Then he went back to brooding over the stacks on his desk, held in place by three of his cameras. He moved his favorite carefully aside, the new and so-expensive-it-still-made-him-queasy digital, and pulled out one of the fourteen sets of blueprints he had to approve for the building department. Behind them was another stack of new building sites to inspect. Everyone in the entire county seemed to be building or rebuilding this year, and as a result, his scheduled workload had tripled.

This did not a happy Cindy make.

She’d been hot under the collar for days, which had meant no sleepovers for him. And now she’d given him an ultimatum. Cut back the hours or stick a fork in her, she was done.

He had to admit, she wasn’t asking for anything unreasonable, but cutting back just wasn’t going to happen, not at this time of year.

Adding to his troubles, it’d been three days since the warehouse fire, and he hadn’t yet satisfied himself that they were done with the scene. The suspected accelerant had turned out to be gasoline, which both Camille and Tina had told him in separate phone interviews they didn’t keep around. The mysterious vagrant hadn’t materialized, though they’d found evidence that someone had been there as recently as a week ago in the way of a boot print—size eleven and a half with diagonal tread. Interestingly enough, the print had held a trace of gasoline. Maybe the vagrant had attempted to light himself a campfire. No one knew.

Kenny thought they should rule undisclosed accidental fire caused by neglectful drifter, but Joe didn’t want to let it go. Only he wasn’t sure if that was because he felt tied up with the past, or if his instincts were truly screaming.

Kenny’s theory—which he’d been happy to share just this morning on a downtown high-rise fire inspection, where they’d been meticulously going through plans and checking fire escape routes—was that it was both. That because of the way Joe had grown up, he tended to keep people at bay, never sharing the real Joe Walker.

Joe had retaliated by pointing out that he’d shared plenty, using Kenny as an example, at which his partner had rolled his eyes. “Like I’m going to keep you warm at night. You need a woman, a good one, for the long haul.”

“This from the guy who changes women like shirts.”

“That’s only because I haven’t found the right one yet, but I plan to.” Kenny smiled at the challenge. “Can you say the same?”

“Yes.” He scowled at Kenny’s scoff. “And it’s not my fault I keep getting dumped.”

“Yes, it is. You don’t open up enough. How many times have I told you spill your beans, open the floodgates. Women get off on that stuff.”