Unforgivable (36 page)

Mia zeroed in on a hunk of white chocolate, determined not to find any more reasons to be in love with Ric tonight.

“There’s something else.”

She was startled by the ominous look he gave her. He had his arms folded over his chest now, and that simmering thing was back. She swallowed a cold bite.

“What?”

“It’s been eating at me all day. All week.” He stepped forward and planted himself in front of her, settling his hands on his hips. She felt a stir of apprehension.

“It’s Black.”

“What?”

“Your friend. Black.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked down. “I’m so jealous of the guy I can’t—” He glanced up and frowned. “Why are you smiling?”

She licked the ice cream from her spoon and shook her head. “That’s such a male reaction. He gives me a ride to work. I’m not standing in his kitchen half-naked, eating his ice cream at eleven at night.”

He gazed at her, the side of his jaw still twitching. “Why did he call you? Earlier in the car? You didn’t answer, but it was him, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She saw the question in his eyes.

“It wasn’t a booty call, if that’s what you’re wondering. Jeez.”

That had been exactly what he was wondering, she could tell. Mia took a deep breath and reached for patience. This was coming from his experience with his ex-wife, and they were going to have to get past this hang-up.

“He’s been helping me. Giving me transportation. Lending me his pistol and teaching me some basics.”

Ric took the ice cream carton from her hands and put it on the counter. “Ask me. Not him.” He stepped closer and settled his hands at her waist.

“Okay.” She tipped her head to the side. “In that case, I need something.”

He waited.

“He’s supposed to pick me up tomorrow to go look at used cars. I finally got my insurance check.”

“I can help you look at cars.” His gaze went to her mouth, and she seriously doubted that he was thinking about cars.

She licked ice cream from her lip, and she
knew
car shopping was the furthest thing from his mind. “I don’t need your help picking out a car. I need a ride to the dealership.”

Suddenly, his hands tightened around her waist. He lifted her onto the counter, and she gasped at the cool tile under her bare butt.

“I can do that.” He slid his hands under her sweatshirt and held her hips again, then leaned in and started kissing her neck.

She closed her eyes and let herself feel him—the warm pull of his mouth, the pressure of his palms stroking her thighs. He eased her legs apart and pulled her forward until she was almost slipping off the counter, but he caught her against him.

“Ric?” She leaned back to look at him. His shoulders tensed under her hands, and she knew he was expecting her to bring up something he didn’t want to talk about right now.

“Do you think it’s possible that someday …” She stretched the question out and watched him brace himself. “Is there even a slight possibility that you and I might, at some point, do this in a bed?”

Relief washed over his face, and she tried not to let it hurt her feelings.

The side of his mouth curled up. “I can definitely make that happen.”

CHAPTER 24

Ric’s bed turned out to be a very, very good place, and he left her in it early the next morning, with a brief kiss and a promise to come back around lunchtime to take her car shopping. It was more like early afternoon by the time he got free. From his expression when he picked her up, she knew it had been a rough morning. But rather than drop her off and go back to work, he insisted on sticking around for the negotiations and actually ended up helping her by playing the role of the skeptical, car-savvy boyfriend while a man in a bad suit tried to separate her from her money.

Now Mia whipped her beautiful new Jeep—new to her, at least—into a parking space as close to the lab entrance as she could manage. Aside from being royal blue instead of white, the Jeep was remarkably like the one she’d had before, and it had cost her every penny of her insurance check and then some. Still, she was elated to have transportation again and couldn’t wipe the grin off her face, even as she made a mad dash through the freezing drizzle to the Delphi Center entrance. She key-carded her way into the building
and stood for a moment, shivering and dripping on the marble floor.

Ralph eyed her from across the lobby with disapproval.

“Hi.” She smiled at the armed guard whose presence there had helped her convince Ric that the lab, with its many layers of security, was a safer place for her to spend the afternoon than either of their homes.

“Wet out there,” she said brightly, although Ralph had never been much of a talker. She combed her fingers through her damp hair and tried another smile. “I saw Kelsey Quinn’s car outside. She downstairs, do you know?”

A silent nod sent Mia on a detour to the Bones Unit before heading up to the DNA lab, where she intended to spend the remainder of her afternoon catching up on the evidence that had stacked up that week.

She found Kelsey at a stainless-steel table, bent over a charred pile of bones.

“Fire victim?” Mia asked.

Kelsey looked at her curiously. “What are you doing here? I heard you were under some kind of house arrest.”

Mia laughed. “Who told you that?”

“You’re the hot topic around here these days.” Kelsey put down her forceps and reached for a can of diet soda sitting on the counter behind her. “What brings you down here? Not that I’m not happy to see you. I’m getting ready to send you a tooth for DNA analysis.” She nodded at the blackened remains. “We need a positive ID on this burn victim.”

“Homicide?”

“Probably, judging by the bullet hole in his temple. Most suicides don’t set the house on fire around them
before they pull the trigger.” She leaned back against the counter, seeming ready for a break. “So, what’s up?”

“I wanted to thank you for identifying the Jane Doe from Lake Buchanan. I thought she’d been forgotten.”

Kelsey shrugged as if it was no big deal, but Mia knew better. Kelsey took seriously her duty to bring closure to victims’ families whenever possible.

“I rattled a few cages, that’s all. Turned up a couple of missing persons whose families had never sent in a DNA sample for ID purposes. One of those panned out.”

Mia nodded. “Was she young, like you thought?”

“Twenty-two,” Kelsey said, and there was sadness in her voice. “She’d been working as an escort only a few months when her mother lost track of her. Mark used mitochondrial DNA to make the ID.”

Mitochondrial DNA came in handy because it was much more plentiful within the cell, meaning that it could be recovered more easily than nuclear DNA. It could be found in bone and hair, too, and Kelsey resorted to it frequently to identify remains that lacked soft tissue. Unlike nuclear DNA, mtDNA was inherited only from the mother’s side. It passed unchanged down the maternal line, so sons and daughters had the same mtDNA as their mothers, maternal grandmothers, maternal great-grandmothers, and so on. In missing-persons cases, maternal relatives were often called on to provide samples to help ID remains.

“You went above and beyond,” Mia said. “You didn’t have to do all that.”

“Mark did most of the work. I just made the phone calls, tracked down the sample.”

“Well, thank you. And Ric thanks you, too. I know you’ve helped their case.”

Kelsey got a glint in her eye. “How is Ric, anyway?”

She must have read the look on Mia’s face, because she smiled knowingly.

“He’s fine,” Mia said. “Good, in fact.” Nerves flitted in her stomach. Maybe she was being stupidly optimistic. But it felt different this time, and she deeply hoped that she wasn’t about to get her heart crushed.

Mia needed to go before Kelsey asked her any more insightful questions. “Anyway, just wanted to say thanks.” She checked her watch. “I’d better hit it before the afternoon gets away from me.”

“Don’t work too hard.”

“Same to you.”

The words were empty on both of their parts, and Mia was already drumming up more to-dos for herself as she headed back to the DNA lab. Kelsey had sparked an idea, and Mia wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else until she checked into it.

She veered away from the elevator and headed for the evidence room, where a clerk was supposed to be posted until five that evening. She inquired about the garbage bags that had been brought in earlier in the week. The sour expression on the woman’s face told Mia that they were still kicking around, probably more fragrant than ever. She led Mia to a separate cool storage room lined with plastic trash bags. Even the brisk temperature didn’t keep the fumes from nearly knocking her over the instant the door was open.

“All of this is scheduled to be hauled off next Tuesday,” the clerk said. She stayed as far away from the door as she could while Mia took a brave step inside. “If you need anything from here, better get it now.”

Mia poked through the bags and examined labels until she found the batch Ric and Jonah had brought in. They had collected everything they needed from it— about half a dozen items that had been analyzed by Mark already.

Mia spent a good twenty minutes sifting through garbage before she found what she wanted. Her thighs burned from crouching, and she was nearly faint from the stench as she lifted a cardboard coffee cup in her latex-gloved hand. She examined the lipstick mark. She examined the name scrawled on the side with black wax pencil.

“Well, now, Camille, let’s see if you can tell me what your son’s been up to.”

Ric cursed his partner as he sailed through another yellow stoplight. Why didn’t he pick up? He waited through a couple of rings, then got kicked to voice mail and hit redial.

Something was about to break. Ric could feel it. Or maybe it was him—
he
was about to break. Fifteen years on the job, and he’d finally hit his limit of stress, setbacks, and political bullshit.

“Macon here.”

“You wanna answer your phone once in a while? Shit, I’ve left two messages. What happened at the firing range?”

“I haven’t gone yet.”

Ric gritted his teeth. “I thought you were heading over there at two.”

“Got sidetracked on something for Singh. Anyway, I’m on my way now. I’ll let you know. You get anything
more on that brass?” Jonah asked. Rey had some other database up his sleeve, and he’d promised to see if they could get any more hits off the shell casings recovered from the shooting scenes.

Ric had woken up that morning much more concerned about the unidentified shooter than about the lieutenant governor. The shooter was a direct threat to Mia. Lane wasn’t. But after spending the entire day checking and rechecking every lead they had on that front, Ric was being forced to shift focus.

“Nothing new from Rey,” he told Jonah now. “I’ll let you know. I’m up at Lake Buchanan, trying to shake something loose.”

“You going back to the house?”

“Got an interview with the carpet installer.” As Ric said it, he spotted the sign for the roadside café where he was supposed to meet the kid, nineteen-year-old Clayton Sands. “I want to find out what that carpet looked like when they ripped it out. Hell, maybe I can even get my hands on it.”

“Call me if you do.”

“Lean hard on that buddy of yours,” Ric ordered. “I turned those case files inside out, and I can’t get any new leads on that shooter.”

They clicked off as Ric pulled into the lot of the café. It was filled with pickups, and he hoped one of them belonged to Sands. It did. Ric spotted him right away— the only solo guy anywhere near nineteen, camped out at a table and nervously rearranging condiments. His T-shirt and jeans were covered in paint spatters. The woman at the carpet store had told Ric he moonlighted for a house-painting company on the weekends.

“Clayton Sands?”

“That’s me.”

Ric flashed his creds and sat down. “I’ve got a few questions for you about a job you did a couple of weeks back.”

“Ask away,” he said, but his casual attitude didn’t mesh with his fidgeting hands. The kid was drinking a soda. If he’d been old enough, Ric might have bought him a beer to loosen him up. Instead, he cut to the chase, rattling off the address and all of the details he remembered from his interview back at the carpet store.

“Yeah, I remember it.” He made a lean-to out of sugar packets. “Got paid time and a half because of the holiday. New Year’s Day.”

“That’s right.”

“Missed half the bowl games but made some good coin, so, you know, can’t really complain.”

“And do you remember what happened to the carpet?”

“The old stuff?”

“Yeah, the carpet you ripped out.”

He nodded, focused intently on his construction project. “Took it straight to the dump soon as we finished.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“What, the carpet?”

Shit, this kid needed to get his nose out of the paint. “Yes, the carpet.”

He shook his head. “Nothing worth salvaging. Maid that let us in said someone broke a case of red wine on it.”

“A whole case?”

“That’s what she said. Twelve bottles. Red wine everywhere.”