Free The Truth Seeker by Dee Henderson Page B

has been her personal crusade.”
    “That’s wonderful news. That funding has been held up for, what?
    Two years? How’d you ever get it to happen?”
    “Actually, that’s what I want to talk to you about.”
    She lowered her drink, her smile flickering.
    “The new police commissioner wants a reexamination of all unsolved murders over five years old in light of new forensic techniques.
    I told him I’d do it
    ”
    “
    if you got funding to combine the archives.”
    “Exactly.”
    She could see a rushing train coming her way. “Ben, one of the lab guys, Peter—”
    “I need more than a good technician. You spend a good portion of your days out at the crime scenes, and you’ve worked directly with cops, you can interpret the case notes. You’re on desk duty for the next several weeks anyway, and you know better than anyone what evidence is worth the time to analyze.”
    “Don’t do this to me.”
     
    “Anything you need, ask.”
    “A vacation is sounding better all the time—”
    He laughed and got to his feet. “Thank you, Lisa. I knew I could
    “Sorry, it’s done.” He gave her a sympathetic smile. “Don’t worry, it’s not Siberia. And I’ll owe you one when it’s done.”
    Bribery still worked. She considered him and wondered how hard she could push it. “A new mass spectrometer?”
    “I’ll see what I can work into next year’s budget.”
    Whoa. She should have thought larger; that had been a fast yes. He was serious enough about this she might have been able to wrangle another technician slot.
    “You’ll do it?”
    She rubbed her eyes, hating this proposition with a passion, remembering her last visit to the police archives. The files were in poor shape, only a fraction of the records had been computerized, most cases had to be located from incomplete and fading handwritten indexes. And the older the case, the more disorganized the evidence.
    She owed Ben more than one favor, but still
    “You’re asking for a miracle. Those cases are cold for a reason.”
    count on you.” He offered his hand to help her up.
    She accepted, already dreading the next few weeks. She was getting exiled, graciously, but exiled.
    “I took the liberty
    you’ll need a place to work. There is a lot of material.”
    Ben’s executive assistant, Gloria Fraim, pushed open the door to the task force room. Basically, it was one large open room located one floor below the laboratories. It could be configured to suit the needs of the particular situation from a large disaster to a multiagency case.
    A series of worktables, a whiteboard, and a light table had been moved in. Metal shelves on rollers lined the inner wall; they were stacked with black boxes two deep. The boxes were worn and sagging,
    the writing on the ends barely visible because the black ink had faded.
    Lisa rubbed her finger in the dust on one of the box lids. This case hadn’t been worked in years. She scanned the row of boxes. “These are all the cases?”
    “Sorry, only about half. We’ve been setting aside the unsolved murder cases as we find them.” Gloria walked over to the other side of the room and pulled the blinds up on the wall of windows, letting in the sunlight. “I asked for you.”
    “Did you?” Lisa smiled; she should have guessed. “I don’t know if I should thank you.”
    “Before this is over you will,” Gloria promised. “You’ve always enjoyed a challenge. Some of these cases that haven’t been solved will break your heart.”
    “What shape are the files in?”
    “Photograph film is brittle, paper yellowing. About what I would expect. Stop by the cold storage records room in the next few days and take a look at the entire project. It’s quite impressive. We’re bringing over the archive files in batches, transferring the most vulnerable of the records to CD-ROM, using charcoal to deal with the odor and moisture in the paper files, indexing and computerizing the cases records.”
    “Massive doesn’t begin to describe that project.”
    “We’ll get it done on time, although I’m afraid you’ll