the computer tech area where he had been working.
His white lab coat hung like a bland curtain about his all but emaciated frame, giving the impression that it would begin flapping wildly about that same frame at the first sign of a breeze.
Startled, Susie’s eyes met those of her junior assistant, who was also a lab intern. The brown eyes continued looking back at her, the assistant never flinching.
“I didn’t know anyone else was here,” Susie told the intern.
“Obviously. When I saw him walk in I was going to clear my throat in case something private was going to be said. But Colton started talking right away and it sounded kind of personal from the get-go.” The look he gave her was sympathetic. “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”
“You just wanted to eavesdrop, hoping to score some juicy gossip,” Susie countered.
She knew how the man operated. Harold Gould knew more about what was going on in the precinct after being here for a little more than three months than some of the twenty-year veterans did. It wasn’t only lab procedures that he absorbed faster than a sponge.
The painfully thin shoulders rose and fell quickly, indicating that Harold had no intention of even attempting to contest her take on the situation. They both knew he enjoyed being a font of information, both technical and private.
“Yeah, well, there’s that, too,” he agreed, and then he tried to set her mind at ease. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any time to talk to anyone so this isn’t going into the rumor mill. And besides, I might be had for a song when it comes to certain things, but don’t ever doubt my loyalty.”
She liked Harold and was fairly certain that his heart was in the right place. But she’d paid the price for blind faith before and that had made her leery. Harold could just be offering her pretty words to distract her, Susie thought. “If it does hit the rumor mill, I’ll know who to come after.”
A small, amused smile played across all but nonexistent lips. “Should I be shaking in my shoes now—or wait until later?” he asked her.
“Later,” she told him. “We have work to do now.” She glanced again at the closed door. “I’m going to have you run the DNA test on the blood this time.”
“Really run the test, or...?” He raised one eyebrow, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken but definitely understood.
Susie wanted to make one thing perfectly clear even as she cut the intern some slack because he was, after all, still relatively new.
“We don’t do ‘or’ here, Harold. We don’t even think about ‘or.’ Just one tiny instance—or even the hint of that kind of impropriety—and everything we’ve ever done here is going to be viewed as suspect and called into question. The amount of work that would be generated by something like that would be astronomical. Have I made that clear enough for you?”
She didn’t want to come off as sounding belligerent, but there should be no question about how procedures were conducted.
“Just kidding, boss lady,” Harold told her, raising his hands as a sign of surrender.
“I know. But it doesn’t hurt to reiterate how we do things out loud every so often so that we don’t ever lose sight of our function here. Because it only has to happen once and suddenly, we’ll get our walking papers and be out on the street.”
“Understood,” Harold assured her. “But even so, you could stand to improve your vocabulary,” he told her. “I could work up a whole host of multiple-syllable expletives you could hurl at yon studly homicide detective the next time your paths cross. You don’t want to be caught unarmed, do you? Or worse, tongue-tied?” he concluded, pretending to shiver at the very thought of that happening.
“You miss the salient point. I don’t want our paths crossing, period,” she said, getting to the heart of the matter.
“For that even to be a remote possibility at this police precinct, one of you is going to have to put in for a transfer. Like, to a different city.” Harold’s shallow complexion seemed to brighten instantly as he thought over possibilities. “Do I get a vote as to which one of you should go?”
She wasn’t about to feed the intern any more straight lines. Given half a chance, the man could go on talking for hours, like a windup toy whose spring had somehow malfunctioned and while she liked him and felt he did have a great deal of potential, she definitely didn’t want to encourage him, especially not when there was work to do.
“Just do the test, Harold,” Susie requested.
The lab intern saluted her comically as he said, “I hear and obey, my liege.”
Susie rolled her eyes as she got back to her work.
* * *
Susie couldn’t be right, Ryan stubbornly thought as he got back into his car. Starting it up, he pulled out of his parking spot, turned the sedan around and headed back to the Lucky C.
The forensic team, obviously, had come and gone. They had a reputation for being very thorough. Although he had been the one to initially call them in to see if he had missed something, he wanted to go back and go over the latest crime scene one more time to see if perhaps they had missed something this time around.
It was worth a shot. What did he have to lose?
Especially when he stood to gain so much more if he was right and Susie wasn’t.
What he wanted to do with this latest return trip to the Lucky C was find something that would negate what Susie was claiming: that that was Greta’s blood at the crime scene. That it was Greta’s blood that was all over the jagged edges of the broken window.
What possible reason could Greta have for vandalizing the family ranch?
If his sister had a grievance—which would have been news to him—she would have gone to talk to whomever she had the issue with.
Talk to them, not deface their property. For heaven sakes, if anything, Greta had become even closer to the family—certainly closer to their mother—ever since she’d gotten engaged. Greta and their mother were busy planning Greta’s wedding. She wouldn’t just suddenly turn on her mother like that, despite any bizarre tales of hormonal bridezillas to the contrary.
Still, he knew how conscientious Susie was. She wouldn’t have just haphazardly conducted that DNA test, or allowed it to become contaminated.
Yet how could her findings be right?
Ryan felt a surge of anger flare up within his chest, anger where his heart was supposed to be.
Try as he might, he couldn’t come up with a way that both he and Susie could be right. One of them had to be wrong and he found the idea that it was him really upsetting. Not because he had any kind of a problem with his ego—he’d been wrong before, most notably when he’d deployed back overseas and cut Susie loose like that, as if she was some inconvenience instead of someone he had found himself caring for deeply—but because that would mean that there was something seriously bad going on with Greta.
He knew Greta. His sister wasn’t a criminal.
