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This morning had started out quietly, giving Emma time to get everything in order for the workday and to catch up on her own social media network. Maybe today she’d take a look at what was going on in Chicago, where she’d been born and lived until she was seven. Chicago held her only happy childhood memories, along with being the only real home she’d had before FI.
When she was seven, her parents had relocated to New York. A year later, they’d died in a plane crash, and she’d been turned over to foster care, being bounced from one home to another. But she remembered Chicago—especially the deep-dish pizza. And it was always cool to see who had been voted the best pizzeria of the week. New York had great Sicilian, but it wasn’t the same.
Rather than hopping on Twitter and scrolling through her usual feed of the people she followed—from friends to celebrities to cool magazines to fashion trends—she went straight to the Chicago Sun-Times web page. She was just about to navigate to the food and dining section when a news clip caught her eye: “Tragic End to a Tragic Life.”
She clicked on the article, feeling sick as she read:
Lisa Barnes, a twenty-nine-year-old woman, was found shot to death in the middle of a residential street in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Currently, she’d been working as a gal Friday at Designer Fitness, a high-end gym five miles from the shooting. As she was a former foster child with a police record, no one has come forward to ID her body. Police believe the murder to be a drug crime.
End of article.
End of a life.
Emma felt a surge of anger. A former foster child with a criminal record—probably for stealing a pack of gum that could have dated back ten or even fifteen years. But that didn’t matter. They had to call it drug-related. Foster kids were always druggies, even as adults, right? No one claimed her, so she was discarded like the trash they assumed she was.
Nothing in life. Nothing in death.
The whole thing made Emma furious.
She was still seething when the front door of Forensic Instincts swung open, and Ryan McKay—the team’s techno-whiz and the hottest hunk going—walked in. Too bad he’d just celebrated the big three-oh and was way too old for Emma’s tastes. To her, Ryan was a smartass big brother. To the rest of the female population? He was a Peter Luger steak waiting to be devoured. Those smoldering Black-Irish good looks and rock-hard body combined with his air of casual deference was the magic combination.
Too bad all those drooling women were shit outta luck. Whether or not Ryan admitted it to himself, he was pretty much taken, and by one of Forensic Instincts’ very own: Claire Hedgleigh. Claire was the FI team’s claircognizant—or, to quote the vernacular, their psychic. She and Ryan were polar opposites, so the sparks flew like crazy when they were around each other. That applied at the office and, as the whole team knew, in the bedroom.
Now Ryan marched up to Emma’s desk, clearly in a whole different mindset than Emma.
“Hey, brat,” he greeted her. “I just came from the gym. Look what I bought.” He pulled open a bag and flourished what looked to be a complicated set of yellow bands, with straps and handles and God knew what else.
“Uh… that’s cool—I think,” Emma said, her attention temporarily diverted from the article she’d been reading. “What is it? Some kind
of sex toy?”
Ryan frowned. “No, and you’re way too young to know what those are.”
“I’m twenty-two.”
“Barely out of diapers. Anyway, this is a TRX Suspension Trainer—a portable performance training tool. You can use it anywhere. It leverages gravity and body weight—in this case, mine—so I can do hundreds of exercises right here at the brownstone.”
“Why were you shopping at the gym? I thought you and Aidan were planning Marc’s bachelor party?”
Marc Devereaux, Casey’s right-hand guy at FI—former Navy SEAL, former agent for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit—had reunited with the love of his life, and they were tying the knot. Love? Marc? No one ever thought it would happen.
But it had. And now, Ryan and Aidan, Marc’s older brother, couldn’t get enough shots in ribbing him about it.
“We’re planning the rager, don’t worry,” Ryan replied with a grin. “We bought Marc a TRX, too. He’ll be thrilled. It was invented by a Navy SEAL. He’ll immediately think it’s a superior device.”
“And the party?” Emma prompted.
“Oh, yeah, that. It’s all set. It’ll be me, Aidan, and three of Marc’s buddies. We’re hitting the gym for a hard-core circuit training competition. After that, we’ll be drinking ourselves into oblivion at that new bar one block over.”
“That’s a bachelor party?”
Ryan’s grin widened. “In Marc’s eyes, yes. He specifically said no strippers.”
“And you listened?”
“Sure we did.” Ryan winked. “But we never promised anything about lap dancers. See you later.” He scooped up his new exercise equipment and headed downstairs to his man cave, or his lair, as everyone called it, to try out the TRX.
Emma’s smile vanished as her gaze drifted back to her computer screen. There was something about this murder that just got to her. Maybe because it was so unfair. Maybe because it hit too damn close to home.
