Page 5 of Rekindle My Heart

She eyed him. “If you are done with this new holistic thing you’ve got going on, we can start.”

Air whooshed out with his exhale. “Very funny. Your perfume is strong.”

Not really, but what could he say—you smell so good I’m getting a woody.

“I’m not wearing perfume.” She rolled her eyes.

Busted. He cleared his throat. “Let’s see the discrepancies you found.”

She pulled up a document. “This report was from a house fire on the third of July. The cause was listed as fireworks. I downloaded this report yesterday.”

“Okay.”

She pulled up another file. “This is the same incident. The same report. Except, I saved this one on July sixth. It shows the cause of the fire as faulty wiring.”

Ryan slid her computer closer, inspecting the reports. “How did you catch this?”

“The homeowner was a friend of mine. A fellow firefighter. He was out of town at the time of the fire. They lost everything.”

“But that doesn’t explain why you have the original report.” Ryan wanted to know her connection to this.

“Wyatt came to me after it happened, and he showed me the reports.” Her gaze scanned the room as if checking to see if anyone else was listening even though they were alone.

“Did he report the inconsistencies?” Ryan scanned the two reports, seeing if anything else was off.

“Yes.”

When she didn’t say more, he pulled his gaze from the screen to find her nodding. A hesitant up and down, as if she was nervous to speak the word.

Okay, what was she not telling him? “Why isn’t he here telling me all this?”

She gulped. “Because he died last month.”

Ryan jerked back. His gut screamed foul on the play. “I remember hearing about that. It was a car crash.”

“Single vehicle. Clean tox screen.”

He didn’t have to be a mind reader to see that Erica didn’t believe it was an accident.

“You’re telling me, Wyatt’s house burned to the ground and he found an error in the paperwork, reported it to his supervisor, and now he’s dead?”

“Yup.”

“Well.” Ryan leaned back in his chair, stroking his close-cropped beard. “That’s either shit luck or the man knew something that someone didn’t want to get out.”

“He mentioned some other things he came across, but he never showed me. After his death, I started digging into old reports and started downloading any new reports. I found two other issues. One with a car fire last month and a commercial building on First Street. The only reason I know that one was wrong is because I was inside, and no way was the flash point where the report claimed it was located.”

First Street? That was down the block from the fire on Sunday. He pulled out his card. “Could you send me those files? Also, I need to get into the fire department’s system to see if there is evidence of hacking or if the person who made the changes left any trace.”

She nodded. A loose curl bounced. With long, slim fingers, she tapped at the keyboard. A minute later, Ryan’s email pinged. The files and a link to the site where AFD stored their files appeared.

“Thanks, I will let you know what I find.” Ryan gathered up his stuff and stood. “Trey wants us to start going through old fire reports looking for more issues, but you already started doing that, so if you find anything else, give me a call.”

He picked up his card from the table, added his cell phone number to the back, and handed it to her.

With two fingers, as if it would explode in her hand, she slipped it into her bag.

Ryan stepped toward the door.