Читать книгу Police Protector - Elizabeth Heiter - Страница 13

Chapter Five

“Let’s go.” Shaye unlocked the door to the lab and held the door for Cole and Luke, trying to calm her nerves. There had been hardly any cars outside the lab, but they didn’t work weekends unless a big case required a rush analysis. But across the parking lot, cops’ vehicles were lined up in what should have been a reminder of her safety.

She’d come so close this past week to feeling normal again. But maybe it wasn’t ever going to happen now. Maybe her parents and her four brothers and sisters were right. She wasn’t cut out for a job where bullets were involved.

Luke was gazing around curiously, but Cole stared back at her, like he could read her mind, and she ducked her head. If she wasn’t cut out for a lab job, she definitely wasn’t cut out for dating a detective. Not that a detective had asked her out. Just given her the best kiss of her life.

Pulling the door until it clicked shut behind her, she led the way through the sterile hallways. Past locked doors with the labels Biology/DNA, Firearms/Toolmarks, Latent Prints and Toxicology. Down to the end, where a shiny new label marked “Digital Forensics,” the most recent addition to the Jannis County Forensics Laboratory. Her territory.

Before she’d started—and last year when she’d taken the other job—digital devices had been sent off to the state lab. But it was one of the fastest-growing areas of forensics in Jannis, and Shaye was still surprised the job had been open a year later for her.

She used her key card to get into the room as Luke remarked, “Good security.”

“Yeah, well, we take chain of command pretty seriously. And that includes making sure no one can access anything they shouldn’t while it’s in our possession. Everything gets logged. Even what I’m going to pull up for you will have a digital log that I accessed it, at what time and for how long.” She’d helped set up some of those extra precautions last year as one of her first assignments on the job.

She glanced around her tiny space, jammed full of equipment—mostly computers. Her office was in the back with no windows, which often made her feel penned in, but today she appreciated it. And she was happy to have something to do besides sit around her house while Cole and Luke drove her crazy. They’d installed new locks on all her doors, exercised in her living room and called the station repeatedly for updates and to assign leads. And that had all been before 10:00 a.m. So when they’d wanted to go through suspects, she’d suggested they come here.

“Let’s get started,” Cole said, dragging her empty whiteboard to the center of the room.

He was wearing the same jeans and button-down from yesterday, just a little more rumpled. The short beard he always had was a tiny bit longer, too, and she fixated on it, remembering it scraping against her chin. She could almost feel his arms going around her again, the breadth of his chest pressed against her, big enough to make her feel surrounded by him. She shook off the memories, hoping her thoughts weren’t broadcast across her face. But Cole was focused, his detective face on.

He jotted the words Possible Suspects, Unlikely and Ruled Out, then carefully underlined each one. “Any case you testified in or were involved in, now or last year. Pull them up, and let’s get to work.”

He sounded determined, almost enthusiastic, and she supposed that was the kind of attitude you needed to be a detective, to slog through hours and hours of clues until you found the right answer.

She understood it because she could do the same with a digital device, dig and dig until it revealed all of its secrets. But hers was a totally different kind of quest, one fueled by years of shyness and feeling overlooked in her big, noisy family. Being the middle child in a family of seven meant you either had to demand attention or be content without it.

She loved her family. She missed her family, living so far away, when the rest of them had stayed in Michigan. But she’d needed to break out, make something of herself as Shaye, not just one of the Mallory siblings.

She settled into her well-worn chair. Time to see if the skill that had moved her past her sheltered, invisible life was threatening to destroy it, too.

“Let’s start with the most obvious first,” Luke suggested, snagging the only other chair in the room while Cole stood in the center of the small space, marker raised and ready.

“The Jannis Crew.” Just saying the name made her feel a little ill. Shaye nodded and opened a file. Because she’d been in the line of fire, her boss had sent the digital devices they’d recovered after the shooting—computers, phones and tablets—to the state lab, so there’d be no conflict of interest. But she’d been on the stand, because she’d found the original trail to the leadership. And she was the only living witness able to identify the shooter.

The three officers who might have seen him had died on the scene. Cole and Luke had run out the station doors as the car was driving past. Forensics later discovered that their bullets had killed the two men in the backseat, but not the shooter. So Shaye had gotten on the stand, ignored her thundering heart and pointed directly at him, sending him to prison for the rest of his life.

“Well, we know it’s not Ed Bukowski,” Cole said, writing his name under “Ruled Out.” “He was killed in prison last week.”

Shaye jerked, spinning her chair to face him as an instant picture of the driver, one tattoo-covered hand draped over the wheel and the other aiming a gold-plated pistol out the window, formed in her head. “He was?”

“Crazy Ed found someone who wasn’t impressed with his crazy,” Luke said, using his gang name. “But put relatives on the Suspect list. The timing could fit. Maybe someone wants revenge for Ed’s death. They can’t go after the drug lord who shanked him, so they’re going after the woman who fingered him, put him behind bars in the first place.”

A violent shudder passed through her, and Shaye knew they’d both seen it. She spun to face her computer, sensing Luke and Cole sharing a look behind her back.

“Maybe we should do this part at the station,” Cole said. “You provide us with the list, and we’ll go through it.”

“No. I want to help.”

“There’s no reason for you to relive—”

“I said I want to help.” Shaye turned back, staring hard at Cole. “You don’t need to protect me from this.”

“That’s my job, Shaye.”

His job. Of course it was. It wasn’t personal to him. But it was personal to her. “It’s my job, too. So let’s do this.” She didn’t give him more time to argue, just looked at her screen again and read off the next case.

Three hours later, the whiteboard was full. Most of the names were listed under “Unlikely” or “Ruled Out,” but they had a handful of possible suspects that Cole and Luke were going to check out.

She stared at the list of names under “Possible Suspects,” and the knot that had taken up residence in her rib cage eased for the first time since she’d walked out to Roy’s parking lot. The only name that worried her was Crazy Ed, the man who’d been at the center of her nightmares over the past year. He may have been dead, but someone like that was bound to have attracted like-minded friends. Were there any left?

More important, were there any left who were willing to risk their own freedom for revenge? Because they couldn’t have missed the massive cleanup Cole and his team had done after the station shooting. They’d have to expect any attempt to go after someone connected to that case would result in the same intense scrutiny.

Shaye let out a breath. “I don’t think this had anything to do with me.”

Cole and Luke looked from the board to her and back again, and then Luke was nodding. “I agree. We’re just being thorough.”

When Cole was silent too long, Shaye asked, “Cole? What do you think?”

“Chances were always slim that this was a targeted attack,” he replied, but there was an edge to his voice that told her he was holding something back.

“But...” she prompted.

“But nothing. Luke’s right.”

She frowned, but before she could argue, the door to her lab burst open, smacking the wall and almost hitting Luke on the way.

He scowled at the petite woman with the pixie cut and wrinkled pantsuit who stood on the other side, and she fidgeted. “Sorry. Shaye, I’m glad you’re here.”

“What’s up?” Shaye asked, hoping no one had noticed the way she’d jumped in her seat at the unexpected noise.

The woman in the doorway, Jenna Dresden, was one of the lab’s best firearms experts, and one of Shaye’s closest friends here. Or at least she had been, until Shaye had left last year. Since she’d returned, things had been a little strained. Maybe because Shaye hadn’t stayed in touch over the past year.

“I looked at the bullets we recovered at the scene yesterday.”

Cole and Luke gave Jenna their full attention. “What did you find?” Cole asked.

“Well, I can tell you the bullet was a nine millimeter. And I can tell you that it doesn’t match up to anything shot from another gun we have on file.”

Cole didn’t have to say a word for Shaye to know exactly what that meant. Someone connected to Crazy Ed being involved just sank down to unlikely. Working other cases had taught her that gang members sold one another weapons, so they often ended up with guns that had been used in previous crimes.

“The gun’s a virgin,” Luke said. “So we won’t know anything until we match the bullet to the gun it came from.”

At that point, Jenna could compare the striations from the bullets they’d retrieved from the scene with those in the weapon’s chamber and see if they lined up. If they did, they had their weapon. And whoever it belonged to was probably their shooter.

“Afraid not,” Jenna agreed. “I wish I had better news. And now I’m going home, because I’ve been here since last night.”

“Thanks,” Shaye called as the brunette headed back the way she’d come. She looked questioningly at Cole.

“Back to square one.”

* * *

“SO, SOMEONE CONNECTED to Crazy Ed is out,” Luke said.

Cole frowned. “I guess so.”

After Jenna had given them the news about the bullet, that was practically a foregone conclusion anyway, but Cole wasn’t leaving anything to chance. So he’d bribed a couple of his fellow officers coming off duty with a pair of basketball tickets to go home with Shaye and watch her until he and Cole were finished.

After hours in the stifling heat of the station—the air conditioner was on the fritz—they’d tracked down anyone even remotely connected to Crazy Ed, which wasn’t a lot. It made Cole sad for the little boy Crazy Ed had once been: parents both killed in a drive-by when he was ten. He’d gone to live with an aunt, who’d overdosed a few years later, and then he’d ended up in the system.

Unlike Cole, who’d managed to form a brotherly bond with Andre and Marcos inside what felt like his fifteenth foster home in eight years, Crazy Ed had found gangs. The rest of his gang was now dead or in prison, and if he had any family left, Luke and Cole couldn’t find it. So no one left to avenge his death.

“He shot up a police station,” Luke reminded him, clearly able to read the direction of Cole’s thoughts. “He chose his path. Nothing we can do about it now.”

“Yeah.” Cole shook off his thoughts about whether Crazy Ed had ever really had a chance before he started dwelling on all the other kids he’d seen in homes over the years, kids he hadn’t kept track of. Kids he hadn’t taken on two jobs to provide them with a real home and ease their transition out of the system, like he had for Andre and Marcos. Because it sure hadn’t been easy for him, suddenly totally on his own, not even a roof over his head when he hit eighteen.