Free Exposed by Laura Griffin

ask. This was another rookie she didn’t know, but at the moment, that was good.
    “I’m the forensic photographer.” She nodded at Brian. “We’re waiting for the rest of our evidence response team. Until they arrive, no one touches anything. Are we clear?”
    She didn’t wait for a reply but resumed taking her photographs as the officer stalked off. Footsteps scraped behind her, and she stood up. Brian was watching her, a look of concern on his face.
    “You seem upset,” he said quietly.
    Upset didn’t cover it. Maddie took a deep breath and gazed up at him. “What happened at the apartment?”
    “They didn’t find her. Looks like some people might have been in there recently, but it’s empty now.”
    She bit her lip and looked away. They’d been so close.
    “SWAT took off, and our evidence team just showed up to have a look around,” he said. “Sam’s over there supervising things.”
    “Where are the shell casings?”
    He looked blank.
    “From the movie theater,” she said.
    “Our evidence guys are processing the scene. Why?”
    “I’d like them.”
    “The casings?” He sounded surprised.
    “We can run them through our ballistics lab.”
    “So can we.”
    “Probably tomorrow.”
    He rested his hands on his hips and gazed down at her.
    “Don’t even pretend you can turn anything around that fast,” she said. “You have to send them to Quantico, and then it will probably take weeks.”
    “We need them for the case record.”
    “You can have them back as soon as we’re finished. You can even run them again yourself, but in the meantime, you might have a lead.”
    She watched him consider what she was offering, and she knew he felt tempted. Her time frame blew his out of the water. Problem was, investigators were notoriously controlling when it came to evidence, and she already had the tripod he’d wanted.
    “Give me one of them, at least,” she said. “For twenty-four hours.”
    She could see him starting to cave as his phone buzzed. He exchanged a few cryptic words with someone—probably Sam—and hung up.
    He gazed down at her and sighed. “One casing, but I’m going to need it back.”
    “Fine.”
    “And I have to drive you home now. Sam needs me at the crime scene.”
    Her stomach clenched. “The apartment’s a crime scene?”
    “By the looks of things, yeah.”

     
    Goran Mladovic eyed the FBI vehicle parked outside his house with annoyance. Not that he minded beingunder investigation. He’d been dealing with that for years, and Matt Cabrera’s task force didn’t know its ass from its elbow. It was the agents themselves he found insulting. Cabrera had sent two rookies—including a woman—to conduct surveillance on him only hours after he’d made a major play.
    Goran’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he read an incoming message from an untraceable e-mail account.
    Delivery complete .
    He went to his bar and poured two fingers of vodka. Tonight he should celebrate. Only February, and it was already shaping up to be his best year yet, and the problem that had cropped up last spring was about to get solved, permanently. Soon he would be back in business and well on his way to making seven figures this quarter alone.
    Goran tipped back his Stoli. Not bad for an inner-city kid who’d grown up on powdered milk and Beanee Weenees.
    For the first time in a very long while, he thought of his parents, who still lived in a tiny Chicago apartment that smelled like boiled cabbage. It was an unpleasant place, where Goran had spent an unpleasant childhood. Having a mother and a father with Russian-sounding accents during the Cold War had not been easy. His parents knew English, but his father would lapse into Serbian during his drinking binges, and Goran would end up on the back steps of their four-story building, nursing his bruises and listening to his parents scream at each other through windows opened to relieve the sweltering summer heat. During those miserable