Unforgivable (5 page)

“I won’t know until I have a look. Ask Clovis to send it up here as soon as he’s finished with it.”

Harvey Snyder was the head DNA specialist at the Delphi Center. Fortunately, he preferred to leave the real work to his underlings, which meant he mostly stayed out of Mia’s way. Less fortunately, he had a gold-plated résumé and some impressive connections in his field, which meant that he wouldn’t be leaving his coveted post anytime soon.

“I presume you’ve been down to HR to inquire about your new badge.” He said it as a statement, not a question, and she felt a spurt of annoyance.

Snyder stepped into her workroom and glanced around. He was one of those short, wiry guys who compensated for his size by puffing out his chest and flaunting his authority. Peering up from his desk yesterday, he’d reminded Mia of a weasel. But standing in front of her right now, he looked more like a meerkat.

“I stopped by on my way in,” Mia said pleasantly.
“They said they’d have a new one ready for me by the end of the day.”

She met and held his gaze. If he’d come up here to admonish her yet again for misplacing her ID badge, he was going to be disappointed. Given last night’s events, she was well past the point of getting weepy-eyed over a reprimand from her boss.

“I understand you had quite an eventful evening.” Now he sounded smug.

Mia sighed inwardly. She hadn’t wanted anyone at work to ask about what happened, but of course, that was impossible. Her name had been kept out of the newspaper—a miracle she felt sure Ric Santos had played a part in—but law enforcement was a close-knit community that thrived on gossip. It was only a matter of time before everyone she worked with knew the identity of the unnamed “Delphi Center staffer” who was involved in yesterday’s homicide.

“Are you sure it’s wise for you to be here?” Snyder asked. “You’re welcome to take a personal day if you’re feeling less than a hundred percent. I’d hate for your work to suffer.”

Yeah, right. He’d
love
for her work to suffer. It would give him an excuse to get rid of her. As it was, he had nothing on her, so he’d made an issue of her one slip-up in two years at the Delphi Center: misplacing her ID badge when she went to the gym this week. Snyder had used her “reckless disregard for security” as an excuse to take her down a peg.

“I’m perfectly fine,” she said. “One hundred percent, absolutely.” She replaced her eye shields, hoping he’d take the hint.

Instead, he leaned a hand on the counter. “By the way, you’ll be getting a package up from Evidence soon. Three packages, actually, submitted by the San Marcos Police Department.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a murder case. The DA called me Wednesday and specifically requested you for the analysis. I told her how backed up you’ve been”—as if the nationwide back-log of DNA testing was a result of Mia’s ineptitude— “but she insisted. Female solidarity, I guess you would call it.”

Mia gritted her teeth. He’d sat on this for two days, no doubt to show the district attorney that he wouldn’t be pushed around. Forget about expediency. Forget that there were detectives somewhere waiting for these results and a victim’s family to consider.

“I’ll get on it right away,” Mia said, hoping he’d pick up her meaning.

“Good.” He nodded curtly. “See that you do.”

Ric found her in the broom closet she called an office, a windowless room adjacent to the Delphi Center’s enormous DNA lab. Mia claimed she liked to work there because it was dark and she often used alternative light sources, but Ric suspected that in reality she was something of a hermit.

She stood at one of her worktables, hair pulled back in a ponytail, eyes shields over her face. An overhead lamp shone down on the table as, with a latex-gloved hand, she manipulated an electrical cord. She braced her free hand against the table as she folded the cord over on itself and frowned down at it.

“Practicing your Girl Scout knots?”

She jumped back and clutched her hand to her chest. “God, don’t
do
that.”

“Sorry.” He should have known she’d be jumpy today. “Just dropped by with your afternoon latte.”

She pursed her lips and watched him. “Who let you up here?”

“Sophie.” He set the coffee on her counter. “I told her I was stopping by to check on you, and she gave me a hall pass.”

Her gaze dropped to the VIP visitor’s badge clipped to Ric’s dress shirt. He’d cleaned up finally and even managed to get a few hours of sleep. She looked as though she hadn’t had a wink.

“You look tired,” he said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“What’s that about?” He nodded at the table.

“Strangulation case. The killer wore gloves, but—” She bit her lip and rearranged the cord. “I’m thinking that if she struggled—which I assume she did, because she lost a fingernail—he would have had to hold her down.” Mia mimicked the action with her free hand. “Which means that in order to tighten the ligature, he probably would have …” Her voice trailed off as she lifted one end of the cord and pretended to clamp it between her teeth. She stopped to examine it. “Aha, there it is. I knew it.”

“What?” He stepped closer, but all he saw was a brown electrical cord. Could she see saliva on it?

“Bite marks. See?” She held the cord up, and he did— small indentions in the plastic, about three inches apart.

“You’re going to get DNA off that thing?”

“That’s the plan.” She smiled slightly, and he could tell she was pleased with herself but didn’t want to gloat. “I’ll do it in a minute. After you tell me why you’re really here.”

Her smile faded, and he wondered what she was hoping to hear. They’d found her Jeep. They’d found her attacker. Less than twenty-four hours, and Ric had already made a collar. He wanted to tell her all of those things.

“Nothing new on your case,” he said instead, and she turned away to tuck the cord back into a paper evidence bag.

He reached up and repositioned her overhead lamp so that it shone on her face. He tilted her chin up. On her right cheekbone was a faint purple bruise. “What’s this?”

She didn’t look him in the eye. “He tapped me with his gun.”

Tapped
her. Right. Goddamn it, how had he missed this? He’d seen her twice since then and hadn’t noticed it at all.

“How’s the arm?”

“Sore,” she said. “I took some ibuprofen at lunch.”

He dropped his hand and stepped back. He shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from touching her again.

“So, if there’s nothing new to tell me, why the visit?”

Was it his imagination, or was there a subtext there? He hadn’t dropped by her office since last summer. Evidently, she’d noticed.

“I’m here to, I quote, ‘light a fire’ under you guys,” he said. “Rachel sent me.”

Rachel was the Hays County DA in charge of prosecuting
Ric’s murder case. Two cases, actually. The first had been his originally. The second he’d inherited.

“I just found out this morning.” She stripped off her gloves and eye shields and tossed them into a red biohazard bin. “Your case is next on my list.”

She led him through a glass door with a double helix etched on the window. The main DNA lab was two stories high and half as long as a football field.

“They just sent up the evidence,” she said over her shoulder.

He followed her past several heavy-duty fume hoods to the walk-in refrigerator, where evidence bags were lined up on a shelf. The entire opposite wall of shelves was filled with rape kits, thousands of them, all awaiting testing. Each kit fit into a box not much larger than a VHS tape, and it would take an army of Mias working around the clock for years to wade through them all. But she didn’t seem daunted by the size of the job. Or if she was, she didn’t show it.

She read several of the bag labels, then rattled off a case number.

“That’s the one,” he said. “We’re thinking it’s connected to another rape-homicide that came in last week.”

She lifted three bags and took them to an empty table. Ric scanned the immaculate laboratory. Lining the walls were glass cabinets containing rows of beakers, test tubes, and other supplies he couldn’t identify. On the opposite end of the room, several white-coated men peered into microscopes that probably cost more money than Ric took home in a year. The Delphi Center operated on hefty fees and a private endowment, so it could afford the best of the best as far as staff and equipment.
Delphi was rumored to be every bit as good as the FBI lab at Quantico. Mia claimed it was better.

“Let’s have a look.” She spent a few minutes at the sink washing up, as if she was scrubbing in for surgery. Then she tore off a sheet of clean white paper from a roll at the end of the table and spread it out to create a work surface. Finally, she pulled on fresh gloves and eye shields before unsealing one of the evidence bags.

The first held the duct tape.

“Who did this?” she exclaimed, instantly zeroing in on the same problem Ric had when he’d first seen the evidence photos. Whoever had removed the binding from the victim’s wrists had cut through the tape in three places.

“No idea. Could have been the crime-scene techs. Maybe the ME. Although I doubt it. He’s pretty meticulous.”

“You didn’t attend the autopsy?” She continued to look surprised.

“Wasn’t my case then. Burleson caught it. He did the crime scene, the autopsy. But then the chief tossed it over to me. Thinks it might be related to a motel murder on I-35. Woman in that case had her hands taped, too.”

Mia shook her head. “Well, I hope you have pictures. This is a mess.”

“We do,” Ric said, but pictures weren’t going to be enough if this thing went to trial. The sort of knots or bindings used by a perpetrator could reveal a lot, provided some idiot didn’t recklessly saw them off the body and destroy the evidence. Photographs were okay, but they weren’t as effective in court as the real thing, which was why Ric had given Burleson a ration of shit over this.
As the lead investigator, he should have kept an eye on the crime-scene techs and even the ME every step of the way to make sure the evidence stayed intact.

Mia was turning the chunks of tape over slowly with a pair of tweezers. “I should be able to get some skin cells off the adhesive side if the perp wasn’t wearing gloves. But even if he was, he might have torn the tape with his teeth and deposited saliva.” After a few moments, she replaced the tape in the evidence bag. “What else did you have?”

“I haven’t seen the rest of it. Her shoes, I think. And her dress. I understand there was a lot of blood.”

Mia resealed the bag and replaced it in the refrigerator before shifting her attention to the second bag. A new sheet of paper came out, new gloves. Mia unsealed the bag and, to Ric’s surprise, pulled out a big white envelope. It was one of those waterproof bubble-wrap mailers.

Her gaze flashed to his. “Who packed this?” she asked, opening it.

“Not me.”

“
Why
was this packed in plastic? It degrades biological evidence.” She pulled out a royal-blue garment that was stiff with dried blood. Shaking her head, she unfolded it and spread it out on the table.

The dress was short, low-cut. The upper half was saturated with blackened bloodstains.

Mia’s breath hissed out. She reached a tentative finger out and traced one of the many gashes in the fabric.

“My God,” she whispered. “He must have stabbed her a hundred times.”

•  •  •

El Patio was loud and crowded when the man’s phone started vibrating on the bar. He checked the number and bit back a curse as he picked up.

The caller didn’t say anything. The man waited.

Finally, a shaky sigh. “Lake View Park,” the caller said. “South lot.”

Unbelievable. He tossed some money onto the bar and went outside into the bitter cold.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he demanded. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Come soon. This one’s …” A nervous laugh, almost hysterical. “God, I can’t believe this. Just get here, okay?”

The man stepped away from the cluster of smokers hanging out near the door. The place was packed tonight. Vehicles streamed in and out of the parking lot.

“This is the last time,” he said, scanning the rows for his Buick. “I mean it. You still got that account number?”

“Just get here! We’ll work that out later.”

“We’ll work it out now. Do you have it or not?”

“Yes.”

He crossed the lot to his car and yanked open the door. “I want double this time. This is getting messy.”

Shit, messy? It was a train wreck. But he was in it now, and there was no going back. The best he could hope for was to minimize the damage and get paid.

He tossed his coat inside and slid behind the wheel as the caller wrestled with the decision. There was nothing to decide. This guy was an addict—completely and totally at the mercy of his habit.

And so he went for the jugular. “Tick-tock,” he said.

“All right! Come on! This is—” The caller’s voice
broke, and he started weeping.
Weeping.
The sound was

fucking pathetic.

“We got a deal or not?”

“Yes. I told you. Are you in your car?”

He turned the key, and the twelve-year-old sedan sputtered to life. It was about fifty thousand miles past its prime. The car, like his career plans, should have been junked years ago. He was getting too old for this shit. And he wasn’t cut out for it, never had been. He needed out. Soon.

“Are you coming?” the caller asked.

He turned out of the lot and cranked the heater. It was a long drive out to Lake Buchanan.

He couldn’t believe he was doing this again. He took a deep breath and focused on the money. “I’m on my way.”

CHAPTER 4