Happy Rookie Blue day! For those of you in my time zone, I hope you enjoyed it! To everyone else: OMG it was awesome! I am pretty psyched to see where they're going to take this... and how all of the writers among you are going to fix everything before the show even has a chance.

I'm sorry it's been such a long wait between chapter. Life has not relented. This was written on the plane home for a funeral, so I'm really sorry if it's a little bleak, I tried not to let my muses go too dark.

Chapter 13: When They Come for Me

The building inspection reports revealed no miraculous answer that night. After four hours of scouring the slightly smudged carbon copies all Andy achieved was a blinding headache and a sense that she was missing something really obvious. At one am, Sam stood up and removed a sheaf of paper from Andy's hands.

"We're not going to find anything tonight." He said, setting the paper on the edge of the table and setting both of their pens on top of it before extending his hand to help her up off the floor. "I'll go over the file again tomorrow, see if anything clicks."

Andy opened her mouth to protest but a yawn stole her power of speech for a moment and Sam continued, switching to the no-nonsense voice he used with suspects or recalcitrant witnesses. "I know it's frustrating as hell not being able to go in yourself, but you're just going to have to trust me." He hauled her to her feet and planted a quick kiss on her lips before letting her go. "We're partners, McNally, no matter what Frank says. That means I have you back no matter what."

Even though a large part of her wanted to scream in frustration, Andy forced her lips into a smile. It wasn't Sam's fault, and snarling at him when he was doing everything he could to help her wouldn't make her feel better. "Thank you."

Sam looked for a moment like he might kiss her again and Andy felt the stirring of butterflies in her stomach, but then his expression changed and he stepped back. "Get some sleep, McNally. All of this will still be here in the morning."

"Goodnight." Andy said, watching his retreating back until he turned down the hall to his bedroom. There was sinking feeling in her gut. They still hadn't really had the talk she knew they needed to have, and the longer they put it off the more sure she was that Gail wasn't the only ugly truth Sam had to tell her. Heaving a deep sigh, Andy picked up the sheaf of paper Sam had taken from her moments earlier and carried it to the guest room. If she tried to sleep now all she would be able to do was lay and stare at the ceiling and imagine all of the things Sam wouldn't want to tell her. Working through the night sounded like a much better plan.

Sam turned the shower to full cold and stepped under the bracing stream of water. After a few moments he readjusted it to a more human temperature. He wouldn't have Andy stay anywhere else for anything, but having her so close without being able to touch her, hold her, kiss her… it was going to drive him insane.

Logically he knew doing anything right now would be a monumental mistake, but Sam Swarek hadn't become the cop, or the man, he was by following his logic. He trusted his gut. It was what carried him through tough moments and good ones. But right now his gut was telling him to go into Andy's room and kiss her until she forgot all of the idiotic things he had done in the last year and he knew without understanding exactly why that doing so was the worst move he could make. Maybe it was the fact that the last time he'd given in to his gut at an inopportune moment she had responded by running away to a dangerous drug task force for months without so much as a text, or maybe he was at last learning a little bit of the wisdom that came with age and a lifetime of impulsive mistakes.

So Sam didn't barge into Andy's room and kiss her senseless. Instead he stood in the shower until he was sure she was fast asleep, then, with a final blast of straight cold to remind his traitorous body that nothing was going to happen that night, he turned to his own, too big, too empty bed and tried to sleep.

.

.

Morning came too soon. Sam knocked the alarm clock on the floor trying to hit the snooze button, rolled out of bed with a curse fumbling for the still shrieking clock with one hand. He was not looking forward to a ten hour shift after only a few hours of sleep, but he tried to comfort himself with the thought that he could get a look at Rosati's notes and maybe figure out how the building inspections fit into the puzzle. She had asked him to find another suspect, he wasn't sure they were there yet, but he was banking on Rosati's distaste for Frank's yelling to et access to her most recent findings. If they couldn't find an alternate suspect soon, there would definitely be an overdose of Frank yelling. The Staff Sergeant had a natural hatred for seeing his own officers' names in the paper for anything less than laudatory. Sam couldn't, and didn't really want to, imagine what he would say if Andy was officially accused of arson just one week after the glowing success of the task force.

Andy was already sitting at the kitchen table, a pen in one hand, a cup of steaming coffee in the other. "Did you sleep at all?"

Andy shook her head without looking up. Her brow furrowed and she crossed something out and then scribbled a few words before lowering the pen and staring intently at the pad in front of her.

Sam poured two bowls of Cheerios and placed one to Andy's left, setting a spoon and the jug of milk within easy reach before taking a seat on her right and tying in to his own breakfast with gusto. "What are you working on/" He asked when she traded pen for spoon.

"I'm not sure." She gave the notepad a dirty look as if it should have given her the answer she needed by now. "I'll let you know if I figure it out."

Sam smiled and changed the topic. "Do you need the truck today?"

Andy shook her head. "No, I want to read the rest of those reports. There's something there.. I can feel it."

Sam felt an irrational surge of pride. It wasn't long ago that he remembered trying to teach Andy to listen to her gut, at least in those moments where a split second could mean the difference between life and death. Now here she was, telling him she was following a gut feeling while he was tossing and turning the too short nights away, hoping to get his unruly heart and body under control so he didn't throw her down on the table and tear her clothes off.

"Okay," he said, rising to put his bowl in the dishwasher. "Text if you need anything."

Andy nodded without looking up, her pen back in hand she had already lost herself in whatever she had been trying to puzzle out when he got up. Sam forced his eyes away, poured coffee into a travel mug and with a last goodbye which Andy responded to with a distracted "Bye," he was out the door and headed to the station.

.

.

"There's something here." Andy muttered, frustration growing. It seemed like she'd been chanting that mantra for days rather than hours. She stood, stretching linked hands above her head and holding until her spine cracked with a satisfying pop. She looked down at the paper. Her graph skills were out of practice, but at this angle she thought she saw something.

She picked up the paper, reading her chicken scrawl carefully. Yes, she'd seen it right. She should have seen it hours ago, it was so simple. It was too early to guess what it meant, but something wasn't right here. "Why on earth would they suddenly do three inspections last year?" She asked the empty room. She reached for the pile of reports again. One anomaly was something, she needed a pattern.

Andy didn't hear the knock at first. She was too caught up in the thrill of her discovery. Of course she would have to go back through all of the reports and confirm she had the dates, times and buildings correct, but for the first time since she'd smelt that cloud of acrid smoke pouring from her oven, she felt like she might make it out of this with her career intact.

The second knock was accompanied by a loud, authoritative "Toronto Police, open up!" and Andy's stomach leapt in sudden panic. Not now! She needed one more day. A day to try and figure out what this meant before she showed it to Sam and hopefully to Jo. She wanted her name cleared as quickly as possible, but without a theory or motive, she didn't have anything substantial enough to knock her name off the top of the suspect list.

There was another knock and Andy rose quickly to her feet and half jogged to the door. She glanced briefly through the peep hole in the front door before unlatching it, feeling a strange combination of relief and curiosity when she saw Jo Rosati in plain clothes with a cup of Tim Horton's coffee in one hand standing alone on Sam's porch looking bored. Andy unchained the door, flipped the deadbolt and opened it.

"McNally, just the woman I was looking for." Jo's voice was friendly. "Can we talk?"

Andy wasn't sure what to make of any of this, but she stepped back and gestured for Jo to enter. "What can I do for you Detective?" she asked, nervousness making it impossible for her to copy Jo's casual demeanor.

"Extra hot, lots of milk, right?" Jo asked, holding out the coffee to Andy.

Andy took the cup, feeling a little like she'd stepped into an alternate universe without realizing it. A sort of backwards land where she and Jo were friends, and probably one where Andy was really good at baking and Sam was the kind of man who talked about his feelings she mused wistfully, wrapping both hands around the hot paper cup. "Thanks." She said in a distracted sort of tone, her mind not quite wrapping itself around whatever the hell this was.

"Look, McNally," Jo said, stepping past Andy into the house. "I've been over your statement a dozen times. I want to go over it with you, if that's okay. Off the record. See if there's anything we're missing."

Andy blinked, twice. The twilight-zone feeling didn't dissipate. "Why?" she asked, bluntness born of confusion more than anything else.

Jo shrugged. "Something doesn't add up, since you insist you didn't do it…"

"I burnt some cookies. I didn't intentionally destroy my home."

"Okay," Jo said, sinking into Sam's couch and somehow managing to look like she belonged there which rankled Andy even more than the doubt in Jo's tone. "So what the hell happened?"

Andy didn't sit. She didn't trust Jo at the best of times, and this Jo, the smiling friendly one who brought Andy perfectly prepared coffee and settled into the townhouse Andy still felt like an awkward guest in as if it were her second home, felt like the Trojan horse, and Andy wasn't going to let her guard down for a second. She leaned one shoulder against the door and took a long sip of coffee – it really was just the way she liked it – and affected a nonchalant pose as best she could while her heart hammered ninety beats a minute and her muscles tensed as if preparing to sprint to safety. "I told you want happened." Andy couldn't quite keep the frustration out of her tone.

"You didn't really tell me much." Jo said. She pulled a couple sheets of yellow paper from her jeans pocket and read aloud: "Got home around 1130 with groceries, wanted to bake cookies, talked on the phone with Nash for twenty minutes, looking for sweatshirt in bedroom at back of apartment, smelled smoke, fire extinguisher empty, pulled fire alarm and helped with evacuation." She raised an eyebrow as if to suggest Andy should be able to immediately see what was wrong with that story. "That's not much to work with."

Andy took another gulp of coffee to steady her nerves. "It's the truth." She said in as sincere a tone as she could manage.

"And there is nothing else?"

"No." Andy hoped her uncertainty didn't show on her face. She wasn't ready to talk about what she thought she'd found this morning. Now when Jo was looking at her like that. Not until she told Sam, so at least when Jo had her thrown in jail she would know there was someone at fifteen picking up where she left off.

"Why didn't you put out the fire?"

Andy knew she had answered this question before and felt a surge of irritation at Jo's disbelief, but se cooperated anyway. At least Jo seemed to be entertaining the possibility that Andy was innocent. Without the investigating detective on her side, Andy knew no amount of evidence could be enough to save her career. She was pretty sure that a trial would mean a desk job for the next forty years. She thought she might rather jail. "The flames had already spread outside of the oven, and my first extinguisher was empty."

"So what did you do?"

"As soon as I realized I couldn't put it out, I alerted the rest of the building by pulling the central alarm manually and then began an evacuation."

"If you started the evacuation, why were you one of the last to exit the building?"

"I made sure everyone in the vicinity was out first." Andy knew she sounded offended, she was. "Even off duty, I'm a cop." She added indignantly.

"Heavy is the badge." Jo muttered half under her breath.

Andy grit her teeth. "What should I have done?" she snapped.

"Refilled your fire extinguisher for a start." Jo snapped back, "and maybe cleaned your oven once in a blue moon. I've burned cookies before, I've never melted my oven doing so. What's your secret ingredient? Petroleum? Baking sheet made of Firestarter?"

For a long moment the women glared at each other silently. Eventually Jo dropped her gaze. "I'm sorry, that was out of line." She looked down at the papers in her hands for a moment. "You mentioned you had had one other fire in your apartment before. Can you tell me about it?"

Face slightly flushed, Andy detailed the first baking disaster in her apartment. When she finished, Jo looked pensive.

"So it was Sam who used the fire extinguisher?"

Andy nodded cautiously, wondering where Jo was going with this.

"Was it because he was closer, or because you didn't think of it?"

For a moment Andy let the scene play out in her head, but it seemed like it was stuck in fast forward. She remembered scolding Sam about frosting, fretting about getting everything done and the disaster zone that was her kitchen presentable in time for their guests, and then there was smoke pouring out of the oven, the shrieking of the fire alarm and Sam spraying her oven with the fire extinguisher. "Sam saw the smoke and gabbed the fire extinguisher. We were the same distance from the oven I think, but I had my hands full." It was the best she could remember, it would have to do. "It was a while ago, I don't really remember more than a few flashes." She admitted.

Jo nodded. "Did you have your oven checked out afterwards?"

Andy raised an eyebrow. "Why?" She asked, her confusion answering Jo's question by default.

"Cakes, like cookies, don't usually erupt into flames when you over cook them." Jo suddenly got to her feet. "This isn't helping. Come with me."

Andy's face must have shown her discomfort because Jo rolled her eyes. "I'm not arresting you or anything. I want you to take a look at something that's been bothering me."

Warily, Andy followed Jo out into the sunny Toronto morning.