Free Athena Force 8: Contact by Evelyn Vaughn Page A

left the note—to create fear. That’s what she’d heard in his pulse, in his heartbeat.
    She shivered.
    Roy made a disgusted sound. “You’re wet. You want my jacket?”
    “No.” She managed to stop him before he could shrug it off. “I should probably get my roommates home. It looks like things are closing up early, after this.”
    “They were in the main ballroom the whole time, right? As long as they didn’t see anything suspicious, head ’em out.”
    “Thank you for the coffee.”
    Roy was frowning at the now-bagged note, holding it up to the light. He wasn’t even looking at her. But he said, “Seven okay?”
    That took Faith by surprise. “What?”
    He slid his gaze from the missive to her, mouth threatening again. “Tomorrow night. Date. Seven?”
    Despite her attack of the heebie-jeebies out front? The only thing more embarrassing than the idea that this was now a pity date was the idea of him knowing she knew it was a pity date. “Okay,” she said, as they both turned to their own particular duties.
    Butch looked immensely pleased with himself.
     
     
     
    Faith had never been to a funeral before. She had no family besides her mother—no grandparents, no great-aunts or uncles, nobody whose passing would have required she attend their services. Since she and her mother tended to move every few years, she rarely made friends long enough to see one of them die. So she wasn’t sure how Krystal’s memorial service compared to other funerals.
    But she knew she hated it.
    The grief was palpable—grief from Krystal’s parents, who’d come to collect the body; grief from all her friends; grief from some members of the community who’d shown up without even knowing Krystal, just as a way of expressing their anguish and outrage over this murder in their city.
    That last group made Faith wonder if perhaps moving every few years hadn’t been a good enough excuse for not attending funerals in the past, after all.
    Butch Jefferson and Roy Chopin were there, too, though they stayed in back. Faith supposed they were taking note of who attended. She remembered from a criminal psychology class that some killers liked to see the results of what they’d done.
    In any case, the detectives’ solemn distance seemed respectful, and Faith knew she could count on them to notice anything suspicious. She kept her focus on the people who needed her more. Her roommates. The family.
    Once the last songs had been sung and the casket had been carried to a waiting hearse for its drive to Texas, Faith had to go home and shower before she could bear to go back to work.
    “Welcome back,” greeted Greg with his characteristically vague smile, once he noticed she was there. “I’m afraid there’s a pretty good backlog of forms for inputting.”
    “Gee, thanks. You need to make me take time off more often,” Faith teased weakly. But it felt good to settle in at her desk and take care of a good chunk of the work, her fingers clattering softly over the keyboard. It felt good to make progress on something and, more important, it felt normal.
    As close to normal as her life got, anyway.
    Not that it would ever stay that way.
    “I thought you’d want to know,” Greg announced, after a lunch break that Faith had worked through. He sat on the corner of her desk, like he had before, and smiled at her over his wire rims. “We didn’t get any full prints off last night’s letter. Other than the prints of the woman who found it, that is. It goes to graphology next.”
    He held up the see-through bag with the Biltmore note inside.
    She was delicious….
    “Can I see it?” When he handed the bag to her, Faith knew she’d have to stall in order to figure out how to do this as subtly as possible. “What do you suppose the handwriting analyst will find?”
    Even forensic scientists who specialized tended to dabble in other areas of the job.
    “Chances are it’s a man’s handwriting,” said Greg. “Although that’s never a