and you investigated who the other likely suspects could be. Then, when everything what put together, you made your conclusion and you moved to the next one.

This case with Zeke, though, didn’t seem to have a right answer. Because even if Zeke had committed arson on his own store, and he was looking pretty good for it right then, I still ended up being wrong in the end. I would still end up driving a wedge between me and Rebecca that we may never recover from.

I let my phone and the business card drop to the conference table and cradled my head in both hands. I sucked in a deep breath, running a hand down my face.

“Think, Matthew,” I mumbled. “Think. Who else could it be?”

Say someone was aiming to set Zeke up, just like my first assumption had been, and like the early evidence had born out. It wasn’t completely unreasonable to believe they’d find a way to plant some information on his computer, was it?

But the only question was, who would go to those lengths? Who would have access to his PC and had enough of a vendetta against Zeke Rogers to go to this kind of trouble just to frame him for an arson fire he didn’t commit?

The only problem was, no one had come up in the investigation that fit the bill, and neither Zeke nor Rebecca knew of anyone else who could manage all this.

My heart stopped for a moment. Except for Rebecca, of course.

She’d had access to his home, his computer. She’d gone to college, clearly possessed the intelligence to concoct a scheme like this to try and ruin her Uncle Zeke.

I began to breathe again as I shook my head. That was ridiculous. She, of course, had no motive or reason to do this to her uncle. Clearly, she loved him like the father she’d never really had.

I picked up the business card and looked at it again.

No, at the end of the day it still came back to Zeke being the perp. The whole Denver mafia thing had just been a wild stab on his part, meant to throw the cops off his scent. They hadn’t been stupid enough to go chasing after it, though, like I had. And now, by chasing after that lead, I’d only managed to drag Rebecca even deeper into this mess.

Now it was my job to yank her out of it. Even if she didn’t want to have anything to do with me afterward, I had to make sure those charges stuck on Zeke. That was the only way she’d be free and clear of the guys like Reggie the Gap and whoever came along to replace Trigger Thomas. And, without me probably not being around, that was even truer.

I took a deep breath and picked up my phone again before dialing DA Wachowski. This was it, I thought as I held my breath until my lungs began to burn. But, as I stared down at the ten digits plugged into my phone and ready to go, my finger hovering over the green phone icon, the screen abruptly lit up and my cell began to buzz.

Chief Beckett’s cell phone.

Shit, I realized, I was scheduled to be on call today. When I’d been in the firehouse earlier in the week, I’d been so wrapped up in the investigation that I’d forgotten to get Derrick Newhouse to cover my shift. I closed my eyes, hit answer, and pressed the phone to my ear.

“Matthew Jones. What’s up, Chief?”

“Jones,” Gilbert Beckett yelled, nearly blowing out my eardrums with that bellowing voice of his. I carried earplugs in my turnout coat specifically so I didn’t end up having to scream just to hear myself speak when I was the chief’s age.

“I’m here, Chief,” I said, my adrenaline already pumping. “Talk to me.”

“Jones! Need your ass down here at the station house yesterday! Got a fire south, and we need to catch it before it spreads!”

And, like that, all my other concerns were out of my head.