She put her head down and did her puny best to push through the crowd, but to no avail. She might as well have been standing in a cage made of arms and elbows and microphone wires.
The panic from before magnified until she was breathing so fast and shallow she started to see black spots and feel lightheaded. The questions and accusations bombarded her mercilessly, and she felt as if she was drowning. An urge to shout for help nearly overcame her.
How could Reese have done this to her? Heck, to her family and her father? It was wrong on so many levels. Fitz didn’t kill those two people. Of that, she was completely convinced. There was no evidence whatsoever to tie him to the murders. He wasn’t the one who’d fled town when the bodies were uncovered. Nope, that had been his partner, Markus Dexter.
As for her, she totally wasn’t so dumb as to process the evidence in a case against her own father like these reporters were accusing her of doing. She knew better than that. She’d mailed all the important evidence having to do with the Harrison-Crane murders to other labs to process. She only catalogued evidence as it came in and then figured out what tests to run and where to send it. It was Forensics 101. Never create even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
However, she also knew that, having been identified as a Colton, her only choice was to say nothing—nothing—to the press. Her professional reputation, her entire career really, rode on her keeping her mouth shut right now.
She looked around frantically for help in escaping the aggressive attention of the journalists, and saw Reese step down off the dais at the front of the room. He plunged into the crowd, and it looked for all the world like he was headed straight at her.
He might be able to help her get out of here, but he was the last person she wanted to see. She made a right turn and hooked her arm around the smallest journalist she could find, urgently pushing the woman aside. Must get away from Reese. But fleeing him in this mob was like swimming in peanut butter for all the progress she made.
Without warning, a hand gripped her elbow and she turned sharply to give Reese Carpenter a piece of her mind over his ambush of her father, hack, her whole family. Except it wasn’t Reese.
The man before her was older than Reese, a bit taller, with brown eyes and dark blonde hair. In great physical shape for a man in his fifties, this man held himself crisply upright.
“Oh! Uncle Shep,” she blurted. “When did you get here? And why are you here?”
Quickly he led her toward the back of the building, away from the crowd of reporters. “I got here in time to catch the end of the press conference. And as for why I’m here, it’s to lend moral support to my brother and my favorite niece. Are you okay, Yvie?”
“No, actually. I’m not.”
The former navy officer and Fitz’s younger brother wrapped her up in a big, warm hug that was exactly what she needed right now. His cashmere coat was soft against her cheek and warm from the heat of his body.
“It’s all wrong,” she mumbled against his chest. “He didn’t do it.”
“I know, kiddo. My brother may be a giant jerk at times, but he’s no killer. Of course, you’re in a position to help prove that. Is there anything I can do for you? Bring you food? Take you out for a coffee? Slip you out the back and get you away from this zoo?”
She looked up at her uncle gratefully. Over the years, he’d had a way of always being there for her when she needed him. Even though his navy career had taken him all over the world, he’d stayed in contact with her, calling her from ships to tell her stories of the exotic ports he’d seen. Now and then she randomly got a package in the mail from him with some pretty trinket from far away. He’d been good to all his nieces and nephews, but the bond between the two of them had always been special.
When the triplets took up all the oxygen in the house, and quiet Yvie had been mostly ignored, he’d come home on leave and taken her to Kansas City on a special adventure, just the two of them. They’d gone to a baseball game, visited a museum and he’d even taken her to high tea in a fancy restaurant. He’d been the one who’d seen her when everyone else did not.
He’d made it home when she broke her leg falling off a horse when she was thirteen. He’d coaxed her back into the saddle by riding behind her and holding her in his arms until she wasn’t afraid anymore. He’d taught her how to drive the car whose keys her father had carelessly tossed across the breakfast table and then left for work when she turned sixteen.
Uncle Shep had even been there for her senior prom. He’d walked her down the stairs from her room and sent her off with a kiss on the cheek and a whisper about how beautiful she was and how proud he was of her. Fitz had worked late that night.
She smiled up at her uncle in gratitude. “Thanks for always being here for me when I need you most. You’re the best.”
He responded as he always did, “Nope, that’s you. You’re the best.”
They traded fond smiles.
“Where are you off to now, Yvie?”
“Down the rear stairwell.”
“Not the parking lot to get away from the jackals?” he asked as he eyed the wall of bodies in the front lobby.
“I’m swamped with work in the lab. And a bunch of it pertains to the murder cases.”
“Fair enough. Go prove Fitz’s innocence. The whole family’s getting together for supper tonight, though. You’ll be there, right?”
Gee. This was the first she’d heard of it. Talk about feeling left out.
“Yeah. Sure,” she answered dejectedly.
Just what she needed. To be interrogated by the entire Colton clan about what evidence the police had on Fitz. Especially since she couldn’t talk about it any more than Reese had been able to. Maybe Jordana would back her up if the whole gang came at her hard.
Shep gave her one last hug. “You head on down to your lab and I’ll run interference up here so nobody follows you.”
“I love you so much, Uncle Shep.”
His eyes brimmed with warmth. “I love you, too, Yvette. I’m so proud of you. Now, scoot. I see a few reporters straggling this way.”
“Bye.” She turned and made a beeline for her lab.
She made it inside and leaned her back against the door while she caught her breath. Safe.
Well, not entirely safe.
As sure as she was standing here, Reese was going to try to barge in here and talk to her about her father’s arrest. She had nothing to say to him, however.
Not only was it a gross miscarriage of justice, but he’d gone behind her back. As the department’s forensic scientist, that offended her, and as the woman he was allegedly dating, it infuriated and hurt her in about equal measures.
As a deep sense of betrayal set in, so did certainty that she never wanted to see him again.
To that end, she locked the lab door from the inside and scrunched a towel along the bottom of the door so no light would shine out into the hallway. There. Now maybe everyone, especially Reese, would think she’d gone home for the day. Just maybe she could work in peace.
She turned around to face the tall shelves stuffed with evidence from the original Dexter house search, the boxes of files from the man’s office, and that cursed puzzle box taunting her on her desk. Somewhere in that mountain of evidence, there had to be something to prove Dexter had killed Olivia Harrison and Fenton Crane.
Sheesh. Now she was doing exactly what she’d accused Reese of—deciding who the killer was and then looking for evidence to prove it.
She was a scientist. Dispassionate. Factual.
Let the evidence speak for itself.
Deep breath.
She strode over to her desk, determined to open the puzzle box today or just resort to smashing the thing.
It took about an hour, but at long last, a flat wood panel slid to the side, and a small black-velvet-lined compartment in the middle of
the box was revealed. Nestled inside it was a metal key. After photographing it and donning latex gloves, she picked it up and turned it over, looking for any identifying marks. Nothing. It was just a key.
But to what?
Obviously, it was important, or at least secret, for one of the Dexters to have gone to all this trouble to hide it. She couldn’t rule out the wife having hidden this key, but it was much more in keeping with Markus Dexter’s character to carefully hide a secret key.
First things first. She dusted the key for fingerprints and lifted a partial of what looked like a thumbprint. It was a nice, clean print, though, and had enough arches, loops and whorls that she ought to be able to make a positive match with it.
She pulled out the sample prints of both Markus and Mary Dexter. It took her under a minute to verify that the partial print was Markus’s. Yep. That was his key…to something.
She made a wax impression of it and then bagged and tagged the key as evidence. Meticulously, she wrote out the steps she’d used to open the puzzle box. That done, she reassembled, bagged and tagged the box. It was too big to fit in the safe she used for valuable evidence, but she did put the key in the safe.
Time to dig into the evidence collected from the Dexter house search. The first bag she opened contained a men’s wooden hairbrush with black bristles. Gray hairs threaded through them. Given that Mary Dexter was blonde, it was a good bet the gray hairs were Markus’s.
He hadn’t given a DNA reference sample before he skipped town, so she was pleased at the prospect of getting one now. If any old DNA evidence was found on the bodies, they could compare it to Dexter’s. Both corpses were currently being examined by a forensic archaeologist who specialized in old crime scenes.
She extracted several hairs from the brush that still had follicles attached to them and bagged them carefully. Although she was trained and qualified to process DNA, her lab in Braxville didn’t have the proper DNA-sequencing equipment, let alone certification by the FBI. She boxed up the sample for shipping and quickly walked it down the hall to the mail chute. She hurried back to her lab and locked herself in once more.
It was cowardly to hide from Reese like this, but she was so mad at him right now she didn’t trust herself not to punch him in the nose when she saw him. How dare he accuse her father of a crime there was no evidence to tie him to?
How could she have trusted him? She thought he was a good cop, an honorable man. Apparently, he was neither. Jerk. And to think, she’d been halfway to falling a little in love with the man. Last night, she’d even dreamed of them married and happy together. Gah!
She threw herself into her work with a vengeance, plowing through most of the remaining evidence from the Dexter house. The two seized laptops were both password protected, so she packed them up and mailed them off to a computer forensics lab in Chicago. Not that she expected Markus Dexter to have been dumb enough to leave behind a smoking gun on his computer. He didn’t even put names in his address book. He surely wouldn’t incriminate himself any other obvious way.
The five o’clock shift change started overhead with stomping boots, scraping chairs and faint voices talking and laughing. Reluctantly, she packed up for the day and headed out.
She cringed at having to face her family tonight. They would no doubt demand to know everything about the investigation of Fitz, and all she could say was that she had no idea what evidence the Braxville Police had. She prayed the clan believed her. She would hate to have them think she’d betrayed them and Fitz by trying to prove he was a killer behind his back.
She peeked out into the corridor. Clear. She literally ran for the back staircase, scurried up it and raced across the parking lot. She nearly spun out on a patch of ice in her haste to get out of the lot, but finally, she turned onto the street and breathed a sigh of relief. Lord, she hated sneaking around like this.
Debating whether or not to go home and change before heading over to her folks’ place, she ultimately opted to procrastinate a little longer and change into more casual clothes. Once home, it became even harder to force herself to leave the security of her little house to go face the music. She dawdled over changing into jeans, letting down and brushing out her hair and redoing her makeup.
Eventually, the moment arrived when she could think of nothing else to do to get ready to go to her parents’ house. With a sigh, she scooped up her keys and trudged out to her car.
As she approached her parents’ massive estate, she caught herself slowing down more and more, well below the speed limit.
Ugh. When had she turned into such a chicken?
Since Reese Carpenter had put her in an impossible situation. That was when.
She decided that, if things got too nasty, she would claim to have an early meeting in the morning and flee the family gathering. It wasn’t great as escape plans went, but it was a plan.
The entire circular drive and the concrete pad between the main house and the carriage house were crammed with cars. Oh, joy. The whole clan was here in force tonight. Her gut and her jaw both tightened.
If she was lucky, she would be able to slip into the kitchen and blend in with the crowd without anyone realizing she’d only just arrived. Goodness knew, she’d done it enough times over the years.
When she opened the back door, the smell of her mom’s world-famous chili and a wall of noise assaulted her. It sounded like everyone was talking at once while crowding the huge kitchen and hanging around the massive island in the center of it.
“Hey! Look who the cat dragged in!” her brother Neil exclaimed.
Darn it. Busted. An assortment of her siblings and their significant others stopped what they were doing to turn and stare at her. “Hey, everyone,” she mumbled. “Carry on with what you were doing.”
After a brief chorus of hellos, the whole gang went back to talking and laughing, and her moment in the spotlight blessedly passed. She was ridiculously relieved, but she was also perplexed. She’d fully expected to be jumped and interrogated within an inch of her life the second she showed her face. What was up with them not having anything to ask her about Fitz’s arrest?
Also, everyone seemed surprisingly cheerful for a bunch who’d just found out their father had been arrested for murder.
Weird.
Her mother came over from the stove and gave her a hug. “How are you holding up, darling?” her mother asked sympathetically.
“Umm, fine. I’m just buried at work.”
“I can imagine. It’s not often Braxville has two big criminal investigations going at one time.”
“How are you doing, Mom?”
Violet smudges under her mom’s eyes gave away the strain that Lilly was operating under. Yvette also recognized in her mom’s face a certain transparent quality to the porcelain skin she’d inherited from her mother. Her skin did the same thing when she was exhausted and stressed out.
“I’m fine, sweetheart.”
“Are you sure? No offense, but you look tired.”
“It’s been a little rough. But all bad things pass eventually.”
“How can you say that? Dad was just arrested for murder!”
“Fitz texted to say he’ll be here any minute. He’ll explain what’s going on.”
“Fitz is coming?”
“Yes, dear. He’s out on bail.”
The whole idea of her father having to be out on bail for anything set Yvette’s teeth on edge.
“Talk to him when he gets here, honey. He has already spoken with the other children, but nobody could find you this afternoon and you weren’t answering your phone.”
“I had a lot of work to do,” she mumbled.
“I’ll let him explain.”
Yvette frowned. That was an unusual undertone of steel in her gentle mother’s voice. Great. What had her dad done now? Fitz and Lilly had been on precarious marriage footing
more than once over the years, usually because Fitz was being an ass. Most of the time it had to do with him ignoring Lilly and/or the kids and choosing his company over his family.
The second-to-last person on earth she wanted to talk to right now was her father. Tonight’s gathering was obviously going to be a casual affair as evidenced by the big pot of chili on the stove, a huge pan of baked potatoes on the counter and a buffet of stuffed-baked-potato fixings in bowls beside that. Because it was a work night, family members would undoubtedly come and go based on their work schedules.
But apparently, everyone would be expected to stick around at least until Fitz arrived. He was the patriarch of the whole clan, after all.
Yvette had just finished eating a stuffed spud and was rinsing her plate in the sink when the kitchen door opened on a gust of freezing-cold air. Two men burst inside and she turned around to greet her fath—
Reese. What on God’s green earth was he doing here? He wasn’t family! And he certainly wasn’t welcome here the very same day he’d arrested the head of the family for a crime he didn’t commit!
“Hey, shortcake,” Fitz said casually, giving her and the wet plate a perfunctory hug before stepping around her to grab a plate of his own and load it up. He added, “Eat up, Reese. There’s plenty of food.”
Yvette moved over to Reese’s side and muttered angrily, “You have some gall, showing your face around here.”
Surprisingly, it was her father who responded. “Take your foot off the accelerator, there, ’Vette. Reese gave me a ride home from the police station. Least we can do is feed the boy by way of thanks.”
Thanks? Thanks? Her father didn’t owe Reese Carpenter thanks for anything!
Reese murmured to her father and she caught part of what he said. “…looks like she wants to kill me…should go…”
“Gimme a second to talk her down off the bridge and get a bite to eat. Then I’ll take you up on that ride to the airport you offered.”
What ride to the airport? And how was it her father managed to sound so condescending to her all the darned time? Sometimes, she got really tired of being treated like she was twelve years old around here. She turned away from both men with a huff and stomped out of the kitchen. Her father might have just told her in not so many words to cool her jets, but it didn’t mean she had to stay in the same room with a Judas.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set Page 37
