Free Intimate Caresses (The Love and Danger Series) by Elizabeth Lennox Page A

to her mind and she clicked out of the e-mail, ignoring it because it didn’t have anything to do with her.  Steven was in the past and she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.  Men couldn’t be trusted. 
    Brock was male, therefore, she couldn’t trust him.  Never would she ever entrust her heart to another man. 

Chapter 6
     
    “These don’t make any sense,” Colt said out loud as he sifted once again through the printed e-mail messages from Joan, the administrative assistant. 
    “What’s wrong with them?” Brock asked, lowering his own sheaf of printed e-mails.  There were stacks of them, mostly technical conversations that he barely understood but instinctively knew weren’t part of the investigation. 
    Colt slid several across the conference room table.  It was just the two of them at the moment since Sam and Walker got pulled away on another case.  “Take a look at the language in these messages.”
    Co lt eyes skimmed along the text, the spot above his eyebrows pinching the more he read.  “You’re right.  This doesn’t make any sense.  What do you make of the messages?” he asked. 
    Brock leaned back again, ignoring the noises from outside the conference room where the other detectives and officers were working their own cases.  “I think it’s some so rt of code.  The odd messages are only in the texts to and from the assistant and the victim,” he conjectured out loud.  “Some of the words don’t even make a coherent sentence.  It’s like the two of them were trying to pick the most random words to string together.”
    Colt sat forward, taking several of the other e-mail messages.  He compared them to the personal e-mail from the wife, and then from some of the other co-workers.  “It’s only in the messages from the assistant and victim.  They aren’t in these,” he said and shoved the papers towards Brock. 
    They looked at each other and instantly knew that they were onto something.  “Time to interview the assistant again?” Colt suggested with a victorious grin.
    Joe shuffled into the room, out of breath and looking flustered. 
    “You got something new for us?” Colt asked, looking up at the man who could stand to lose fifty or sixty pounds.  He looked like he was going to have a heart attack at any moment. 
    Joe mopped his brow with a handkerchief then stuffed it into his back pocket.  “Nah.  Just the interesting lipstick colors I’d noted in the file.”
    Colt and Brock both looked at each other, then almost fell over in their chairs while sitting up, both of them leaning over the autopsy report.  “What lipsticks?” they both asked.
    Joe turned the page, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth as he searched in the text for the lipstick descriptions.  When he didn’t see anything, he cringed. “Uh oh.  I have a new stenographer and he must have missed that part.”  He sighed and ran his hand through his hair, messing up the few strands he had left. 
    He leaned against the table as if the weight of the world were on his shoulders. “I’m sorry fellas,” he said with a sigh.  “There were two colors of lipstick on the victim but I wasn’t able to get DNA samples from them.  One was a coral color and the other was a glossy pink.”  He groaned as he pushed away from the table.  “He’d also had sex with two people before he died and both times were very recent although one was several hours before death and the other was more recent.”
    “How could you tell?”
    “By the residual texture,” he said as if that were the most obvious thing.
    Colt and Brock both lo oked at each other.  “I like women, but even I’m not so callous as to have sex with two different women in the same night,” Colt said disdainfully.
    Brock crossed his arms over his chest.  “Looks like our victim wasn’t such a nice guy.”
    “I think we should head over and talk with the ladies in his life again, don’t you?” Colt asked.
    Brock