“Sorry.” With that, she pushed past him.
“I bet the box that said ‘works and plays well with others’ always had ‘needs improvement’ checked on it,” he said, raising his voice as she walked away.
She looked at him over her shoulder. “But the box labeled ‘pummels annoying cop senseless’ was also checked every time.”
Ethan shook his head. Working together was just going to have to wait a couple of days. He had a definite hunch that she’d be coming around by then.
“Your loss,” he called after her and turned just as he saw Dax Cavanaugh coming toward him.
Right behind him were Richard Ortiz and Alan Youngman, two other veteran detectives on the force who now found themselves part of the arson task force. Remarkably, none of the men seemed to resent his presence despite the fact that they were all veterans with several years to their credit, while this was his very first assignment as a detective.
There were times he could have sworn that his shield was still warm in his wallet.
“What have you got?” Ortiz asked him, looking more than a little disgruntled. “And it better be worth it because I was just about to get lucky with this hot little number.”
“He doesn’t want to hear about your rubber doll collection,” Youngman deadpanned to his partner.
Ortiz looked insulted. “Hey, just because you’re in a rut doesn’t mean that I am,” the younger man protested.
“Guys,” Dax admonished in a low voice. “Playtime is over.”
Youngman frowned as he shook his head. “You’re no fun since they put you in charge.”
“We’ll have fun after we catch this arsonist and confiscate his matches,” Dax replied.
Overhearing, Kansas couldn’t help crossing back to the men and correcting this new detective. “He’s not an arsonist.”
Dax turned to her. His eyes, Ethan noticed, swept over the woman as if he were taking inventory. What was conspicuously missing was any indication of attraction. Brenda must be one hell of a woman, Ethan couldn’t help thinking about the man’s wife.
“And you would know this how?” Dax asked the self-proclaimed fire investigator.
“An angel whispered in her ear,” Ethan quipped. “Dax, this is Kansas Beckett. She says she’s the fire department’s investigator. Kansas, this is Dax Cavanaugh, Alan Youngman and Richard Ortiz.” Three heads bobbed in order of the introductions.
It was more information than she wanted, but she nodded at each man, then looked at the man conducting the introductions. “I didn’t say I was the fire investigator. I am the fire investigator. And how did you know my last name?” she wanted to know. “I didn’t give it to you.”
“But remarkably, I can read,” Ethan answered with an enigmatic smile. “And it was in on the ID you showed me”
“How do you know it’s not an arsonist?” Dax persisted, more emphatically this time.
She patiently recited the standard differentiation. “Arsonists do it for profit,” she told him, moving out of the way of several firefighters as they raced by, heading straight for the building’s perimeter. “Their own or someone else’s. The buildings that were torched, as far as we can ascertain, have no common thread drawing them together. For instance, there’s no one who stands to profit from getting rid of a battered-women’s shelter.”
Ethan turned the thought over in his head. “Maybe there’s a developer in the wings, looking to buy up land cheap in order to build a residential community or a king-sized mall or some vast hotel, something along those lines.”
But she shook her head. “Too spread apart, too farfetched,” she pointed out. “It would have to be the biggest such undertaking in the country,” she emphasized. “And I don’t really think that’s what’s going on here.”
Dax was open to any kind of a guess at this point. “So who or what do you think is behind these fires?” he asked her.
She was silent for a moment. Almost against her will, she glanced in Ethan’s direction before answering. “My guess is that it’s either a pyromaniac who’s doing it for the sheer thrill of it, or we’re up against someone with a vendetta who’s trying to hide his crime in plain sight with a lot of camouflage activity.”
“In which case, we have to find which is the intentional fire and which were set for show,” Ethan theorized.
Kansas looked at him. “I’m impressed. Chalk one up for the pretty boy.”
He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or actually giving him his due. With Kansas, he had a hunch that it was a little bit of both.
In all, twelve children and nineteen adults were saved. Because the firefighters had responded so quickly to Kansas’s call—and despite the fact that several women and children wound up being taken to the hospital for treatment—not a single life was lost.
Tired, seriously bordering on being punchy, Ethan nonetheless remained at the scene with the other detectives, interviewing anyone who’d been in the building just before the fire broke out. It was a long shot, but he kept hoping that someone might have witnessed even the slightest thing that seemed out of the ordinary at the time.
Because she wanted to spare the victims any more unnecessary trauma, and since the nature of the questions that the police were asking were along the lines of what she wanted to ask, Kansas decided it was best to temporarily join forces with the Neanderthal who had slung her over his shoulder.
The women and children who’d been in the fire had her complete sympathy. She knew the horror they’d gone through. Knew, firsthand, how vulnerable and helpless they’d all felt. And how they’d all thought, at one point or another, that they were going to die.
Because she’d been trapped in just such a fire herself once.
When she was twelve years old, she’d been caught in a burning building. It occurred in the group home where she’d always managed to return. She came to regard it as a holding zone, a place to stay in between being placed in various foster homes. But in that case, there’d been no mystery as to how the fire had gotten started. Eric Johnson had disobeyed the woman who was in charge and not only played with matches but deliberately had set the draperies in the common room on fire.
Seeing what he’d done, Kansas had run toward the draperies and tried to put the fire out using a blanket that someone had left behind. All that had done was spread the flames. Eric had been sent to juvenile hall right after that.
Kansas couldn’t help wondering what had happened to Eric after all these years. Was he out there somewhere, perpetuating his love affair with fire?
She made a mental note to see if she could find out where he was these days.
Kansas glanced at O’Brien. He looked tired, she noted, but he continued pushing on. For the most part, he was asking all the right questions. And for a good-looking man, he seemed to display a vein of sensitivity, as well. In her experience, most good-looking men didn’t. They were usually one-dimensional and shallow, too enamored with the image in their mirror to even think about anyone else.
More than an hour of questioning yielded the consensus that the fire had “just come out nowhere.” Most of the women questioned seemed to think it had started in the recreation room, although no one had actually seen it being started or even knew how it had started. When questioned further, they all more or less said the same thing. That they were just suddenly aware