the hesitation wasn’t because he still felt that way.
“Well, sometimes when—” she chose the easier word for the five-year-old to understand “—soldiers come home from where there’s been fighting, they feel the same way. Like they don’t know how to fit in back home anymore. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yeah,” the boy repeated, more certainly this time.
“Well, I met someone a while ago who helps them with that, in the coolest way.”
“How?” Sam was clearly intrigued now.
“He finds dogs who have no one to love them, and he matches them up with the soldiers who need them.”
“Dogs?” Sam’s eyes had gone wide.
“Yep,” she said cheerfully. “So the dogs get a home and somebody to love them, and the soldiers get a best friend who will always understand when they’re not feeling quite right. Isn’t that cool?”
“Yeah.” With enthusiasm now, until the boy added sadly, “My mom hates dogs.”
“No surprise there,” Stefan muttered.
She wondered if Stefan realized his son was testing these particular waters. She went on rather briskly, “Anyway, that’s where we’re going. To where Mr. Hollick keeps the dogs for the soldiers. He’s not there right now, but someone will be.”
Sam’s eyes went saucer big this time. “Really?”
“They all belong to someone else already,” she said carefully, “but it would still be fun to meet them, wouldn’t it?”
That Sam could hardly sit still after this gave them the answer to that question. And when they arrived at their destination, and were greeted by an excited cacophony of happy barking, she thought Sam just might lift off, he was so excited.
The fact that within minutes of their arrival Sam was giggling, surrounded by a pack of clearly delighted, gamboling dogs of varying sizes and breed combinations, proved her right better than anything else could have.
The woman who’d greeted them, a grandmotherly sort who said she had become a volunteer at K-9 Cadets after one of Max’s dogs had saved her son’s life, had been quite happy to oblige when Daria explained.
“It’s great for the dogs to encounter all sorts of people, like they will once they’re paired with their veteran. It’s a wonderful thing Max is doing here.”
“Absolutely,” Stefan said, but his eyes were on his son, whose joyous laughter as he played with the animals was something Daria was guessing he hadn’t heard much of.
When he finally turned to look at her, he caught her watching him. “Convinced?” she asked hastily.
His mouth quirked. “Maybe. Still doesn’t give my house any more room for a dog.”
“Details,” she said rather airily, then added with a grin, “Of course, details never matter to the person who doesn’t have to handle them.”
When they got home and Stefan told Sam to look at his room and decide where he wanted his new bed, the boy scampered off happily, looking for the first time like a normal five-year-old.
“Thank you,” Stefan said to Daria again as she prepared to leave. He wanted—oh, how he wanted—to hug her again, but he didn’t dare. “I really haven’t been thinking in his terms, and I should have been.”
“Oh, yes,” she answered lightly. “Here, on two days’ notice, for the first time in your life, instantly start thinking like a five-year-old.”
“You’re cutting me a lot of slack,” he said, but he couldn’t help smiling.
“Somebody has to, since you’re certainly not,” she returned, smiling back in a way that made him want to hug her even more.
But she left, and he felt a little adrift without her quick, easy and wise support. And when she texted him a couple of hours later, asking if he could take a call, he immediately dialed her cell.
“How’s it going with Sam?” was the first thing she asked.
“Better. You really nailed it.”
“I’m glad. But listen, I had a thought. About the case.”
He was surprised at himself, and the fact that he felt almost disappointed that she hadn’t just reached out because she wanted to talk to him.
Business. Colleagues. Serial killer. Hello, Roberts, get with the program.
“Shoot,” he said.
“Remember that couple in the furniture store, behind us when Sam was sitting on the bed?”
His brow furrowed. What that had to do with anything escaped him. But he said, “I remember.”
“Were you close enough to hear what they were saying?”
“Yeah. They were talking about where to meet up later, after they—” It hit him. “You think Bianca met Blue Eyes before she went upstairs?”
“It’s a thought. If she did, then kept her…assigned date, but after he passed out went back downstairs…”
“To wherever they planned to meet up,” he finished.
“It’s a thought.”
“Indeed it is.” He let out a breath. “And a better one than we’ve had yet.”
“It also means we need more lobby and bar video, from earlier in the evening.”
Which meant more hours spent searching that video. Hours spent alone with Daria.
And somehow he didn’t mind.
“Another day of this and I’m throwing away my cell phone, my tablet and my laptop,” Daria muttered, hitting the pause button on the video. “If I never have to stare at another screen again, it would be fine with me.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of taking mine back to Illinois and throwing it in Lake Michigan,” Stefan said, sounding as weary of this as she felt. “Along with every other screen within reach.”
She leaned back in her chair. They had been working backward a half hour at a time from the moment they already knew Bianca had come downstairs for the last time. The security video ran at fifteen frames per second, but they were watching at one-third speed, so an hour took them three times that. Add in that they had to do it twice, once for the lobby video and once for the bar video, and they had only managed to get through two hours of frame-by-frame scrutiny.
Daria’s eyes were burning. Stefan was rubbing at his as well, so she guessed they must feel the same. He got up, stretched. Daria
