Marie Ferrarella - Cavanaugh In The Rough

Unable to stand it, she looked up and glared at him. “What do you want, O’Bannon?” she muttered. It took everything she had not to shout the question at him. The man was making her crazy.

Chris never hesitated as he answered her. “Dinner.”

She clenched her jaw. “You can buy it in any supermarket,” she informed him coldly.

He sidestepped the roadblocks she was throwing up as if they weren’t there.

“With you.”

This time Suzie was the one who didn’t hesitate for a second. “Not at any price. Now please go before I take out my manual on workplace harassment and start underlining passages to get you banned from my lab.”

“It’s the crime scene lab, not yours,” he reminded her pleasantly, taking a page out of her book. And then Chris inclined his head. “Until the next time.”

“There is no next time,” she countered, steaming even though she refused to look up again.

“Don’t forget we’re working this case together,” he told her cheerfully.

He thought he heard Suzie say “Damn” under her breath as he left the lab.

Chris smiled to himself.

Chapter 4

Suzie counted to a hundred.

Slowly.

She’d already gotten the impression that O’Bannon was the impatient type, so if he was planning on doubling back to make a reappearance in her lab, she was fairly certain he’d do it way before she reached a hundred.

Just to be sure, she counted to a hundred a second time.

Finished, she relaxed and turned her attention to the tablet the detective had deposited almost carelessly on her desk—as if he didn’t know that her interest would immediately be drawn to it. She mentally crossed her fingers that the two fumbling teens had somehow managed to capture something of significance on their phones, and that it wasn’t all just blurred videos.

Heaven knew she wasn’t getting anywhere with the photos she’d taken at what now amounted to the secondary crime scene, Suzie thought. If the woman’s killer had dumped her body there—and Suzie was certain that whoever it was had—she had no hope of singling out his or her shoe prints from all the other prints that were so pervasive around the body.

She hadn’t found any traces of blood in the area, either. None belonging to the victim and none that might have pointed to her would-be killer. In addition, Suzie hadn’t seen anything beneath the young woman’s nails to indicate that she had tried to fight off her killer.

What she did find, however, was a great deal of spilled alcohol, all varieties, on the floor, as well as traces of drugs that at first assessment appeared to be of the recreational variety.

She found it rather ironic that she was dealing with that sort of party scene now. She herself had almost gone that route when the scandal had broken wide open. Only her fierce resolve to hold herself together for her mother’s sake had kept her from doing it. Kept her from availing herself of the alcohol and drugs that would have numbed her acute pain, as well as her acute shame, and brought her peace, at least for a little while.

And then, after the trial was over, her mother had killed herself, abruptly bringing what was left of Suzie’s own shattered world crashing down on her.

She paused for a moment, drawing in a long breath as she struggled to center herself and put the barriers back up where they belonged. She needed to contain those memories, to keep them as far away from her mind as she possibly could.

Though she hated admitting to weakness, she knew that she couldn’t handle those memories yet.

Maybe she never would.

Squaring her shoulders, she pulled the tablet closer and activated the video. She had clues to find and a murder to make sense of. She owed it to the dead girl.

She owed it to a lot of dead girls.

* * *

It felt like she’d been staring at the videos, playing them over and over again, for hours now. Each time she did, she picked up something new she hadn’t seen before.

But now her eyes felt as if they were burning.

Leaning back in her chair for a moment, Suzie closed them.

When she opened her eyes again, only the extreme control that she had learned to exercise kept her from screaming. Even so, her heart pounded like a war drum.

When she’d shut her eyes to momentarily rest them, she’d been alone in the lab. When she opened them, she found she wasn’t alone any longer.

Chris was standing right in front of her, less than two feet away.

Damn O’Bannon, he would wind up giving her a heart attack.

“Why are you sneaking up on me?” she demanded, unconsciously pressing her hand against her chest, as if to keep her heart from leaping out.

“I wasn’t sneaking,” Chris told her innocently. “Although I did leave my tap shoes at home. The chief of d’s frowns on scuff marks the taps make on the wood,” he explained, keeping an entirely straight face.

She didn’t have the patience to listen to him go on and on. Her composure had faded hours ago.

“It’s late, O’Bannon. What are you doing here?” she asked.

Rather than becoming defensive, he turned the tables on her, saying mildly, “I could ask you the same thing.”

She didn’t care for the nature of his question, or his attitude. She hadn’t invaded his work space; he had invaded hers.

And she wanted him gone.

“I have work to do. I like working late,” she emphasized. “There’s usually no one around to bother me,” she added, looking at him pointedly. Her message was clear.

Or so she thought.

Chris nodded. “I had a hunch,” he told her. “That’s why I came back.”

Give the situation, he wasn’t making any sense. But then, she was beginning to think that he was doing that on purpose. Well, whatever his game was, she didn’t have the time or the desire to play. She wanted him gone.

Now.

“Unless you have some new information for me—” Suzie began, but she never got the opportunity to finish.

“No, no new information,” Chris confessed, making no move to leave.

“Well then—”

Again he didn’t give her a chance to finish. “I do, however, have this.”

She still had no idea what he was talking about—or why the man just couldn’t take a hint, even if she was hitting him over the head with it.

“‘This?’” she questioned.

She looked on in surprise as he hefted a large paper bag from the floor and placed it on her desk—obviously one he’d brought in when she had her eyes closed. Chris began to unpack its contents.

Within seconds, he’d taken out five steaming white containers, each embossed with red Chinese characters on the sides.

“You know the old saying, if the mountain won’t come to Moh—”

“I am neither the mountain nor the person in your imaginary drama,” Suzie pointed out sharply.

Chris rolled with the punches. “Okay, then let’s just call it a mercy dinner.” Since she didn’t instantly protest, he continued. “You haven’t moved from that spot since I dropped off the videos. You’ve got to be starving by now.”

Suzie’s mouth dropped open, but she recovered quickly. “You’re spying on me?” she cried, not knowing if she should be creeped out or just angry. Who did this man think he was to take over this way? To keep tabs on her every movement?

“No,” he stated. “What I did was have a casual conversation with my uncle.” Before she could take him to task any further, he added, “I called him to let him know I’d gotten the cell phone videos copied and that I’d dropped them off with you. That’s when he mentioned your habit of burning the midnight oil and that you’d probably be doing the same thing with this. He expressed concern that you had a habit of forgetting to eat.”