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The next morning, both Alaina and I had to go to work. We woke up like a regular couple, and it felt so good to have something tangible like that in my life. As long as I had been with Stacia, we’d never begun the process of living together domestically. She was always busy with something, and while she occasionally spent a night here or there, she never made it a regular thing.
Alaina was with me more often than not. We didn’t even feel the need to have sex in the morning, although that would have been a great start to the day. Instead, we just held each other, slowly allowing consciousness to return.
I kissed her good morning and got up to shower. Then it was her turn in the bathroom, and I went to make breakfast. We had eggs and toast with coffee. We took the dogs for a walk and then parted in the parking lot.
Alaina was going to take both Duke and Duchess in with her. Despite the fact that the criminal was still in the wind, she was optimistic. I knew it was hard for her to be separated from her best friend for so long. Duke’s return to work was a good thing, and I wished them both well.
I pulled into the fire station at exactly nine, parking in the back lot along with the other firefighters. I found my buddies Elliot and Patrick in the kitchen, sharing a cup of coffee. It was well past time for them to be doing something more productive, so I teased them about it.
“Doesn’t look like you guys are getting a lot of work done,” I said.
“Speak for yourself,” Elliot grumbled. “I’ve been here all night.”
We worked shifts of 24 to 48 hours, and while I was usually on the same shift as my friends, we rotated off occasionally. After the all-hands-on-deck situation in Littleton two nights ago, I took a well-deserved break. But Elliot stayed on to work out the rest of his shift.
“What about you?” I asked Patrick.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’m on janitorial duty.”
“Are the engines prepped?” I prompted them, getting the official business out of the way.
“Prepped and ready to go, boss,” Elliot assured me.
“I’m not your boss,” I said.
“Assistant fire chief,” Patrick reminded us.
“Emphasis on the word assistant,” I replied.
“Get a cup and have a seat,” Patrick said, pointing toward the cabinet. “Stop giving us hell for sitting on our lazy asses.”
I laughed. It hardly seemed like a job sometimes when the three of us got together. That was until the alarm rang and we had to go racing off to put our lives in danger. I followed his instructions, choosing one of the odd assortment of mugs we had available and pouring myself a cup.
“How was last night?” I asked, just to make conversation.
“Same old,” Elliot replied. “But nothing spectacular. I think that kind of stuff waits until you’re on duty.”
“Don’t curse me,” I warned him.
“It’s not a curse,” he said. “I’m just reporting facts.”
“So?” Patrick waited until I had taken a seat before digging into me with his curious eyes.
“So?” I repeated, not sure what he was after.
“We’re dying here,” Pat said, thumping one palm onto the table. “I heard you found Stacia.”
“Oh, that,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” Patrick responded. “That.”
I looked at Elliot and saw the same level of interest in his gaze, and I knew I wasn’t going to get out of that kitchen without some sort of confession. These guys had been with me from day one and they knew how much Stacia meant to me. Hell, Patrick was the one who’d encouraged me to propose to her. He’d gone with me to pick out the ring.
“Yeah,” I admitted with a sigh, “I found her. She’s been working in Littleton for the past few years.”
“Right down the street?” Patrick gasped.
“Pretty much,” I agreed. “She changed her name and she says she’s in witness protection.”
“What for?”
“She says that someone in her family is after her,” I explained.
“Who?” Elliot wanted to know.
I shook my head. “She didn’t say. I didn’t really get to talk to her very much.”
“After all this time, you didn’t get to talk to her?” Patrick prodded, shocked that I hadn’t made more of an effort to reconnect.
“She didn’t want to see me,” I said reluctantly. It was the only truth that mattered. Whether she was afraid for her life or not, the bottom line was that she could have reached out, but she didn’t. I wasn’t that important to her.
“Did she say that?” Elliot asked.
“Not in so many words,” I admitted. “But she wasn’t all that eager to talk. And then when the nurse showed up with her medicine, she kind of dismissed me.”
“Man,” Patrick said, in awe of the situation. “What are you going to do?”
“What can I do?” I asked with a shrug. “I’m going to help her if I can, but things between us will never go back to what they once were.”
“I’d steer clear,” Elliot advised.
“Why?” Pat asked.
“Assuming that the person she’s running from had something to do with her getting trapped in the blaze, it’s a fair bet they know she’s alive,” Elliot surmised.
I hadn’t thought about it like that, but he was probably right. In that case, it made it more important to figure out what was going on, not less. No matter what had happened between us, Stacia meant a lot to me, and I didn’t want to see her hurt.
“You think the guy she’s running from and the one who set the fire are related?” I asked.
“Or the guy she’s running from just took advantage of the situation,” Elliot mused.
“That would be an awful coincidence,” I said.
“An unlikely coincidence,” Elliot agreed.
“Maybe the credenza just fell on her while she was trying to help someone,” I suggested.
“You were there,” Elliot reminded me. “We weren’t.”
“I didn’t see anybody else in the room,” I remembered.
“So are you going to see her again?” Patrick asked.
“No way,” Elliot argued. “You have to treat her like a civilian. You rescued her from the fire, but that’s where it has to end. Do not go barking up that tree again.”
“Why not?” Patrick countered as if I wasn’t in the room. “They were good together.”
“He’s got a good thing going with Alaina,” Elliot said. “If there’s one thing that will mess that up quicker than anything else, it’s spending time with an old girlfriend.”
“True,” I said, sipping my coffee.
“All I’m saying is that you have a second chance,” Patrick replied. “You shouldn’t let it go to waste.”
“Forget about her,” Elliot advised. “That’s my two cents.”
“I can’t,” I admitted. “I think you’re both right, honestly. I care about Alaina, and I don’t want to see her get hurt. But I can’t just walk away from Stacia. There are too many unanswered questions.”
“You know what curiosity did to the cat,” Elliot said cryptically.
“Cooper!” the chief’s voice cut through our little gossip session, making all three of us jump. “In my office.”
I stood up, pushing my chair in and walking the coffee mug to the sink. “On my way.”
“Forget about her.” Elliot got one last word in.
“Go see her,” Patrick countered.
I gave them both the finger and walked out, leaving them to scrounge for conversational topics all on their own. More than likely, they would continue to hash out what I should do without my input. Whatever they decided, I was going to make up my own mind. But they had given me a lot to think about, and I was grateful for their counsel.
“Did you get some rest?” the chief asked as soon as I stepped into his office.
“Yes, thank you,” I replied.
“Good, because we have a lot of work to do,” he said.
I sat down opposite him and waited. He picked up a pen but didn’t write with it, using it instead to fidget as we talked. The chief and I went way back, to a time when I was just a rookie and he was my mentor. He had personally recommended me for the position as assistant chief, and I took that as the highest praise possible.
While the department was in some financial troubles, I was also functioning as an arson investigator. That’s why I had been working with Alaina. We were two halves of the law enforcement coin brought to bear on the case.
But unfortunately, we hadn’t been able to make any major arrests. There was one guy who started a few fires who was behind bars, but the ringleader was still free. The chief wanted to know if the police had made any progress in locating him.
“Not that I’m aware of,” I said reluctantly.
“So we need to be prepared for more fires?” the chief asked.
“I don’t think he’s going to be setting any fires,” I replied. “He’s on the run. We have his name. Every police officer in the county is looking for him. I seriously doubt he’s still in Colorado.”
“You never can tell with these folks,” Keith Jones said, tapping the pen on the edge of his desk. “Rossi’s got plenty of holdings here in the city.”
“He’s burned down most of them,” I observed.
At one point, Silvio Rossi had been a respected businessman. He owned real estate across the city in a diverse portfolio of residential, business, and warehouse locations. But that was all in the past. Now he was a wanted fugitive, a known fire starter and mafioso who led a criminal underground. I didn’t know how deep his activities ran, but there was at least one murder and more than a dozen arsons.
Alaina and I had been working the case for more than a month, and while Rossi was always a person of interest, we had only recently discovered that he was setting the fires himself. The insurance companies had stopped paying, alerted to the scam by the authorities. There was nothing left of Rossi’s vast fortune now beyond whatever cash he had managed to squirl away.
“He probably has friends who are hiding him,” I suggested.
Chief Jones shook his head. “No, he left the country. Why would he stick around?”
“I can think of one reason,” I said, although it wasn’t promising.
The one person that I was sure Rossi had murdered was Alaina’s father, ten years ago. That meant that there was bad blood between them and provided a possible motive for the criminal to remain in the vicinity. If he thought that Alaina was closing in on him, he might try to finish what he started. The details were sketchy, and it definitely wasn’t the plan of a sane man, but I didn’t want to discount the threat.
Rossi hid it well. He had dinner with the mayor and was on the boards of at least three influential companies. All along, he’d been a pyromaniac hiding in plain sight. We lost our chance to grab him, but that didn’t mean he was gone.
“Which is?” Jones prompted me.
“He killed Alaina’s father,” I shared. “He could come for her next.”
The chief sat with that for a moment, knowing the depths of my feelings for my new girlfriend. “I don’t think that will happen.”
“I hope it won’t,” I agreed. “But I can’t discount the possibility.”
Chief Jones sighed. “Okay, if he hasn’t left the area, then where is he?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Just brainstorming,” the chief pressed, trying to get me to open up.
“I can go back to his list of holdings,” I said. “As far as I know, he’s burned down ninety percent of the property he owns in the city.”
“What about outside the city?” the chief asked.
“There may be some things he’s hidden under someone else’s name or under a holding company,” I surmised.
“Run with it,” the chief instructed. “Do everything you can to help the police locate him. That’s your priority.”
“Will do,” I responded, standing up.
“Let the rest of the guys handle the engines and the chores for now,” the chief said.
“Does that mean I’m off locker room duty?” I teased.
“For now,” he repeated. “I just want to catch this sucker before it’s too late.”
I nodded my agreement, assuming that the chief was talking about avoiding another disastrous fire like the one in Littleton. But there was something else about his statement that struck a different note, something a little bit more personal.
“I want him just as much as the next man,” I declared, “maybe even more.”
“You’re young,” the chief said, catching me off guard with the sudden change in subject.
“So are you,” I argued. “He’s not going to get any of us, I can promise you that.”
The chief sighed. “I appreciate the compliment, but I’m not sure it’s deserved.”
“What are you talking about?” I puzzled.
“Nothing,” he responded, waving me out. “Just go get Rossi.”
I left the chief’s office more confused than ever. I hoped he wasn’t getting down on himself for failing to bring Rossi in. We all shared that responsibility equally, and it was just as much on my shoulders—and Alaina’s shoulders, for that matter. Blame wasn’t going to help the situation.
I walked up the stairs to my office to study the computer records for the thousandth time. There had to be something in there that would lead us to our man. If persistence was the name of the game, then I was all in. I just knew I had to catch the criminal before it was too late, even though the entire police force was on the job. They weren’t the ones who had everything to lose. It wasn’t their girlfriend being targeted.
