“Right. And I’m sure you think I’m incompetent enough to have no idea that these questions are repeats, and that there’s absolutely no good reason to ask them twice.”
Her brows arched at the whaaaa? that had to be plastered all over his kisser, and wait… “You didn’t just forget?”
“Walker, please.” She laughed, although the sound wasn’t completely sarcastic. “I remember how you take your coffee, for God’s sake. I’m not going to blank on the details of a case I’m trying to break.”
Her words sank in good and hard, and hell if she didn’t have a point. Kellan turned off of Washington Boulevard, his curiosity doubling with every stoplight and side street, and screw it. “So why ask the same questions again if you already know the answers?”
“Because you’d be surprised how many details get swallowed by the adrenaline of a moment,” Moreno said, her shoulders softening ever so slightly against the black leather seatback behind her. “Sometimes witnesses remember particulars from an event after they’ve had a little time to process, so repeating interview questions after a few days can yield new information from time to time.”
Something hot and without a name tempted Kellan to tell her he knew exactly what a person could remember if given enough time to dwell on certain events, and damn it, he needed to lock up his emotions and get this little cloak and dagger mission over with.
“Sorry.” He forced his focus out the window to the dingy streets and crowded, weed-choked yards marking the outskirts of Remington’s North Point. “I really didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and there were barely any onlookers when we got to the scene. I remember thinking it was a good thing. Less people who might get hurt.”
“That is a good thing,” she said, dipping her chin in a small nod. “Your captain said he suspected the fire was electrical. Can you tell me why?”
Okay, yeah. Facts. This he could do. “The fire spread pretty fast, and there was a lot of heat in the walls. That’s pretty consistent with an electrical fire in an older structure, where the building materials might be out of date. Polystyrene insulation, stuff like that.”
Moreno let out a soft huh. “So chances are slim that this fire was set intentionally.”
“Arson’s actually a lot less common than most people think,” Kellan said. He’d only heard of a handful of arson cases in his two years with the RFD, all of which had been either wickedly obvious or notoriously difficult to nail down with proof.
“Is that a yes?” Although the question carried all of her trademark sass, her tone didn’t, and his answer popped out, matter-of-fact.
“That’s a yes. For calls like this, the fire marshal looks at the reports from the responding fire companies, then does a walk-through to determine whether or not a building is salvageable, but actual investigations are pretty uncommon. Anyway, there are only three reasons a person would torch a place on purpose, and none of them really makes sense for this scenario.”
“You’ve got my attention,” Isabella said, the spark in her eyes backing up her words and sending a bolt of unexpected heat right through Kellan’s bloodstream. “Hit me.”
He cleared his throat, collecting the energy to send a sternly worded back-the-hell-up message to his cock. Focus on what’s in front of you, jackass.
Right. Arson. “So, ah, the first is insurance fraud, which doesn’t seem to play in here unless I’m missing a pretty big puzzle piece.”
She nodded in agreement. “The house is owned by a rental company, but it’s been vacant for about six months. The last tenant was an eighty-year-old retired librarian with no known family, and the rental company had barely enough coverage to rebuild the place. They won’t gain much more than heartache from the place burning down. What’s the next reason?”
“To set the fire simply to watch it burn,” Kellan said, pausing to make a full stop on red before turning onto Glendale Avenue. “But true fire bugs are pretty rare, unless you’re binge watching action movies.”
“It doesn’t seem to fit the circumstances,” Moreno agreed. “So what’s the last reason?”
He exhaled, long and low. “To cover up a crime. Although if that were the case here, your guy would’ve attracted a whole lot less attention by burning the photos rather than the whole house. Since the pictures are pretty much the only thing to survive the fire…”
“It looks like this house burning down was not only accidental, but a lucky break.”
“You have a very weird definition of lucky,” Kellan said, pulling up in front of the house in question. But rather than get snippy or serious the way he expected, Moreno hit him with the full force of her grin.
“You have no idea, Walker. Now let’s go catch a bad guy.”
4