Maureen wiped off the steam-fogged mirror to reveal her rosy-skinned reflection staring back at her. She wasn’t familiar with this woman. Despite all her efforts, she was becoming involved with matters that she knew she shouldn’t. Maybe she wasn’t running away as she normally would because this time, young boys only a few years older than Braden were involved. Maybe she enjoyed the company and attention of the detective, as abrasive and self-assured as he was. She searched herself for the cold, hard logic that would permit her to try once again to escape from her situation and found none. She could only stand there and stare, trying to bend her reflection back to the person she recognized.
The sound of the knob turning snapped her out of her thoughts. She threw the towel around herself as best she could as Detective Benitez’s frame filled the doorway.
“Jesus!” she shouted at him as she retreated to the far end of the bathroom. “Don’t you know how to knock?”
“I did knock!” he protested, turning his head and half covering his eyes. “I heard the shower turn off a while ago and then nothing. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. When I didn’t hear an answer, I decided to let myself in. I didn’t see much, honest.”
“Well close the door!” she demanded.
He quickly complied.
Maureen unfolded the towel and wrapped it around herself, covering up her excited nipples. She felt embarrassed by her body’s betrayal of her arousal at the idea of being seen the way she was. Maureen bundled up her hair in the second towel, picked up her pile of clothes, and walked out of the bathroom.
“All yours if you want it,” she said, making sure to brush up against him as she passed. “And by that, I mean the bathroom, you perv.”
Maureen smiled to herself as she strutted toward his bedroom to change. She hoped he was watching her walk away. She told herself it was because she wanted to show off what he couldn’t have, but deep down, she wasn’t sure that was one hundred percent true. She couldn’t resist the urge to take a peek over her shoulder, and she just caught a look at his eyes as he closed the bathroom door. She felt a tiny pang of sadness as she heard the sound of the shower starting.
I’ll bet he’ll be glad I took such a hot shower, she thought to herself as she dropped her towel and began to dress.
TWENTY-TWO
“What are we waiting for?” Maureen asked Manny as they sat in his truck parked in the lot of the County Coroner’s Office. “Why aren’t we just going in?”
He pulled out his cell phone and checked the time. It was just after quarter to five.
“Just give it a few more minutes,” he said to her, keeping his eyes on the front door.
Manny’s plan was to wait until just before the office closed, feeling that it would give them the advantage of surprise. With luck, they’d run into a skeleton crew and few questions would be asked. He wasn’t completely sure if the news of him being thrown off the case had reached the coroner’s office, but he figured he would confront that issue if it came up. In any case, he’d find out very soon if Agent Layton was going to keep his promise to intervene if he got himself into any hot water.
What he was really hoping for was to see Stacey Winherst leave the building before he and Maureen made their entrance. She was the one person he didn’t want to run into, not because she intimidated him, but because he wasn’t in the mood for her attitude and their inevitable verbal jousting. He certainly began to think differently about the woman after his conversation with Layton. Manny could sympathize and maybe even empathize, but in the back of his mind, he still didn’t understand why she couldn’t just be polite sometimes.
“Maybe she’s different away from work,” he mumbled to himself, without realizing that he was vocalizing his thoughts.
“Huh?” Maureen said.
“Never mind,” he said, looking back at his cell phone for the time. “Let’s head in.”
Manny led Maureen through the hallways of the office as confidently as he could. He had only ever been there once before when he had taken an orientation tour after being hired by the Police Department. He hadn’t thought at the time he’d ever be back investigating a double homicide. Manny knew that the lab was at the rear of the building and down the stairs to the lower level. Their luck held out. No one stopped them or questioned their presence, and he was able to find the set of stairs that he was looking for, descending down into the basement.
At the bottom of the stairs, Manny found a sign pointing to the lab and followed the arrow to another sign and another hall before they were finally confronted by a pair of steel doors. He took a moment to gather himself. The reason for coming here was to find out about the missing accelerant report. That was what he had told Maureen. What he hadn’t told her was that he also wanted to see if they had gotten DNA out of the vomit sample that he’d taken from the jail cell. And if so, if it was a match to the crime scene.
Manny took a deep breath and pushed through the doors as if he were an old west gunslinger walking into a saloon. In his mind, he felt like a fool, but he reasoned that if he looked confident enough walking in, someone would be more likely to talk to him and give up the information he was looking for.
The lab was quiet. The smell of alcohol mixed with other cleaning agents hit Manny’s nose as he wandered among the tables of laboratory supplies toward the opposite end of the room.
“Hello?” Manny called out. Maureen stayed silent behind him.
After a moment, Dr. Winherst’s young assistant came out of an office from somewhere in the back. He was carrying a box of neatly labeled samples in evidence bags, balancing it carefully.
“It’s Derrick, right?” said Manny, hoping that a more gentle and familiar approach would loosen the young man’s tongue.
“Yes, sir,” answered Derrick as he placed the box on a table and dusted his hands on the side of the lab coat.
“I don’t know if you remember me,” Manny continued, pulling out his badge from his pocket and holding it up, “but I’m Detective Manny Benitez of the Sycamore Hills PD. We met briefly at the crime scene of the Lowes murder.”
“Sure, I remember, Detective,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He seemed nervous. Manny pegged the young man as the type who was likely a whiz in the lab but lacked the social skills to confidently speak to someone he thought of as his superior.
“I believe that Dr. Winherst brought back a sample of a supposed accelerant possibly used to start the fire at the second crime scene,” Manny continued in his formal tone. “I was wondering if the tests on the substance had come back with anything.”
“Well, yes, but . . . ,” Derrick stammered uncomfortably.
“But, what?” Manny pressed him.
“Well, I’m not sure I’m supposed to discuss that with you,” he said sheepishly. He leaned in to Manny and lowered his voice. “I heard that you weren’t working the case anymore.”
“And just who told you that?”
“Dr. Winherst.”
Damn! Manny felt his face twist in frustration, and he turned away from Derrick, hoping to conceal his feelings. He found himself looking at Maureen, who was standing like a statue and observing the whole scene. Her face broke slowly into a sly smile as she roused herself and stepped past him, patting him on the shoulder as if she had interpreted his reaction as a silent plea for help.
“C’mon, kiddo,” she said, stepping up to Derrick and tracing a finger down his chest. “Would we be here if we weren’t helping with the case?”
The young man’s tongue seemed to stick in his throat. Eventually, Derrick managed to pull his eyes off the woman in front of him and looked at Manny. “Who is she?” he asked.
“She’s my partner,” said Manny.
“That’s right, we’re partners. And we can’t afford to wait. There’s a sicko out there killing kids. So chop, chop! Let’s see the info that the detective asked
for.”
Derrick hesitated for a second, clearly not sure what to do.
“Now!” Maureen shouted, helping to force his feet into action.
“Subtle,” Manny whispered as they followed the young man over to a bank of computers.
“Hey, it’s what you brought me for, isn’t it?” She seemed very proud of herself.
“Just don’t get carried away. We don’t need to draw more attention to ourselves than necessary.”
“Yes, Detective,” she said, giving him a mocking salute.
“Manny,” he said.
Maureen just rolled her eyes and turned around.
By the time they came up behind Derrick seated at one of the computers, he had already pulled up the report. Manny tried to read over his shoulder, but got lost almost instantly in the chemical formulas and CSI shorthand that littered the screen.
“So you said you guys figured out what the accelerant was,” Manny said, flipping to a fresh page in his notebook. “What can you tell me about it?”
“It says here that the substance is comprised mostly of oleic and linoleic acids, with some other triglycerides and a very limited amount of diglycerides and monoglycerides,” Derrick replied, reading off the screen. “Dr. Winherst notes that the concentration of each would tend to indicate a type of vegetable oil, most likely olive.”
“Olive oil?” Manny said, puzzled.
“That’s what the report says,” Derrick said, pointing at the screen.
“Anything else?”
“Um, there does seem to be something else here,” the young man said, punching a key to scroll down the page. “Dr. Winherst indicates an abnormal concentration of Commiphora gileadensis.”
“What is that?” Manny asked.
“I don’t really know,” Derrick said. “It’s a scientific name for some kind of plant, that much I can recognize, but it’s not really my area.”
“Okay, how about you just spell it for me,” Manny said, readying his pen.
Derrick spelled the two words for him once and then again when Manny couldn’t keep up the first time.
“Okay, one more thing,” Manny said. “You remember that vomit sample that Dr. Winherst had you collect from the first crime scene, right?”
Derrick nodded.
“What did you find out about that?” Manny asked. “You know, did you confirm that it wasn’t from a dog or anything? Any hits from the FBI database?”
“Um, let me check,” the young man replied. His fingers clicked on the keyboard for what seemed to Manny like an unnecessary amount of time to answer his question. “It doesn’t look like the FBI came up with any match in the database,” he said, turning around and facing them.
“But it is human, correct?”
“Yes.”
So their perpetrator wasn’t in the system. It certainly fit with Manny’s theory that the pile of vomit at the first scene was the result of the uneasy stomach of a rookie killer. If that was the case, it told him that whoever was responsible wasn’t a psychopath.
“Okay,” he said to Derrick, “what about the second sample I sent in a few days ago for comparison? Did that DNA profile match the first one?”
Derrick clicked away again for several agonizing moments. Manny turned his head toward Maureen. She was watching everything with her arms folded across her chest. She looked stern, but still pretty in the bluish laboratory light. He found himself hoping with all of his heart that there would be no match, wincing inside at the thought of potentially having to handcuff her again.
“The data indicates no match.” Derrick’s voice brought him back to the moment.
Manny felt a smile of relief break across his face. “Good,” he said, realizing that he was still looking at Maureen.
She tilted her head and furrowed her brow, as though she understood what he meant.
Manny turned back to Derrick and slapped the young man on the back. “That’s good work. I think that’s everything I need. Thanks, Derrick.”
Manny stuffed his notebook back into his pocket and nodded to Maureen that it was time to leave. She turned and walked out of the room a step behind him. Manny could feel her eyes on him. They reached the double doors of the laboratory and walked through into the hallway.
“So vomit, huh?” Maureen’s voice ricocheted off the wall and into his ear.
“What’s that?” he said, hoping he could avoid answering any questions about the subject. Somehow, he knew he couldn’t.
“You said you found a sample of vomit at the first crime scene,” she pressed.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“And you think that it came from the person who killed that kid?”
“Maybe. I was thinking that the person who killed Jacob Lowes had never killed someone before, and they got a little queasy at what they had done. I’m thinking it was the first time they’d killed anyone.”
“And then you said you sent another sample for com-parison.”
“Did I?” he said.
They had reached the front doors of the building. Manny stopped to hold the door open for Maureen. She stared at him and stood a pace from the threshold, shaking her head. Manny rolled his eyes and walked through the door, propping it open for her to follow behind.
“I threw up in the jail cell after I had the nightmare about the second kid,” she continued her suspicions.
Manny didn’t say anything. Instead, he quickened his pace as they made their way to his truck.
“I was waiting in the interrogation room for you for a pretty long time after that.” The volume of her voice had risen with the effort that she was exerting to keep up.
Manny reached his truck and quickly began to open the driver’s side door, but Maureen had caught up and slammed it shut. She spun him around by the shoulder and slammed him in the chest with an open palm.
“That second sample you talked with that kid about was my puke, wasn’t it?”
Manny took a deep breath and looked into her eyes. They burned with an odd look, neither furious nor dispassionate. “I figured it would either rule you out,” he said, finding his voice after a moment, “or it would make the case against you. I needed to know.” Manny hoped he didn’t hurt her feelings too much.
“Okay,” she said, almost cheerily, patting him on the shoulder and heading around the truck to the passenger’s side door.
“What do you mean okay?” Manny called after her, stunned by her reaction.
“You said ‘good’ when that Derrick kid told you that my sample didn’t match the other one,” she called back over the roof of the truck. “That means you were hoping for that result. And now you might actually trust me. That’s good for me. I know I didn’t kill those kids. And now if I got another person on my side, so much the better when the rest of the shit crashes on me.”
Manny couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The nerve of that woman! he thought as he yanked his door open and jumped into the driver’s seat. She followed suit as he turned the key and stepped on the accelerator.
“You know, I actually felt bad about doing that,” he said to her as they drove down the road back toward Sycamore Hills proper.
“Don’t. I don’t blame you. You did what you had to do, so just forget about it.”
“Yeah, but you’re innocent. I just feel bad that I judged you as quickly as I did.”
“You’re just falling for my charms,” she said dryly. “Better be careful, Detective. I’m not guilty of any murders, but that doesn’t mean I’m innocent.”
They drove for several minutes in silence while he tried to focus on the next destination and how to best divide the work between the two of them once they arrived.
“Isn’t that the road to your place?” Maureen said as she pointed to her right.
“Yeah, but we’re not going back there yet,” he replied.
“We got another stop to make.”
“Where to?” she said, looking about her, as if trying to zero in on where they currently were. “The only thing this way is the community college, isn’t it?”
“That’s exactly right,” he said.
They had to research a couple of things and the library of the community college had much better internet connectivity than his place and, obviously, many more computers. He wanted to actually have some kind of breakthrough before he made any report to Agent Layton.
The look on Maureen’s face told him she wasn’t going to enjoy it very much.
TWENTY-THREE
The library of the community college was about as busy as they expected for a Tuesday night a week before classes were to start. Relieved that they could work in privacy, Manny had little trouble finding two computers away from the others in the computer bank. He sat down in front of one machine and pulled out the chair in front of the other. Maureen sat, albeit with some hesitation. Manny slid the mouse across the pad to wake up the computer. Out of the side of his eye, he noted that Maureen was mimicking his movements with her own machine.
“All right,” he said typing in the website he wanted on the keyboard, “I’ll search for what this scientific name that Derrick gave us means; you see if you can make sense out of those numbers and letters you wrote down yesterday.”
Maureen stared at him and didn’t move. The look of confusion on her face told him that he may as well have been speaking Greek to her.
“Have you ever used a computer before?” he asked.
“Of course I have! It’s just been a while.”
“Well just jump on the internet,” he replied, “and pull up the search engine.”
“Which one is the internet?”
He leaned over to her computer and helped her. “That’s the search engine,” he said pointing at the screen. “Just type in what you’re looking for in the bar there and hit Enter.”
He watched as Maureen pulled out the piece of newspaper she’d written her scribbles and symbols on and laid it next to her on the desk. She then slowly, with only her index fingers, began to type. Manny couldn’t help but grin as he turned his attention to his own computer.
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