Chapter 11 #2
“That's physical evidence,” she said. It came out quieter than she intended.
“That's physical evidence,” Marcus confirmed.
“The smell you described is specific to MRI coolant systems and consistent only with direct service work on the equipment. It corroborates the service territory analysis and the sterile equipment profile.” He paused.
“It goes in your supplemental statement today. Formal documentation.”
She nodded again, but she was still looking at the board.
He watched her look at it and thought about three weeks ago when she'd been sitting on the ground in Shelby Bottoms at 6:29 a.m., logging things in her rattled brain that she didn't understand yet.
The gloves. The smell. The deliberate turn of her wrist. She'd carried all of it without knowing what she was carrying, and now, it was on the board.
It was evidence, and it had just told them who they were looking for.
“Haven,” he said.
She looked at him.
“You did that,” he said. “While on admin leave with a concussion and limited access. You held onto everything, and you found it.” He kept his voice level.
Factual. “That's one of the reasons why you're on this task force.” He was so fucking proud of her. He wanted to lift her out of that chair and spin her around. Stupid, but true. He couldn’t imagine the courage and the fortitude it took to fight off this bastard and then remember every detail. No one else had managed to do it.
She looked at him for a moment. The look he'd come to recognize.
The one that wasn't gratitude and wasn't quite happiness. Perhaps satisfaction … no … There was more there. Something almost like content. There was a connection between them. One they both could sense. He saw it in her eyes, and he knew she could see it in his. He wasn’t trying to hide his feelings. Hell, there wouldn’t be a feasible way to do that.
He was damn good with the neutral face, but his feelings for her seemed to overrule that.
“The records requests should come back in forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And then we'll have the list.”
“We will.”
“And then we find him.”
“Yes,” Marcus agreed. “We find him.”
She looked at the board one more time. At her name in the evidence notation. At the answer written above.
Then she picked up her pen and her notepad and said, “I'll write the supplemental statement.”
She sat back down at her workstation and woke up her computer.
Marcus stood at the board for a moment longer. Looking at what three nights of careful work and one woman's memory of a hospital waiting room had built.
MANUFACTURER-CERTIFIED SERVICE TECHNICIAN.
Twenty to thirty-five people in the corridor.
One of them was his murderer.
He didn't know that name yet. But he was close.
He went back to his desk.
At 4 p.m., he found her at the window.
Not working. Just standing there the way she'd stood at the window two nights ago, looking at the city doing its afternoon thing. He came to stand beside her with his coffee. She didn't move over, and he didn't need her to.
They stood there for a moment.
“My mother's fine,” Haven said. “In case you were wondering. Six years clear.”
“First, I’m sorry I didn’t ask, and second, I’m glad she’s okay,” Marcus said.
“She still goes to Vanderbilt for her annual imaging.” She paused. “I still drive her.”
He thought about that. About the waiting room near the equipment corridor.
About a twenty-four-year-old Haven sitting in a plastic chair while her mother had scans and a door opened sometimes onto a cold corridor that smelled like helium and disinfectant and something elemental.
About the fact that she'd sat in that corridor for eight months watching her mother get better and had filed the smell away without knowing she'd need it years later.
“She gave us the case,” he said.
Haven’s brow furrowed in confusion.
“Your mother,” he said. “If she hadn't gotten sick. If you hadn't driven her. If you didn't know that smell—”
“We'd have gotten there another way,” Haven said.
“Maybe, but it would’ve been slower.” He paused. “A lot of things had to line up for us to be standing here with a confirmed field and a pool of thirty-five.”
Haven was quiet for a moment. “She'd find that funny,” she said. “My mother. She'd say she was always useful.”
Marcus looked at the city. “She'd be right.”
Haven looked at the city, too.
They stood there for a while. The late afternoon light was doing the thing it did in November by going amber way too early.
“Forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” Haven said.
“Forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” Marcus repeated it.
“And then the list.”
“And then the list.”
She turned her head slightly and looked at him. Not a long look, three seconds, maybe four. The kind of look that was more work than it appeared. He looked back. Neither of them said anything.
Then she looked back at the city.
“I'm going to go review that supplemental statement,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
She went, but he stayed at the window for another minute. The amber light was going orange now, the city shifting into evening. Somewhere in a service company database in one of four manufacturer headquarters a personnel file existed with a name on it.
He would find that name.
He would also, he acknowledged privately, need to figure out what to do about the look she'd just given him and the fact that he'd returned it. Damn it, he knew the something that was between them was the real thing. It was different … more intense and at the same time more comfortable than anything he’d felt for women he’d dated in the past. He was more than a little confused at the longing and desire he was feeling.
No, confused wasn’t the right word. Frustrated.
That was definitely it. Frustrated at the case, at himself for being frustrated with the case and at the sizzling between them that wasn’t going to be ignored.
Maybe they could find time to explore that energy.
They had forty-eight to seventy-two hours to work on that.