Page 34 of Defender
He studied her a moment. “Stick to your office. You don’t know what might dirty those pretty little hands out here.” He waited until she walked away and around the corner of the shop.
Okay, that was weird. And more than a warning. What was he afraid she’d find?
Dani would have to look into it. Maybe after everyone left. She walked back to her office as slowly as possible.
Later that afternoon, her cell phone rang with an unknown number.
“Hello?”
“This is Kumar. I want an update on your initial impressions.”
Dani closed her office door and kept her voice low. “I’m getting the lay of things here. Nothing obvious on my initial reports, but one of the workers threatened me.” She told Kumar about the two recycling accounts for the same company and Jim’s “warning.”
“Do we have a rundown on all the employees? I was thinking I could try to get him to warm up to me?—”
“Stop right there, Kim. You need to stick to the numbers. That’s why you’re there.”
“Yeah, but?—”
“Don’t worry about the personnel. I have the profiler looking into them, and others investigating our missing informant. I’ll pass this info on to them. Stick to your job and find the money. We need concrete evidence, not hunches and ambiguous threats to go after. Understand?”
Dani blew out a short breath. “Understood.”
But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
Eight
Michael couldn’t get Eddie’s voice out of his head. His pitiful cries the night Michael had found him in that cupboard, and again at the park. Finn sat at the desk across from Michael, looking at other cases of break-ins, trying to find a connection.
The phone calls they’d spent the afternoon making to the store employees had offered no leads. Eddie was the closest witness, but he was already traumatized and not talking. Flora Donner had even called back and answered their questions, but she had no clue where Gary could be, and she’d had no direct contact with him in years.
Finn rolled back in his chair and stretched. “Well, that was a bust.”
“No luck?” Michael tried to snap out of his own musings. “We should try?—”
“It will have to wait till tomorrow, partner. Time to clock out.”
“It’s only three.”
“But with our late-night call, we run the risk of overtime, and you got the same memo I did. The captain doesn’t want to authorize any more of that than he has to. We can start fresh tomorrow.”
He’d let Finn go home, but Michael wasn’t going to sleep well with all the loose ends to follow up on. He could investigate off the clock.
“Right.” Michael closed his folder of notes. Call him old-school, but it helped him to remember details better if he wrote them out with pen and paper. He only had a bunch of questions at the moment though.
Finn stood and pulled on his jacket. “Let me guess. You’re gonna let me leave while you stay up all night beating down more leads.”
Michael said nothing. Just clicked his pen a few times.
“Don’t your brothers have a game tonight?”
Aw, shoot. “They play North Eagle.” Hopefully it wasn’t obvious Michael had completely forgotten about it until Finn said something.
“The rivals. Well, you certainly don’t want to miss that, now, do you?” Finn’s pointed smirk said he hadn’t missed a thing.
“Fine. I’ll leave.”
“Good. I’d hate for you to track down leads and investigate without your partner. In fact, maybe I’ll see you at the game. I’ve got nothing better going on.”
