Joan Pickart - Body of Evidence

Something way down in Colin’s gut knotted. “But…?”

“The tape for last night…”

The man swallowed tightly, his eyes flicking nervously from Colin to Wilson.

“What about it?” Colin asked, his voice very quiet because he already knew the answer.

Bergen swallowed again.

“It’s gone.”

“N ow what do you suppose the odds are of that particular tape, and that tape only, going missing?” Waters mused aloud as they made their way into the station. Their quick run to the younger Gardner ’s private college had netted them only the fact that it didn’t take long if you drove fast; the youngest Gardner had been off campus.

Darien shifted Gardner ’s laptop, the evidence they were here to book, to her other arm. “About the same as the Cubs winning the World Series,” she muttered, without thought starting up the stairs for the detective office, even carrying the extra few pounds of the computer.

“Or less. If that’s possible,” Waters added with a quirk of his mouth as he started up with her.

“So, does that narrow us down to residents and their families? Those who knew about the cameras and where the recording equipment was?” Darien asked.

“And everyone from the security company. And anyone any of them might have told.”

“Or anybody who went looking, I suppose,” she said. “It wouldn’t be tough to figure out it would be in the basement. And we knew instantly the unlabeled door had to be it.”

“Exactly.”

They reached the Detective Bureau door, and Waters leaned around her to open the door. She’d long ago given up making an issue out of such things-she’d found too often they were a test of sorts-but when she stepped through she turned and held the door for him as he followed. He accepted the gesture without comment, and she wasn’t sure if she’d passed this test. If indeed it had been a test.

“Hey, if it isn’t the two-W detective team of Waters and the lovely Miss Darien. What have you two been up to in the stairway? Don’t you know it’s easier in an elevator?”

“Oh, joy,” Darien muttered. Then she flashed a quick look at Waters, hoping the mustached Detective Palmer, a man she’d only recently met but still could only describe as rude, crude and obnoxious, wasn’t his best buddy.

“Well, now, if it isn’t every woman’s dream come true,” Waters drawled.

“Hey, hey, you know they love me,” Palmer said, in jovial tones, proving to Darien what she’d already thought, that the man was too stupid to even know when he was being insulted. “You’re not the only chick magnet around here.”

Oh, puhleeze, Darien thought. “Excuse me,” she said. “I must be a matching pole.”

Palmer looked blank, but she caught Waters’s quick, appreciative grin just before she tried sidestepping around the sleaze to head for her desk.

“I’d take it easy, honey,” Palmer said, his voice taking on a nasty undertone. He gave the computer she carried a look of disdain. “There’s a lot of people not very happy that you got this spot over guys who deserved it more. A lot of people asking why. And how.”

She stopped in her tracks. She knew exactly what he was implying, that she had slept her way here. She turned, and gave the man a level gaze.

“Are you trying, in your Neanderthal way, to make a point?” she asked sweetly. “If so, you’re going to have to spell it out. I’m just a silly little ol’ woman, after all.”

“Keeping in mind there’s a witness,” Waters said softly, surprising her.

Palmer frowned. But even he seemed to realize if he came right out and said what he was thinking it could boomerang on him.

“Yeah, right. Well, I don’t have to say a thing. We all know.” He slid Waters a sideways look, as if uncertain if he should include him in his generalization.

“Don’t you have some missing persons to look for?” Colin asked, knowing there had been several reports recently.

“Yeah, yeah,” Palmer muttered. Apparently deciding he was better off abandoning this particular ship, he turned and walked away, leaving them in the deserted hallway.

Darien felt a queasiness in her stomach that she fought not to show. She flicked a glance at Waters, who was watching her, his expression unreadable.

“So that’s what everybody thinks?”

“That’s what Palmer thinks,” Waters said. “I’d say you’d have to ask to find out what everybody else thinks.”

“No, thanks. I don’t care.” She took two steps, then stopped. She looked back at him. “No, maybe I do. If it’s what you think.”

He studied her for a long, silent moment. “I may not be sure why you’re here, but no, I don’t think you slept your way into this job.”

“Why?”

He seemed surprised at the question. “Almost ten years of being a cop teaches you to read people. If you’re paying attention.”

“Oh.” Then, as she realized she probably should, she said, “Thank you.”

“Don’t bother.” As if it were an afterthought he added, “Why did it matter what I thought?”

“Because it would be very hard for me to work with someone who thought I sold myself and my soul for the job,” she said bluntly.

This time she’d only gone those same two steps when he called her.

“ Wilson?”

She turned to look over her shoulder at him.

“You handled him just right.”

A slow smile curved her mouth. “Thanks.”

Those simple words warmed her much more than they should have. And she thought that she could come to like Colin Waters, even if he was the resident division hunk.

They walked past Joshua Benton’s cubicle and Waters joked that he was likely locked up in the lab with Maggie Sutter, working miracles. She laughed in agreement; she’d seen the lab, but what went on there was as incredible to her as her expertise with computers was to technophobes.

An hour later, she realized she’d been mistaken. Not about feeling she could like Colin Waters, but about the height of his hunk status. Now, in close quarters with him-she’d been given a desk in the same cubicle in the open office area-she was aware of just how much attention he got from most of the females in the entire building. They were always stopping by on some pretext or other, hand delivering a phone message, a copy of a report, anything, all of which could have been sent through normal delivery channels. She felt a faint distaste growing as the parade continued. And the fact that Waters apparently saw nothing unusual about it told her how often it happened.

She wasn’t spared herself; the close and not very subtle inspection she got from the women told her that word of her assignment as his partner had spread rapidly. She couldn’t fault their taste-Colin was a very attractive man-but their methods made her feel a little bit ashamed to be female just now. Even if she had been interested, which of course she wasn’t, she would never try those kinds of maneuvers.

They’d agreed to divide up the reports on their initial interviews, and she’d been secretly relieved not to have simply been told to do it all, being the female, the rookie, and thus the most likely secretarial material available.

Once they were done, almost simultaneously, they filed the reports and headed back out to the parking lot. She’d retrieved her car when they’d returned to the apartment to find out about the missing tape. They had just reached it when her cell phone rang.

“Hi, babe, it’s me.”

“Hi, Tony. What’s up?”

“Getting ready to leave for the Yucatán, so I wanted to check in.”

“Check out, you mean,” she teased.

“That, too,” he said cheerfully. “Everything okay, fuzz lady?”