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“Franz! Get your ass back to your beat!” Detective Baker stomped across the squad room, papers clenched in hand. She reached him, pushing the wrinkled papers into his chest before pointing her thumb over her shoulder at the door. “I got a complaint from Grossim on Main. Those kids are back at it again.”
Franz snatched the paperwork before it fell from Baker’s hands, growling a series of curses as he scanned it. He gave a curt nod to Anastacia, stalked out of the room and down the hall toward the cruiser parking lot, calling for another officer to join him.
“The kid’s death getting to you?” Baker was still there, watching Anastacia look over the case board.
“I just hate to see people hurt. Especially when they’re innocent.”
“He may not have been.” Baker snorted and plopped herself into Mel’s chair, giving the spirit less than a second to vacate it. She gave a quick shiver before she motioned half-heartedly toward Sammy’s picture. “He worked for Dominic, for Christ’s sake. He may be a kid, but don’t confuse youth for innocence.”
“It’s not his age. He was scared, but not at being caught for murder.”
“You can’t know for sure what he was scared about.”
“I can feel it.”
“Ah, you’re one ofthosefeelers, aren’t you?” She smirked and pointed at Anastacia in accusation. The disdain dripping from the words made Mel want to sit back down through her and give her the full force of his cold ghostliness, whatever that was. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, that strange feeling of displacement when someone passed through him was deterrent enough. Bullets weren’t nearly as off-putting as living people.
“We all are to a point.” Anastacia shrugged, “We just have varying degrees of how far.”
“I’m not.” Baker opened her arms as if to show off herself as the prime example that would prove Anastacia wrong.
“Sure, you are,” Anastacia countered immediately. “Otherwise, why would you become a cop?”
“A lifelong dream.”
“A calling then?” Anastacia’s voice lifted and Mel felt a bit of pride bloom for her. “What do you believe a calling is but being drawn to something, a feeling… as you put it?”
Stymied, Baker’s lips pressed together, her jaw sliding back and forth as she thought. “I’ll have to think about that.”
Knight came back to the desk and huffed as he took over Anastacia’s empty chair, nearly bulldozing through Mel standing behind it. It was bad enough phasing through someone when he saw it coming. It gave Mel the heebie-jeebies when it was by surprise.
“The ballistic team finally has the weapon logged in,” Knight reported.
“Great, how long until we get the match findings back?” Anastacia asked.
“We already know he didn’t do it,” Mel said from behind Knight, trying his hardest to burn holes with his eyes through the back of the detective’s head for nearly running through him.
“Our boys in the lab are pretty quick. Shouldn’t take more than the usual twenty days, but may be up to sixty days with the load they got.”
“Two months?!” Anastacia cringed.
“What’s wrong? You said you didn’t think he did it," Knight probed.
“I would like to close him out as a suspect and get going on another path. Someone wanted us to believe Sammy was the shooter. Planted his tie clip and... and I just don’t think a clean kid should have ‘murderer’ on his gravestone. You know he didn’t do it, Knight.”
“As much as I liked the kid, he pointed a loaded gun at both of us. I cannot put it past him to pull the trigger.”
“If he shot, the way he was holding the gun that night in the alley, he would have lost a chunk of skin from his hand. An experienced shooter would have known that. I want to clear his name and now we have to wait two months.”
“We can cut down the time.”
Baker stood at the unfamiliar voice as Knight spun slowly and Anastacia craned her neck around the others to see Montgomery and another man approaching the desk.
“How d’you get in here, boys? I thought Dominic was sore with us.” Baker spoke before anyone else could form a word.
Montgomery tossed a small USB drive to Knight, who caught it in one hand, narrowing his eyes at the memory stick.
“And what’s this?”
