Joan Pickart - Body of Evidence

After that he finished the reports from those calls and interviews, then reread the case reports Sutter and Benton had filed. He mentally crossed the maid off his suspect list when he’d learned she had had a gentleman caller herself the evening before the murder; no wonder she’d been a bit edgy.

He mentioned it to Wilson. She nodded, but didn’t look away from her screen. He tossed down his pen, closed the computer file, and sat for a moment rubbing at gritty eyes. Just another in the string of long nights.

He glanced over at his partner. He didn’t know how she did it, sat and stared for so long at a computer screen day after day. His eyes started to scream back at him after a few hours. But she was just as intent as she had been when she’d started, clearly with no thought of quitting. She had the drive, he had to admit that. And she’d made some good observations. Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as he’d feared.

At that moment she leaned back at last, arching her back in a slow, graceful move. She shoved one hand through her hair. He’d never thought of short hair as particularly sexy before, but he just might change his mind. The blond cap fell back in a tousle that looked as if she’d just run her fingers through it after getting out of bed.

Shock jolted through him as his body clenched. For a moment he refused to believe what he was feeling, but the rush of heat that followed, pooling low and deep inside him, made it impossible to deny.

Are you nuts? he asked himself. Isn’t it bad enough she’s the epitome of everything you’ve proven you can’t handle, a woman made for a marriage that would last a lifetime, with kids gathered round? Add the fact that she’s a colleague, and your partner to boot, and you’re not playing with fire, you’re tossing around napalm.

“Gotcha!”

He nearly jumped, wondering how on earth she’d guessed his reckless thoughts. It took him a moment to realize her exclamation was directed at the laptop she was working on. He stood up.

“Go-” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Got what?”

She looked up at him, satisfaction warming her blue eyes. “The files. I found the files. They were buried a bit, but they’re there, right where I thought.”

“Can you get them open?”

“I think so. I’ve got this program that’s designed to do just that.” She looked up at him again. “I’m going to have to do it on this machine, or risk corrupting the files trying to copy them. Is that going to be a problem, evidence wise?”

“Worth it, if it works. We’ll just have to log every step. Go for it.”

She nodded, then turned and pulled a jewel case out of her purse and removed a CD-ROM. She inserted the disk into the laptop’s drive.

“Hang on,” she said.

He waited while she opened a software program with what looked to him like a very rudimentary interface. He decided not to ask what it was or where she’d gotten it. After a moment she typed a series of commands, then leaned back and waited, her eyes fastened on the screen. Several minutes passed, during which she assured him the wait was not unusual.

Then the computer let out a high beep, the screen flashed and changed, and row after row of jumbled characters raced across and down the screen.

She let out a low, hissed breath.

“What is it?”

She sat back and rubbed at her face in obvious weariness. Then she looked at him.

“It’s all in code.”

He blinked. “What?”

“They’re all there, the files I mean, but they’re encoded.”

“Hot damn,” he breathed. “That means there’s something there really worth hiding.”

Realization dawned on her face, and he knew she had been so intent on solving the new problem that she hadn’t thought of the ramifications of the results she’d already gotten.

“Hot damn,” she echoed. And grinned.

Darien was exhausted. Exhausted, but still determined. They’d brought her into this job because of her computer skills, so she was darn well going to prove that they’d made a good choice. So she kept at it. She’d taken a three-hour nap last night in one of the few offices with a couch in it, but at 5:00 a.m. she’d been up and at it again. She’d been antsy to get back to working on Franklin ’s computer. She knew it was in part because that was safe, familiar ground where she knew what she was doing, unlike this seemingly endless legwork.

She didn’t look up until her partner wandered in about a half an hour later.

He’d obviously been to the locker room and taken a shower; his hair was wet and slicked back. It emphasized the even, chiseled features of his face, strong masculine jaw and cheekbones she hadn’t really noticed before. A drop of water from his hair trickled down the side of his face, then traced a path along his neck.

“-having any luck?”

She jerked her gaze away from the unexpectedly fascinating travels of that droplet.

“What? Oh, no, not yet.” She looked at the message that had flashed on her screen, tapped a couple of keys, then looked back at him. “What do you suppose he was hiding?”

He leaned a hip against his desk, and she noticed then he’d put on a pair of jeans. And judging by how snug they fit, it must have taken him ten minutes just to get into them, especially if his skin was still damp, she thought.

At the images that raced through her mind she felt a blush that began somewhere around her navel. And again she missed the first part of what he said.

“-anything. Could be just secret business files, maybe something on a takeover.”

“Maybe he cooked some books,” Darien said, still working to recover a poise shattered by her own too-vivid and suddenly overactive imagination.

“Or if we’re real lucky, it could be even worse, something criminal.”

“You mean something bad enough that it could have gotten him killed?”

“It’s a possibility,” he said.

“All the more reason to get this broken fast,” she said, and turned her gaze back to the screen.

“Coffee?”

She looked up again, surprised. “Yes, please.”

“How do you take it?”

“One each cream and sugar.”

He nodded and exited the cubicle, leaving her still a little bemused that he’d even offered. When he returned a few minutes later, a luscious aroma made her look up.

“The guy was just bringing them in, they were still warm, and I couldn’t resist.”

He set a small plate down in front of her, and put a matching one on his own desk. She looked down at the obviously freshly baked cinnamon roll, and nearly grinned as her stomach growled in Pavlovian response.

“I can see why,” she said with heart-or stomach-felt sincerity. “Thanks.”

She tore a piece off the edge, and found it tasted as divine as it smelled. She looked up to thank him again, and found him licking icing from his fingers in a way that made her think again of those rebellious shower thoughts she’d had earlier. Immediately she tried to distract herself by peeling off another layer of the roll and popping it into her mouth.

So, the hunk has a sweet tooth, she thought.

“It’s a weakness,” he said rather sheepishly, and for an instant she feared she’d spoken aloud. “Baked stuff. Can’t help myself.”

She found that rather endearing. “Did your mother bake a lot?”

“No. She was all thumbs in the kitchen. But my stepmother, now she can whip these up with her eyes shut. Cakes, cookies, you name it. She always joked she had to run five miles a day to keep from weighing a ton just from sampling.”

Darien grinned. “Sounds like my kind of woman.”

“She’s great. I was ten when my mom died, so when my dad brought her home a couple of years later, she stepped into a pretty difficult situation. She did a great job, though. Even if I didn’t really appreciate it until much later.”