Joan Pickart - Body of Evidence

“Just busy. Have a good trip. Send me a postcard.”

“Don’t I always?”

“Unless you forget,” she said.

“Love ya,” Tony said.

“Love you, too. Be careful.”

“Always.”

She disconnected, then slid the phone back into her coat pocket. And became aware that Waters hadn’t walked on to his own car but was still here watching her.

“Boyfriend?”

It wasn’t any of his business, really, but she found herself answering him anyway, just to see what he’d say. “No. Ex-husband.”

That got you, she thought, hiding a smile at his startled look.

“Ex?” he asked after a moment. “Didn’t sound ex to me.”

“How do you talk to yours?” She knew from office gossip that he’d been married and divorced.

“I don’t,” he said flatly.

“That’s too bad.”

She thought she’d kept her voice fairly even, but he turned on her anyway. “You think all divorces should be…what’s that stupid word, amicable?”

She shrugged. “I just know mine was. Tony and I are still good friends.”

“Friends,” he muttered, still in that sour tone.

“We were friends before we got married, and should have stayed just friends. We were too young to understand what marriage was really all about.”

“Don’t tell me you were high-school sweethearts.”

“No. I was twenty, he was twenty-one, but we were still too young. It worked at first, but after about three years he got to thinking about how he hadn’t played enough.”

“So he cheated on you?”

“Tony? Good grief no. He would never do that. I didn’t mean that kind of playing. I meant literal play. Ski, bike, climb, you name it.”

“And you didn’t?”

“I enjoyed fun as much as anyone, but I also wanted to have kids. That was the break point for him. And it’s just as well. He wasn’t mature enough to raise a child, and he knew it. I respect him for that.”

“So, Wilson, you married a playaholic?”

She ignored his sharp sarcasm, but she did wonder what kind of nerve she’d hit. “Tony is who he is. Above all he’s honest. And that saved us both a lot of pain. I’m glad he’s my friend. Besides, my parents like him and he’s good to them, and I wouldn’t want to ruin that.”

“Honest,” Waters muttered.

He lapsed into silence, which left Darien wondering why on earth that had come pouring out of her. It was true she wasn’t uncomfortable talking about Tony and her marriage, but she didn’t usually tell near strangers all that.

It was too late now to worry about, so she turned her thoughts to something else, something that had just struck her when he’d made that comment about Tony being a playaholic. He’d called her Wilson. Unlike Palmer.

…Waters and the lovely Miss Darien.

She’d noticed that most cops called each other by their last names unless they were personal friends. But they called women by their first names. She hadn’t thought much about it until Palmer had made that rude, suggestive comment. And suddenly she was seeing it as something more, some subtle symptom of a man’s world that had yet to completely accept the intrusion of females.

But Colin Waters called her by her last name, just as he did most others. That comforted her somehow.

Great, Colin thought as he rubbed at his eyes. So your new partner, besides being gorgeous enough to stop most men in their tracks, was on the kiddie track. Was friendly with her ex-husband. Kept her parents happy. The proverbial, perfect girl next door. Exactly the kind of woman I always avoid.

He wasn’t sure why this realization bothered him. She was only his partner, after all.

It was odd that he was actually thinking of her that way already, as his partner. She hadn’t said all that much, either in interviews or in between, but what she had said had been right-on. She’d surprised him, more than once. As she’d been surprising him today; she’d set herself up this morning with a diet soda, then dug into Gardner ’s laptop computer and had been hacking away ever since. She showed no sign of being aware of time passing, merely kept at it, with the occasional mutter to the computer screen that he’d noticed before in those who had carnal knowledge of the things.

He’d thought the words “carnal knowledge” as a joke about computer geeks, but somehow when applied to Darien Wilson, they managed to make him feel damned uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair and made himself go back to filing the last of their reports, and going through what had been added by the forensics team thus far.

“Sutter says the bruises on his face were likely made by a heavy ring of some kind.”

She paused then, looking up at last. “That helps.”

“If he’s still wearing it,” Colin said glumly.

She went back to her work. More and more time passed. There were moments of silence, followed by a series of quick keystrokes. More muttering, then more silence, more keystrokes. She was so intent that she didn’t even glance up as he went to the copy machine and then returned.

For a moment he stood looking over her shoulder. Instead of the usual software interfaces he was familiar with, there were strings of odd-looking characters on the screen. They made no sense at all to him, but she seemed to find them easily understandable. But then, while he was fairly computer literate, his comfort zone ended outside his regularly used software.

“Come on, come on,” she murmured, then let out a tightly compressed breath when the screen flashed and went blank. She leaned back in her chair and rubbed the back of her neck.

“Problem?”

“Not sure. He’s got some odd chunks on his hard drive that could be hidden files. I just have to find my way into them.”

“Hidden files?”

“They could be junk, but we won’t know until I can get in there.”

He leaned against the edge of his desk and gestured at the computer. “How’d you get so into all this?”

“I started out doing research for school online. Then a Web site. The more I got into that, the more I wanted to know.”

“And the jump from there to police work?”

She swiveled the chair around to look at him straight on. “My mom got taken in by an online scam. During that case, I saw a whole lot of innocent people who got taken by thieves who used this medium I loved for their crimes. I wanted to stop that kind of thing. It’s going to be the crime scene of the future. It’s already here.”

God, she really was the girl next door, out to avenge her mom. “It’s not all nice, clean computer crime, you know.”

She gave him a wry look. “Believe it or not, I knew that. And if I hadn’t, this assignment would have taught me in a big hurry.”

“Sorry,” Colin muttered.

“Look, I know I was hired for this-” she gestured at the open laptop “-because the department is recruiting computer people, but I didn’t come into this blind. I thought long and hard before I applied. And longer and harder before I took the job because I knew there were going to be people who felt like Palmer does.”

“Palmer is just a jerk.”

She studied him, long enough to make him wonder what she was thinking. “Thanks, but you know there are others who think the same thing.”

“They may question your being given the job, but if you prove you can do it, eventually that’s all that will matter.”

“Promise?” she asked, her mouth quirking up at one corner.

“Yeah,” he said, hoping he wasn’t being too optimistic.

She studied him again for a long moment before saying, “So, now that I’ve told you my life story, tell me yours.”

He blinked, startled. “Mine?”

“Why don’t you talk to your ex?”

“Why would I?” He was aware he sounded a bit defensive.