Chasing Fire

the brains, the canniness, let’s say, the aptitude to do all that’s being laid down here? Forget motive and opportunity and all that cop shit.” Gull shrugged it off. “Is he the man for this?”
    Lucas said nothing for a moment, only nodding his head as if affirming his own thoughts. “He’s not stupid, and he’s a damn good mechanic. Starting from the back, yeah, he could’ve figured how to disable equipment without it showing until it was too late. Killing Latterly . . .”
    Lucas stuck his hands in his pockets, looked away at the mountains. “I’d see him going after the son of a bitch once he found out Latterly was messing with his daughter. I’d see him beating the man bloody for it, especially considering Irene’s connection to the church. It’s harder to see Leo putting a bullet in him, but not impossible to see.”
    He sighed once. “No, not impossible. He’d be capable of shooting up the base. Aiming for anybody, I don’t think so. But if he had, he wouldn’t have missed. And that’s one I’ve thought long and hard on since he’d have had Rowan in the crosshairs.
    “Dolly? They kept at each other like rottweilers over the same bone. He’s got a temper, that’s no secret, and it’s no secret she caused him a lot of shame and disappointment.”
    “But?”
    “Yeah, but. The only way I can see him killing her is an accident. I don’t know if I’m putting myself into it, or if that’s a fact, but it’s how I see it. I guess what I’m saying is I can see him doing any of those things, in the heat. He’s got a short fuse, burns hot. But it burns out.”
    “You’ve been giving all of this some long, hard thought.”
    “Rowan’s in the middle of it.”
    “Exactly. Hot temper. Hot and physical.” And, Gull thought, straight down the line of his own take on it. “Latterly and the tampering. Those were cold and calculated.”
    “You’re thinking some of this, maybe all of it, comes from somebody who works on base. Maybe even one of your own.”
    He thought of the men and women he’d trained with, the ones he fought with. “I haven’t wanted to think it.”
    “Neither have I, but I started asking myself these same questions after L.B. told me about the tampering. After I settled down some. We’ve skirted around it, but I’m pretty sure L.B.’s asking himself the same.”
    “Are you leaning in any particular direction?”
    “I worked with some of these people. You know as well as I that’s not like sharing an office or a watercooler. I can’t see anyone I know the way I know those men and women in this kind of light. And I don’t know if that’s because of what we were—still are—to each other or because it’s just God’s truth.”
    He waited a beat, watching Gull’s face carefully. “You haven’t told Rowan your line of thinking?”
    “I did.”
    Approval and a little humor curved Lucas’s lips. “We can add you’ve got balls to what I know about you.”
    “I’m not going behind her back.” He thought of where he stood right now, and with whom. And grinned. “Much. Anyway, I made a spreadsheet. I like spreadsheets,” he said when Lucas let out a surprised laugh. “They’re efficient and orderly. She doesn’t want to think it could be true, but she listened.”
    “If she listened, and didn’t kick the balls I know you have up past your eyes for suggesting it, it must be serious between the two of you.”
    “I’m in love with her. She’s in love with me, too. She just hasn’t figured it out yet.”
    “Well.” Lucas studied Gull’s face for a long moment. “Well,” he repeated, and sighed a second time. “She’s got a hard view of relationships and their staying power. That’s my fault.”
    “I don’t think so. I think it’s circumstances. And she may have a hard head and a guarded heart, but she’s not closed up. She’s too smart, too self-aware, not to mention a bred-in-the-bone risk-taker to deny herself what she wants once she’s decided she wants it. She’ll figure out she wants me.”
    “Cocky bastard, aren’t you? I like you.”
    “That’s a good thing, because if you didn’t, she’d give me the boot. Then she’d be sad and sorry the rest of her life.”
    At Lucas’s quick, helpless laugh, Gull glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to start heading back.”
    “I’ll walk back with you. I run here off and on,” he reminded Gull. “And I have something I need to tell Rowan, face-to-face.”
    “If it’s that