caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror attached to one of her closet doors. A low groan escaped her as she studied the grubby clothes that dwarfed her petite figure, and the fuzzy house shoes that would have looked more at home at a teen slumber party. She ran a hand over her spiky hair and glared at the smudge of dust on her unpainted cheek.
“No wonder he still thinks I’m twelve,” she muttered. She winced when she remembered his ex-wife, with her perfect hair, perfect face, perfect teeth, perfect breasts. Lindsey turned sideways and poked out her chest, eyeing the results in the mirror. “Pitiful,” she grumbled. “Just pitiful.”
She mentally replayed the way she’d bantered with Dan, swapping put-downs and bad jokes, pretty much the way she and her brother carried on when he was home. When they met on a professional basis, she and Dan usually ended up yelling at each other—and she’d admit that she usually started it. Maybe it was just a teensy bit her fault that he hadn’t seen her as a sexy, desirable woman.
If she gave up now and moved away, putting her dreams behind her, would she always regret not giving it one more try? She’d never been a quitter, and had never been hesitant to go after something she wanted—except for Dan. What did she have to lose—except her dignity, her pride and her ego?
The grubby woman in the mirror suddenly looked a little pale, but there was a new look of determination in her green eyes.
Dan Meadows was about to find himself with a brand-new problem on his hands.
Chapter Two
“What are you doing here already?” Dan’s secretary said, glaring at him from his office doorway.
He looked up from the paperwork littering his desk and said, “Excuse me?”
“I heard you didn’t leave here until after ten last night. Now here it is not even eight in the morning and you’re already at it again.” Hazel Sumners shook her head in exasperation. “You are not Superman, Dan Meadows. You need rest.”
He heaved a gusty sigh. “I’ll have you know I got nearly eight hours’ sleep last night. That’s plenty of rest for a grown man.”
“Rest involves more than a few hours of sleep,” she scolded. “How about leisure time? You know—fun? You didn’t even take time off for Lindsey’s birthday party Friday night.”
“I saw Lindsey on Saturday,” he retorted. “I didn’t totally ignore her birthday.”
“That isn’t the point. You should have been at that party having a good time with your friends. You should have taken off Saturday afternoon to go fishing with Cameron, and a few hours yesterday for church and a nice Sunday dinner somewhere. But what did you do? You worked, except for having a quick sandwich with Lindsey.”
“How did you—”
“I saw Lindsey at church yesterday morning, and I asked her if she’d seen you during the weekend. She told me you popped in to tell her happy birthday and then came right back to the office.”
“Do you ask everyone about my business, or just a select few?” He kept his tone mild, but he couldn’t help being a bit annoyed that Hazel had been monitoring his actions so closely. Her job was to keep up with his work schedule, not his personal life.
“Your friends are worried about you, Dan—and so are your co-workers. You’re working too long and too hard, and if you don’t slow down you’re going to crash just as hard.”
It was with some effort that he held on to his patience. “I’ll take some time off as soon as we catch whoever has been setting fires around here.”
Still scowling, she shook her spray-stiffened, salt-and-pepper head. “This is just like those break-ins that took all your time last summer. You said that as soon as you solved those, you’d take a vacation. But Delbert Farley’s been in jail for weeks now and you’re still working just as hard as ever. Catch this firebug and something else will come up. And before you know it, your whole life will have passed you by.”
“Thank you so much for that cheery prediction. Now perhaps you could go answer the phone before it rings right off your desk?”
She turned and stalked away, mumbling something about foolish, stubborn men.
Unable to resist the cliché, Dan shook his head and muttered, “Women.”
What was going on with them these days, anyway? Lately it was either his secretary ragging him about his working hours, or his women friends nagging him to take a vacation. Concerned grandmas complaining about the blessedly few serious crimes that took place in Edstown, or his sister calling him to fuss about not making enough time for his family. Not to mention Lindsey—nipping around his heels one minute for every detail about his ongoing investigations…and then announcing out of the blue that she was considering moving away.
What was she thinking? Sure, she’d managed well enough in Little Rock for a couple of years before she’d moved back here. But she was a small-town girl at heart, not one of those tough, big-city reporters. And frankly he wouldn’t want to see her turn into one.
Not that she cared about that, of course. She hadn’t asked for his opinion. She’d simply stated that she was thinking about putting her house up for sale. It was actually none of his business—even if he had promised her brother that he would keep an eye on her now that their father had passed away.
He’d known even as he’d made the promise that it was only a formality. Though ten years younger than Dan and B.J., Lindsey was still a grown woman, fully capable of making her own decisions. If she chose to move to Dallas or Atlanta—or Antarctica, for that matter—there was little anyone could do to stop her. Certainly not someone who was nothing more to her than a long-time friend of her older brother.
Oddly enough, considering how often Dan complained about her hanging around so much in her professional capacity, he would miss her if she moved away.
Forcing his concentration back to his work, he glanced at the files littering his desk. They contained summaries of the fires that had been set around town—starting with the old dairy barn last summer. A few weeks after that, a recently vacated rent house had burned, under strikingly similar conditions. An old garage a few weeks after that. And then the tragic cabin fire—the one in which Truman Kellogg had died.
Kellogg had been asleep when the fire started and he’d died in his bed—probably never woke up, mercifully. None of the other suspicious fires had involved buildings that were occupied. Of course, there was the possibility that the arsonist hadn’t known anyone was there: Truman had rarely visited his vacation cabin and then usually only during summer months.
There had been other details about that fire that differed from the others, but it was hard not to be suspicious about it, considering everything that had been going on in the past few months. Neither Dan nor the fire chief had ruled out arson in Kellogg’s death, though they had no proof that the fire had been deliberately set—not like the others, in which there were obvious signs of arson yet no clue about the arsonist.
There’d been a long gap between that fire and the next one—the abandoned warehouse last week. Long enough that people had begun to hope the fires had ended. At least no one had died in the latest fire. Dan was determined to catch the guy before anyone else died.
“Chief?”
