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“Are you sure you still want to give this a shot?” Sam asked, pausing inside the lobby, and funny, he looked as if he really would turn around and head home if she popped off with a negative.
“Will you still drop it if they say no? Or if they say yes and we don’t find anything that can’t be rationally explained?”
He stepped toward her, and her heart chose that exact moment to flip beneath her cream-colored sweater. “I know you might not believe this, and you’d have good reason. But I really am a man of my word. If they say no, I promise to drop it, Lucy.”
“Okay.” The word coasted out of her on little more than a breath, and she needed to get it together, like five minutes ago.
She cleared her throat. “Right. Then I’m still sure I’d like to prove you wrong.”
“Challenge accepted.”
Sam hung back for a step, letting her lead the way to the suite where the office of arson investigation office resided. With her resolve nailed back into place, Lucy made the trip in efficient strides. The space consisted of a small lobby separated from the rest of the suite by a long counter, behind which a handful of cubicles stood and two doors—both closed—led to what Lucy assumed were the private offices of the lead investigators. Even though the department had begun transitioning all reporting to electronic formats several years ago, getting the city’s extensive records scanned into the database, particularly for arson investigation, had been a slow process, as evidenced by the seven huge filing cabinets lining the perimeter of the cubicle space. The office still carried the faint musty odor of paper and dust, like a library, and Lucy took a deep inhale of it as she approached the counter with Sam beside her.
“Good morning. May I help you?” asked the bespectacled middle-aged white man behind a nearby desk, and Sam deferred to Lucy with a quick lift of his brows.
Well, here went nothing. “Hi, I’m Lucy de Costa, and this is Sam Faurier. We’re firefighters at Station Seventeen, and we were wondering if—”
“Oh, my God! Sam Faurier, is that you?”
Surprise crashed Lucy’s words to a halt, and they both turned toward the redheaded woman balancing a stack of file folders on the hip of her navy blue uniform pants.
“Nat? Holy hell, it’s been a minute. Last time I saw you, you were on Truck Fifteen,” Sam said with a smile, and seriously, did he knoweveryone?
The redhead—Nat—paired her eye roll with a genuine laugh. “It reallyhasbeen a minute. That was five years ago. And I believe the last time you saw me, my house was wiping the basketball court with yours in the RFD charity brackets.”
“Look, it’s not my fault Dempsey pulled a hamstring. Anyway, it was for a great cause. I didn’t know you were working in arson investigation. They’re lucky to have you.”
Nat’s smile turned bittersweet. “Thanks. I was diagnosed with lupus four years ago, so active duty was kind of out for me after that. But they’re keeping me on my toes out here. Arson investigation is pretty fascinating—at least, when I’m not half-buried under file folders. Anyway, what brings you all the way out here?”
“Funny you should ask,” Sam said, gesturing to Lucy. “This is Lucy de Costa. We work together at Seventeen. Lucy de Costa, Nat Delacourt.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Lucy said, and Nat’s eyes brightened.
“Oh, you’re on engine, right?”
Lucy gave up a slow nod, her “yes,” coming out like a question.
But Nat just laughed. “I know Shae McCullough. We worked together on a case a little over three years ago, and we still keep in touch. She says great things about you. I’m glad we’re finally meeting.” She sent her gaze from Lucy to Sam, then back again. “But since I’m guessing this isn’t a pleasure tour, what can I do for the two of you?”
“Well, it’s kind of a long story,” Sam said.
“And crazy,” Lucy added, and Nat laughed again.
“My favorite kind. Why don’t you come on back to the conference room and you can tell me the whole thing?”
A few minutes later, they were all in a small room off the rear of the cubicle space, seated around a rectangular table half-covered in cardboard boxes full of file folders. Nat had chosen a chair across from both Lucy and Sam, settling in against the seatback before saying, “Okay, you’ve got my attention. Hit me with this long and crazy story.”
But rather than diving right in and using his connection to Nat to his advantage, Sam looked at Lucy. “Why don’t you do the honors?”
“Oh.” She waited out her shock for a second before nodding. “Okay, sure. Five days ago, we were on shift and a call came in for a warehouse fire.”
“Oh, yeah. I heard about it,” Nat said. “It sounded like a doozy. I’m glad neither of you were hurt.”
If Nat had also heard that they’d been benched over said fire for breaking protocol, she didn’t show it, and relief eased Lucy’s shoulders by a fraction. There was such a thing as too much transparency, and the set down wasn’t something she really wanted to re-live. Plus, it didn’t have any bearing on their trip out here.
“Yeah, me too. Anyway, Faurier and I were inside the warehouse on search and rescue, and the fire was pretty intense. We were wondering if the fire marshal had been out to do an initial scene inspection yet.”
“Funny you should ask”—Nat reached over to the pile of folders she’d been carrying on her hip when they’d arrived—“because this arrived on my desk this morning. The fire marshal did a full scene inspection two days after the fire.” She flipped through the report. “The electric hadn’t been on in the building for quite some time, so that definitely wasn’t the cause.”
