Dark Burning: Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 6 Read online

  She smiled what she hoped was the right gigawatts and leaned toward him as she sat on the edge of the burnt orange arm chair, wishing she’d worn a longer skirt that morning. “I’m so happy to be here, Denzel.”

  It sounded utterly convincing to her ears and she damned near blinked at the shock of it. That might have ruined the effect.

  “Before we brought you out, I was telling the audience about my new lawnmower.”

  Okaaaaay. She had nothing to add to that. Literally nothing. She turned and blinked at the audience again, drawing a laugh she hadn’t intended.

  Denzel laughed, deep with the kind of vibrating echo that made a person want to hear more of it. “They had the same response. They didn’t want to hear about my lawnmower either.” He turned to the audience. “Why do you all hate my lawnmower?”

  Despite herself, Merritt felt a laugh bubble up. No wonder the man had been co-host of the show for five years. The audience was eating out of his hand over something as mundane as a lawnmower.

  She grinned at the audience, then back at Denzel. “Is this like a horsepower thing? Do you need a certain horsepower to get bragging rights where a lawnmower is concerned or something?”

  There came that deep laugh again. “You’re messing with me, aren’t you? On the air five minutes and she’s messing with me, people. In my own house.”

  Merritt felt herself relaxing and the next half hour passed with ease. On the final commercial break, Denzel cautioned her that he was going to ask her about the fires happening around town, so she was ready when he asked the question.

  “We can’t let you go today without asking you for an update on this arson investigation. You’ve been covering this from the start, haven’t you?”

  Merritt nodded. “I have. I got lucky, really.” She shifted, crossing her ankles as she leaned to the side, settling in her chair. “I was researching a really dry piece—”

  “I can’t picture you writing any dry pieces,” Denzel interrupted, his sexy voice going an octave deeper to give it a double dose of sexy times rumble.

  Merritt laughed. “Trust me, this was nothing more exciting than property title insurance. All of Dark Falls should be glad that article went in the trash before it ever hit the editor’s desk.”

  The audience laughed at her joke and Denzel leaned in, putting one hand on her arm.

  “And you made the connection between the first couple of fires during that research?”

  Merritt nodded. “I did. The first piece I published just noted the possible connection between the fires at two abandoned properties, but at this point, there have been more and the police have confirmed the link.”

  Denzel leaned in. “And, do they have any leads? Do they have any idea why this person is setting fires?”

  Merritt took a deep breath wondering if he really thought she was going to tell him something earth shattering or if he was just doing this for ratings. “I can’t share anything about any leads, but I think this arsonist seems to be trying to avoid injuring people.” She hesitated but continued. “I mean, it seems that way, at least. He’s targeted abandoned properties in the past and now with the most recent fire, a house that was empty at the time of the fire.”

  Denzel leaned in closer to her, his eyes holding her, moving slowly like he might say something mind blowing, and then he spoke. “We’ll be back right after this break.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Merritt’s hands shook as she left the stage. It hadn’t been a train wreck and she was fairly sure the encouragement and compliments she was getting from Denzel and the assistant producer weren’t complete BS, but that didn’t stop her from feeling like she might throw up.

  She nodded at anyone who spoke to her, feeling a little glassy-eyed as she wound her way toward the chair where she’d left her bag. It might not have been the complete disaster she’d predicted but she didn’t ever want to do it again.

  She lifted her bag into her lap, glad that the buzz of the production meant everyone had gone back to work around her. They were ignoring her now.

  Her boss was dancing around the producer, trying to get him to commit to having her on again. Merritt felt the uncharacteristic urge to smack him boil up in her. She wasn’t a violent person, but this man was drawing something out in her she hadn’t known was there.

  Merritt could feel her phone buzzing in her bag and was tempted to ignore it, but it wasn’t a good idea to ignore her phone nowadays with her son in full blown rebellion mode. He was still ticked off about their move and wasn’t showing signs of letting up on the acting out anytime soon.

  She pulled it out, surprised to see she had eight missed calls, and they were all from Eric. She supposed she should think of him as Detective Cantu but it was hard to do that. The first time they’d met, they had been naked within hours of saying hello. Her cheeks flushed at the thought of it.

  It was cliché to say she had never done anything like that before, but it was the God’s honest truth. She had dated Collin’s father for almost six months before sleeping with him, making it all the more shocking to her when he had walked away when she found herself pregnant.

  She’d thought they would be getting married long before the baby came into the picture. Of course, he apparently hadn’t been on the same page. That had become abundantly clear when he’d returned to Ireland without her.

  Still, she wasn’t a saint. So she’d slept with other men before, usually after a long period of dating and an even longer discussion about birth control. But she really and truly had never done what she’d done with Eric. She didn’t go home with strange men in bars and have sex.

  Her phone stopped ringing, only to start again within seconds. Clearly, the man needed to talk to her. She would have bet anything the man would have conveniently forgotten his boss’s order to keep her apprised of developments in the case, but who knew? Maybe he had something to share with her. It happened.

  Sometime the police wanted to get something out there and they used a friendly news source to do it.

  “Hello,” she said, planning to ask if there was an emergency with her next breath, but not getting the chance.

  “Are you out of your mind? Have you somehow lost the ability to think like a smart, critical, functioning human being since the last time I saw you?”

  Merritt froze for a split second before saying into the phone, “Detective Cantu?”

  She knew it was him on the phone. She’d know his voice anywhere. Still, she thought for sure he must have dialed her number by mistake. So, maybe once he heard her voice, he would recognize his mistake and stop ranting.

  It didn’t work.

  “Yes, this is Detective Cantu.” This was said in a tone that said it should have been obvious to her. “Do you want to tell me what the hell you were thinking?”

  He was back to the growling tone she was used to from him. Okay, so he knew he had called her. She still had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Um,” she said, then almost kicked herself for sounding so hesitant. “You’ll have to tell me what you’re talking about if you want an explanation.”

  Wait. Why was she offering to give him any sort of explanation? Damn, the man had her flustered. She stood up from the chair she’d sunk into, thinking maybe the height and stiff spine would help her keep her wits about her as she tried to get through this conversation.

  His words were ground out and she could picture the furrow between his brows he’d have if he were here facing her in person. “You just went on national TV and taunted this guy.”

  Merritt spun and looked back to the set she’d left a moment before. He had watched the show.

  “It was only local,” she said almost absently as she tried to process that he’d just watched her on the show.

  He growled.

  She pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at it before bringing it back to find him ranting again.

  “—and you have no idea if that guy was watching or not. He could have seen you
r little performance as easily as I had. How do you think he’ll take to being psychoanalyzed?”

  “I wouldn’t call it —”

  “Oh yeah? Then what would you call it? You sat there and talked about him trying to protect people, like he’s some kind of hero or something. This guy is a sicko, Mer, and you just drew his attention to you. You put yourself in his sights!”

  “Detective Cantu,” she said, adding steel to her voice to make sure he knew she was finished with this conversation. “If you just called to yell at me, this conversation is over.”

  She remembered how she’d seen him that first night. She knew walking into that bar that she was only going to get a one-night stand. She’d wanted one night of wild freedom. She was moving away from the support system of having her family to help her raise Collin. She knew she was going to be completely on her own from then on. She wanted to go out and be carefree and wild for just one night.

  She hadn’t been foolish enough to think that their night was going to go anywhere other than where it had gone. Back to her hotel room. She wasn’t stupid about men anymore. She had her eyes wide open as far as the other sex was concerned.

  Still, despite being realistic, she remembered thinking when he pulled out her barstool and put a hand on her elbow to help her stand, that he was a modern-day gentleman. A sexy, hard-muscled, sweet-talking modern-day gentleman.

  What a crock. She mumbled the line from Gone with the Wind under her breath as she looked back on that night. “You sir, are no gentleman.”

  He snorted and she realized he’d heard.

  “It’s ‘sir, you are no gentleman,’” he said.

  Now it was her turn to growl. Only it was less of a growl and more of a grinding of teeth to keep the shout in. She hung up before he could deliver any more corrected movie lines to her. She couldn’t believe he knew the line, much less had the audacity to correct her.

  Ass.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I’m Bill Lincoln.” Jackwagon stood at the front of the bullpen and gave them all a smile. It was one of those creepy smiles like the principal of your elementary school might give you when he tried to convince you there was a pal in principal. “You all can call me Bill.”

  Or Jackwagon.

  Eric didn’t need to look at the rest of the unit to know they weren’t buying this guy’s act, either. He hadn’t been sent here to be their friend. He had been sent to spy on them and report back to the mayor’s office.

  “I’ve been around the building for the last couple of days working with the other units and the patrol officers, so some of you may have seen me around.”

  He nodded at Eric and John with a smile like they were buddies or some shit and Eric fought the urge to correct his use of the word may. Might was the word he was looking for. He tipped his chin up instead, giving the kind of acknowledgment that would tell his unit he wasn’t vouching for the guy.

  What bothered Eric the most about the man was the way he’d been trying to take over the Captain’s role in their conversation the other day, clearly attempting to step all over her, but here he was giving all of them the I’m your best friend line. He would have respected him more if he’d at least shown his true colors here.

  “I’ll be working with all of you on the image we project.” He scanned the room. “We’re going to start with the professionalism of our detectives.” He put extra emphasis on the final word. “We need you all in suits, looking like the professionals we know you are.”

  Beside him, Scanlon kept her face utterly still and Eric had a feeling she’d already had this argument with him. He understood the desire to put them all in suits. Really, he did. It was what most detectives wore, whether on television or real life. It just wasn’t what their team did. They’d switched out of suits fifteen years ago and it had been working for them.

  There was the distinct sound of shifting of feet and people murmuring.

  There was a reason they dressed like they did in business casual or jeans and tees. It let them go into situations where they might need to look like an average person on the street instead of being labeled right off the bat as cops.

  If they had to wear suits for anything other than court, they’d be forever running in and out of the station house to change if they needed to run and execute a warrant.

  “What you wear says a lot about who you are,” Jackwagon said, the tone scolding.

  Eric looked at the man’s suit. He was right. His suit was tailored and had that look too-fashionable men wore where the suit was just a little too snug and a little shorter in the leg. It shouted loud and clear that the person wearing it didn’t work for a living. They worked at looking good.

  “When you show up on someone’s doorstep to interview them, we want them to see the DFPD as professional officers, not looking like a bunch of thugs.”

  Eric listened with half an ear. This guy would have to learn for himself why this was a bad idea to stick every single one of them into a suit. There would be no trying to tell this asshole what to do.

  Eric’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out, seeing it was his mother’s nursing home. Dammit.

  He stepped out of the room and answered, knowing her monthly bill had been paid so they had to be calling about something else. “This is Eric Cantu.”

  “Mr. Cantu? This is Maria from the Spring Oak Living Center. I’m calling about your mom. She’s fine,” she rushed to say, “but she’s taken a little fall. She would feel better if you came over and checked in on her.”

  Eric rubbed his neck and looked back into the bullpen, catching John’s eye. It was either go see his mom or stay here and listen to more bullshit from Jackwagon. He held up his phone to John to signal that he’d call him and then headed out to his car as he told the woman from the center that he’d be there in twenty minutes.

  He mentally geared himself up for seeing his mom as he drove. If she was hurt, he wanted her to get the care she needed. He never wanted to see her in pain.

  Still, knowing he was going to have to see her threw him back to being a kid, being at the mercy of her manipulations. If she’d had some reason for her lies all these years, he might be able to handle her better. If she’d been an addict or had a gambling problem, maybe he could see it as an illness and be able to support her in trying to get better.

  The truth was, though, that there was no reason for her behavior other than that she was selfish and didn’t care about anyone other than herself. If she was caught in her lies, it was nothing more than annoying to her. She wasn’t even a compulsive liar. If there was no reason to lie, she didn’t.

  The trouble was, it could be hard to figure out if she had a motivation to tell a lie or not, since her reasoning could be something so mundane that only she could see it. Eric could remember too many times when his mom wanted attention or wanted to feel better about herself and didn’t care who she hurt. She cheated on his dad almost with an open flippancy like she wanted everyone to know.

  When Eric was twelve, she was mad at his dad. She told Eric his father wasn’t his birth father. Of course, she also told him it would hurt his father too much to know that Eric knew. So for years, he kept it secret. She strung him along on that secret, telling Eric someday, when the time was right, she’d introduce him to his real dad.

  Take a kid who loves their dad and tell them some fucked up story like that and the damage is pretty bad. Eric loved his dad, but wanted to know his real father, too. The guilt of that had eaten at him.

  He’d studied his dad for signs he was or wasn’t his. There was no easy birth mark they shared or anything like that, and it turned out kids are piss poor at comparing the shape of a chin or the color of eyes. It took Eric years to get up the courage to ask his dad.

  His dad had cried. Not in front of Eric, but after. After he’d showed Eric pictures of himself as a kid and pointed to the shape of their faces and the color of their eyes and the way they both had the same cowlick. But then his dad had gone into the bedroom and cr
ied.

  So, yeah, he didn’t visit his mom. He visited his dad’s grave and talked to him like he was still alive at least once a month, but not his mom.

  Still, that didn’t stop the churning in his gut on the ride to the home. He clenched the steering wheel. If she was hurt badly, they would have told him on the phone. Yeah, he told himself. The fact they hadn’t meant she was okay.

  Or it meant this was bogus and she was faking.

  Shit. Eric already had red flags going off when he walked into the home where his mom lived, but the strange look on the receptionist’s face confirmed it. He had asked if she had any news about his mom and her fall, and she looked at him with pinched brows and a small shake of her head.

  “I haven’t heard anything about a fall,” she said. Looking down at the desk in front of her as though there might be some news of it there.

  The center was a small one, with only twenty or so rooms on each of two floors. His mother was on the second floor. If he was a different man, maybe he would hope the receptionist simply hadn’t heard about her fall yet.

  He wasn’t that man.

  “I’ll just head up and see her,” he said, walking down the hall to the right to take the stairs up to the second floor.

  He found his mother in what the center called the day room. It was brightly lit and had tables for card games and an old television with two sofas that had seen better days. His mother was sitting at a table, playing cards, her laughter loud as she entertained the people around her.

  “I said to him, you can’t charm a charmer. I know exactly what you’re up to! Can you imagine,” she said, looking around to the faces of the people around her. Some looked like they had figured her out and knew the story was bullshit. Others looked like they were eating it up as she went on. “I mean really, who would have thought a five-time Emmy winning actor would try to pick me up in the grocery store!”

  Her eyes landed on him and her smile widened. “Eric!”