Wildfire by Cathie Linz Read Free Book Online Page A

you.”
    “I think we pretty well covered everything last night, Detective Gallagher.”
    “On the contrary. But that’s a different matter. Right now I’d like to talk to you about the fire.”
    “Oh.” She felt rather foolish for assuming Brady had come to discuss last night, when in fact it was an official visit.
    Brady pulled the visitor’s chair right up to her desk before sitting down. Suddenly the desk was transformed from a barrier to a working surface to be shared. He pulled a small notebook and a cassette recorder out of his vest pocket.
    Amanda was beginning to know his clothes almost as well as she did her own. That vest was the same one that she’d fumbled under the first time she’d met him, his shirt in muted grays and blues the same one that he’d worn the day he’d shown her his “references,” and the jeans hugging the male symmetry of his body were identical to the ones he’d worn last night.
    “Mandy?” His voice asked for her attention.
    “Mmm?” She’d given up trying to talk him out of using that nickname. In fact, the way he said it, it sounded kind of nice—warm and special.
Wait a minute, what
’
s wrong with you?
she silently demanded.
This man is dangerous, he proved it last night
.
    All he did was kiss you,
her sense of fair play contradicted.
He wanted you in his arms and he got you there. And you enjoyed it too, didn
’
t you?
    “Amanda!” That did get her attention.
    “I’m sorry. I was thinking about something.”
    “Something, or someone?” he challenged. The conflict in her eyes hadn’t gone unnoticed by him. Brady caught that certain look and was willing to bet that a man had put it there. Had she been thinking about Bob Mason? The possibility irritated him.
    What the hell was he worrying about it for anyway? He was here to discuss the fire. The past two weeks had turned up nothing in the way of clues about the arsonist’s identity. The lab report had come back with no conclusive results, except for the matter he’d come to discuss with Mandy.
    “The day you discovered the fire, you told me you’d gone downstairs to get some material out of the storage room.”
    “That’s correct.”
    “What kind of material?”
    “Duplicate books and periodicals. We participate in a duplicate exchange program with other libraries, trading our extra copies for things we need.”
    “Okay, so what happened when you got downstairs?”
    “Happened?”
    Brady rephrased his question. “What did you see?”
    “I didn’t see very much. As you know the lighting down there is not the best. I did smell smoke though, as I told you before.”
    Brady checked his notebook where he’d outlined the critical points of their last taped conversation. “Go on,” he prompted.
    “The smoke was coming from the storage room and I could see flames through the open door.”
    This was what he’d been hoping for. “You’re sure the door was already open when you got downstairs?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is that door normally left open?”
    “No, normally it’s locked.”
    “Who had keys to the room?”
    “I did, as did every department head. Then there’s one copy kept up front at the reference desk.”
    Brady swore under his breath. “So anyone could have had access to a key. Why was the room kept locked? Were any of the materials stored there valuable?”
    “No. The few rare books we have are kept in a fireproof file in the archive room. The storage room was kept locked only to prevent vandalism.”
    Brady jumped on that. “Had there been any trouble with the storage room before? Any attempts to break into it, anything like that?”
    “No, none at all that I’m aware of. You might want to check with Security to see if they had any reports.”
    Brady reached out a hand to switch off the pocket-sized cassette recorder and wrote a few lines in his notebook. But it was the way he wrote them that caught Amanda’s attention. She watched the telltale hook of his left hand as he scribbled