Page 12 of Over the Flames

The hesitation in her voice slowed his pace, and Lawson turned to face her. She’d asked good questions in there. He’d been impressed. Though now he could see the cracks in her control, the doubt bubbling to the surface. “She had the proof on her phone. The accusations got Baldwin Webb fired from The Seattle Times. She had no reason to kill him last night if her editor had already taken care of the issue.”

Her long, blonde hair lifted slightly with the breeze coming through the tall trees and wildflowers as she diverted her ethereal blue gaze somewhere over the white vinyl fence. “He never told me. That he’d been fired. Baldwin had never shared anything about his work with me, told me he didn’t want his opinion to color my own investigations.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and she suddenly looked so much…smaller than she’d been when they’d walked into that house. “Now I know why. He’d tried covering his tracks. Makes sense he wouldn’t want to tell me he’d been fired for stealing another journalist’s work. I trusted him, and now I’m wondering if I was going to be one of those writers someday. I’m wondering if he’d only been my friend so he could eventually steal from me. So many things I believed about Baldwin ended up being a lie. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“You learn from it and move on. The same thing you’ve been doing your entire life.” Lawson slipped his notepad and paper into the breast pocket of his jacket as rain grew heavier. He squinted up into the sky. Dark clouds rolled over one another in a hypnotic dance, and he reached for her. “Come on. We don’t want to be caught out in the open if the entire island shuts down again.”

She stepped into the circle of his arm and headed down the path, but the sense of being watched prickled the hair on the back of his neck. Lawson looked back over his shoulder, to the large window at the front of Rose Hindley’s house. It was empty. Nothing but a gray reflection of the clouds and trees filling the space. This case, Arden’s involvement—his mind was playing tricks on him. The gate slammed closed behind him, hiking his nerves into overdrive.

Water splashed under his feet as he jogged to catch up with Arden, rounded the front of the SUV, and wrenched the door open to climb inside. Their doors slammed at the same time, encapsulating them in the small, humid space.

“You want to find Phil Anderson next. See if his story matches up with Rose Hindley’s.” Strands of hair stuck to the edges of her face, and she moved to smooth as many of them as she could. Arden really was a hell of an investigator. Always a step ahead. Only he’d been so focused on the case—on his distrust for the media in general—he hadn’t seen it until now.

“Phil Anderson’s editor told Rose he’d stopped submitting stories, lost his house, succumbed into depression.” His throat dried as he turned the key in the ignition and shoved the SUV into Drive. “That his marriage fell apart. He might’ve been willing to do anything in order to get that back. I know if I had the chance to do it all over again, I would.”

“We should stop to get something to eat before trying to track down Phil Anderson. The address Rose Hindley gave us is off island. It’ll take us at least an hour to get there.” Arden stared out the passenger side window. The fact she hadn’t returned the same sentiment stalled the air in his lungs. “You can drop me off at my car, and I’ll meet you there.”

A thread of rejection gripped his gut like a vise, but Lawson couldn’t blame his ex-wife for shutting down the olive branches he’d extended. He hadn’t been there for her. Not when Rey had died, not during the funeral, not when she’d walked out of the courthouse after the judge had officially declared them divorced. He’d been so wrapped up in his own misery, his own grief, he’d been blinded to hers. It would take a lot more than his earlier apology to heal that wound, but, faced with the reality that Arden could’ve easily been the one tied to the chair in that warehouse last night, he was willing to try. “Three years ago, I worked a case where a four-year-old girl went missing.”

The weight of her full attention spiked his blood pressure higher. “I remember the case. Your reigning theory was the girl’s father had kidnapped her after he’d lost the custody battle.

“We couldn’t find him for weeks, and her mother was worried her ex-husband was too unstable to make sure the girl got the medication she needed for her diabetes. She was…inconsolable. In my office every day, sobbing, pleading, screaming at me to do something.” Lawson’s grip encased the steering wheel as he maneuvered the SUV into the flow of traffic. He hadn’t had any clue what it’d been like to lose a child then, but he’d been desperate to ease the mother’s ache. Even a little. “We had an all points bulletin sent to every law enforcement agency in the state. Marshals, local police, DEA. Whoever we could reach, we needed their help to bring her home, but…nothing. The guy had disappeared. So I went against protocol, and I reached out to the media.”

Arden didn’t respond, and the air grew thick inside the cabin of the SUV. She’d told him she remembered the case. She knew how this story ended.

“I made contact with a reporter working for King5. Someone I was assured I could trust. I gave her the details of the case, including the fact the girl needed her medication every day.” Wind whipped hard and fast through the trees lining the side of the road as Lawson pulled short at the next stop light. Most of the island was still recovering from the violence of the past twelve hours. Broken trees branches stretched low over the street, rain pelting the windshield in a chaotic frenzy as though reflecting the storm he’d kept inside all these years. “I expected her to spread the word to her fellow reporters, the other stations. She was supposed to make the public aware and ask them to help us find the girl.”

“That’s not what happened.” Arden’s words barely registered through the low buzzing in his ears.

“No.” The light turned green, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Rage boiled hot under his skin, and the back of his neck heated. “She tracked the husband down herself by narrowing the list of all the pharmacies where he’d have to refill his daughter’s insulin and interviewing each and every pharmacist with his photo in hand. Within a couple of days, she’d found him. Mere steps ahead of us, and instead of calling police, she asked him for an interview. She wanted the father’s side of the story. She wanted to be the one with the exclusive, so he invited her into his friend’s house where he’d been holing up while the owners were on vacation.” Images of that scene superimposed over the all the rest he’d walked into flashed across his mind. “She’d made it only a few steps into the house. I’m not sure if she met or saw the little girl before the son of a bitch planted a knife into her back, but he must’ve realized she wasn’t the only one who could find him. He killed his daughter, too. Just left her there in the middle of the floor with the reporter who was supposed to help bring her home. Like a piece of garbage he didn’t need anymore.”

Long fingers slid across Lawson’s thigh, ripping him back into the moment. The light turned yellow then red, but it was the feel of Arden’s hand on him that kept his senses hostage. “You never told me the details. You’d convinced me you were handling it.”

“The cases I work, the things I’ve seen, I didn’t want you or Rey to have to face any of it. I’m the one who broke protocol. I’m the one who trusted someone I shouldn’t have, and it got two innocent people killed, including that four-year-old girl. I have to live with the consequences of that case for the rest of my life, but that’s not my point.” Her fingers stabbed into the muscle of his thigh as the sound of their daughter’s name, but he wasn’t going to pretend they hadn’t lost the best part of themselves. He wasn’t going to pretend they weren’t still hurting. He slid his grip to the bottom of the steering wheel as the light changed again. Angling his head toward her, he nodded. “You accused me of having a grudge against the media, and you’re right. I do. I don’t trust reporters or journalists or news anchors—any of them—because in my experience, their motives are purely selfish. Hell, if we learned anything from Rose Hindley back there, it’s that even the most trusted sources are hiding secrets from the people they’re supposed to care about. Journalists like Baldwin Webb don’t want to help protect the public. All they want—all any of them want—is to be more significant than the people beneath them. No matter who they hurt in the process. I made the mistake of letting that reporter run her own investigation. I’m not going to do the same with you.” He stepped on the accelerator. “We’ll go to Phil Anderson’s together.”

Dark clouds tumbled over one another overhead as Lawson and Arden pulled into the ferry parking lot a few minutes later, and he headed toward the long line of cars wanting to cross to the mainland. “Is that all you see me as, Lawson? A journalist who can’t be trusted?”

His gut clenched. No. She wasn’t. She was the woman he’d fallen in love with in that bar nearly a decade ago. The woman who’d balanced the most violent memories with years of good ones. She was the mother of his only child. She was his wife, and a larger part of him than he cared to admit, and she was begging him to believe her intentions with this investigation weren’t selfish. To trust that she really wanted to uncover the truth of what happened to Jacqueline Day and Baldwin Webb and not use the facts of the case to her advantage. But he couldn’t. Not after hard-learned experience had proven otherwise. The reporter he’d depended on during the case of the missing girl had put herself in danger by trying to climb to the top, and the similarities between her drive to succeed and Arden’s were too familiar. He’d already lost his daughter to something he couldn’t control. He wasn’t going to lose his wife. “It doesn’t matter how I see you, Arden. None of it changes the fact I’ve got a killer to find, and you’re going to do everything in your power to take advantage of me and this case to get what you want.”

Lawson paid for the ticket to board the ferry and drove them up the ramp to park. Mere seconds after shoving the vehicle into Park, Arden shouldered out of the SUV and disappeared between the line of parked cars with her bag over her shoulder, presumably to head toward the deck. Damn it. What was he doing? She wasn’t supposed to be here. He’d sworn not to trust the wrong person again, but neither could he ignore the visceral, gut-clenching need to keep her close. Two journalists—people she’d known—had already been murdered, and the thought of walking onto a scene where the medical examiner identified Arden as the victim was too much to bear.

He slipped between the parked vehicles and headed for the stairs leading up to the deck. The vibrations of paint-coated metal shot up his legs as he stared out over the vast expanse of Puget Sound. Rolling waves tipped the head of the ferry up slightly as he caught sight of the blonde beauty clinging to the railing twenty feet to his left.

Her coat lifted with the help of the wind skimming across the water as she turned her face into the sprinkling rain, and paralysis took hold. Apart from the moment she’d single-handedly brought their daughter in to the world, he’d never seen a more perfect sight in all his life. Beautiful. Tension bled into her shoulders as he stepped up to the railing beside her, but she didn’t turn to face him. “I’m not that reporter, and I’m not Baldwin.”

“I never meant to imply you were, but I see too many similarities between them and you. I see the same drive to get the story, and I…I don’t want you to end up like they did.” Settling his forearms across the top rail, Lawson leaned into it for support as small jellyfish floated past the stationary boat. Cold gusts whipped across his skin, but while all the other passengers had opted to take shelter inside, he craved the stark drop in temperature. The pressure valve in his chest released as the truth surfaced. “I don’t want to lose you because I made the mistake of bringing you into this investigation.”

A spear of sunlight broke through the storm and lightened the color of her eyes as she turned to face him. “You can’t lose me, Lawson. I’m not yours to lose.”

Chapter Eleven

Wedged in among multi-million-dollar price tags, the rambler-style house outside the Redmond city limits stuck out with dirty, medium-blue siding, overgrown hedges, and brown spots eating what was left of the grass. Banded stacks of mail had built up around the bottom of the free-standing mailbox, edges of letters and ads sticking out from the thin tin door as Arden and Lawson headed up the cracked driveway. The windows cut out along the top of the garage had aged with dust. This was the last known address of the second journalist who’d claimed Baldwin had plagiarized his work. Phil Anderson, a man who’d lost everything according to his editor. Arden’s throat dried with her shallow breaths. No sign of a vehicle or evidence that anyone had stepped foot on the property in months, but the possibility of not verifying her mentor had stolen another journalist’s work wasn’t what squeezed her lungs in a vise.

It was Lawson. He’d revealed the details of one of the toughest cases in his career, given her insight into how dark and perverted his investigations could get, and every cell in her body had urged her to try to ease the guilt he’d carried all these years. Right up until the moment he’d implied everyone in the media was exactly like the reporter who’d gotten herself and that little girl killed, that the people in her line of work were a danger to his investigations. That he couldn’t trust them. That he couldn’t trust her.

She’d given him her word not to write about the story surrounding Jacqueline Day and Baldwin Webb’s murders at the risk of losing everything she’d worked for, but it hadn’t been enough. She would never be enough. Not for him. Arden slipped her thumb beneath her coat sleeve, tracing the puckered scar at the base of her palm. She’d learned that a long time ago.

“Rose Hindley was right. It doesn’t look like anyone has been here in weeks. Maybe more.” Lawson hit the doorbell with his thumb, the staticky sound barely reaching through the solid front door. A wide bay window caught the reflection of swaying trees and darkening clouds. The rain had let up, but it wouldn’t last long. Not with the worst yet to come. Lawson stepped down off the porch and glanced inside the window looking out over the front yard. “I don’t hear anyone inside. Don’t see anyone either. No cars in the driveway. I don’t think anyone has lived here for a while.”

“The land records still show the house is in Phil Anderson’s name. I can’t imagine he would’ve walked away from his only source of equity after he stopped writing for The Daily Herald and his marriage ended.” Arden slipped her hands into her coat pockets, surveying the street. The chains from a swing set at the back of the property protested as the wind picked up, and a chill swept down her spine.

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