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“Finley,” she said.
He grinned. “You’re a legend around here, Finley.”
Finley bit her lips together to hold back her own grin. It wasn’t often she heard compliments like that from anyone related in any capacity to Metro.
Houser chuckled. “Don’t go giving her the big head, Brett.”
Taylor’s face reddened. “Sorry. I get carried away.”
“Ignore him,” Finley said to the guy. “He gets grumpy when I trump him.” She glanced at Houser. “And I just did.”
Taylor laughed. “Follow me, Finley, I’ll let you peek at that purse.” They headed along the corridor. “You can’t touch anything,” he explained, “but you can look, and if you need to see a different side of anything, I can touch it.”
“Got it,” she said, flashing him her best smile.
He blushed and hurried a little faster toward their destination.
Finley had been here before, but it never ceased to amaze her just how large the lab was. More than eighty thousand square feet spread over two floors. State of the art. Serious tax dollars had gone into this place.
Taylor led them to the Evidence Receiving Unit. “Since the evidence has already been processed, we’ve stored it back in a vault. Tomorrow we’ll be moving it to the Property and Evidence Section, where it will wait for its day in court, so to speak.”
Finley was fully aware of the steps. The preservation and protection of evidence was paramount to any case. She was extremely lucky to be getting an advance in-person look in her capacity as the firm’s investigator. Generally, her team would have to be happy with photos.
She and Houser waited in a small room outside the vault while Taylor retrieved the evidence. The room had a couple of stools that stood next to a stainless steel table. A light/magnifier combination had been mounted to the table for closer inspection of the evidence.
“I hadn’t seen Lucy in a while when she was murdered,” he said quietly. “Her mother talked to me, of course. Evidently, I was the last boyfriend she knew about. If Lucy was with anyone after me—on any kind of steady basis, I mean—she didn’t share this with her mother.”
Finley couldn’t see a savvy investigative reporter listing Houser on her case board if he hadn’t been in the picture for a while. Didn’t make a lot of sense. Then again, there hadn’t been a picture of Finley’s father. Maybe Cagle hadn’t known about him when she created the case board. But why not add him later?
It was also possible that Cagle had been unraveling by that point. To lose so much in such a short period of time was not easy to come back from. Maybe she’d lost her edge too. Finley knew that place too well. There were times when you only saw what you needed to see.
“I would like a walk-through of the house,” Houser said, interrupting her intense thoughts. “Hey.”
She shifted her attention to him, lifted her eyebrows in question.
“I’m doing you a huge favor and taking a big risk letting you see this evidence in person. I need you to do this for me.”
This made her chuckle. “Kind of a ‘you show me yours and I show you mine’ thing?”
Exasperation claimed his face. “Yes.”
She might be enjoying this a little too much at this point. “We can go to the house tomorrow. I have dinner with the Judge tonight.”
He visibly relaxed. “Thanks.”
She shook her head. “I was never going to hold out on you, Houser.”
He smiled, did one of those half shrugs. “I may have known that.”
Yeah right. She’d had him worried.
Taylor appeared with the evidence. He placed the container on the table, efficiently removed his gloves and tugged on a new pair, then placed a sterilized tray next to the container. Taking extra care, he removed the purse and the cigarette butts from the container. Each item had been tucked into a clear evidence bag.
Finley’s heart beat faster. The idea that this handbag was the last personal item Lucy touched got to her. It always did. No one’s life should be taken from them. This—the girl’s small Louis Vuitton multicolored handbag—had been important to her. A status symbol that was likely more about the fashion of the day than how much it cost. Lucy had this small bag with her when she encountered the man who murdered her. If there was anything on or in this bag that helped identify her killer, they needed to find it.
When Taylor had placed all the items from the container onto the tray, Finley was surprised to see more than the slim wallet that matched the handbag, Lucy’s driver’s license, and a tube of lip gloss. There was a car wash receipt dated three days before the murder.
She looked at Houser. “You didn’t mention the car wash receipt.”
