Burn Chapter 15: All in a name, a hawaii five-0 fanfic

Burn

Landon Richardson

Official Disclaimer

The characters of Lieutenant Commander Steven 'Steve' McGarrett, Chin Ho Kelly, Kono Kalakaua, Adam 'Toast' Charles, Governor Patricia Jameson and Detective Meka Hanamoa, do not belong to me in any shape or form. I am merely using them for my own entertainment purposes.

The character of Detective Sergeant Danielle 'Danni' Williams probably can be considered to be mine by now. Although she was originally based on male Danny, she soon evolved becoming her own person. She has her own background, her own family, her own history and her own distinct personality. This isn't to say that the Danny Williams we all know and love is completely gone, he still emerges through her at times. I like to think of female Danni as what Danny could have been if everything in his life had gone his way. As in full custody of Grace and a decent relationship with his ex.

The character of Grace has also changed slightly due to the change in Danni. Her surname is Taylor as this is her father's surname and was Danni's married name (Danni reverted back to her maiden name when she was divorced). Her parents also are amicable which has also impacted Grace but never fear, she's still the sweetheart we know and love, if anything she's more a sweetheart now.

The character of Supervisory Special Agent Jack O'Connor, Detective Abraham Lee. Doctor Rosie Lange, Kent Deacon, Ross Hall, Sasha Hall, Nicole Hall, Brent Cox and Special Agent Walker Humphries however do belong to me as does any other character who you do not recognise from the show. Please do not use them, or my version of Danni and Grace without first asking for my permission to do so.

Author Note

Welcome to what is technically the twelfth chapter of Burn once you've factored in all the interludes and the prologue!

Please enjoy!

Overall Summary

Fire, fire burning bright, which member of Five-O will you try to claim tonight… When Five-O are tasked with hunting down an arsonist who has graduated to murder, they didn't expect themselves to become potential targets. Now it's a race against time to find the murdered before it's too late.

Chapter Summary

Jack O'Connor let out a sigh as he exited out of the front door of the partially burned down house, his eyes flickering around the crowds who were being held back only by a thin piece of fluttering yellow police tape and a few Uniformed Officers and wondered thoughtfully whether this would be his life now.

Overall Romance

Hints of Steve McGarrett / Danni Williams (McDanni)

Mentions of past Duncan Taylor / Danni Williams (Dunni)

Hints of Ryan Moore / Danni Williams (Rynni)

Meka Hanamoa / Amy Hanamoa (Mekmy)

Chapter Romance

Hints of Steve McGarrett / Danni Williams (McDanni)

Warning

This story features a female Danni Williams in place of a male Danny Williams. Although in some stories I write, Danny does exist, he does not exist in this one.

If this is not your cup of tea then please hit the back button.

Another note

I do not have a Beta so please forgive any mistakes which may creep in, I always do my best to edit the story and check it but sometimes mistakes do creep in.

The places I've mentioned in Hawaii are ones which come from google, including the addresses. I've never been to Hawaii myself in person so I apologise for any mistakes which I may make, these are not intentional.

Chapter Twelve

All in a name

Tuesday 5th October 2010

1024 Carpenter Street

Honolulu

Oahu

Jack O'Connor's Point of view

It wasn't that he objected to it because he didn't; he liked most of the members on his new team though some he acknowledged would be harder to get to know then others and he already knew that the cases they would be working on would be interesting. It was just the fact that it would be a lot to learn and to take in, considering what he had done in his old job before the Director had made his choice and told Jack to settle in Hawaii as it would be his new home for the foreseeable future.

He shook his head slightly trying to dislodged the thoughts as he turned his attention to the CSU team who were out here working the perimeter of the house looking for any form of evidence that the Arsonist may have left behind in his rush to leave the scene before it and he was discovered. He noted that they worked as a unit, almost able to read each other mind without words, something which he had been able to do back with his team in Washington. He would have to take the time to start learning the names of the various CSU Agents and some basic information about them if he was going to be working with them on a regular basis.

Danni seemed to be the people person on the team so she was probably going to be the best person for him to approach about the topic.

He has already found out through past experience that people were more likely to help you with any issues you had if you at least knew their name than if you hadn't bothered to take the time to learn it.

Biting the inside of his mouth, Jack looked down at the singed laptop which was tucked away in the evidence bag he was holding and wondering whether they would finally strike it lucky and find something on it which could help them. The Arsonist had been one step ahead of them from the beginning of the case and Jack was determined to find something they could use, something which would flip the table on the person they were hunting and give them the advantage for a change rather than the other way around.

He headed down the path, nodding at the Uniformed Officer who held the tape up for him so he could slip beneath it and headed over to where he had parked his car. He quickly unlocked it and climbed in, ignoring the attention that he had attracted from the waiting crowd, all of them probably wondering who he was and what he was doing. He locked the doors behind him, placing the evidence bag on the passenger seat and started the engine, allowing himself just one moment to enjoy the feel of the car beneath him and the healthy sound the engine made. The car even had the new car smell to it which he loved. That was the one pro of having to move to Hawaii, the fact that he could get himself a new car without feeling guilty that he shouldn't because he already had a perfectly good one.

Jack looked back once more at the house before he twisted the steering wheel and pulled away from the kerb, driving slowly down the street to avoid hitting one of the neighbours who seemed to feel that standing in the middle of a road which was still in active use was the best place for them to stand to find out what was going on.

He wondered whether people were genuinely this stupid of whether there was just something about the sight of an active crime scene and police nearby which made them that way. He breathed a silent sigh of relief when he reached the highway, putting his foot on the pedal and flipped the radio on, allowing the familiar sound of music to rush over him as his mind began to wander, focusing on the case as he tried to make sense of everything they had gathered together so far.

It seemed as though his Director had been right when he had told him over the phone that he would find himself dealing with a wide variety of cases rather than just the two types which he was considered to be an expert on, cases which would challenge him and test his abilities as an Agent and Investigator to the limit, something which the Director believe he needed. The arson case could certainly be seen as one of those varieties which he had come across occasionally while reading through files but which he had never actually worked on himself.

The fact that it wasn't going as smoothly as the previous case which the team had worked on was different as well. During the last case they had always had a lead which they could follow but with this case it seemed that every lead they did locate ended up being a dead end and he knew that their time was running out and swiftly at that.

A man or woman like the one they were chasing wasn't going to wait for them to catch up. They were going to make the most out of their opportunities. Going by their past behaviour it was safe to make the assumption that whoever they were had already handpicked their next target and was probably in the process of stalking them so they could learn everything about them. They could even have interacted in person with them and the victim wouldn't even know it, to his victim, he or she would simply be another customer or a friend of a friend but to the Arsonist it would be different, to them, it would be intelligence gathering. Jack wondered how long he spent with them; did they take months learning about them? Did they befriend them, acting like they were close when all the time he or she was scoping out their house to see how he could follow through with the plans already laid out, taking the time to learn the entrances to the houses and any possible exits to the premises.

Jack felt his eyes narrow in determination, he wasn't going to allow this to happen again, he didn't want to see Steve or Danni pick up a phone call only to be informed of yet another death which they as a team had failed to prevent. He didn't want to look down at the burnt corpse of a child and be assaulted with images of his own daughters in a similar situation.

What the hell made whoever they were hunting kill a child before burning them.

Did whoever it was believe they were saving them from something?

"Focus O'Connor" He said out loud to himself, using the sound of his own voice to bring his thoughts back in line. It wasn't his job to try and get into the Arsonists head to figure out their motives behind why they did what they did and what had turned whoever it was onto the path they were currently on, that job would be down to the psychiatrists and his defence lawyers who would probably insist that the person plead insanity. Jack's job was to find any evidence and leads which might be on the laptop and to provide his new team with any backup if he got called in. If they were going to find anything which would blow the case wide open then it would be on the laptop sitting innocently on his passenger seat.

He just had to find it.

His thoughts drifted to the team as he followed the directions from his Nat sat. he still found it hard to believe that they had only been a unit for eleven days, even the original team of four had only been a team for six days before Toast and he had been brought into the fold. It would probably take a while for them to get their different styles of working to gel together but he had the feeling that when they did, then they would be pretty unstoppable.

It would just take time and effort on all their parts.

He glanced at the clock in the dashboard, his mind wandering to his daughters, wondering how they would be settling into their temporary home. They had been surprised by everything on the island from the moment they had stepped out of the airport into the warm air. He could still picture how wide their eyes had grown as they had stared at the passing scenery on the way home. Even his sister and his two Nephews had been silent, preferring to gawk at everything they passed. He couldn't blame them, not really. Hawaii and Washington DC couldn't have been more different to one another if they had tried. It would take some time for all of them, himself included, to feel comfortable enough in Hawaii to begin to think of it as their home.

There was still so much to do as well now that they were with him. He still needed to find a house which would be their own, not one which he had rented because it had been the best one which he had seen which had looked halfway decent and which had appeared to be in a good area. Money wasn't a problem for him, the problem was finding somewhere which catered to all of their tastes, especially as his sister and Nephews would be living with them until they got themselves settled which meant finding a place large enough that they wouldn't be living on top of everyone. Once he had the location, he could register both boys and his girls into school. They needed to keep to a familiar routine after all. Poppy's school should be the easiest as she was about the same age as Danni's daughter Grace, all he needed to do was get information about the school from the small blonde and pray that there was enough space in the class for one more. Having a work colleague who had a daughter the same age as his was a blessing as it would Poppy a much-needed friend in the area.

Jack tapped his hands against the steering wheel in time to the beat of the music, hitting the indicator and pulling his car into the car park for their headquarters, moving through them until he found the space which Danni had allocated to him. Killing the engine, he breathed out, twisting in the seat and grabbed the laptop from beside him before climbing out of the car, his eyes automatically going to the bright blue sky above him, noting that once again there was no clouds in the sky, normally by this time in Washington, the leaves would be turning red and brown with the weather already cold to reflect the season. It was going to be hard to adjust to there being no seasons.

He moved around the car, locking it behind him and headed up the steps into the main building, flashing his badge at the guards who took a long look at it before waving him through. Jack ignored the elevator once he was through the various scanners, and headed towards the stairs taking them two at a time. He pulled the door at the top open and entered the corridor which their headquarters was based on. He walked down it and entered the quiet headquarters, glancing around him, his eyes lingering on the offices, realising with a jolt of surprise that he was the only person in the large area indicating that Chin and Toast must have still been out in the field checking out the surveillance cameras.

Shaking his head, he placed the laptop on the computer table and headed in to his office, looking around him for a moment, attention fixed on the closed up boxes which he had been half way through unpacking yesterday when the call for the case had come through and they had sprung into action. His eyes narrowed slightly before he caught sight of the one which he wanted and moved towards it, opening it and glancing inside. He rummaged through it for a moment before his face broke out into a grin as he pulled out the cord and two thumb drives which he had been looking for.

"There you are." He murmured to himself as he twisted back around and headed into the main room again and over to the computer table. He ripped open the evidence bag and reached inside, gently retrieving the laptop from within and placed it down on the table. He glanced at both thumb drives before selecting the one he wanted and placed in in the socket of the laptop, waiting for a moment until a small light began flashing on the thumb drive telling him that the Watch Dog program he had created was working. As much as he wanted to get stuck in to see if the laptop had anything on it which they could use, he still had to be careful. For all he knew the Arsonist was a computer expert who could have planted a virus on the laptop as a precaution in case it didn't burn up in the fire which had clearly been his intention.

Jack glanced down at his watch, nodding to himself before he turned and headed away from the table and into the empty kitchen instead, grabbing his mug from the cupboard and made himself a quick, much needed coffee, before he headed back into the main room, looking around him to make sure he was still alone before the thumb drive beeped loudly at him, attracting his attention. The light had still turning amber to green meaning that the computer and its thumb drive was free from any virus or potential malware which could have been hidden in another system.

He slipped the thumb drive out of the laptop and placed it into his pocket before he picked up the cable, he had brought out with him and attached one end to the laptop and inserted the other end into the side of the computer table. Checking everything was correct, he pressed down on the start button on the computer and waited.

He breathed out nosily as he leaned forward and resting his palms casually on the surface of the table as the small screen flickered into life. He smiled slightly, his eyes moving up to the large plasma which was showing everything that the laptop was showing.

Pulling out the second thumb drive he inserted it, knowing that it would run through every program on the hard drive looking for anything which would flag up as unusual; such as files which were too large for what they were meant to be.

The first thing he saw was a picture of Martin and Rita Chen smiling up at him, obviously they had liked the picture of the two of them enough that they had chosen to use it as their background, he looked away towards the program running, the results so far indicating that there was nothing greatly unusual on the hard drive yet. It seemed at first glance that everything was generic, the same as any other laptop which someone could have brought off a shop floor. It could be that the Chens hadn't used it often or if they did, they had simply left it exactly how it had been since the moment they had turned it on

Out of both options he figured that the second one was probably the most likely in this case. Most people had a basic idea of how a laptop worked but only a few who were interested in computers would take the time to learn the ins and outs of their machines and upgrade them. Most people simply preferred using it for emails and to surf the web.

"Hey, I didn't expect you to back already, I thought you'd still be out at the new crime scene with the others."

Jack looked up at the already familiar voice, a smile coming to his face when his eyes locked onto Chin's dark ones, taking in the curious expression the older man was giving him.

"I was with them but the Chens laptop actually survived the blaze with only minimum damage done to it if you don't count the cosmetic damage to it so McGarrett had me take it from CSU and bring it back here to work my magic on it to see if there was anything on here we can use. Danni and Kono were talking to the next-door neighbour who made the initial call about the fire when I left and McGarrett was somewhere doing whatever it is that McGarrett does." Jack explained with a shrug, his smile widening when Chin grinned at his comment.

"He was probably glaring at CSU waiting for them to hurry the hell up so he could get in there and run the scene." Chin commented dryly, raising his eyebrow when Jack laughed at the comment. He could easily picture it in his mind, even after only five says of knowing the other man, Jack knew that Steve hated not being in charge.

He shook his head and looked back to the screen to see that the various icons had finally finished loading up. His eyes flickered casually over them before he selected the one for email. Hopefully then Chens were people who kept themselves logged in which would save him some much-needed time. If they weren't, then he would have to upload his codebreakers program to the laptop and wait for it to do the function he had programmed it to do. That would take time and that was the one thing they didn't have much of, especially if the arsonist had realised, they were closing in on them.

Clearly, he had not been expecting them to make the connection between him and the Chens as quickly as they had. It had made whoever it was sloppy, that much was clear from the way they had messed up their deaths by not only leaving the laptop behind but also a witness who has seen what had happened and who could probably identify them if they could get him a good photograph to look at. The Arsonist had achieved his goal of killing the Chens but it wasn't up to his usual standard.

The Chens death could be the one thing which helped lead them straight to him.

"So, have you managed to find anything on it yet which we can use?" Chin asked him as he moved across the room and came to a stop beside Jack, his eyes raised to the plasma screen, watching it as Jack worked.

"There's nothing yet." Jack admitted, glancing towards him briefly. "But I've only just started looking through it, I had to check for viruses and malware before I could properly begin. What about you and Toast? Did you manage to find anything at the phone shop? Speaking of Toast where is he exactly? Wasn't he with you?" He questioned looking around him, expecting the tall lanky man to suddenly appear like he was in the habit of doing.

"Toast is just across the street quickly grabbing something which he said he needed." Chin told him, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder towards the doorway before he continued to answer Jack's other questions. "We managed to get an image from the surveillance camera. Toast just needs to upload it onto the system so he can clean it up, if he manages that then we should be able to run it through your database and see whether we can get a hit from it. Steve and Danni think that the Arsonist may have started somewhere else first and ended up here in Hawaii. If that is the case then there should be some cold cases or even some open cases which follow the same patterns as the ones we're dealing with."

"If there is a record of it out there then we should be able to find it, we just need to put in the search perimeters for the case into the database and let it do the rest." Jack told him confidently.

"That's what we thought. Toast sent a copy of the picture to Danni's cell phone just in case the man who she and Kono are interviewing recognises the man from the picture. We figured it was worth a shot."

Jack nodded, breathing out a sigh of relief when he saw that Rita Chen's email account was still logged into.

"This is a lucky break." He commented absently to Chin before selecting the top email, briefly reading through the contents before he came back out of it and selected the next one, repeating the same action. He was aware of Chin disappearing briefly from his side only to reappear moment later with a mug of coffee in his hands, the sight reminding Jack that he still had his own coffee to drink.

Picking up his mug, he sipped at it as he skimmed through another email.

They both glanced up when the door was pushed open revealing Toast who was holding what looked like a bright blue smoothie of some kind which Jack didn't even want to know about. It certainly explained what the other man had been getting.

He shook his head and looked down at the next email, his eyes widening as he read through it once before rereading it and opening up the photo which had been attached to it.

"Chin, I don't think we need Toast to run that photo through the facial recognition program anymore." Jack said slowly, attracting both of their attention to him as he double clicked the photo bringing it up onto the plasma screen. "Meet Rita Chen's lover Terry Barclay, looking at the email and what he has written in it I think it's safe to say that he have the identity of our Arsonist. You might want to call McGarrett to let him know." He stated as he glanced up and grinned at Chin.

Now they were beginning to get somewhere.

Author Note

Thanks for taking the time to read. An especially big thank you if you have left me a review, favourite the story or decided to follow it.

I really appreciate it