if there’s any money to be found in the budget so I can have you cloned.”
Brian Cavanaugh was his brother and Aurora’s chief of detectives. As such he was far more into the budget end of the police department than Sean was.
“Until then, I’ll just work faster,” Suzie promised, getting back to the report again.
Sean stopped just short of the doorway. “Don’t you dare. There’s such a thing as working yourself to death and you’ll do none of us any good—least of all yourself—if you do that. I’m serious, Suzie,” he told her, his voice dropping an octave. “I want you to go home at least at a regular time if not earlier today.”
Suzie made a noise in response that told him she had heard his voice, but hadn’t heard the words or the gist of what he was saying.
This wasn’t over, Sean promised himself. And then he laughed under his breath. He knew a lot of managers who would love being in his place, love having an employee who never seemed to get enough of work and always seemed to be tirelessly on the job.
But as a father, he just didn’t think that kind of behavior was healthy. If nothing else, Suzie was too tunnel-visioned. Suzie Quinn needed to have balance in her life. She was far too young to be strictly all about work, especially since she gave him the impression that she wasn’t doing it to get ahead. If he had to make a guess, he would have said she was doing it for the sake of justice.
It made him wonder if Suzie was hiding from something. Or more to the point, if there was something she was running from.
If things continued this way, Sean told himself as he walked into his office, he would have to do a little digging.
* * *
Suzie listened for the sound of a door closing. When she heard it, she released the breath she’d been holding and relaxed a little. She knew that her boss meant well when he tried to urge her to go home early, but he just didn’t understand. There was no reason for her to do so because there was no one and nothing waiting for her. No anticipated mail in her mailbox, no long-awaited email on her computer, no texts or messages of any sort from anyone she wanted to hear from.
Suzie heard from her brother, Lane, only on the occasional holiday—and not always then. Her mother was no longer among the living, but her father still was. However, she had absolutely no desire to hear from the senior member of her now defunct family. So there was nothing and no one to fill her off-hours.
Oh, a sense of curiosity mixed with desperation had made her actually give in and attempt to do something outside work, but that experiment, undertaken yesterday, had fallen rather flat, so there was no point in revisiting it.
All it had accomplished was making her come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t cut out for anything beyond work. She just wished that everyone else would come to the same conclusion and allow her to get on with her life the way she saw fit.
The immediate problem was that right now there was no case to occupy her mind or her skills, which was why, to fill the time, Suzie was doing the paperwork she had put off. It wasn’t that she was more conscientious than most of the people who worked in the crime lab. She just didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. At least not yet. Not until she learned how to herd them all into a cage and keep them there, away from the day-to-day fabric of her life.
Aurora’s criminal element, such as it was, wasn’t cooperating. Although she would have been the first to admit that a crime-free city was a wonderful thing, Suzie couldn’t help hoping that something would come up by the time she put the last of the stack of paperwork to bed.
More than anything, she really didn’t want to be left to her own devices.
* * *
It wasn’t all that long ago that Chris had been the exact same age as the boys he’d just cornered. What he couldn’t remember, though, was ever being as scared as they appeared to be.
At the moment, he was having a difficult time getting either one to be coherent, even after they had recovered their breaths and voices. Now the problem seemed to be that they were both talking over one another. The end result was an annoying cacophony that left him as unenlightened as he had been when he’d first cornered them.
Straining to follow both disjointed monologues, Chris finally gave up trying to make heads or tails out of the dissonance. He drew in a breath, whistled long and loud, until both teenagers finally stopped talking at the speed of a runaway freight train.
Stunned, they stared at the man who had pulled them over.
“Don’t you want to hear what happened?” they cried in unison. It was the first time since they’d come flying out of the building that they were both intelligible.
“More than you can possibly know,” Chris assured them, “but I won’t find anything out if you keep on talking over one another like two screech owls in a barnyard competition. You,” he said, randomly picking the taller of the two. “What’s your name?”
“Bill,” the teen answered nervously, apparently worried that he was being singled out. “Bill Peterson.”
“And I’m—” The other teenager began to give his name, but Chris held up his hand.
“You’ll have your turn. Okay, Bill Peterson,” he said, addressing the first teenager. “Why were you and your friend here flying out of the old Kresky building like the devil himself was after you?”
The question had the teenagers turning ghostly pale again. Bill cleared his throat before speaking. “You’re not going to believe me.”
“Try me,” Chris said patiently, giving the impression that he wasn’t about to go anywhere until he got the truth out of them.
The two teenagers exchanged looks.
“Look at me, Bill,” he ordered. “Look at me when you answer.”
Bill flushed. “Maybe we better show you,” he muttered.
Instead of urging them on, Chris glanced from one to the other. He figured it was time to get the second teen’s name just in case the two got it into their heads to take off again. If they went in different directions, he could go after only one. Having both their names—if they weren’t lying—at least gave him a fighting chance of bringing the teenagers in.
He had a feeling this wasn’t just some prank. Something definitely was going on.
“And your name is?” His no-nonsense stare seemed to glue the second teen’s feet to the ground.
“Allen, sir.” The youth actually swallowed. Any second, Chris expected to see his Adam’s apple dance. “Allen Kott.”
“Okay, Allen Kott, why don’t you and Bill here show me what got the two of you looking paler than Snow White.” When the duo looked as if they intended to walk back into the building behind him, Chris gestured that they were to lead the way. He wanted to keep an eye on them the whole time.
The teens complied.
“How did you two happen to be in the building?” Chris asked casually as they crossed to the abandoned department store. “It’s supposed to be locked up.”
Bill
