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MINKA
It’s not often I get to sit in the quiet and think.
Despite having such a large office, a fancy desk, and a comfortable chair, my work since arriving in Copeland has kept me, for the most part, on my feet and dashing from one autopsy room to another.
From one crime scene to another.
But right now, Kylie Bastion and Kiera Chase have both been processed, the matchbook O’Dey handed in is with forensics, I’ve already met with Kiera’s partner and watched a man sob through his grief, and the rest of my team are taking care of their own caseloads, so I have a minute to sit and consider what we might be missing.
Later, I’ll deal with the shitty communication issue night shift is having with day shift. Later, I’ll deal with the emails piling up and the phone messages I have to return.
Later.
It’s not my job to solve these crimes. It’s not my place to conduct my own research and attempt to find a killer. My only responsibility is to deal with the body, collect evidence, and hand it over to the investigating officers.
Yet, here I sit, hypothesizing about a man who kills young women.
“Aubree?” I shout to be heard through the glass wall that separates us, and, glancing across, I shake my head at the mess that is her desk and the office—that isn’t an office at all—she’s commandeered.
She’ssupposedto be sitting with the rest of my team, a hundred feet to the left of where she is right now, andnotjust feet away, so my view—besides the cityscape, when I look right—is the back of her highlighted hair and, when she’s feeling sassy, her upside-down face when she tilts in her chair and watches me by hanging her head backward.
She was so eager to become my second, mymentee, that all hundred-and-ten pounds of her moved the heavy desk on her own and set up camp just outside my door.
It both infuriates and amuses me.
“Aubree!”
“Yeah?”
She doesn’t turn. Doesn’t face me. Doesn’t do a damn thing but shout right back. So I pick up my phone and dial her number, and through the glass, I watch as she answers.
“Doctor Emeri speaking.”
“Get your ass in here.”
Hanging up, I shake my head as the crash of my headset into the receiver makes her jolt in her seat.
Jumping up in her tight jeans and flirty shirt, she snags her can of soda and waltzes into my office with a smile that says nothing of the way she startled a moment ago. “Yes, o captain, my captain?”
My working life, since meeting Doctor Aubree Emeri, has been a constant battle of not smiling, because she’s so annoyingly charming.
“That poem was a metaphor,” I inform her.
“I know.” She crosses my office and perches her ass on the corner of my desk. “It lives in infamy.”
“Perhaps. But the captain does not. Walt Whitman literally wrote that his captain—a metaphor for Abraham Lincoln—died. The captain is dead!”
Her lips curl into a shaking grin she works so hard to smother. “I, uh, I flunked out of whatever semester that was.”
My brows rise along my forehead. “High school?”
“Sure. Whatever gets me out of this conversation. What’s up?”
“Where are we up to with Chase and Bastion?”
Switching on her work-brain—as opposed to her ‘annoy Minka’ brain—she nods and drags the visitor chair closer so she can set her feet on top. “Tox has come back on both. Same drug cocktail two times over. We have an injection site for both, just as you figured. Both have a similar medical history, in that neither had anything chronic or long-term going on. They were healthy before their run-in with our killer. Neither was married, though one was in a committed relationship, the other was not. Both had young sons. Both worked service jobs. Wedon’thave Bastion in or around the Opulus Club, but she works over by the pier, so… convenience, maybe? At this point, the detectives are yet to find the point where—if—the two women cross. But we have a dozen other similarities, plus the drug cocktail to connect the murders. We also have uniforms.”
Curious, I try to run that through my mind. “What?”
