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Her personal phone started ringing, which startled the heck out of her. No one really calls the thing anymore. She took it off her hip and rolled her eyes with a secret smile when she saw who was calling. “I’ll catch you later.” She excused herself from Detective Branson, who’d already started to walk away, and headed towards the door.
Riley’s eye had been twitching for the last ten minutes, and since he was ass deep in cattle shit and wasn’t going to be free anytime soon, he did the next best thing. Cell service on this part of the land is for shit, but his luck held out. He breathed a sigh of relief when his woman answered, but it was short-lived. “Who’re you going to catch later?”
“I was talking to Detective Branson.” Celia was tempted to call him by his first name, but she figured Riley’s crazy meter was already teetering on the brink.
“What’s that asshole want? When’s he leaving anyway?” Celia had a big stupid smile on her face as she headed to her car. She couldn’t believe how tickled she was by his juvenile behavior.
“Riley, the man, is here to pick up a serial killer and close out one of his cold cases; he doesn’t have time for anything else.”
“That’s what you think. Don’t make any plans for lunch; I’m coming to get you.”
“I thought you said…” Before she could remind him that he was supposed to be culling cattle today and would be busy, he hung up in her ear. “What a nut.”
Celia made her run to the lab before heading to the hospital to see what was going on with her suspect. Since she can do more than one thing at a time, even when she was talking to Detective Branson about his issue, her mind had been working overtime on the case on her desk. A lot of things weren’t adding up for her, and she needed to go back to the beginning.
Of course, it was still new, less than twenty-four hours in fact, but she well knew how important the first hours of any case are, whether it be murder or anything else. She’d barely dropped the stuff off at the lab when she got a call from tech. “What do you have for me?”
“Okay, I’m not sure how helpful this is going to be at this point, but it’s what we’ve got so far. The message originated from Ryan Swamp’s email, but it didn’t come from any of his devices.”
“I think I get what you’re saying, but can you explain?” She felt that hum in her blood that she gets when she’s on the trail of something.
“Okay, so we brought in all of his devices, computers, tablets, phones, from home and school, and none of them were used to send that message. But, we can’t clear him because the message did come from the school. We’re in the process of finding out exactly which computer was used.”
“You can do that?”
Andy seemed a bit offended by the question but informed her in as snooty a voice as she’d ever heard from him that it was his job to do that. Celia hung up, thinking the case was getting stranger by the minute. You’d think with all the twists and turns of the last two cases that she’d be used to it by now, but she was more accustomed to cut and dry crime.
On the way to the hospital, her mind turned to a different tactic. If Ryan wasn’t the one responsible, then who could’ve sent that message? The first thought would be that Marissa had sent it to herself, but she’d seen how distressed the young girl was the night before and couldn’t imagine that she was that good of an actress.
Could it be a disgruntled student, a jealous teacher? Who, what? If she had to go that route, the case would become even more of a headache. She’d already asked Ryan if anyone else had access to his passwords, which he denied, but if they were to take this road, then she was going to have to revisit that question.
Her mind went to his home life. She’d already planned to talk to the wife and the underage stepdaughter, which was set up for some time today. Had this been New York, a judge would’ve already moved to have the kid removed from the home while the investigation was underway, but here they do things a little different.
She vaguely remembered seeing the wife at the station the night before and the kid at the school when they arrested him. Of course, she hadn’t known that the girl was his stepdaughter when she was cuffing him, and by the time she’d put him in the car, the kid had run off. She wished now that she’d had a chance to talk to her before the mother had a chance to prep her.
