“What happened? Walk me through it. I know what your captain said, but I need your impression.”
Tora did just that.
Out came her little notebook, much like the one Gene carried, and she flipped it open.
The whole time, Elizabeth saw how proud Ethan and Gene both looked. Yeah, this woman mattered to them.
Tora continued.
“We got the call that there was a body found. We showed up, and found a vagrant man shanked in the chest. As our ME was doing his thing…we wandered around. There on the second floor, we found a locked door and an unlocked door. On the door with the lock, it screamed suspicious, so curiosity always kills the cat. We had to investigate.”
Elizabeth let her talk.
It was clear she was a decent cop. She was painting the full picture, covering all the important parts. Yeah, she’d been a detective for enough time to know how to do this.
That was helpful.
Tora finished.
“There was a big, shiny padlock. I thought that was strange, so I went out on a ledge, literally, and we peeked into the windows. Inside, we saw the craziness. That’s when I called my boss, and he didn’t want to handle this.”
Elizabeth understood that.
It wasn’t like she could blame someone for not wanting to dive into vats of eyeballs.
It took a special kind of crazy.
HER.
It took her.
“He said it’ll drain resources, and make it damn difficult to figure out who the victims will be. We had to pass on it, which sucks because I always get the crap cases with Mac.”
Mac agreed.
“It’ll take months to do the DNA, and we would have been yanked anyway—seniority and all. I’m sorry if we wasted your time. This won’t be an easy one without DNA.”
She stopped him.
Oh, she had news.
They rolled like this all the time.
“It’ll take us today to find DNA. We move fast. I’ll have the victims’ names by tomorrow, as long as they were in a database. Then, I’ll be able to work that part of it.”
Mac laughed.
“Man, to have the FBI resources.”
Yeah, it was nice.
That was why she got paid the big bucks. Oh, wait. She absolutely didn’t get paid the big bucks. She had a plethora of husband sugar daddies.
Which was a whole other issue for her.
Tora was to the point.
“We kept the room intact. The CSIs went in through the one window, but only after your ME cleared it. They are in PPE, so they touched nothing. We had them wear full protective gear, so no contamination happened.”
