Page 33 of Bachelor Cop Finally Caught? (Hot off the Press! 2)

“What are you going to do now?” she asked after a momentary hesitation. “About Eddie, I mean.”

“I’m going to do my job—just as you’re going to do yours.”

She reached for her door handle. “Then I suppose we should both get on with it.”

“Lindsey—”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Yes?”

“If you want to stop by my office later today, I’ll let you have a look at the notebook. Off the record, of course.”

Her green eyes widened almost comically in surprise. “You’ll let me see it? Why?”

Damned if he knew. “Maybe I’d like your opinion,” he suggested, although he’d already had so-called experts examine the book and had others scheduled to look at it later that very afternoon.

Maybe Lindsey was as frustrated by the distance between them as he was. She accepted his offer quickly enough. “I’ll be here later, then. What time?”

“It will be late before I’m free—around eight, I’m afraid. Too late?”

“Of course not. Want me to bring some sandwiches or something? You’ll be hungry by then.”

r /> “Sounds good.”

“Highly irregular, of course,” she murmured with a shadow of her usual impish smile.

He was well aware of that. Sharing evidence with a reporter was hardly standard operating procedure. But this wasn’t just any reporter, of course.

This was Lindsey.

Chapter Eight

Savory scents lingered in Dan’s office even after the pizza Lindsey had brought in with her had been reduced to a grease-stained box and a few nibbled crusts. Sitting side by side behind the desk, Dan and Lindsey had pored over every page of the notebook, as well as all the papers in the manila folder Dan had borrowed from Eddie Stamps’s bedroom.

“Look at the letter a.” Lindsey pointed to a word in the notebook and another word on one of the essay test papers. “The little crook at the top? It’s very similar in both examples.”

Dan looked carefully from one page to the other, for perhaps the hundredth time. “I think you’re right. I tend to believe Eddie Stamps wrote both of these.”

Lindsey nodded. Eddie’s writing for his schoolwork was almost obsessively neatly printed. Emotionless. The writing in the notebook was very different—scrawled, splotched, angry-looking. And yet, she sensed that what they were seeing was two sides of the same person rather than two different writers.

Everything she knew about Eddie indicated that he was a young man who kept a great deal locked up inside him. He said little, participated in few school activities and had few friends, though the ones he had were very loyal to him. They thought he was “cool.” Very smart, even though his grades in school were only adequate—but that, they agreed, was because he was bored by meaningless classroom work.

They all still denied knowing his whereabouts.

“Someone with this much pent-up rage and confusion could be setting fires in a twisted effort to express those emotions, couldn’t he?” she mused aloud, tapping the notebook.

Dan set down the canned soda he’d been sipping. “That’s what the expert from Little Rock said.”

“But what about the fire that killed Truman Kellogg? If the same person set that fire, could it have been an accident that someone died in it? All the other buildings were empty when they were burned—could the arsonist have believed Kellogg’s cabin was vacant, too?”

“To be honest, at this point I don’t know what the arsonist believes,” Dan confessed. “The consultants who have studied or heard about this notebook agree that it was written by someone who is seriously disturbed, very angry and about to explode, but they stop short of saying this is definitely the arsonist. As I’ve said before, he could just be fascinated by the fires, perhaps envious of the arsonist’s boldness. We could even be dealing with a potential copycat. But there’s no evidence here that indicates a calculated murder.”

He squeezed the back of his neck as he spoke, as if the muscles there were stiff and sore. Lindsey couldn’t help focusing on the lines around his mouth and the faint hollows beneath his eyes. He was tired, she thought. Troubled.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him look truly happy.

She tossed the paper she held onto the desk. “You’ve done all you can today. You’ve talked to practically everyone who ever spoke to Eddie, and you’ve studied these papers until I’m sure you have every word memorized. And somehow you’ve handled all your other responsibilities at the same time.”

“That’s my job,” he said, looking uncomfortable with her comments.

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