Page 12 of Ice Cold Liar (Ice Breaker Cold Case #14)
“I need to check the smoke detectors inside,” Eb explained. The faulty detectors were his red flag. The detectors, and, of course, the big red flames that had burned in her den.
“What?” The firefighter hunched his shoulders.
“The smoke detectors. I need to check them. They didn’t go off. Either let me in to check them or you go and check them. Find out why the hell they didn’t work.”
Because Eb had a very, very bad feeling about this scene.
Someone could have slipped in the back door. Set the fire…
And waited for Naomi to burn.
If she’d been alone, without the smoke detectors to alert her to the fire’s presence, she would have burned. She would have died.
Naomi didn’t know what she was supposed to do with a hero.
One who’d literally given her the shirt off his back.
Her arms remained crossed over her chest as she waited for the cops to close in.
Familiar figures. At this point, most of the police department members were familiar to her.
But it wasn’t the officers in uniform who had her tensing.
It was the detective who walked behind them.
The man who’d pulled up in his predictably dark SUV.
A guy in jeans and a half-buttoned shirt who’d clipped a badge to his belt and had a holster beneath his left arm.
Detective Clark Anderson. He’d been particularly driven to get her locked away for the little matter of her husband’s murder.
“Naomi.” A shake of his head. “Causing trouble again, are you?”
Henry remained sitting at her side. “If by causing trouble, you mean…did a fire break out and nearly destroy my home? Yes. That did happen. But I’m safe. Thanks for your concern, Detective Anderson. Always glad to know you are looking out for my well-being.”
He stopped a few feet away. His gaze raked over her.
And, yes, fine, she was suddenly grateful for the double shirts.
It took all she had not to dramatically call out…
Who does a woman have to kill in order to get full clothing around here?
But, no, that question would not be appreciated.
She got that. Her dark humor would be inappropriate.
Still…
She was so on edge that she almost blurted it out. Almost.
“What happened?” Clark asked. The two uniformed officers flanked his sides.
“A fire.” Shouldn’t that be obvious based on the fire truck at the scene? And the firefighters? But then again, she hadn’t found him to be the sharpest tool in the box during all of their previous interactions, either.
He’d been too intent on locking her away.
Or, even better…as he’d once told her…getting her the death penalty.
A life for a life. Naomi swallowed. “Why are you even here? I get the firefighters. I even get uniformed cops. However, I hardly think a detective should be at this scene in the middle of the night.”
“Heard the call go out. Recognized the address.” His hands went to his hips. “Knew I had to come immediately.”
How wonderful. Not.
“You start it?” Clark asked.
Her gaze narrowed on him. “Are you seriously asking me if I just tried to burn down my own home?”
“Well, only fair, isn’t it, given that you murdered your own husband?”
She took a lunging step toward him.
Strong hands closed around her shoulders. “Sweetheart, are you going to introduce me?”
Shock rolled through her. Had Eb just called her sweetheart? She’d thought she heard him call her baby earlier, but that had been in the heat of the moment. A possible auditory hallucination given the fire around her and the stress but this time…
He did it. He called me sweetheart.
He pulled her back against him. Back against his warm, strong, bare chest. And one arm moved down so that his forearm slid over her chest while his fingers brushed lightly over her shoulder.
His breath blew over her skin. “ Play along,” he whispered.
Or, she thought he whispered the command.
The order was so incredibly soft. A bare breath of sound against the shell of her ear.
“This is…” Naomi cleared her throat. “Detective Clark Anderson. And Officers Kennedy Willow and Aziah Burch.” Yep, she remembered them all. Hard to forget because Kennedy and Aziah had cuffed her at this same location. Ah, memories. They’d cuffed her even as she’d loudly protested her innocence.
“Who the hell are you?” Clark demanded as he glared at Eb. The officers remained silent. Watchful.
“Eb Jones.” He kept her pinned against his body. Kept right on holding her, too.
“Eb Jones?” Clark took a step closer. “As in, Hudson’s former partner?”
“Guilty as charged,” Eb said.
She flinched. Dammit, he did not need to go around saying stuff like that. If she didn’t get to use dark humor, then neither did he.
Clark closed in even more. “You’re the partner…and you’re here?” His gaze dropped to the arm that Eb still had curled around Naomi. “With her?”
“Looks that way,” Eb responded. “You are observant.”
“Where is your shirt?” Clark wanted to know. His tone had flattened.
“Sir.” Kennedy stepped forward. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, even in the middle of the night. “It appears she is wearing the shirt, sir.”
Oh for goodness… “Yes, I’m wearing it. Excellent deduction.” Naomi lifted her hands and curled them around Eb’s forearm. She tugged. Casually.
At first, he hesitated, then he let her go.
“I’m the victim.” She stepped to the side and waved back toward her house. The still smoking house. The smoke could easily be scented on the wind. So could the coming storm. “My house caught on fire tonight, but I’m good. No need for the cops to get involved, I am?—”
“There’s a need,” Eb cut in to say. “It’s a good thing they are out here.”
Wait, it was ?
“This is my new friend, Jeffrey Lee.”
A young firefighter stepped forward. One that, in the swirl of lights, she could see sported a very large mustache.
“Jeffrey did a bit of checking inside the structure for me,” Eb continued. “Jeffrey, will you tell the cops what you found?”
Jeffrey bobbed his head. He clutched a helmet in the crook of his arm. “The smoke detectors didn’t have batteries.”
Naomi sucked in a sharp breath.
But Clark just shook his head. “You took out your own batteries, huh, Naomi? Trying to get an insurance claim, were you? Did you think that if you?—”
“She was asleep, dumbass,” Eb snapped.
Clark stiffened. “What did you just call me?”
“I had to wake her up. Carry her down the stairs. Then she insisted on fighting the blaze with fire extinguishers that she had in her closet. A woman who sets her house on fire doesn’t stop to try and put out the flames.
A woman who survived a fire as a child doesn’t set herself up again to face that same hell.
” Rage vibrated in Eb’s words. A carefully controlled rage.
That was the thing about Eb. He knew how to control his emotions. She struggled in that regard. In that very moment, it felt as if her emotions were close to ripping her apart. It took all of her energy to hold herself together.
“You’re saying someone else set the fire?” Clark rocked onto the balls of his feet.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Thanks for following along,” Eb gritted out. “I think someone could have broken in via the back door of her place. Got inside, started the blaze, and slipped out while Naomi slept.”
“And when would this genius arsonist have taken the batteries from her smoke detectors? Oh, wait, let me guess. Right before he started the fire?”
“The smoke detectors upstairs and downstairs didn’t go off. She had them throughout the house.” Eb’s flat response. “None of them alerted us to the fire.”
Eb was right. She did have plenty of smoke detectors. They’d been the first thing she installed after buying the property.
“No one got upstairs. I would have known.” Eb was adamant. “So that tells me the batteries were removed before tonight. As in this was a premeditated attack.”
The officers shifted a bit uneasily and glanced toward the house.
Clark kept his gaze on Eb. “So you’re a fire investigator? Here I thought you and Hudson were just government pencil pushers.”
A pencil pusher? Really? Was that the story the CIA had fed to him when the detective had been poking around about Hudson’s job?
“I’m telling you that someone just set up Naomi to either die or get seriously hurt. Now you should act like a cop and investigate.” Eb glanced at Naomi. “You ready to get away from here?”
More than ready.
“I have clothes for you, ma’am,” the firefighter with the impressive mustache told her. He extended a bag toward Naomi. Grateful, she took it from him and realized that Eb had a bag resting close to his feet, too. She hadn’t even noticed it until that moment.
“She’s not leaving. I have more questions!” Clark puffed out his chest. “Questions for you both.” His right hand rose, and he jabbed his index finger into the air. It went first in Naomi’s direction, then in Eb’s. “First, are you screwing your dead partner’s wife?”
Naomi opened her mouth to snap out an angry response.
“Yes,” Eb announced before she could reply. “Though I don’t think of it as screwing. I’d never be so crass with her.”
What was happening?
“Making love. That’s what we do,” Eb clarified.
“You’re fucking your dead partner’s ? —”
“That question has been asked and answered.” Eb took the bag from Naomi. “I’ll carry it for you.” He spared a glare for the detective. “What else do you want to know?”
“Why the hell are you in town? I was told that you worked outside of the country most of the time. And when you were in the US, your home base damn well wasn’t in Baton Rouge.”
No, it wasn’t. Hudson had told her that Eb’s home was in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
“I’m here for Naomi,” Eb told him. “Thought that was obvious when I answered the previous question. I came for her. I’m staying for her. And if you won’t do the job and find out who is threatening her, then I will do it for you.” A brittle pause. “Any other questions?”
“Yeah. Plenty of them.” Clark bared his teeth as the emergency responder lights swirled around them. “Just who would hate Naomi so much that they’d want her to burn?”