Standing in the middle of her safe zone, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly, releasing the urge to throttle somebody.
“Briefing go that badly?”
Samantha turned to see her best friend, coworker, next-door neighbor, and all-around confidant Crystal Mullen in the doorway. Petite with brown eyes and her shoulder-length dark hair in its signature ponytail, Crystal was always there when Samantha needed to vent about something. These days, that was a lot.
When her boss, Louis Russo, said he was assigning her to the serial killer task force, Samantha had been thrilled. Okay, that sounded bad. For a nerd like her who was used to working miles behind the lines, where she barely had a clue what case she was involved in, the chance to team up with the police as they chased down a murderer, uncovering clues and questioning suspects, sounded exciting. Then she’d started going to meetings, and the shine had quickly worn off that particular apple. Now, after only a little more than a week, she dreaded every briefing she was forced to attend and their ability to frustrate her beyond all rational explanation.
“No worse than usual, which is to say horrible,” Samantha admitted, moving over to her mini fridge to pull out a bottle of water. She held another up to her friend, but Crystal shook her head. Crystal was a die-hard caffeine addict. Seriously, her friend would wheel around her coffee in an IV stand if Louis had let her.
“Let me guess,” Crystal said as she perched in the chair in front of Samantha’s desk. Her friend never actually sat back in the comfortable club chair like a normal person. Probably because she had way too much caffeine in her system. “They’re upset you haven’t already solved the case for them.”
Samantha sat down behind her desk with a sigh. “Pretty much. They didn’t want to hear that I barely had time to do more than an initial assessment of the body found this morning.” Opening the bottle, she took a long drink of water. “Never mind that I was able to establish an approximate time of death and confirm the amputations were accomplished with the same type of saw as the one used in the previous Butcher cases. Or that the cuts were made by the same person, based on the angle and technique involved. I even got samples collected and prepped for DNA profiling and checks against CODIS and NDIS, but that still wasn’t enough for them.”
“Sounds like a lot to me,” Crystal said. “What else were they expecting?”
Samantha shrugged, relaxing back in her chair and lazily swiveling from side to side. “I think they’re all waiting for the wow factor to kick in like all those CSI shows on TV. You know, where they collect and profile DNA, then a computer spits out a name before the first commercial break? They don’t want to hear this killer chooses his victims specifically because they aren’t in the system and that he’s too meticulous to leave behind any hair, fiber, or blood evidence. And because I know the killer is a man from the size and depth of his boot prints, they think I should be able to track those boots to a specific store and found out who bought them. But I can’t do that because it doesn’t work that way.” She sighed. “I know they’re just trying to catch this guy, but so am I. But when there’s no evidence, there’s no evidence.”
“Maybe I can find something to make the task force happy,” Crystal said.
“Let’s hope,” Samantha agreed.
Crystal was a forensic technician at the lab, working on a little bit of everything, but concentrating mostly on latent prints and tool marks. Before coming to work at the institute, Samantha never would have thought there’d be a call for someone to do that full time, but Dallas was a busy city when it came to crime. Crystal could work overtime for the rest of her life and never catch up with the backlog of cases that needed her expertise.
Samantha was about to ask Crystal if she wanted to start going over the body together when footsteps outside her office interrupted her.
“Senior Corporal Duncan,” she said with a smile even as Crystal snapped her head around to see who was at the door. “Come in.”
Trey and the other three officers with him from the SWAT team exchanged looks before stepping inside. Her office wasn’t small by any means, but with the four very large cops in there, it suddenly seemed much harder to breathe.
Or maybe that was simply a side effect of being so close to Trey.
Samantha would be the first to admit she and Trey had been bouncing around in each other’s orbits ever since she’d responded to a crime scene involving the SWAT team and found a handful of dead criminals who’d supposedly been mauled by wild coyotes in the middle of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Her experiences with the team had only gotten stranger from there. To say that they weren’t quite normal was an understatement.
Okay, so maybe her intellectual curiosity wasn’t the only reason she’d spent most of the past year and a half stalking Trey. With that square jaw, intense blue eyes, and perfect amount of scruff, the man was extremely attractive. Not to mention the fact that he looked amazing in the dark-blue tactical uniform. But there was more to it than that. Simply put, there was something about him that mesmerized her every time she was around him. His presence at the Audubon center this morning had made it damn hard to focus on her work, that was for sure. Even with a headless corpse there to distract her.
The funny thing was, she wasn’t surprised at all to see him and his teammates here in her office today. In fact, since hearing that it had been Trey and his fellow SWAT officers who’d actually found the body, she’d been pretty much expecting a visit from them. Just like back in mid-June, when they’d inserted themselves in the middle of that delirium drug thing…which really hadn’t been a drug thing at all. When things got weird in Dallas, SWAT was going to be there.
Realizing she’d yet to make any introductions, Samantha quickly did so. Trey did the same, introducing Connor, Trevor, and Hale, though she could have easily introduced them herself since she had files on every member of the SWAT team. Crystal was well aware of Samantha’s fascination with all things SWAT—and Trey in particular—so it was no surprise when her friend came up with an excuse to leave, saying she needed to start working on the body Samantha had brought in earlier.
“Normally, I’d ask what brought four of Dallas’s finest down to my office,” Samantha said as she moved around the side of the desk and sat on the edge to study the four men, “but since you showed up minutes after I got done briefing the task force—and you were also at the crime scene this morning—I’m assuming your visit is related to the Butcher.”
Trey glanced at his teammates, who returned the look, as if saying your call.
“You’re right. It is.” Trey gave her a smile, flashing the most perfect dimples. “We’re hoping you might be able to tell us a little about the case.”
Samantha had to fight the urge to return his smile. Damn, when Trey put on the charm, it was scary how badly she wanted to walk over there, climb him like a sloth, and start coming up with names for their future children. But she fought off the desire. Besides, she didn’t need to think about names. She had all four of them picked out a few days after meeting the hunky cop. No, she needed to play this cool and use the situation to get what she wanted.