Valerie Hansen - The Rookie's Assignment

The older woman shook his hand firmly and regarded him as if he were an interesting specimen caught in one of the fishing nets adorning the walls, although he wasn’t sure what he might be a specimen of. The minute she spoke, however, he got a pretty good idea.

“So, Aiden paired you two up, did he? My, my. Maybe he’s finally taking some of my advice. It’s about time.”

“Nick and I are just working together for a few weeks,” Keira insisted, “so don’t start in on us the way you did with Douglas and Merry O’Leary, okay?”

“Hey, I didn’t do anything. The good Lord made those two compatible, not me.”

“Right.” Keira rolled her eyes. “I’ve been telling Nick how great the food is here so we’d better grab a table. You never know when we might get a call and have to leave in a hurry.”

“I’ll take your order myself and put a rush on it,” Vanessa promised. “The special today is clam chowder and crab cakes. How does that sound?”

Nick nodded and grinned. “If it tastes half as good as this place smells, it’ll be the best thing I’ve ever eaten. Bring it on.”

“Me, too. And iced tea, please,” Keira said. “We’ll sit right here.”

Nick reached to pull out a captain’s chair for her but she was already plunking down in a different one. Edging his own chair around slightly so that his back wasn’t to the door, he joined her.

“Still nervous?” Keira asked.

“Still careful,” he replied with an arched brow and a half smile. “I try to never sit where I can’t see what’s coming. It’s an old habit.”

“And probably a good one.” Keira shifted slightly to make more room for him on her side of the small table. “This is the kind of thing I meant when I said I wanted to learn from you. My brothers and the rest of the officers in Fitzgerald Bay are much more relaxed than you are and I want to be prepared for anything.”

Nick noticed her barely perceptible shiver. “Good. That means you’re still open to new ideas. A lot of cops are so set in their ways they refuse to learn.”

Leaning her elbows on the table to come even closer, she lowered her voice. “Actually, I want you to think out loud when we’re going over evidence together. Ask me anything you want, no matter who it involves. Please?”

“If you’re sure that’s what you really want.”

“I’m sure. It’s possible that you and I can put our heads together and come up with another suspect, or at least eliminate Charles.”

“And if we can’t?”

“We will. I know we will. There must be something we’re missing. Something that points to the real killer. You brought the murder weapon and the other evidence back with you since the lab was done with them, didn’t you?”

“The bloody rock? Yes. And the victim’s shoe. There were no usable prints on any of that stuff.”

“What about the dolphin charm found near her body?”

“That may have been lost on the beach months ago, maybe last summer. There’s no way to tell. And no, it didn’t have any fingerprints on it, either.”

Keira straightened to make room for the bowls of steaming chowder Vanessa was placing on the table in front of them and thanked the older woman.

Nick was glad they’d been interrupted. Of the two blood types found on the rock, only one had belonged to the victim. If Keira had read the lab reports she knew that, too.

Until he’d had a chance to interview more townspeople, he figured it would be best to limit their discussion of those particular clues. They led straight to her brother Charles.

Because her partner had grown so quiet and subdued while they ate, Keira decided to try to draw him out with questions. “I’ve been thinking,” she began.

He slowly lowered his soup spoon. “Uh-oh.”

“Very funny. I just wonder if maybe those guys in the trucks were only passing through. Either or both of them could have been criminals, of course, but maybe they had nothing to do with ransacking your room.”

“Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy, too?”

“Okay, okay. You don’t agree. Am I right?”

“For a change, yes.”

His lopsided half smile pleased her beyond anything she’d expected and encouraged further banter. “For a change, huh? You sound more and more like my brothers every minute and you’ve only been here a few days. I hate to think what you’ll be like after a month.”

“Maybe it won’t take that long to solve the murder,” Nick said. “I’m going to want a DNA sample from Charles.”

Now that was a surprise. She scowled. “Why? He already provided one.”

Watching her partner’s face, Keira made a deduction that was very upsetting. “Wait a sec. You think he—we—may have falsified evidence?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. Nobody would mistake the implication. You want to take a sample yourself because you don’t trust us.”

When Nick swiveled to look at her, she could tell he was hesitant to say more. Well, he didn’t have to. She knew precisely what he’d meant.

“Look, Keira, wouldn’t you rather the second sample was taken and proved to be a match to the first? It would help the state police and your brother at the same time.”

“The truth is in the first sample Charles gave.”

“Okay. But Olivia worked for his family. There’s still a good chance that some of the material found under her fingernails belonged to a Fitzgerald. The question is how it got there and whether that’s all that was found.”

“You have results that I don’t know about?” Keira asked.

“We do have more than one blood sample from the rock that we believe was the murder weapon. Unfortunately, the blood type is a common one and it does match your brother’s.”

“I read that in the preliminary toxicology report. So?”

“So, the best way to clear his name is send a new sample for typing and a DNA test. If the prime suspect wasn’t related to you, you’d jump at this chance. Admit it.”

“Okay. Maybe you’re right. But you’re not going to pin this murder on an innocent man. We won’t allow it.”

“Do you actually believe I came here to frame him?”

Keira sighed. “No. But I’ve heard of cases where men spent years in prison before the truth came out and they were freed. Charles has small children to raise. He needs to be there for them, not locked up over some trumped-up evidence that an overzealous prosecutor decided to use.”

“You’re really afraid for him, aren’t you?”

She knew Nick was reading her just the way he’d claimed he could. Well, maybe she was a little transparent but Charles was her big brother. She loved him. And she loved his twins, Aaron and Brianne, too. They were only two years old, their mother had deserted them, and now the nanny they’d grown attached to in her place had been murdered. What would happen to the poor little things if their daddy was hauled off to jail?

Before she could decide how to rebut Nick’s suggestion that she was fearful, he reached across the table and patted the back of her hand. His touch was gentle and the look in his hazel eyes warmed her to the marrow in her bones.

“I promise you one thing,” Nick said quietly. “I will never assume anyone is guilty unless I have solid proof. And I’ll give your brother the full benefit of the doubt. That’s another reason it’s important to take a second swab for DNA. It’s the surest way to rule him out.”

“What if it doesn’t? I mean, Olivia worked for him. Suppose she got his or the kids’ DNA under her nails some other way? It didn’t have to have happened right when she was killed.”

“No, but she did have that day off.”

“You don’t know much about toddlers, do you? They don’t understand things like days off. Maybe Olivia did something for one or both of the twins that day, even if she wasn’t supposed to be working.”