Page 119 of Deep Tide

His eyes narrowed.

Leyla slid out of the booth before she said something really bitchy on his first day back.

“I think you’re making a mistake, Leyla.”

“Well, good thing it’s my mistake and it’s none of your business.”

•••

Nicole drove through town, running yellow lights as she glanced at the clock on her dashboard. She was going to be late for the team meeting for the second time in two days. She’d gotten sidetracked with a car theft on the north end of the island, and now she had a ton of paperwork to do on top of everything else.

In an ideal world, she’d be like one of those TV detectives who only worked one case at a time. But in addition to being the lead on a high-profile homicide, she also had to juggle the regular flow of assaults, thefts, and drunken stupidity that happened daily in a busy resort town.

Nicole rolled to a stop at a light and checked the clock again. Her stomach tensed.

She was worried about more than being late. Once again, she was showing up to the meeting with nothing new to share with the team. She was pretty sure Brady had started to regret tapping her for this job. And to make matters worse, Joel was back in town, and even though he wasn’t officially working the case, Nicole knew he would find a way to sit in on the meeting and get the scoop about whatever was going on.

But there was no scoop to get. Despite busting her butt and working around the clock for days, Nicole still didn’t have a single actual suspect in Amelia Albright’s homicide. The closest she had was a person of interest, who happened to have a rock-solid alibi because he’d been at a tech conference in California at the time of the murder.

She waited impatiently for the light to change and tapped her phone to call Miranda. Again, no answer. She scrolled through her contacts and found the number for the lab technician she’d been working with all week.

“Hi, it’s Detective Lawson,” she said when he picked up. “I’m checking on the status of an item I submitted for fingerprinting.”

“Oh, hi. Just a sec.”

She heard muffled voices on the other end and pictured the skinny young man pressing the phone against his lab coat.

The light turned green, and she waited for the car in front of her to wake up.

“Detective, you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Are you calling about the GPS device?”

“Yes.”

“We haven’t run the prints from that yet.”

“She got prints?”

“You’re talking about the package from Miranda Rhoads? Yes, she lifted prints off the battery—”

“Battery? What battery?”

“It looks like... Okay, yes. The notes say she dusted the GPS device for fingerprints, including the battery inside, and she lifted two partials. We’ll be running them through the system shortly. She put a rush on this.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. It’s next in the queue.”

Thank goodness for Miranda. And she’d actually gotten prints off the battery inside the GPS. Nicole wouldn’t even have thought to check that, and this was exactly why she always preferred it when Miranda handled their evidence.

“Okay, and when do you think you’ll have that result?”

“Soon. Definitely. I have a note here to call Miranda as soon as it comes through. Did she tell you about the other one?”

“What other one?”

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