Page 2 of Over the Flames

A woman, tall and slender, shouldered out of the first vehicle. The dark gray slacks and button-down shirt of her uniform highlighted the vicious red of her hair, but it was the piercing green eyes and set to her expression that pressurized the air in Arden’s lungs. Plump lips and high cheekbones worked overtime to soften Sheriff Blair Sanders’s hardened exterior. “Are you the one who called this in?”

“Yes.” Arden nodded, all too aware of the tablet she’d removed from the scene in her bag. She clutched the baton for some kind of anchor as the repercussions of removing evidence from a crime scene surfaced. Her mentor—her best friend—had been murdered. She hadn’t been thinking clearly, but the chances of replacing the device where she’d found it without the sheriff noticing plummeted. Nervous energy paralyzed her in place.

Hand lingering above the Glock 19 holstered on her left hip, the sheriff approached the cement pad of the warehouse, then froze. In that moment, Arden understood Sheriff Sanders had caught sight of the body. Her friend’s body. The sheriff didn’t take her eyes off the victim but softened her voice. “Did you touch anything?”

Arden shook her head, even as nausea swirled in her stomach. “No.”

“Okay. You did the right thing.” Pinching the radio strapped to her vest, Sheriff Sanders spoke into the device. Strong fingers latched onto Arden’s arm and maneuvered her out of the warehouse as though she were made of glass or about to break into sobbing convulsions. “What’s your name?”

This wasn’t happening. Baldwin wasn’t dead.

“Arden M—” No. That wasn’t her name anymore, hadn’t been for almost two years. “Arden Olsen.”

“You can put that away now, Ms. Olsen.” The sheriff nodded toward the baton at Arden’s side. Raising one arm, Sheriff Sanders motioned to something—or someone—behind her. “This deputy is going to get you a cup of coffee and ask you some questions before taking you down to the station for an official statement. Anything you can tell us about what you saw is important, understand? When you called 911, you said you thought whoever had done this was still in the area.”

“I heard something drop onto the cement before I opened the door.” She forced the baton to collapse. Another vehicle pulled into the parking lot, a darker unmarked SUV that had no place on a small island like this. Jacqueline Day’s death wouldn’t be viewed as a single incident anymore. Not with the similarities between both scenes. Baldwin Webb’s name would be added to a list of victims burned alive by the same killer. It stood to reason the feds would be brought in on the case. Tears clouded her vision. “Why would somebody do this?”

She let the deputy at her side pull her toward his patrol car as reality bled into focus. Someone had killed Jacqueline Day in her vehicle three days ago, and now Baldwin had been killed in the same manner after telling her about the results of the autopsy report. There had to be a connection, and as soon as she was finished giving her statement to the sheriff’s department, she’d find out what it was from Baldwin’s tablet. Baldwin hadn’t believed Jacqueline Day’s death had been an accident, and Arden had to find a way to prove him right. She’d connect it to Baldwin’s death, and she’d expose a killer. With or without the police’s help.

“Arden?” That voice. His voice. She’d prayed every night she’d forget how her name on his lips warmed the darkest stretches of her insides, but her traitorous body hadn’t forgotten him in the least. “What… What are you doing here?”

Gravity increased its hold on her legs as Special Agent Lawson Mitchell of the FBI’s Violent Crimes Unit closed in on her. Apprehension climbed up her spine. Lawson’s thick eyebrows and dark, styled hair shaped a perfectly symmetrical and chiseled jawline and brought out the color in his storm-gray eyes. His pristine navy-blue suit and white button-down shirt begged for relief from the mountainous stretch of muscled shoulders beneath the fabric. Every inch of the man she’d tried to forget triggered her instincts to run. Not out of danger but something far more terrifying: remembered attraction.

“I’ve got this.” Lawson nodded to the deputy still waiting to take Arden back to the sheriff’s station on the other side of the island, dismissing him. The last bit of sunlight dove beneath the horizon, but Lawson instantly made up for the lack of light with a click of his flashlight before turning that intensity he carried back to her. “I asked you a question. What the hell are you doing out here?”

The tremors in her hands shot down her legs, but she wouldn’t break down. Not in front of him.

“I’m covering the Jacqueline Day story, but now there seems to be more to the investigation than police originally believed.” She lifted her phone between them, a defense mechanism that meant nothing when it came to him, and hit the voice recorder. She forced herself to breathe evenly, to hold onto the sob building in her throat. Her friend had been murdered, but she wouldn’t let Agent Mitchell see her cry. Never again. “Care to make a statement as to whether the death of this second victim might be the result of a budding serial murderer?”

“No comment.” The words left his mouth between gritted teeth, raising the hairs on the back of her neck.

“Agent Mitchell, the body is in here. Looks like we have another one on our hands.” Gravel ground hard in Arden’s ears as Sheriff Sanders burst the bubble they’d built around themselves in a matter of seconds. “Is there a problem?”

“No problem, Sheriff.” Lawson pushed past her toward the warehouse. “My wife was just leaving.”

Chapter Two

They’d found another victim.

Special Agent Lawson Mitchell couldn’t get the images out of his head. The blackened skin, the residue of gasoline around the body, the once-human shape of the remains. The cold deep in his bones had nothing to do with the falling January temperatures of the Pacific Northwest. He’d worked more than three dozen violent crimes cases over his career. Robbery, gang wars, kidnappings for ransom, serial cases here and there, but he’d never seen anything like this.

And Arden had never been involved.

Lawson straightened his tie and prepared for the upcoming battle as he crossed the industrial carpeting stretching the entire length of the King County Sheriff’s Department Vashon Island satellite office. With nothing more than a few desks in the bullpen for the handful of deputies he’d met, a conference room, and the sheriff’s office, the island’s small police force had their work cut out for them.

And he wasn’t far behind.

A deputy had brought Arden in to give her statement a little more than thirty minutes ago, enough time for the medicolegal investigators to collect what they needed from the scene and get the body ready for transport to the morgue at Harborview Medical Center on the mainland. As soon as the autopsy could be done and a positive identification made, Lawson could explore a possible connection between the victims. Because the manner of death between this victim and Jacqueline Day said there sure as hell was one.

Instant awareness flooded through him as he walked past the conference room, the old dusty blinds doing nothing to hide the woman on the other side of the glass. He stopped outside the door. Arden Olsen. One of Seattle’s up and coming investigative journalists who never seemed to miss out on a career-changing story. He should’ve known she’d be at the scene. With a drive to succeed—to prove herself—like hers, there wasn’t ever a story too big or too small where she vied to play judge, jury, and executioner, but now she’d become part of the narrative. Lawson pushed into the conference room.

Her sea-blue gaze locked with his, as though the same responsiveness coursing through him had taken control of her, and an electrical surge shot down into his fingertips. He pinched the file folder in his hand a bit harder. Long, blonde hair shifted over her shoulders as tension climbed into the tendons between her delicate neck and shoulders. Yeah, that was the Arden he’d known, the one always prepared to hide behind that perfectly guarded composure as if nothing could break through. Hell, after being one of two front-row witnesses to the events of their lives over the past two years, he wasn’t sure anything could get through that mask.

He certainly hadn’t been able to. No matter how many times he’d tried.

She leaned forward in her seat, long fingers pressing into the surface of the conference table between her and the deputy across from her. “Does he have to be here for this?”

“The FBI is taking over jurisdiction concerning this case, Ms. Olsen.” Lawson took the seat at the end of the table, close enough to smell hints of Arden’s familiar perfume. Patchouli, vanilla, a hint of citrus. “And, as a key witness, I must warn you, you’re going to be seeing a lot of me.”

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