They talked and laughed and worked their way through most of the food and several cups of coffee, and a good hour and a half had gone by before it even occurred to Sean to wonder why it was so easy for him to talk to her. They had an ease between them that felt more like the connection between good friends than the awkward getting-to-know-you stage between strangers.
Brynn picked up the last piece of toast, sighed, and put it back down. “I’d better not. I already feel like I won’t want to eat again for a week.”
He suddenly remembered something and looked around. “Isn’t there usually a waitress here?”
Brynn pushed her plate back, apparently full at last, and nodded. “Ethel. She does synchronized swimming three mornings a week, so it’s serve yourself on those days.”
Sean thought about the old movies his grandmother had liked to watch, and decided Brynn must be putting him on. “Her name is Ethel, and she’s a synchronized swimmer?”
“Yes, why?”
He shook his head. “Never mind.”
The diner’s door banged open, and Zach strode in, followed by a couple of the guys from the crew. The last thing Sean wanted to do was share Brynn with them, and he knew the moment they caught sight of him they’d come barging over.
“Hey, we might want to head out,” he told her. “It’s about to get pretty noisy in here.”
She glanced back over her shoulder at the group just inside the door, and he could have sworn she flinched a little. “Yes, time for me to go. Breakfast was . . . nice.”
She put a hand in her pocket, but he shook his head. “My treat.”
“But—okay. Thank you.” With that, she was up and out of the booth almost before he could react, but he couldn’t let her go like that. “Wait. Brynn, how do I reach you? I’d like to do this again, or dinner, maybe, as soon as we can figure out a time.”
Brynn started shaking her head before he’d even finished the sentence. By the time she replied, his heart was already sinking into his gut.
“Oh, no, you don’t understand. We can never see each other again.”
Before he could protest, she slipped through a door that said Employees Only, and she was gone.
Zach’s booming voice penetrated Sean’s stunned disbelief. “O’Malley, there you are. The chief wants to see you. Something about reporters and obeying orders.”
Sean stood up and met Zach in the aisle. “Forget it. I’m off duty. Tell him to go talk to a mirror, like he usually does.”
Zach didn’t smile at the admittedly lame joke. “You’re going, and I’m going with you. We’ve finally got a lead on the freak who’s setting these fires.”
Sean glanced back at the door through which Brynn had disappeared, but then made himself shake it off. No time to worry about mysterious women right now.
“Let’s go get the bastard,” Sean said grimly. He pulled out his wallet and left money on the cash register counter for Olaf.
“Go get him for all of us,” the little cook said, and the murmurs of agreement from everyone in the diner followed them out the door.
FOUR
Sean sat in the uncomfortable metal chair in the conference room and amused himself by imagining all the ways he could crush Bordertown Fire Chief Arvin Ledbetter like the pompous little cockroach he was. He didn’t know how many asses the new chief had kissed to get the job, but the windbag was clearly good at his work.
The ass-kissing part of his work. Not the fire chief part.
Zach and the guys had brought takeout breakfast for everyone, because they were all just too damn tired to cook. Nobody had said much until they’d devoured Olaf’s cooking down to the crumbs. Now they were ready to listen, even though most of them looked ready to drop any minute. The shift change had come and gone, and the fresh day crew sat and leaned against the clutter of safety notices and posters lining the walls of the room, including one that Zach had artistically altered.
Sean doubted that Smokey Bear had ever performed such a lewd act on a goat.
Shift change hadn’t meant a thing today. Not a single one of Sean’s crew had made a move to go home. They all wanted to catch the arsonist before he could strike a fifth time.
“As I was saying, we suspect that this is the fourth fire the same perpetrator set in Bordertown,” Ledbetter said, positioning himself in front of the whiteboard.
Sean groaned. “We know that. Same accelerant, same signature, same guy. Do we have any new evidence or not?”
The chief glared at him, and Sean could almost see the word insubordinate form in the jerk’s brain. “Yes, if you’d have a little patience, O’Malley. We believe the fires are the work of a disgruntled ex-Bordertown city official who was fired from the parks and—”
“No,” Sean interrupted, earning himself a death glare. “We already checked him out. Wagner, Waggoner, something like that?”
Zach nodded. “Yeah. Wagner. He had an alibi for the second fire.”
“Alibis can be faked,” Ledbetter pointed out.
“You’re right,” Sean admitted. “But that’s not why it isn’t him. Wagner is pure vanilla human. The arsonist used magic for the accelerant.”
Sharply inhaled breaths and low, vicious cursing filled the room from every firefighter in it. They all knew how much harder it was to combat a magically enhanced blaze.
“He could have had a partner,” Sue Newman pointed out, but she didn’t sound convinced. Her short, blond hair stood up in spikes, and dark smudges under her eyes testified to her exhaustion. She’d been on the same shifts as Sean for the past several days.
They were all working too hard, but they didn’t have a choice because, so far, the arsonist was working harder. Or smarter. Either way, the madman was at least one step ahead of them, and this time he’d almost claimed his first human victims.
Sean was pretty sure the man wasn’t working with a partner, though. Arsonists were almost always loners—at least the true crazies and the ones who considered themselves experts were—and no amateur was behind this string of fires.
Ledbetter made a croaking harrumph sound. “What evidence do you have that magic was used? We found no proof of that.”
Sean had been hoping the question wouldn’t come up, because he couldn’t explain it without revealing his fire demon heritage. As far as he knew, only fire demons and black magic practitioners could see the complete spectrum of colors in a fire and instantly know which were caused by magic, and there was no way in hell he was giving anybody cause to think he was either. He’d sworn an oath to his father—all the O’Malley boys had.
So he deflected. “You called us here because you had new evidence, Zach said, and since our witch was helping put out the fire, I just figured—”
The chief scowled, which unfortunately made his piggy little eyes squint and his puffy little jowls puff out even further. Sean made the mistake of glancing at Zach, who was clearly thinking the same thing, and he had to fight back the grin. It was neither the time nor the place for it, and there was damn sure nothing funny about the situation, but the man looked ridiculous when he tried to act important.
“Yes, well, you’re right,” Ledbetter said, pointing to the department witch, José Castilho, who was slumped at one end of the table looking no more than half-alive.
Castilho looked up when the guy next to him elbowed him, and he nodded wearily.
“Yeah. Magical accelerant. Worse than anything I’ve ever encountered before, too. It fought me like a living thing.”
The exhausted night-shift men and women around the room nodded and made sounds of agreement.