The Fire Still Burns (2 page)
Read The Fire Still Burns Online
Authors: Crystal-Rain Love
Her sweet scent wafted across the table bringing back memories best left forgotten, and he became infuriated by the fact that he was remembering moments spent with her while his brother's killer was still on the loose.
“I want Zeke's murderer. I don't give a damn what I have to do to find him, even if it means I have to work alongside you, but don't get in my way on this.” He leaned forward with his hands braced on the table edge, purposely invading her space.
She looked up from the papers before her to glare at him, closing her hands into tight little fists. “I didn't apply for this job. The chief contacted me because he knows I can find the arsonist. I’m a volunteer firefighter in Los Angeles and a very successful private investigator. I'm not trying to get in your way, Adam. I didn't even know you were the investigator. If I had, do you really think I'd have taken the job?”
Adam sat back in his chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I don't know, Brynn. I thought I knew you once and it turned out I was wildly mistaken.”
“Insult my character all you want, but I'm on this case whether you like it or not.” She bent her head back over the files in front of her, reading the pages. “So there were two incidents almost exactly a month apart.”
“Yup.”
She looked at him briefly in what he assumed to be annoyance, before returning her eyes to the information before her. “Depending on when your brother was actually taken, the incidents may have actually been an exact month apart. Why don't I see a list of suspects?”
“Right there.” He pointed at the sheet in front of her.
“Two names?”
“That's right.”
She smiled at him, one of those smiles people used when they thought they were smarter than you and were about to say something clever to prove it. “So tell me, how did Ames Anderson and Chuck Davis make the list?”
Adam held her smug stare, determined not to show his growing irritation with her and the situation he had been forced into. “Anderson’s a drifter, hardly known by anyone, and Davis got into an argument with Zeke at the bar a couple nights before his murder.”
“If my memory serves me right, Chuck Davis has had an argument with just about everybody in this town, and is especially volatile when he's drunk.”
“So?” Adam shrugged, growing annoyed.
“So…why would he get into a spat with your brother and just up and decide to burn him alive a few nights later? Did they even exchange blows or was it just words that got thrown around that night?”
“Words,” Adam conceded, knowing there wasn't much evidence against Davis but, hell, there wasn't much evidence against anyone.
“Yeah, must have been some pretty rough words to turn him into an arsonist, especially since I can't see Davis having the mental faculties to pull these two fires off.” Her gaze fell back to the papers. “These took planning.”
“What about Anderson? Nobody knows much about the guy.”
“And that instantly makes him suspect? That's the problem with small town justice. The innocent are condemned with no evidence whatsoever.”
He picked up the loathing in her tone but didn't bother attempting to determine where it came from. She could hate Black Bear Gorge, she could hate him, all he cared about at the moment was finding his brother's murderer. “So who do you think the guy is?”
“I have no idea,” she said in a tone completely devoid of emotion, a fact which irked him. “I'm not so sure it was a guy though.”
“Why do you say that?”
Brynn shrugged, something odd in her posture, the way she wouldn't look at him directly, but he couldn't quite put a finger on it. “Never rule out the so-called fairer sex. Vengeful women are dangerous women. Did he have any bad break-ups, dates that got out of hand?”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” Adam’s anger surged through his veins, making it damned difficult to remain sitting across from the woman he wanted to strangle.
She had betrayed him, lying straight to his face while sleeping with his best friend for who knew how long, and now she was insinuating something like this about his brother. “My brother was a good man. You should know.”
“Should I?” Her eyebrows raised, her lips twisted into a near sneer. A look he'd never seen on her before, a look that didn't seem right on her, but then again, he hadn't known her as well as he'd thought.
Before he had a chance to respond, she erased the sneer and restarted her interrogation. “Surely he must have had some sour relationships. No man is perfect.”
“He never had a relationship serious enough to go sour. You remember how he was.”
“So he was still a ladies man.” She sounded bitter. “Had he gotten into any confrontations around the same time, other than the one with Chuck Davis?”
“None I recall or I would have put it in my report.” Adam closed his hand into a fist, barely keeping his temper under control. How amateur did she think he was?
“Zeke was a good guy. He was looked up to, respected by his peers. He held a steady job and stayed on the right side of the law. Sure, he could throw back some beers, but he never touched drugs. There was no reason for him to be murdered.”
“Apparently there was.” She closed the folder holding his report and pushed it back toward him. “I'll check into the drifter, but don't bet all your chips on this guy. He just might be simply passing through.”
“Might?”
She shrugged, rising from her seat. “He might be a psychotic crackpot. We'll find out soon enough. Now, let's go.”
“Go where?”
She looked over her shoulder at him as she paused with one hand on the door, giving him a good eye roll. “The crime scenes, of course.”
Chapter Two
“That thing will never make it where we're going.” Adam looked at Brynn's compact in disdain, his lip curling up at the little dark gray Jetta as if it were a cockroach. Brynn almost grinned, remembering how much Adam loved his trucks.
“I'm sure it'll do fine.”
“Have you been away from here so long you actually believe that? The road we're headed to is all dirt with deep ruts. You'll get stuck and I'm not about to waste what’s left of the day digging you out of the road. Come on.”
Brynn bristled at his tone, but bit her tongue as she followed him to his black Ford F-250, which, fortunately, was not the same truck he had driven in high school. There were memories made in his old truck that she couldn't deal with now.
“Are you getting in or not?” Adam called from inside the cab as Brynn stood outside the passenger side, her hand gripped around the handle of the open door.
The bench seat wasn't as long as she would have liked it to be, and she didn't want to sit so close to Adam, not with her emotions in an uproar. Because of the pain she’d caused him, she’d never intended to return to Black Bear Gorge. If Calvin Wylie, his former best friend and her supposed husband hadn’t stolen her money and blown his brains out, she wouldn’t have come back. Adam thought she’d betrayed him, and she’d done nothing to disprove him, but the way he glared at her got under her skin.
She battled between wanting to comfort or hit him. He wasn’t the only who’d been wronged. She still hurt.
“Well?” He looked at her impatiently, which was all she needed to spur her into action. She hopped into the truck and slammed the door shut behind her.
“Easy with the door,” he growled.
She grinned.
Black Bear Gorge hadn't changed much over the past thirteen years. Brynn looked out the window at the passing scenery as they drove through the town, not caring what she looked at as long as it took her attention away from the tall, sexy, brooding man next to her in the small confines of the truck's cab.
The drugstore and the bank looked exactly the same, as did the local diners. Most of the businesses appeared to be under the same management, nothing at all having changed except maybe a few fresh coats of paint.
Women walked down the street with their hair big and teased, or braided at the sides. They wore sundresses and sandals, or tight jeans and cowgirl boots with cropped tops as they pushed their babies in strollers.
Most huddled in and around Flora's Beauty Shop where they'd get their hair colored and their nails polished and shaped. Brynn looked at her own scraggly nails and cringed. She had never fit in with the women of Black Bear Gorge during her youth. Sure, she liked to dress up for parties, but part of her had always wanted adventure. Something outside the normal day-to-day life of being just a mother and housewife.
She may have not relished the idea of being just a housewife, but she had intended on marrying Adam once he made it on the police force and she became a firefighter. Their grand plan had included three children by the time they hit thirty. She had already reached that mark.
She risked a sideways glance at Adam and caught him looking at her curiously before quickly redirecting his eyes toward the road before them. His hands on the steering wheel were large and strong, unadorned. The absence of a wedding band didn't mean he was available though.
Brynn wondered again who the blond was in Chief Parker's office. She was obviously close to Adam. She didn't know which bothered her most—the fact the woman was close to him or that she was apparently Black Bear Gorge's first female firefighter. Whoever the woman was, she had taken her dream and possibly the only man she'd ever loved.
Brynn rolled her eyes in self-disgust. Those days of adolescent adoration were over. Adam had thrown her aside like garbage when she'd needed him most. Once enough money was saved, she and her son were leaving Black Bear Gorge for good, and, this time, the image of the small town fading away in her rear view mirror would be the only memory taken with her.
“So why do you have to go to the scenes when you have all the information in my reports?” Adam didn't look at her, just stared straight ahead at the road. Deep frown lines marred his smooth complexion.
“I'm not doubting your abilities as an arson investigator, Adam.” She let out a sigh, struggling to keep her hands in her lap instead of giving in to her yearning to grab his head and yell in his face to get over it, she wasn’t trying to steal his job. “I just like to be thorough and besides, I'll be looking at the damage from the viewpoint of a detective.”
“What do you think I am?” He cast her a heated glance.
“An arson investigator and a P.I. are slightly different. Just trust me on this.”
Adam snorted, mumbling a word that sounded like trust under his breath as he negotiated a left turn and passed Calvin Wylie's family home. Time seemed to stand still as they drove past the house, both of them undoubtedly remembering what had led up to her leaving town. Brynn wiped her sweaty hands on her jeans, her stomach churned as she wished for the millionth time she had never met Calvin Wylie.
“I thought your last name was Wylie now.”
Brynn took in a deep breath, decided to answer him as truthfully as possible without saying too much. “I’ve always gone by my maiden name.”
He took his attention off the road long enough to look at her through narrowed eyes, his brow wrinkling as he lowered his gaze to her left hand. Brynn covered it with her right, blocking his view of her naked ring finger.
He returned his gaze to the road, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “You're divorced?”
“Cal’s dead. The way gossip is spun out in this town I figured you would have known that.”
Judging by the way his eyes widened, he really hadn't known. He shook his head, then focused on the road again, his fingers flexing on the steering wheel. “His family moved away last year. I guess they haven't kept in touch with anyone. I take it he passed recently.”
“A few months ago.”
“How?” The word came out forced.
Brynn twirled a strand of her hair as she gazed out the passenger side window, thinking how she should answer the question. She had planned on telling anyone who might ask that he died in an accident and leave it at that, but she didn't savor the idea of lying to Adam again, especially not within a few hours of reuniting with him.
“I'd rather not talk about it.” Still not completely open to the idea of letting Adam know Cal had committed suicide, she sidestepped the question. The way he and his mother viewed her, they would most likely say she was to blame for it.
In a way, she supposed she was, but they didn't need any more ammunition against her. In the end, it was Cal who made the decision to end his life, unable to deal with his guilt over what he’d done to her. No matter how deeply she loathed him, she would never have wanted him to kill himself.
Silence ensued for the rest of the drive, tension sitting between the two like a third passenger. Other than the awkwardness between them, the ride itself was smooth and pleasant. The late afternoon sun wasn’t particularly brutal and the breeze blowing through the open windows as they traveled on was refreshing. Still, anxiety produced fresh sweat on Brynn’s palms and she wiped them on her pant legs. The drive wasn't actually taking that long but it seemed like hours had passed already.