Home > Meant to Be Immortal (Argeneau #32)(2)

Meant to Be Immortal (Argeneau #32)(2)
Author: Lynsay Sands

CJ’s eyebrows had risen higher and higher as he spoke. Now she said, “I don’t really see why you felt you had to stay here, Captain. It’s Jefferson I’m here to interview. You don’t need to be present for that.”

“I may not need to be, but he’s one of my men and I intend to be,” he told her firmly. “But that’s no never mind anyway since Jefferson is the one who caught the call about the fire on his way back to the station. He’s out there now waiting for us to join him.”

“Us?” CJ echoed with surprise.

“Us,” he said with a firm nod. “I need you there.”

“Why?” she asked at once.

“You’re a detective, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a question and he didn’t wait for an answer, but continued, “Well, I was a detective before I was captain, but that was twenty years ago. Evidence gathering may have changed since then. This is the first murder Sandford has seen, and I don’t intend to mess it up.”

“Surely one of your men—” CJ began, only to be interrupted.

“My only detective dropped dead of a heart attack last month. I haven’t hired a replacement yet, and while one of my younger fellows is taking a training course in detective work, he’s just started that. I need someone who knows their business out there to help with evidence collection. So—” he paused and raised his eyebrows “—I figure you can come tell us what to collect and how to bag it and ask Jefferson your questions while you’re at it.”

CJ was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking. “Captain, I’m not a cop. I’m with the Special Investigations Unit; we’re a civilian organization. We investigate cops; we aren’t one of them. I’ve got no business being at a crime scene,” she said firmly.

“You may not be a police officer now, but you used to be,” Captain Dupree said with unconcern.

CJ’s eyes narrowed at these words, and only continued to do so as he proved he’d looked into her background by adding, “In fact, while you started out on patrol like my boys, you moved up to homicide detective before shifting over to CSIS, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. I gather there you were blazing a fine trail of successes as one of the best detectives they had before you switched over to the SIU.”

He didn’t say “and became a traitor to the boys in blue,” but CJ could hear that in the words. Investigating the police for corrupt or illegal activity did not make you a lot of friends. At least not with the police. They tended to see CJ and the people she worked with as traitors to fellow officers. As far as other police officers were concerned, the members of the SIU were one step up from slugs. Or maybe one step down.

CJ didn’t particularly care. She had at first, but she’d gotten used to it, and what she did was important. To her mind, a good cop was worth their weight in gold, but every profession had their bad apples, and bad cops could do more damage than your average dirtbag criminal. She felt no regret or guilt over what she did.

“Well?” Dupree snapped. “Are you going to step up and help out here or what? If you don’t, we’ll have to wait for a detective from the Ontario Provincial Police to come help us. That could take days and evidence has a tendency to walk away or get trampled on if not gathered right away.”

CJ knew that when it came to fires, a lot of evidence was unavoidably damaged by the firemen as they fought to put out the fire anyway. But it was always better to collect whatever wasn’t damaged as quickly as possible.

“Sure,” she said finally. “I’ll help. But I can’t collect or bag evidence. That would affect your chain of custody.”

“You won’t have to. You just tell Jefferson what and how and he’ll do it,” he assured her, some of the stiffness sliding from his shoulders now that he had her agreement. He immediately came around the counter to hand her a slip of paper with an address on it. “That’s where the fire is. You’ll want to take your own vehicle so you aren’t stuck there until one of us is ready to go. You have GPS?”

CJ nodded as she glanced down at the address.

“Good. I’ll—”

“Captain!”

Irritation flickered over his face at that shout from somewhere toward the back of the building, and then Captain Dupree started to back away, saying, “You head on over there. I’ll follow in my squad car.”

He didn’t wait for a response, but turned and hurried around the counter and through the doorway at the back of the room, disappearing from sight just as someone shouted for him again.

CJ folded the slip of paper and headed back out to her car. This wasn’t how she’d planned to start her investigation, but that didn’t bother her. Investigations rarely went according to plan. Hell, neither did life for that matter, and she’d learned to roll with the punches that came at you. Still, being roped into a police investigation was a bit unexpected and, in this case, not something she was looking forward to since it involved a crispy critter. Her nose wrinkled at the term they had used on the force to describe murder victims whose remains had been burned. They’d had lots of nicknames for victims. Civilians probably would have thought them heartless and cruel for the most part, but when you investigated the atrocities people committed on each other, you had to find a way to separate yourself from it emotionally or it would tear you apart. Nicknames were just one of the ways they did that.

 

Sandford was a relatively small town of 12,000 people. That might not seem small to some. There were much smaller towns, but 12,000 was small for having its own police department. Most towns in Ontario that were that size, and some with even larger populations, had given up the expense of running their own department in favor of contracting out to the Ontario Provincial Police. Sandford had avoided that so far. But while the town wasn’t all that large when it came to population, it was much larger in physical size thanks to being a farming town and it took nearly twenty minutes to reach the address the chief had given her, which ended up being on a rural route lined with large fields and the occasional farmhouse.

CJ was able to see the house from several minutes away, or at least the fire raging through it. The building was an old brick farmhouse and the fire was still roaring, despite two fire trucks and more than a dozen men fighting valiantly to put it out. CJ pulled in behind a long line of pickups—volunteer firemen was her guess—parked on the grassy verge of the extremely long driveway and made her way up the gravel drive toward the chaos of bodies moving around the blaze. She was about halfway up the driveway when she heard the “whup whup” of the ambulance and saw it heading toward her. CJ had to step onto the grass to make way for it to leave, but then continued forward, heading for the only man in the mass of people ahead who was wearing a police uniform.

 

Pain, pain, pain. That’s what woke Mac. Every bit of his body was in agony, from the tips of his toes, to the top of his head, and every inch of his skin felt like it was afire. A scream of agony was rising up in his throat when voices pierced the cloud of suffering, distracting him.

“My God.”

“What is it, Sylvie? Is he dead? Should I turn the lights and siren off?”

“No, Artie. He’s still alive, but he’s—well, he’s healing.”

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