Free Unforgivable by Laura Griffin Page B

together on a cold case last summer. She’d gone from Fort Worth to the state crime lab before landing her job at the Delphi Center.
    “There was this case about six years ago,” she said. “One of the first ones I worked all by myself. It was a sexual homicide. The victim, Laura Thorne, was nineteen. She disappeared from a party one night and was found in some nearby woods a few days later. The duct tape used to bind her hands came through our laboratory. Her clothes, too. I tested everything. Couldn’t recover anything from the perpetrator, only the victim.”
    “Was she stabbed?” Ric asked, now seeing where this was going.
    “Fifty-three times. There were slashes all over her dress.”
    “Piquerism,” he said.
    “Exactly.” Mia shook her head. “Anyway, the casemade an impression on me. I still think about it a lot. Sometimes I even dream about her, and she’s wearing those putrid clothes.” Mia shivered, and he didn’t think it was because of the weather.
    “Some cases stick with you.” He wasn’t sure what else to say. Sometimes he’d wake up in a cold sweat thinking about a crime scene. Only there was usually some sick twist to it, such as the victim wasn’t the victim but Ava. Or his mom. Or even his ex-wife. The worst part wasn’t the scene but the suffocating feeling of getting there just a few minutes too late.
    “I think the cases might be connected.”
    Ric raised his eyebrows.
    “I know what you’re going to say,” she hurried to add. “There are a lot of stabbing victims. Duct tape is common. I know all that. But I think you should check into it.”
    Ric took his time answering, choosing his words carefully. Mia was the most talented DNA expert he’d ever worked with, both in the lab and on the witness stand. With a little finesse, he could get her to turn his lab work around in record time. Besides the district attorney, who liked him, Mia was probably his best contact. No, she was definitely his best contact, because she couldn’t get booted out of office the way the DA could, which meant that she was with him for the long haul. And he couldn’t afford to jeopardize her help by balking at her theory.
    He also couldn’t afford to sleep with her, no matter how much he wanted to. It would be a disaster on every front—professionally, personally. Maybe not sexually, but that didn’t make up for the other two.
    He thought of that kiss last night. It had been over before it started, before he’d even gotten a good taste.
    “Will you check into it?” Her blue eyes looked hopeful now.
    “I can take a look. Like you said, though, stabbing and duct tape are pretty common. Is there something else you noticed … ?” Ric let the question dangle, not wanting to ask if there was anything else that would make a rational person think these two cases might be connected.
    “Isn’t that enough?”
    “Honestly? No. If it was an unusual kind of tape, maybe. But it looked like plain silver duct tape to me. You guys should be able to run it down, find out if that’s true.”
    Mia sighed, frustrated. “It’s just, I don’t know, a feeling I get when I look at the evidence. Like the crimes feel the same, you know? The same kind of impulse behind them or something.”
    Ric just stared at her.
    “Don’t you ever follow your instincts?” she asked.
    “Absolutely.”
    “That’s all I’m asking you to do here.”
    Hell, what could it hurt? If nothing else, it would keep his best contact at the Delphi Center in his corner. “All right, I’ll check into it,” he told her.
    She looked relieved, as if he’d lifted a weight off her shoulders.
    “Thank you.” She stood and collected her purse. “You have something to write on? I’ll tell you the case number.”
    “You’ve got it in your head? From six years ago?”
    “I told you, it made an impression on me.”
    Ric pulled out the notebook he kept in his jacket pocket and jotted down the number she recited. Six years ago. As cold