Free A Scrying Shame by Donna White Glaser Page A

blood. Guts was determined to keep her happy.
    “The whole thing?” Arie stared at the thirty-four-by-twenty-foot expanse of lush wool Berber carpet.
    “Nah,” Grady said. “Just the blood site. We’ll have to take an extra five feet or so of what looks uncontaminated to make sure the blood didn’t travel. You’d be surprised. But my guess is it didn’t flow side to side.” He shook his head ominously.
    “You think it went . . .”
    Grady jabbed his finger at the floor. “Down. My guess is it soaked into the floor trusses. We’ll see. If it did, we can only do so much. That’s why Guts is coming over. It’s his call.”
    They got to work. Cutting through the backing of the carpet proved incredibly difficult. The razors in their utility knives dulled quickly. Arie was afraid she was going to cut off a finger. She could imagine Grady bitching at her for recontaminating the area. The only good thing was that, although they had to wear their biohazard suits—they did on almost every job—and rubber gloves, they didn’t have to wear face masks. Nevertheless, Arie was sweating like a pig within the first twenty minutes.
    They heard the condo’s front door open.
    “Dammit,” Grady said. “Guts is early. He said he wouldn’t be here ’til this afternoon. Go head him off, and tell him to come back after lunch.”
    Arie trudged off down the hall, happy to have a break, but wondering how Guts was going to react being told to go away and come back later.
    She rounded the corner and almost ran smack into the amazing-blue-eyes-nice-butt, winky guy.
    “Holy crap,” he said.
    Apparently he’d never seen a life-size ambulatory banana before.
    Up close, the guy was even more gorgeous than she’d remembered. Coal black hair, those startling—and now startled—delft-blue eyes, and the hint of dark stubble that made a man in a business suit look rugged and sexy as hell.
    “Who are you?” Arie managed to ask.
    “No, the question is: Who are you ?”
    He sounded pissed, but Arie thought that was probably because she’d scared the hell out of him. Men didn’t take well to bananas leaping out of dark hallways.
    Recognition crept into his eyes. “That was you in the red Focus the other day, wasn’t it?”
    “Uh huh. I was late for work. I’m a cleanup tech,” Arie said. Duh. Like he couldn’t figure that out.
    She scrambled to regain her composure. “I don’t think anybody is supposed to be here. This is a crime scene.”
    She almost gasped at the brilliance of his smile. Unfortunately, it vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.
    “I’m aware this is a crime scene. In fact, it’s my crime scene. I’m Detective Connor O’Shea.”
    “Oh.” Arie’s mind, not at its best today anyway, went utterly blank.
    They stared at each other. O’Shea’s eyes dipped, scanning Arie from her scraped-back-from-her-head-into-a-ponytail hair to her blue-booties-over-yellow-suit feet. Her heart skipped around a little until she remembered he was a cop. They had a tendency to look people over.
    And she was blocking the hallway leading to his crime scene.
    He raised a sooty eyebrow, waiting for her to figure out she needed to move aside.
    “Oh,” she said again. She stepped back against the wall, rattling the painting next to her head in its frame.
    He slid past, but as he did, she could have sworn he stole another quick peek at the “girls,” which jutted out like two cantaloupes. Arie’s body flooded with heat. Damn it. She was blushing. She snatched up two trash bags and fled to the van.
    Arie would have stayed away until she was certain that he had left, but she knew Grady would pitch a fit. As she tossed the bags in the back of the van, she remembered the wedding dress. She’d set it aside as Grady had suggested, but she didn’t know if he’d told Guts or not.
    When she returned to the apartment, Detective O’Shea stood in the living room. He had a small notebook out and was jotting something