Hazardous Duty (27 page)

We began searching the floor for a
telltale speck of crystal. While the other two searched inside, I climbed onto
the fire escape. The nighttime sky made it hard to see.

“Riley, toss me the flashlight from my
desk drawer.”

He did as I asked. I twisted the top and
a pinpoint of light spotted the wall in front of me. I studied every inch of
the escape landing, but there was nothing.

Maybe I should check the metal stairs.

I stepped onto the first foothold and
the structure started downward with my weight. I held my breath until it
slammed into the next landing. Crouching to keep my balance, I examined the
first step.

Nothing.

Lowering myself down, I flinched. A
piece of hair caught in a metal crevice. I jerked back and the strand snapped.
Out of curiosity, I shined my light on the spot. There was my short, strawberry
blond hair.

I leaned in closer.

And there beside it was a long blond
strand.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Using a pair of tweezers, I
carefully pulled the hair from the fire escape and placed it in a plastic
zippered bag.

Riley squatted in front of me, studying
my every move. “I think you’ll make a pretty good forensic specialist one day,
Gabby.”

The first smile I’d felt in days
stretched across my face. “Thanks.” I held up the bag. “Let’s get this to the
station.”

“Any ideas
who
it belongs to?” Sierra asked from the window.

“Not Candace. Lately, she’s a brunette,”
I said, climbing back into my apartment. “Maybe it’s someone we haven’t met
yet. There were other women in the picture. I’m just ready to have this
finished, once and for all.”

“Amen,” Riley echoed behind me. He dug
into his pockets and pulled out his keys. “Come on. I’m driving. It’s time to
put closure to this.”

Parker wasn’t at the station when I
arrived, but a lab tech was. I handed the bag over to the middle-aged Latino,
Lela, and explained how I came across it.

She held up the bag to the light. “If
you look at the end, you can see the hair came out at the root. We should be
able to get some DNA off of this.” The slender woman glanced up at me. “Where
did you say you found this?”

I told her.

She shook her head. “We checked all over
the apartment. Sometimes another set of eyes will find what we missed.”

I glanced back at Riley and Sierra, as
they chatted by the doors and decided to keep the conversation going. “Do you
miss things a lot?”

“Not a lot. But we’re not God. We can’t
see everything. It sounds like you were thorough, though. There isn’t going to
be a good, unbroken chain of evidence so this won’t hold up in court. But if we
find whom this belongs to, he or she had better have a rock solid alibi for last
night. Good job.”

“Thanks.” I stared at the lab equipment
and wanted nothing more to wander around, exploring all of the technology and
wonders of science. I wanted to ask Lela questions, to quiz her about her job.
I didn’t want to leave the crime lab, I realized.

My eyes zoned in on the gold cross
hanging around Lela’s neck. Could she be a Christian? Could she have found
common ground between faith and science?

She caught me staring and touched her
necklace.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, looking away.

“No need to apologize. Are you a
Christian too?”

“No, I can’t prove there’s a God. I look
at Christians and how screwed up they are and it compounds my belief that God
is a myth.”

“Just because God is perfect, doesn’t
mean that Christians are. You know that—you are a scientist, right?”

“As soon as I finish my degree I will
be.”

“Then you realize that the universe is
fine-tuned for our existence.” Lela continued to mix solutions together in test
tubes as we spoke. “You know that if certain physical properties were even slightly
different, we wouldn’t be here. Besides, you don’t really think that a tree is
just as significant as you are, do you?”

The fact was, sometimes I did believe
that and the thought depressed me. I shrugged.

“Don’t confuse life with God, Gabby—or
Christians. We make a mess of things because it’s our nature. But you can look
at the orderliness of the world and see that someone’s in control.”

Wasn’t that what Riley had told me at
lunch that day? That I was assuming that life was a reflection of God? It was a
coincidence that these two people had said the same thing. Or was there really
a such thing as coincidences?

Lela pushed a hair behind her ear. “Let
me know if you ever want to chat, okay? About science or God or both.”

I nodded. “I would like that.”

Riley appeared behind me and touched my
shoulder. “You ready?”

That was a great question, I realized.
On many levels.

***

All night, I tossed and turned on
Sierra’s hide-a-bed. The hair kept nagging at me, taunting me. Who could it
belong to? Who had I met concerning this case with long blond hair?

I sat up in bed. Veronica? She had long
blond hair. And she had a connection to the campaign. Her father had some tough
competition in the election since he was running against Cunningham. But was
Veronica a killer?

No. I shook my head. I left her in the
coffeehouse when I ran to my apartment and she was still there when I got back.
She couldn’t have killed Cunningham.

There could be any number of other women
who Cunningham had an affair with who had hair like that. I couldn’t ignore
that possibility.

I sank back into the bed again. Which
put me back at square one.

Frustrated, I took a long hot shower.
Despite the humidity, I played with my hair, trying to get all the waves out of
it by blow drying it straight. I applied make up with care. Anything to waste
time.

I needed to get a change of clothes from
my apartment. Sierra still snoozed in bed, I realized, glancing at her bedroom
door. Though tempted to wake her and make her keep me company in my
blood-splattered apartment, I shook my head. I could handle it by myself.

Gripping my keys with a white-knuckled
fist, I forced myself upstairs. I paused by my door. Last night with Riley and
Sierra I’d handled it okay, but now I was alone, with no one to distract me
from the memory of Cunningham’s desperate eyes and the blood from his wounds. I
didn’t want to experience the horror that had taken place in my apartment
again. I didn’t need any reminders of the gruesome crime.

But I did need a clean shirt.

After drawing a deep breath, I twisted
the lock and the door opened. My gaze was drawn to the splatter of red across
the kitchen floor. I closed my eyes.

Michael Cunningham. Murdered. In my
apartment.

I shuddered.

How had my life turned into such a mess?

I looked away and saw the light on my
answering machine beeping. Keeping my gaze focused, I stepped across the room
and hit play.

“Gabby, it’s your dad. Just wanted to
remind you I’ll be home next week. I need to borrow some money. Ernie’s
birthday is coming up, and I need to buy something.”

He always came up with some excuse to
buy alcohol. I knew his tricks. And I needed to start making some changes. Dad
needed to get help, but he wasn’t going to accept it from me. He would have to
hit rock bottom before he realized how dire his situation was.

Glass crunched beneath my feet as I
hurried past the kitchen to my bedroom. I grabbed some clothes from my dresser
and started to retreat. A textbook resting on my bookshelf caught my attention.
I hadn’t touched it in years.

Hugging the clothes to my chest, I
crossed the room and slid the book from its snug home. It was from one of my
forensics classes at college. I ran my hand over its smooth cover and
remembered the excitement I’d felt as I’d studied this book.

I stuck the book on top of my clothes
and hurried back to Sierra’s. After I dressed, I sat on the couch and looked
over the textbook. I remembered Lela’s words to me last night. I remembered the
feel of being in a crime lab.

Maybe it was time to make some life
changes, I realized. But first, I had to ensure I didn’t go to jail for a crime
I didn’t commit.

***

An hour later I decided to go visit
Harold. It had been a few days since we’d spoken and so much had happened.

I walk into the jail and went to the
front desk. “I’m here to see Harold Morris.”

The bald man looked over a sheet and
shook his head. “He’s out on bail.”

“He is?”

“Just released this morning.”

After thanking the guard, I hurried to
my van and drove to Harold’s house. When I pulled up, he was playing with
Keisha and Donovan in the front yard. I threw the vehicle into park and ran
across the yard to embrace him.

“How . . . ?
When . . . ?” I started, at a loss for words.

“Riley bailed me out this morning.”

“He did?” Why hadn’t Riley mentioned
this to me? He had obviously known when I spoke with him earlier.

“He’s been the biggest blessing to me, a
real answer to prayer.”

Riley’s words came back to me. Don’t
confused life with God, he’d said. Was that what I was doing? Was I
transferring my view of life onto God? Could it be true that God wasn’t harsh
and unfair, like life?

Harold squeezed my arm. “You’re an
answer to prayer too, you know.”

I laughed. “Me? An answer to prayer?”
I’d never heard that one before.

“God’s been using you, Gabby, even if
you haven’t realized it.”

My cheeks flushed. I needed to change
the subject before the strange emotion that welled in my gut became evident. I
cleared my throat. “So, how are you doing?”

“Okay. Better now that I can spend some
time with my family before my upcoming hearing.”

“Do you have any idea how that evidence
got into your trunk, Harold?”

He shook his head. “None.”

“When was the last time you opened it,
before the fire?”

“I went grocery shopping the Saturday
evening before we cleaned the house. That’s the last time I remember.”

“So, sometime between Saturday evening
and Monday when you were arrested, someone put it there.”

“I’ve thought about it over and over as
I sat in the jail cell. I just can’t figure it out.”

“Can I look at your trunk, Harold? Maybe
there’s some kind of clue there.”

“Look all you want.” He tossed me the
keys. I popped the trunk open and examined the carpet for anything out of
place. A leaf embedded itself in the carpet. Some pine straw. An old jack.

“Do you have a flashlight?”

He disappeared inside and returned with
one in hand. I examined the crevices, searching for something to give me a
clue. The police hadn’t even searched the trunk, I’d bet. They’d found the
stolen goods and deemed Harold a criminal.

If—when—someone else put the loot in
Harold’s car, they had to leave something behind. As humans, we left traces of
ourselves everywhere, from hair to fingerprints to skin flakes. I’d just read
about it in my textbook earlier. With enough patience, I could find something.

Had someone picked the lock? I studied
it, but didn’t see any signs of tampering. They could have gotten hold of his
keys somehow. But that seemed too risky.

I walked around the car and tugged on
the doors. They were all unlocked.

“Do you usually lock these?” I asked.

“Call me an old fashioned country boy,
but no, I don’t.”

I slid inside the backseat and tugged at
the seatbacks. They pulled down to allow for extra luggage room. What if the
murderer/arsonist had pulled the seat down, put the items in the trunk, then
left the police to do the rest of the work?

It seemed plausible. And if that was the
case, evidence could be in the backseat, too.

I shined the light on the floor, then in
the crevices of the seat. Nothing. I continued to move the beam of light
through the car. As I studied the window across from me, I froze. Slowly, I
crawled across the car, closer to almost invisible thread stuck in the door.

Bingo.

A long blond hair dangled.

***

I dropped off the hair at the station
and briefly spoken with Detective Adams. He assured me he was doing everything
he could. Back at Sierra’s, I flipped through the pages of my old textbook.

I closed my eyes and replayed my
conversation with Candace. She’d said Cunningham had multiple affairs. I would
bet one of those affairs was with a woman with long blond hair.

Something nagged at me. There was a
connection I knew I wasn’t making. I reviewed all of the blonds I’d met in
connection with Cunningham. There was the woman at his office, his publicity
director. Both seemed like possibilities, but my gut told me not to pursue
those leads. There was someone else…

I snapped the textbook shut. Everything
clicked and I could clearly see the big picture. I knew whom the hair belonged
to. Now I just had to prove it.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I rushed upstairs and knocked
at Riley’s door. Veronica answered, her smile disappearing when she spotted me.

“I need to talk with Riley. It’s
urgent.”

Her gaze darkened. “We were just packing
his things. Can’t it wait until another time?”

“No, I need to speak with him now.” I
pushed past her and into Riley’s apartment. I found him in the kitchen. He
paused from packing his pots and pans.

“Gabby.” A wrinkle formed between his
eyebrows.

“I know who killed the Cunninghams and
burned their house down.”

Riley set the box down and turned toward
me. “Who?”

“I’ll tell you on the way. Right now I
need you to come with me.”