Читать книгу Second Chance Colton - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 9

Chapter 2

Ryan isn’t going to like this.

The thought echoed over and over again in Susie’s head as she looked down at the results from the latest DNA test. It was the third such test she’d authorized and this one she’d again done herself. She knew she was wasting her own time, not to mention the lab’s precious resources, just to make doubly sure—or triply sure as the case was—that the final results were the same as what had already been concluded the first and second times the test had been run.

There was no mistaking the findings. It was Greta Colton’s blood that had been found along the edges of the broken glass from the vandalized stable. It wasn’t just a vague familial match, which would have meant that the blood might have belonged to a family member, like Big J or one of Greta’s brothers. The match she was looking at was dead-on.

The blood belonged to Greta.

There wasn’t a single trace of anyone else’s blood on the jagged broken glass. No accomplice, no one else’s blood on the scene.

Only Greta’s.

Greta had been the one, for whatever reason, who had broken into the stables via the window instead of going in through the door, which as far as she knew, had been Greta’s normal custom.

What the hell was going on here?

Why would Greta be breaking into the stables through the window? It just didn’t make any sense.

Far from happy, Susie blew out a breath. Much as she really would have preferred coming up with a different conclusion, she had definitely nailed down the who. Now it was up to Ryan to find out the why.

Ryan definitely wasn’t going to be happy.

“That did not sound like a good sigh.”

Perched on a stool against the equipment-laden counter, Susie managed to swivel her stool around to face the doorway. She knew who she would be looking at before she was actually turned around. Nobody else’s voice undulated under her skin the way his had.

The way it still did.

Water under the bridge, remember? Water under the bridge. You’ve moved on. So keep moving, Susie told herself fiercely, albeit silently. Ryan no longer figured into her life, except professionally.

Doing her best to collect herself and look every inch the forensic expert that she was, Susie replied, “It wasn’t. And it definitely won’t be from your point of view.”

Ryan’s gut tightened. He knew what was coming and he braced himself—or tried to. “The DNA—”

Susie had never been one to prolong a verdict for the sake of dramatic effect. With distasteful news, it was best to get it out as quickly as possible and move on.

“—is still Greta’s,” she said, completing his sentence. “I’m sorry, Ryan. I had the test run a total of three times using three different samples from three different areas on the broken glass. I ran two of the tests and had someone else run another one.” To back herself up, Susie held up the three separate printouts that had resulted. “It came out the same each and every time. It’s Greta’s DNA. The blood found at the scene belongs to your sister.”

Ryan took the printouts from her and stared at the results on the top sheet. The findings on the two sheets beneath it were identical.

He felt as if someone had driven a knife into his stomach—and was still twisting it.

“There has to be an explanation,” he insisted, talking more to himself than to the woman perched on the stool.

“Ask her,” Susie suggested matter-of-factly. When Ryan looked down at her with confusion in his eyes, as if he had suddenly realized that he wasn’t alone in the room, she said, “If you really think that this doesn’t make sense, then ask her why she broke the stable window. Maybe she didn’t do it to get into the stables. Maybe there’s another plausible reason why the window was broken.” And why the stables were vandalized, she added silently.

“You don’t believe that,” he said, going by the expression on her face.

Susie shrugged away his observation. “What I believe—or don’t believe—isn’t the point here. I’m the forensic expert, you’re the detective. It’s up to you to take what I give you and arrange it into some sort of a complete picture that gives you the plausible answers you’re looking for.”

It almost sounded cut-and-dried—but he knew from experience nothing ever was.

He frowned, looking down at the printout Susie had given him. “This doesn’t give me any answers, just more questions.”

“It’s a start,” she told him crisply. “Use it to help you get those answers.”

“So now you’re telling me my job?” he asked, recalling that she had accused him of doing the same yesterday. He wasn’t being defensive, he told himself, just curious to see what the woman would say if he asked. “What is this, a demonstration of ‘turnabout is fair play’?”

Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything to him, Susie thought. She’d run the tests, done her job and given him the results. It was now up to him to work with what he had. Her part in this was over. She had to keep telling herself that, keep reminding herself to keep her distance, even though something inside her still insisted on holding out the hope that...

That nothing, Susie upbraided herself. There was nothing between them anymore except for business. He’d seen to that.

“Just trying to make the results more palatable for you, Detective Colton,” she told him.

Ryan winced. He could almost feel the frost encrusted around her words. “Ouch. That’s pretty formal. But I guess I deserve that.”

Yes, you do. That and a hell of a lot more, she added silently. “See, you’re detecting already,” she told him, doing her best to keep distancing herself from Ryan. She knew if she didn’t, if she allowed just a crack to open up, no matter how small, he’d somehow seep into her system, and just like that she’d be vulnerable all over again. In danger of having her heart ripped out again. She’d been down that route once and had no desire to revisit it. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got cases other than yours all clamoring for my time...” She allowed her voice to drift off as she deliberately made a show of getting back to work.

“No. Sure. Thanks.” The single-word sentences came out of his mouth in staccato fashion, as if he was firing each word one by one, pausing in between each.

She heard Ryan begin to walk toward the exit. This was where she was supposed to continue looking down at the work on her desk, the work she was already supposed to have finished but had moved aside so that she could run those additional DNA tests in hopes of finding another suspect, one that wasn’t Ryan’s sister.

All she had to do was hold out a total of thirty seconds. Fifty, tops, and he would be gone, Susie told herself.

There was really no need for her to say anything more to the man than she’d already said.

No need at all—except, perhaps, to satisfy her own curiosity about a man she had once believed herself to be madly in love with.

Once?

Hell, you’re still in love with him, you big idiot. You think you would’ve learned by now, Susie upbraided herself, annoyed at her own lack of discipline, not to mention a certain dearth of self-respect.

But for her internal lectures never took, no matter how driven they were by common sense, and she found herself turning all the way around on her stool. She was just in time to see Ryan about to step over the threshold, out into the hall.

Two more seconds and she’d be home free.

One—

“So what are you going to do?” she heard herself asking Ryan.

Apparently already lost in thought, Ryan jerked his head up. He’d heard her voice, but not the words that she’d said. “What?”

“So what are you going to do?” Susie repeated, enunciating each word.

Ryan crossed back over the threshold, but only took a couple of steps toward her before he stopped. He had to admit he was surprised that she was interested enough to ask him that. “I’m going to call Greta and do just what you suggested. I’m going to ask her what she was doing in the stable and why she had to break the window in order to get in.”

Susie thought for a moment. “Your sister’s a horse trainer, isn’t she?”

He was surprised that Susie had taken the time to find that out. It wasn’t as if they ran in the same circles these days. And back when they were together, their worlds had contained only each other, to the exclusion of everyone else. That meant family members, as well.

“Best in the business,” Ryan confirmed.

“Maybe she was passing by the stable at that hour for some reason, looked in and thought she saw smoke coming from the stable. Or maybe she thought she saw a horse in distress. The fastest way from point A to point B is still a straight line.” She shrugged carelessly, unable to come up with any better explanations at the moment. “Maybe that was why she broke the window.”

Although he appreciated her effort, he thought that Susie was definitely reaching. “And she didn’t stick around to tell anyone what she did?” Ryan asked skeptically.

Susie took her theory to the next step. “She was probably too embarrassed about breaking the window for no reason so she didn’t hang around, waiting for someone from the family to hear her out. Most likely, she’s just working up the nerve to answer for what she did. Nobody likes to admit that they made a mistake or acted rashly,” she pointed out.

They were talking about his sister, and Susie was giving him ammunition to defend Greta’s actions, but he really wasn’t convinced.

“I suppose that sounds plausible enough,” he allowed. “But I’ll believe it when I hear it from Greta’s own lips. Last I heard, she’s not even supposed to be in Tulsa right now.”

“Well, she might not be, but her blood certainly is,” Susie said, indicating the printouts he was holding. “I don’t have to point out that you can’t have one without the other.”

“Unless someone’s trying to frame you,” Ryan said as the idea suddenly occurred to him. The only thing that wasn’t occurring to him was why someone would go to the sort of trouble that actually framing his sister would require.

But even as he began to vaguely entertain the idea, he saw Susie shaking her head.

Exasperation seeped into his tone. “What?” he asked.

She had to stop him before he got carried away with the idea he seemed to be embracing. “If someone for some obscure reason actually did manage to have a sample of your sister’s blood—and I’m talking about enough to smear on the jagged edges of the window—it would have started to coagulate in a vial. There are certain characteristics of stored blood that would have shown up in the blood workup that was done. They didn’t,” she informed him flatly. “This blood was fresh when it came in contact with the broken glass.”

“I was afraid of that,” he murmured, again more to himself than to her.

Susie’s slender shoulders rose and fell, not in a show of indifference, but to signify that some things just couldn’t be changed no matter how much one might want them to be different.

“So, go back to your initial plan,” she told him.

“Which was?” he asked, wanting to see what Susie thought his plan had been.

“You said you were going to go question your sister and ask Greta what she was doing there at that time of night. Ask her why she thought it was necessary to break into stables that she could have just as easily accessed the proper way—through the door.”

Susie was right of course. But the more he thought about it, the more this proposed conversation with Greta was not going to be a conversation that he was looking forward to. Added to that was the fact that Greta had been a little jumpy since their mother had been found battered and beaten.

In the past couple of months his normally cheerful little sister had become increasingly uneasy, at times acting almost paranoid, and questioning her about the acts of vandalism and the break-in at the Lucky C was definitely not going to help the situation or Greta’s frame of mind, he thought.

He could feel Susie’s eyes on him, as if scrutinizing his very thought process. What she said next all but confirmed his suspicions.

“Maybe you should take another family member with you when you go to question her,” Susie suggested.

Susie pressed her lips together. She knew she should just keep out of this. After all, the man had all but callously torn her heart right out of her chest without so much as a warning shot. She owed him nothing.

But even so, the look on his face had her feeling for him. She knew that if she were in his place, confronting this sort of situation, she would feel awful.

Memories from the past tried to break through, memories of a time when they were each other’s entire world.

But that was then, this was now, she reminded herself. She had to get a grip on her emotions. They had absolutely no place here.

“Thanks,” he said, surprised that Susie would even bother to attempt to give him helpful suggestions, given their past. “But that’s not a good idea. If I take one of my brothers with me, Greta will think we’re ganging up on her. She’s been on edge ever since our mother was attacked.” He remembered being called to the scene by his frantic father and racing to his mother’s side. The whole episode was vividly imprinted on his mind.

“Just before she slipped into an unconscious state, when I asked my mother who did this to her, she just stared at me and then started to cry. I couldn’t get her to say anything or even indicate whether or not she had seen the attacker’s face. She slipped into a coma right after that.

“When she finally came out of her coma, every time Greta was anywhere near her, my mother looked, I don’t know, spooked I guess is the best word for it. As for Greta, she just looked uncomfortable—and hurt.” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what to make of any of it.”

For a moment Susie forgot that she wasn’t supposed to be talking to Ryan beyond uttering a few monosyllabic responses. All she saw was an all-too-human homicide detective, torn between job responsibilities and familial loyalties—a fellow human being in need of some kind of support.

That was the Ryan she was talking to.

“If not another family member, maybe you could take another female with you to be supportive of Greta as well as you,” she proposed.

“You?” Ryan asked in surprise. Was she actually offering to come with him to question Greta?

Susie shrugged. She had painted herself into a corner with that one, she thought. The focus wasn’t supposed to be on her but on the situation—and the crime. She’d meant the suggestion in a general way, but there was no denying that she was a female.

“I do qualify for the category,” she was forced to admit, almost against her will.

Ryan smiled then, remembering a time prior to the breakup he had engineered. A time when everything had seemed perfect despite the claim the service had on him. Remembering a very small island of time when he had been in love, and had just allowed things to “be” without any in-depth analysis.

“If memory serves me, you more than qualify—and thanks for offering—but this is something I have to do on my own,” he told her. “I think that the less people Greta sees when I arrive, the better this whole situation might work out.”

Or at least that was what he hoped.

Susie didn’t know if he was just being protective of his sister, or if Ryan was once again dismissing her wholesale out of his life.

In either case, she told herself, her conscience was clear. Despite the extenuating circumstances, she’d offered to do the right thing. That she had done so was not negated by his refusal of her offer. It just made her square with him.

“Suit yourself,” she responded, doing what she could to sound indifferent. “You always know best.”

The last part had sounded incredibly cold as well as formal and withdrawn to his ear. Whatever bridge they had crossed a moment ago was now officially uncrossed again and they were back to their initial corners. They were once again on the opposite sides of the fence, the words opposite sides all but ten feet tall with neon lights dancing around them.

He didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time to deal with any regrets, small or, in this case, large. What was done was done and he had to focus on the present. Just possibly, he had a sister to bring back to the fold. A sister that he had to take care not to alienate as he tried to subtly question her about her part—if she had played a part—in these bizarre, random attacks of vandalism and destruction that were occurring on the ranch.

A sister who just might never forgive him if she proved to be innocent of any wrongdoing and thought that he was accusing her of the exact opposite.

There were times when he scolded himself for not having chosen a simpler, easier path in life. But everyone had to follow their strengths, he reasoned, and his involved ferreting out the truth and taking down the bad guys.

“Thanks for all your help,” he said to Susie as he started to leave again.

She looked up at him. “I’m sure you don’t mean that, but you’re welcome.”

He was about to take exception with the way she had phrased that—it sounded as if she had stopped just short of calling him a liar—but he caught himself just in time. There was no point in attempting to contradict her point of view about the immediate matter at hand. She had a right to her opinion, even if she was dead wrong. Because he had meant what he’d just said.

He was deliberately wasting time. Every minute he stood here was another minute that he was delaying the inevitable because it was going to be, at best, awkward and uncomfortable. He didn’t want to think about what it would be like at its worst.

Squaring his shoulders, he left the lab. He needed to get this over with. Now.

And then, he thought as he went down the corridor, he could move on to something else.

Hopefully more successfully than the last time he’d told himself he was moving on.

He sincerely doubted that he could do any worse.