Free Fade the Heat by Colleen Thompson

she wanted to scream. She knew damned well he hadn’t gone anywhere except to confer with the arson investigator. But accusing him wasn’t going to get her out of here any faster.
    “You said Jack Montoya was at your house when the two of you heard about the fire,” Detective Worth continued. “Since doctors don’t make house calls and you look the way—the way you do, I’ve gotta figure he had some other reason to drop by.”
    Narrowing her eyes at him, she forced herself to speak slowly and distinctly. “He’s an old friend, that’s all.” Reagan uncrossed her legs after she noticed Worth studying the nervous jiggling of her foot. “My parents owned a rental house, and his folks were our tenants back when we were kids. But that was a long time ago. I haven’t even seen him in—I don’t know—twenty years or so. Until today.”
    “And you decided to renew this acquaintance because…”
    She wished she were facing Detective Dough Gut in the boxing ring instead of across a desk. Blood and teeth would be flying, and none of them would be hers. “As I mentioned earlier, I needed a release to return to work signed, so I went by his clinic.”
    Worth made a show of flipping through his little notepad. “Where you had some sort of altercation?”
    “A minor disagreement,” she amended. Altercation sounded like something a cop would write on an arrest report. “And he came by my place later to get things straightened out. For old time’s sake, I suppose.”
    Detective Worth raised an incredulous eyebrow, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from swearing.
    “He ask you out before the news story came up?” he asked.
    She snorted a humorless laugh, thinking of how angry Jack had been with her—and how irritated when she’d mentioned his mother’s nieto plans. “Not hardly.”
    “Guess he hadn’t gotten to that part yet,” Worth said. “So you don’t know anything about his friends at BorderFree-4-All?”
    She thought of what Jack had said on the way here in the car. I never cared about the politics, never gave a rat’s ass where they came from. All I wanted to do was keep some kids alive.
    “No way is Montoya tied up in that stuff,” she said. “All he cares about is helping patients, especially the kids.”
    “But you said you haven’t seen him in decades.”
    One left hook. That’s all she’d need to knock this turkey on his ass. It would damn sure be easier than explaining a gut feeling.
    “You know I’m with HFD,” she reminded him. “Like the cops, we’re on the streets all hours, and we meet a lot of citizens, most of them on the worst days of their lives.”
    He nodded.
    “When people are under stress,” she said, “they say things and do things that give you a feel for who they are. The defense attorneys of this world would probably say you’re making snap decisions, but on the streets you have to, don’t you? Otherwise, how do you know the guy who meets your ambulance at the scene of a stabbing isn’t about to whip out his knife to finish off the vic? How do you know he isn’t gonna take a crack at some bystander—or at you?”
    As a detective, he’d undoubtedly once worked in uniform. He knew the score as well as she did, and she saw the agreement in his blue-gray eyes, saw, too, the realization that the two of them had certain experiences in common.
    “You do get an instinct for it,” he conceded. “You have to, to make it on the streets.”
    “Well, my instinct tells me that Jack Montoya’s about the furthest thing you can imagine from a killer.Even as a kid, he was such a decent sort—but this is about now, and everything I’ve seen tells me there’s no connection.”
    Worth tapped more ash into the day clerk’s mommy mug and shrugged. “Maybe. But what I’d like to know—and what the feds are going to be damned interested in learning—is why BorderFree released a statement praising Montoya’s ‘acts of defiance against an unjust law’ and calling