Up in Flames [The Heroes of Silver Springs 10] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic) (21 page)

“Regina Zimmer,” Max confirmed. “She’s Ethan Zimmer’s daughter.”

“And the woman who was in your apartment this morning,” Ford added and chuckled at the look Max knew must be on his face. “Cory mentioned it when he came back from running his errands. Don’t worry, man. Your secret is safe with us.”

Did he intend to keep his relationship with Regina a secret? Did he even have a relationship with her now? Hell if he knew. They’d had sex, three times, and it had been fucking incredible. They’d talked, too. And wasn’t that a surprising moment he should probably note on his calendar? He and Regina Zimmer had talked, and she hadn’t once attempted to detach his head from his shoulders with her pit-bull teeth.

Ford turned his attention back to the computer screen. “So, what is it you’re wanting me to dig for exactly?”

Max pushed his personal thoughts about Regina aside and focused on the fires. “The fires in those articles are connected. They happened in a sequential order. I want to know if that same order has happened before, somewhere besides Alabama, maybe.”

Ford’s brows etched together. “I’m pretty sure that’s probably the first thing Regina has checked out, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but I want to run my own check, go back as many years as I can. And I want to check out Ethan Zimmer’s career as a fire investigator, too, maybe even all the way back to the start of it.” Max raked a hand over his head. “There’s a reason this Flame Jumper is hitting Silver Springs now. Regina is that reason. She’s Ethan’s daughter.”

“And this Flame Jumper apparently knows this. You’re thinking Ethan is the connection and something in his career prompted this Flame Jumper to go after him and now Regina.”

Max pushed a hard breath from his lungs. He’d told Regina he would help her find this guy. What he hadn’t told her was the extent and path in which he intended to dig. “Can you pick through Ethan’s past? I want to know his background, the fires he investigated, people he might have pissed off, if he stepped out of line anywhere…”

“You want a career rap sheet on Regina’s father?”

“In a nutshell, yeah.”

“Regina doesn’t know you’re looking into her father’s past, does she?”

“No.” Max sighed. “And I would rather she not find out.”

“I’m a narcotics detective, man. Not only does it fall out of my area of expertise, but it’s way out of my jurisdiction.” Ford held up a hand, stopping Max when he started to speak. “I do have a few contacts in the Kingsford PD, though. I can make a few calls and ask them to do a little discreet checking for me.”

“I’d appreciate whatever you can do.”

Ford leaned back in his chair again, swiveling it slightly to fully face Max. “I’m not trying to pry, but if you think this thing between you and Regina has any chance of becoming serious, you might want to tell her what you’re doing. I’m jumping in feet first here, but from what I’m gathering, her father couldn’t catch this Flame Jumper and now the guy is setting fires in Regina’s turf. I get you want to help her catch the bastard, but putting out the fires is your job. Investigating their cause is hers.”

“She’s not going to put her father under a microscope.” Max was certain of that. The woman was ready to give up her position in a city where she’d made a name for herself to go back to a place where she’d be living under Ethan’s shadow just so she could be there for him.

“But you will,” Ford pointed out. “Or at least, you’re asking me to.”

Max sighed as he got to his feet. “And she won’t be happy about it when she finds out I did.” He didn’t doubt for a second he’d see her pit-bull teeth then, and, this time, she’d likely bite his head clean off his shoulders.

* * * *

Regina propped her elbows on her desk, buried her face in her hands, and groaned. “Think, damn it. Think!”

Therein lay her problem. She
was
thinking, just not about what she should be. A picture of Max formed in her mind. She saw him leaning against the headboard of his bed, his solid chest and rigid abs bare, and his long legs clad in sweatpants stretched out in front of him. The image was so clear she could have been standing in his bedroom again rather than sitting behind her desk in her office.

Christ. She wanted to be standing in his bedroom again. She wanted to be in that bed with him. She wanted to forget the world and get lost in his arms.

“You are so fucked.”

She sighed, lifted her head, and did her damnedest to push him out of her mind. She had a job to do, one she should have been doing all morning instead of engaging in hot monkey sex with Max for half the day.

You’re letting him do it to you already.

She’d let down her guard, let him in, and she could already feel the destruction beginning.

You let him in too far.

How could that be possible? They’d had sex, great sex, but that’s all it had been. She’d let her attraction to him run the show this morning, surrendered her desires, and gave up fighting.

You gave up more than that.

No, that couldn’t be true. Sex did not equal love in any calculation. She was absolutely, positively not falling in love with Max Jasper after one incredible morning in his bed.

You started falling for him long before today.

Oh, hell. As badly as she didn’t want to think that could be true, she knew it was. She’d been on a downward spiral, tumbling closer and closer to doom for far longer than she wanted to admit. This morning had simply sealed her fate.

A fate that’s going to play out in a chain of events just like the damn fires you’re investigating.

She could already see it. She was in love with the man. She had a job to do and a decision she couldn’t back out of. Once she caught the Flame Jumper, she’d leave town, and her whole world would go up in flames.

“Why are you doing this?”

She saw the question like a double-sided coin. Heads was Max, and she already knew the answer. He was a man. He did it for the sex. Sure, he didn’t want a one-night stand. He’d likely spend time with her before she left town and then it would be over. If he’d really wanted more than sex, he would’ve asked her to stay, wouldn’t he?

Focus on the tails.

Tails was the Flame Jumper. An arsonist always had a reason, even if it only made sense to him. Her father had attempted to profile the Flame Jumper. The guy wasn’t a professional torch. There was no evidence found in the cases that occurred in Kingsford or the fires thus far in Silver Springs to suggest he was being hired by someone else to set the flames. There was also no evidence of anything even resembling the chain of fires occurring anywhere else that her father had been able to find.

The Flame Jumper was smart. The fires he set might seem random, but they weren’t. A pyromaniac tended to burn whatever struck his fancy at any given time simply for the thrill of it. Each of the Flame Jumper’s fires held a purpose in the arsonist’s mind. Otherwise, why would he have set the specific fires at the predetermined times and stopped the way he had done in Kingsford? Why create that same chain of events now in Silver Springs?

“It means something, but what?”

“That’s somethin’ I haven’t heard in a while.”

Startled, Regina jerked her head up, her gaze slamming into Gage’s. “What?”

Gage smiled as he closed her office door behind him. “You talkin’ to yourself.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to the door. “I knocked, by the way. I guess you didn’t hear me.”

Regina rubbed her temple with the first two fingers of her right hand. “I was lost in thought.” She managed a small smile. “And talking to myself.”

Gage tipped his chin toward the papers on her desk as he took a seat. “That the stuff on this Flame Jumper?”

“Witness statements, interview accounts, background checks on employees…” She flipped through several pages and then turned to her computer. “The Kingsford office sent me everything that was in Dad’s old files about the cases there from four years ago. Even his notes are in here, or at least most of them anyway.”

“You didn’t look at this stuff when it was going on, did you?”

Regina shook her head. “I’d just finished up school. I was putting in time with the fire department, getting my experience with tackling the blazes I intended to investigate later. The case was pretty much lumped in the cold file by the time I signed on in the investigator’s office. Then, I had my own cases to deal with. Dad talked to me a little about it, but I didn’t get involved.”

“Maybe what the whole case needs is a pair of fresh eyes.”

Regina expelled a half laugh. “I sure hope so, but so far, I’m not seeing anything Dad didn’t. If the Flame Jumper keeps to his apparent schedule, I’ve got less than a week before he torches some physical therapist’s office. Which one and where, I don’t have a fucking clue. Dad assumed there was a reason he set fire to the one in Kingsford, but Dad’s investigation into the place, the records on the patients, and all that, didn’t turn up anything.” She sighed, closed her eyes briefly, and shook her head. “It’s not random, Gage. Nothing this guy does is random. He’s got a reason for the places he torches, but what the hell is that reason?”

Gage settled back in his seat and rested one ankle on the opposite knee. “Start with the therapist office.”

“If you do, you come up with the theory that the Flame Jumper had a beef with the therapist. Maybe he was injured, went to the therapist for rehabilitation of some sort, and it didn’t work.” Regina had already traveled down that thought path, just as her father had four years ago. “It’s logical, except that Dad got a court order to review the patient records before, and came up with nothing. It’s even more logical to go off Dad’s theory that, no matter how wacked it sounds, the Flame Jumper’s injury was the result of an accident in a Buick Regal that was brought into an automotive shop for repair, likely just before the accident even though, in the chain, the wreck and the fire occurred in the opposite order.”

Gage scratched his chin. “But where does the daycare center fit in? That’s the fourth fire, right?”

“The fourth and yet another with no apparent connection to the first three aside from the accelerant used to torch the place.” Regina drummed her fingers on the desktop, her mind working at warp speed. “He’s recreating something, maybe from his own childhood. Maybe he attended that daycare.”

“After he was involved in an accident in a car that had just come out of the shop, injured, sent to therapy, then, what, bullied at the daycare ’cause he now had some kind of disability?” Gage sounded skeptical.

Regina shook her head and sighed. “Stranger things have put people on destructive paths.”

Gage pursed his lips. “Okay, let’s say you’re right. You don’t know anything about this guy. You don’t know how old he is. You don’t know when the original chain of events occurred, assuming that it did. How the hell do you catch him?”

Regina pushed a hard breath from her lungs. “If I knew that, Gage, I’d already have the guy behind bars.”

A collective uproar of pure feminine laughter drifted through the back sliding doors of Captain Dean Wolcott’s house, and the men scattered about the outside deck shook their heads and grinned.

“Girls are so silly.”

Max heard the comment and glanced down to find Timmy, Ryan Magee’s ten-year-old stepson, rolling his eyes. Max chuckled and rubbed the palm of his hand over the boy’s head. “Get used to it, kid. No matter how old they are, they never lose that silliness.”

“What are they getting all gooey for in there? It’s just baby clothes and junk.”

Max stepped forward to the nearby ice chest, pulled a beer and a soda from the cooler, and offered the kid the Coke. “Girls always get all gooey over baby stuff. That’s why they’re the mommies and boys are the daddies.”

Timmy stood taller, squaring his shoulders and puffing out his chest. “Yeah, ’cause we’re the strong ones.”

Max laughed, wondering what Regina and the other women inside would say to that comment. He knew Regina, Bailey Barrett, and Terri Vega had proved themselves as tough as any man in their careers. That was to say nothing of their personal lives, too, and he figured the other women inside weren’t too far behind those three in the strength department.

He popped the top on his beer can. “Oh, don’t think for a second those women in there aren’t strong. Imagine if you had to carry another person around inside you for nine months.”

Timmy wrinkled his nose. “That wouldn’t be so bad. It’s the way they get that person out of them that’s gross.”

Max tapped his can to Timmy’s in a toast. “I can’t argue with that, buddy.”

But he did wonder what Regina would look like pregnant. Christ, what the hell was he thinking? It had barely been a few days since they’d finally stopped sniping at each other and turned their sparring matches into hot fun between the sheets.

You’ve turned it into more than that.

Yeah, if were honest with himself, he’d have to admit what they had going now did feel like more than that. He was fucking crazy about the woman. When she was around, he couldn’t see anything but her. When she wasn’t around, he couldn’t think about anything but her. Damn if that didn’t feel like the start of a real relationship to him.