I also need to do laundry.
I’ve been wearing the same pants for two days.
:)
It wasn’tthat I didn’twantto go over to Elliot’s place—I really did need to do laundry, and somebody was going to notice that my pants were filthy and wrinkled soon, although I personally didn’t want to wear them three days in a row, either.
There was also the complication causedbyElliot. Specifically, the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about him. About us. About the fact that there was anus.
I still wasn’t entirely sure where we were going—what he wanted long-term. But it had only been three days, so I guess talking long-term was probably a bit premature. Especially given that I’d waited six months for a first date and then another month for a second.
And on top of that, I had the three active cases I was trying to juggle. Case One went all the way back to my first solo case after being hired—the burned dead man in his car. It was a case of arson, but the accelerant was different than in the barn-and-arson case (Case Three). And then there was Colfax’s bonfire, which wasn’t mine, but was making me suspicious given the fire-plus-shifter combination wasn’t really a common one, even though two of the five dead bodies in the barn hadn’t been shifters, but an elf and a missing Arc-human. At least her family had been contacted to collect her body so that they could find some kind of closure, paltry as that had to have been.
Case Two was Elliot’s. Or, rather, the dead badger and the dead dog that had been left on Elliot’s property. And that was also producing complications, at least in my head, because I wasn’t sure what the appropriate protocol was on the fact that I’d just started dating the victim of an ongoing case. I felt like that should mean that I now had a conflict of interest, but given the fact that Smith had called me even though he knew I knew Elliot in the first place, I wasn’t sure where the line was for personal relationships getting me removed from running evidence. Because it wasn’t like I was the person who would be doing the arresting or interviewing or any of that.
The three older unidentified bodies from the barn had been sent off to a lab in Green Bay to see if they could give us a better time of death that might help us to identify them. I was prettysure that whoever Colfax was working with in Gresham on the case was trying to match them to family members of missing persons, but that was definitely none of my actual business. I provided the DNA and the chemical tests, and somebody else did the detecting and running down of relatives.
Case One had stagnated—but I was hoping that there might be something in the particulate evidence from the car that might matchsomethingwe could actually identify. From the barn, I had samples of dirt from the floor, some sand, salt from a blue plastic bag that was labeled ‘Road Salt,’ straw, some sort of seeds that might have been alfalfa or something else that was grown as feed. I also had samples of at least three different gages of rope, some twine, and some fabric scraps, as well as swabs from a few gas cans, several oil cans, and some other things whose labels I hadn’t been able to read.
And when I finished with that, there was still Elliot’s case. It had fallen down the priority list—even thoughIdidn’t particularly want it lower down—because the other cases involved murder. Dead animals always went lower on the list than dead people, even when those people were shifters.
I’d worked straightthrough lunch, and it was past four by the time I got all of the particulates in Case Three processed, catalogued, and logged. Several would go out for spectral analysis or other testing so that I could determine whether exact matches if we compared them to other samples—for instance, from another open case, a cold case, or some future case that I actually hoped never happened.
I probably should have gone home—or at least to Elliot’s—but I wanted to actually do the work on Elliot’s case so thatwe could catch the assholes who were threatening him, and tomorrow there might be a new case that would push it back down the list again.
So I pulled the box and got to work.
I had no idea how long I’d been working when my phone buzzed.
Are you still at work?
Yeah.
Trying to finish up this case.
Did you eat?
My stomach rumbled loudly, and that made me actually look at what time it was.
Well after seven. Oops.
I did not.
I’ll do that as soon as I finish this up.
Can I bring you something?
That question worked to distract me more than anything else that had happened that day. Because it meant that Elliot cared enough about me and my well-being to want to bring me food. Maybe it was the proverbial glow of a new relationship that people talked about, but the fact that he actually cared enough to do something for me made me smile.
You don’t have to do that.
Will you eat it if I do?
Yes.
I’ll be there within a half hour.
It would be unconscionably rude not to eat whatever he brought me, assuming I actually could, which Elliot always made sure was the case. My stomach growled again, and now that I wasn’t hyperfocused on work, I could actually tell how hungry I was. I really needed to not skip lunch. And dinner.
