Latent Danger (On the Line #2)(14)
Dr. Kane nodded. “I’ll show you.” She waved a hand for them to follow and they moved into a smaller room.
“These are photos of the rope from the last murder before your killer dropped off the face of the earth.” She pulled the close-up images of a length of rope out of a folder and spread them on a small table. One showed the knot used on the rope. A slip knot of some sort. Another showed a close-up of the end of the rope. The third showed an even tighter shot of one of the cut ends of the rope and a fourth showed a similar photo but it was clearly a different cut end of the rope.
“Here.” Dr. Kane pulled the third image toward them and pointed at the frayed edges of the rope. “This is the rope from your last murder thirty years back. Both ends of the rope were cut with something that our killer must have needed to saw back and forth with on the rope. It’s not a clean cut. If you look on this end, you’ll see where the tool must have slipped further along the rope as he was sawing back and forth. What you end up with is a cut where some strands of the rope were cut a few millimeters shorter than the other strands of the rope.”
Shauna and Zach leaned in and the brush of her arm against his did shit to his body it shouldn’t have. Hell, he was in trouble here.
“Oh yeah,” Shauna said, using her own finger to trace the spot on the photo that showed the cuts.
Zach focused back on the rope and saw what they were talking about.
“Now,” Dr. Kane said, pulling out a new photo from a separate folder. “This is one end of the rope we found on Adrienne Edwards.”
She placed the image next to the older photo and Zach watched as Shauna’s mouth formed a perfect oh. He glanced down and froze.
“Wow. That’s—”
“The same rope.” He finished Shauna’s sentence.
“I’ve sent the two ropes off to the lab for them to analyze further, but there’s very little likelihood it’s not the same rope,” Dr. Kane said. “Now, I will tell you I think your killer got smart and got something better to cut that rope with this time around.”
“What makes you say that?” Shauna asked.
“This is the other end of the Edwards rope.” Dr. Kane laid down another photo, this one showing a very clean, even cut end of the same rope.
“Wow.”
Zach grinned at Shauna’s repeated wows but he had to admit, she had the right word for the situation.
“And the lipstick?” He asked.
Dr. Kane moved to a microscope. “I had a feeling you’d want to see it.” She bent over the microscope and fiddled with the dials on the side. “I’ve got both samples set up in here. The sample on the left is from one of the girls thirty years ago. The one on the right came from Adrienne.”
She stood and Zach raised his hand to gesture for Shauna to go first. She looked and murmured another wow. Stepping back, she let Zach look through the lens.
He didn’t see it. “What am I supposed to be wowing over?”
“You don’t see that?” Shauna laughed.
Dr. Kane took pity on him. “The color, the texture, the density. All of it matches.”
Zach bent to look again. It was two side-by-side smears of red. “Okay. I’m going to take your word for it.”
He could see the shared grins on Shauna and Dr. Kane’s faces as he stood.
It was Dr. Kane who spoke. “As well you should. But I also ran tests and the composition is the same. There are two ingredients that were banned from the market fifteen years ago.”
He and Shauna nodded, sharing a look.
“I’ll get you the semen samples to run up to the lab, Shauna. I’ve got a vaginal swab and oral.” Dr. Kane said, before walking out.
Zach hated to think that there might be two separate semen donors, but knew both samples needed to be run. This case made his stomach churn on so many levels.
Zach caught Shauna’s elbow as she moved to follow. “Shauna,” he said. It was the first time they’d been anywhere close to alone. Never mind that Dr. Kane would be back any minute and there were lab techs right next door.
Shauna looked down at his hand on her arm, then slowly up at him. Her face told him she didn’t appreciate the contact.
He dropped his hand. Clearly, she didn’t feel the same charge racing through her body at the simple touch that he had. “I just feel like we should clear the air since we’re working on this together.”
She gave him a strange look and he was reminded of Liz and her are all adults this stupid? looks. “There’s nothing to clear, Zach. We’re good.”
Did she feel nothing between them? He wanted to step into her. Wanted to challenge her to deny she felt the heat that swirled whenever they were close to each other. The old him would have. Maybe he was no worse than the hockey players he was looking at for rape.
Instead, he stepped back. “Yeah? We’re good?”
Shauna only nodded, once, as Dr. Kane walked in. If the medical examiner noticed anything out of the ordinary, she didn’t comment. But then, she wouldn’t. Dr. Kane was all about the job.
As he walked out of the building next to Shauna, one fact hit Zach in the gut. The draw he felt toward her was even stronger than it had been years before. This time, though, it was different. Yeah, he still felt all the attraction he always had for her, but there was more to it this time. There was something different in how he was drawn to her now. It was more ... real. More substantial somehow.