Page 32 of The Last Close Call

Crime labs were known for it. Constantly working around rape kits and bloody clothing took a toll on people. Rowan had done it for only a few years, but she’d felt like the walls were closing in on her.

She focused on her food, dipping a celery stick in dressing. She wasn’t comfortable talking about this with him, but she didn’t know why. Cops knew all about burnout.

Maybe she was worried he’d have the same reaction she’d picked up from her coworkers when she’d quit—that she was too young to understand burnout. That was for people fifteen or twenty years in.

“So, how’d you get into adoption work?” Jack asked.

Why was he so stuck on this? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out with a man and he hadn’t wanted to talk about himself the whole time.

She smiled, trying to lighten things up. “Why are we so focused on me?”

“I’m interested.”

A tingle went through her. His voice sounded sincere, and the steady look in his eyes made her think he meant it. But, again, he was a detective, clearly skilled at drawing people out. She needed to remember that.

She finished off a wing and wiped her hands on her napkin. “Well, you met my friend Lila. The bartender at the Duck?”

He nodded.

“Lila’s adopted, and a while ago she bought one of those DNA kits. She asked me to take a look at her results and help her find her birth parents. So I did. She was able to reconnect with her mom and also locate a half brother she never knew about.”

“Instant family.”

“Sort of.”

Lila and her birth mother didn’t get beyond a few stilted encounters. But Lila and her half brother had hit it off, and now she did stuff with his family. For someone who had been a loner most of her life, just having that one familial connection had made a big impact. Rowan felt good being a part of that.

“Anyway, it’s rewarding,” she said now because Jack was still at least pretending to look interested. “I like reuniting families. And there’s a lot more of that happening now that DNA kits have become so popular.”

“So, I’m guessing you’ve mapped out your own ancestry?”

She shrugged. “No.”

“No?” He smiled. “Why not? I would have thought you’d have traced your family back to the Mayflower or something.”

Despite his smile, he was watching her closely, and she tried to seem nonchalant.

“Well, I have some reservations about putting my profile out there.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It’s a privacy thing,” she said. “Plus, I’ve been so busy with other people’s projects. Lila put me in touch with a couple of online groups, and I started helping more and more adoptees. It began consuming so much time, I decided to quit my day job and make a consulting business of it, and I’ve been building up my network ever since, getting referrals and recs from people.”

“Sounds like it’s really getting off the ground,” he said. “Guess I’m lucky you made time for my case.”

“Of course.”

“Not ‘of course,’ ” he said with a smirk. “You dodged my calls for more than a week.”

“I didn’t know it was about WCR. You should have led with that.”

His brow furrowed as he set down his sandwich. “You know, WCR is a misnomer.”

“How do you mean?”

“The first two cases happened on the west side of campus, yes, but the other seven happened elsewhere.”

“The other seven?”

---