Born Wild by Julie Ann Walker Page B

help but wonder if Wild Bill had misjudged the woman.
    ***
    Black Knights Inc. Headquarters, 2nd Floor
    8:20 p.m.
    No, no, no. Something isn’t right. How the hell did the arson investigator miss this?
    â€œYou gonna invite us?” Mac asked, dragging Bill’s attention away from the high-resolution photos Jeremy Buchanan had provided. They showed Eve’s blackened, gutted condo, and if Bill was being honest, Buchanan had really come through for them in a couple of ways. First, he’d held his own as they escorted Eve to the Hummer—Bill had recognized that kill-or-be-killed look in the man’s eye, the look that said Buchanan had been willing to do whatever needed to be done in order to keep his cousin safe. And second, these files were straight-up cherry. Comprehensive and detailed.
    He wondered if maybe, just maybe, he’d jumped to the wrong conclusion about the guy. Not that Buchanan wasn’t still an asshole. He was. No question. But there were quite a few people who thought Bill was an asshole, so that particular moniker didn’t hold a hell of a lot of water. Plus, the dude worked vice. He was a multimillionaire, trust-fund baby who preferred to get his hands dirty in the trenches to make the world a better place rather than sitting in some high rise celebrating the high life. So, yeah, maybe Buchanan wasn’t as ginormous a tool as Bill’d initially thought.
    â€œHey. I said, you want to invite us?” Mac repeated.
    â€œHuh?” he frowned, his eyes darting back to the photo in his hand, his thoughts racing along with his heart. Most of the guys he worked with had metronome-steady pulse rates, but not him. Nope. He’d never perfected that little trick. Then again, unlike other operators, the adrenaline didn’t make him weaker or less logical. Hell, no. It did just the opposite, focusing him, sharpening his world and everything in it to a fine point. Except, for the life of him, he couldn’t guess what in the world Mac was talking about. “Invite you to what?”
    â€œThat party you got going on in your head,” Mac drawled. “You’ve been sitting over there making noises for the last five minutes.”
    He had?
    Bill glanced at the other two people seated around the conference table. Eve was gnawing her thumb down to what had to be a bloody stump, and Ace, holding the report on the condition of Eve’s Vespa, was frowning at him over the top of it.
    Okay, so obviously he had. But that’s because he was onto something big, huge . And the only thing that tempered his excitement at having made this particular discovery was the knowledge that Eve had been right all along…
    Someone was trying to kill her. Sonofabitch.
    â€œThe fire department used the old method of locating the fire’s point of origin by relying on lowest burn and deepest char pattern,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. That method had been proven faulty more than five years ago. “Which points to the drapes on Eve’s living room window. But what they didn’t take into account was that the fire burned for over six minutes after the initial flashover and before the CFD put it out. And that means it had time to change from a fuel-controlled fire to a ventilation-controlled fire.”
    He glanced around at the faces looking back at him, expecting something more than a series of wide-eyed blinks. Then he reminded himself not everyone—very few people, in fact—understood the mechanisms by which explosions, and the resulting flames, operated, and he tried to put it in layman’s terms.
    â€œIt means the fire didn’t originate from the curtains lit by the candle. It means the fire originated by the front door and spread toward the air coming in through the open window. See,” he slapped the photo he’d been examining down on the conference table and turned it around so the others could see, tapping the image with his