Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead(Finlay Donovan #2)(31)

“Get in!” she shouted. I ran for the passenger side, slamming the door as Vero made a tight turn and sped toward the back entrance of the farm, both of us breathing hard as bright yellow flames flickered through the smoke behind us. “What the hell just happened?”

“Someone firebombed Steven’s office, that’s what happened!” I gripped the dashboard as the Charger raced past the barren field Vero and I had dug up a month ago. The line of cedars at the rear of the property loomed ahead, and she slowed at the end of the gravel road, careful not to leave skid marks as she turned onto the asphalt.

The Charger picked up speed, hugging the winding road too tightly. Everything inside the car smelled like charcoal, and my throat grew tight around my swallow.

“Pull over,” I said, bile threatening to rise as the car soared over another bump.

Vero’s eyes narrowed on the curves ahead. “We can’t stop here.”

“I said, pull over!” My hands tightened on the passenger door. The tires squealed, kicking up smoke as the car skidded to a stop on the narrow shoulder. I flung open the door, heaving the meager contents of my stomach into the ditch.

When it was over, I rested my sweaty forehead on my smoke-blackened hands, my elbows braced on my knees and my butt perched on the edge of Vero’s bucket seat, waiting for the feeling to pass as I remembered the way the flames had curled around the sofa.

“Steven slept on that couch,” I said, my voice ragged with acid and smoke.

I could feel Vero’s tension fill the car as she pieced together the bits I hadn’t said. Steven had only moved into his new house a few days ago. Up until last week, Steven had been living in that trailer. Sleeping on that couch. The only address FedUp had shared in the post was for the farm. If EasyClean had staked Steven out before taking the job, like Vero suspected, she would have known he’d been sleeping in his office.

A tongue of orange flames licked the sky in the distance, clouds of black smoke smudging out the stars. I wondered if Steven’s security system was tied to his smoke detectors. If it would alert the authorities in time for anything from his office to be spared, or if it would all burn to the ground before anyone reported the fire.

I wiped the last of the sickness from my mouth and shut the passenger door.

“Whoever EasyClean is, she wasn’t exactly neat.” Vero shook her head at the flames. “You and I would have done a much better job.”

I raised an eyebrow at her soot-smeared face.

She held up her hands; they were as filthy as the rest of her. “I’m just saying, for one hundred grand, you expect a person to be professional. Thank you, by the way, for not puking in my car. See? Neat,” she added, gesturing to me, as if my ability to avoid vomiting on her upholstery should be a bullet on my résumé. My dark laugh brought tears to my eyes, and I wiped them with my sleeve.

Vero put the car in gear and eased us back onto the road. “Did you get anything from Bree’s desk?”

“I found her name and address on her time card and a few odds and ends she left in a drawer. Her last day of work was the twenty-sixth of October.” Vero threw me a meaningful glance, probably thinking the same thing I was. Steven hadn’t been entirely forthcoming about when he’d laid Bree off. Which meant he probably hadn’t been honest about why either. “How about you? Did you find anything in Steven’s books?”

“I didn’t have time to read them, but I took a bunch of photos of his transactions over the last few months. And I snapped some pics of the bills in his inbox. We can go through them at home. Maybe we’ll dig something up.” At my wince, she shrugged. “Sorry. Bad pun.”

A siren wailed in the distance. Vero checked her rearview mirror and I turned in my seat. Red-and-white flashing lights flickered through the trees behind us, racing toward the farm. There wasn’t likely to be much left standing, but at least Steven hadn’t been sleeping there—or worse, passed out drunk on the sofa in his office—when the fire started.

“You think the cops will talk to the security company?” Vero asked.

I thunked my head against the window, clapping a hand over my eyes. The fire marshal would need a day or two to collect evidence. And the police would need time to obtain a warrant to talk to the security company. But Steven … he could request a report from the security monitoring service within a matter of hours. He could pass that information along to the detectives if he wanted to speed up the investigation. “The record of my conversation with the security company will lead them right to Bree.”

“If she didn’t hire EasyClean to roast Steven, she doesn’t have anything to worry about.”

“What if she did?” I still wasn’t convinced Bree was entirely innocent. “I need to talk to her before the police do. Steven’s hiding something. He lied about the reason he fired her, and as far as I can tell, she hasn’t been back to the farm since; all of her personal stuff is still sitting in a file drawer. If she was upset enough not to go back for her things, then maybe she was angry enough to pay someone to kill him.”

“You seriously think she’s responsible for this?”

“I don’t know, but if she is, I need to convince her to call off the job before the police have a chance to arrest her.”





CHAPTER 16