Page 13 of Lost and Found

“A few years ago, I paid for her clothes to be sent to a lab for another review. DNA detection has come a long way since we were in college. The report showed touch DNA from who you’d expect. Everyone she’d partied with that night, and about a dozen more unidentified people. The killer plus everyone she bumped into from the party to the streets.”

“What are you going to do if you go down this path and discover it’s Ryan?”

“God, Wes, it’s not him. Can you move on?”

“But what if that’s what we learn when we start digging?”

“You’re being obtuse.” That was a polite way of calling someone a jerk, wasn’t it? Definitely obtuse.

“I’m asking questions.”

“It’s not Ryan. Whatever you have in your head about the Cosgroves, he wasn’t like them, and I know in my heart he wouldn’t have hurt Caitie.”

“Everybody has secrets.”

This partnership wouldn’t work. She threw her hands up. “Maybe you should leave—”

“Look, Bailey. I’m not trying to upset you.”

Too bad. She was. “If it were Ryan—which it wasn’t—then no one would have broken into my house and told me to back off.”

His tongue probed his cheek as he weighed her logic. Then he shrugged. “I can imagine the Cosgroves pulling all kinds of stunts if you were going to besmirch their precious name.”

“I am a Cosgrove.”

Wes rolled his eyes. “You already said you weren’t one of them.”

She wanted to strangle him. “Pull your attention away from Ryan.”

“Or else?”

“Or you won’t be any help at all.” Her phone alarm buzzed. They’d spent far more time talking than she’d realized. “Shoot. I have to go.”

“Where?”

“Home.” A small lie. She’d eventually be home. “What’s it to you?”

“Then I should go too,” he suggested. “I don’t know what you and Vivian discussed about securing the rental until you move, but—”

“I hired off-duty police officers to be there around the clock.” Not to mention, she had no plans to introduce him into her life if he was going to focus on Ryan. She’d never bring someone into her house who would make her son uncomfortable. Matt didn’t have many good men in his life, and she wouldn’t allow Wes to meet him until the wild suspicions about Ryan were out of Wes’s system. She gestured to the boxes stacked against the wall and the pile of reports. “You have a lot of catching up to do. I’ll let you stay here—”

“You’ll let me?”

Bailey ground her teeth. “Lock up on the way out.”

“That’s your plan?”

“Yeah, and we’ll debunk your ridiculous theories tomorrow.” She left before he could disagree, hating how flustered she was, and slammed the door behind her.

Why the hell was Wes smiling? A better question was why he was fighting the urge to follow Bailey out of the parking lot. She was a pain in the ass with her pretty head buried in the sand.

He scrubbed his face with his hands. More than a day’s worth of work waited for him, and all he could think of was the curve of her ass when she’d spun away.

What the hell was his problem? He had less than twenty-four hours to read through reports and evidence that would take him a week to comb through carefully. But instead of getting started, he kept staring at the damn door.

Wes puffed out his cheeks and dialed Vivian’s cell phone.

She answered on the first ring. “What’s the verdict? You going to stay on the job or wimp out?”