Next to me, the fancy new PurePrep beeped.
I pulled the sample code, swabbed from the body of the skinned dog, and punched it into the county crime database.
And then I got to work cataloging the other things that had been swabbed off the dog, checking them against samples taken from Elliot’s driveway and the badger, hoping that if I could stay focused on work, I could ignore the hunger until Elliot showed up with dinner.
The computer chirped, and I glanced over, expecting it to tell me that it had no matches.
Except that it did.
The DNA came back as Charles Lee Buettner, who had a record that included two counts of reckless driving and a DUI.
I immediately called Smith.
“Mays. To what do I owe the pleasure?” He sounded surprised. Of course, I was working well after business hours, so maybe that was why he was surprised to hear from me.
“I just got an ID on DNA pulled off the dead dog,” I told him.
“Send it to me,” he said, his low voice tight with urgency. “Immediately.”
I obliged. “Does that mean you can pick him up?” I asked him.
“It gives me a reason to talk to whoever it is, at least. But there might be a reason for his DNA on its body that wasn’t that he killed it. It might be his dog, for instance. Or it maybe bit him.”
“One can hope,” I remarked darkly.
Smith snorted. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he told me. I suppose it wouldn’t look good if I seemed biased against a suspect. Although in my defense, I wouldn’t have thought the least negative thing about him if he hadn’t been IDed by a dead dog left as a threat. “Any human DNA come back on the badger?” Smith asked me.
“No,” I replied. I’d tried going over every inch of its body and hide, but every sample swab I’d run had only come back astaxidea taxus.
“Too bad. The dog could be excused as coincidence.”
“Coincidence?” I spluttered.
“It could just have been dumped,” he pointed out. “Given how close it was to the highway.”
“Asecondskinned animal?”
“If you’re thinking like a defense lawyer, it introduces doubt.”
“Fuck that,” I muttered under my breath.
“Say again?” Smith asked. Given that I hadn’t really intended for him to hear it, I wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t.
“Nothing worth repeating,” I replied, trying to force myself back into professional cheerfulness. Or at least make my bitter anger less obvious.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m just frustrated.”
“Understandable,” Smith said. “And you’re not the only one, for what it’s worth. Send me those results, and thanks—and Mays?”
“Yeah, detective?”
“Don’t work too late.”
I snorted, thanked him, and we both hung up. I quickly wrote up the report on the DNA results, then sent it over to Smith’s email.
I was running a couple more swabs through the PurePrep, trying to find any other scrap of DNA that wasn’t either canine or mustelid, when my phone buzzed—Elliot letting me know he was here.
