She could feel his eyes pinning her down even if she deliberately didn’t look up and make eye contact. “A regular paycheck at the end of the week,” she told him dismissively.
“Uh-uh,” Chris said.
He leaned down in front of her, getting in her face and making it impossible for her to avoid eye contact with him. His gaze felt as if it could delve right into her soul and she really resented the invasion.
“That isn’t it, either,” he told her confidently.
“Then what is?” she asked, doing her best not to allow her temper to flare.
Suzie braced herself to listen to the detective spin his outlandish theories. At the very least, she expected to hear him spout some grandiose rhetoric. But it was her turn to be surprised by him.
“I don’t know yet,” Chris told her honestly. “But I’m working on it. I’ll let you know when I come up with an answer.”
Suzie frowned. She didn’t have time to waste watching this too-handsome-for-his-own-good detective trying to mesmerize her. She had work to do and so did he.
“Your time would be better spent coming up with answers regarding our dead woman,” she said in a no-nonsense tone.
Our.
Her slip of the tongue was not lost on Chris. The grin on his lips told her so before he uttered a word. “Our first joint venture. We should savor this.”
“What I’d savor,” she informed him, “is some peace and quiet so I can work. Specifically, some time away from you.”
The expression that came over Chris’s face was one of doubt. “Now, if we spend time apart, how are we going to work on this case together?” he asked, conveying that what she’d just said lacked logic.
Suzie had only one word to give him in response to his question. “Productively.”
With that, she went back to doing her work, but that lasted for only a few moments. A minute at best. Though she tried to block out his presence, he still managed to get to her.
He was standing exactly where he had been, watching her so intently that she could literally feel his eyes on her skin. It caused her powers of concentration to deteriorate until they finally became nonexistent.
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.
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