Page 422 of Cold Case, Warm Hearts

“Yeah?”

Stella nodded. “Maybe it’s just not as bad as Ithoughtit would be.”

Addie chuckled.

Kyle strode in. He waved, so she waved back. “Stella tell a knock-knock joke again? They’re usually terrible.”

Addie shook her head. “She admitted Benson might not be so bad.”

Kyle made a face.

“It might grow on you as well.”

“I guess anything is possible.” He headed for his desk.

They’d established a certain working rhythm, but it was still new. She had no idea if they would stick around after the case was done. She wouldn’t mind if they did. She was used to working with other agents, and she’d discovered an empty echoey office wasn’t her favorite thing.

She checked her email, dealt with the immediate stuff, and headed for coffee.

Kyle met her at the coffee bar she’d set up. “How’s your sister? And your friend?”

Since Stella didn’t drink coffee, Addie filled two mugs and handed him one. “It’ll be a long process for both of them.”

Kyle was older, maybe nearly forty, but a newer agent. He’d joined the FBI from a career as a police detective and had an excellent eye for inconsistencies. “I can’t imagine.”

“Mona is still pretty upset, but so is Russ. It’s hard to put the hammer down on the teen antics when she’s grieving. She can’t blow off steam in unhealthy ways because she’s grounded.” Addie winced. “I’m just glad she’s not the one who found him, and she was nowhere near when it happened.”

Stella nodded. “Me, too. Poor kid.”

“Jacob looks better, and he’s moving around.” She realized she hadn’t referred to him as “Jake” that time but wasn’t sure what it meant. “When he’s up to it, we’ll get him back to his apartment and clean up there.”

The cops didn’t have any leads on who’d broken in or why. Nothing was taken. There were no signs of forced entry, and the security system hadn’t noted any anomalies.

Neither she nor Russ was all fired up to kick him out, though. Even if Russ’s couch was uncomfortable and her sleeping on it meant he couldn’t spend all hours at his desk working on that thing he said he didn’t want to bother her with. Because apparently, Jacob was helping him with it.

Addie shoved away that irritation. She probably didn’t have the bandwidth to worry about peripheral stuff right now. Russ likely made the right call there.

“Where are we at with all this?” Addie motioned to the whiteboards.

Kyle waved a hand out. “The way you organized it cut out hours of work trying to correlate all the details. We were able to find two additional cases in PD files. Except we believe they’re thesamecase.”

“Tell me.” She tried to phrase it not like an order because she wasn’t their boss technically. And they were here doing her a favor.

Stella brought over a tablet. “Two victims. One male, one female. Both show the same injuries, though one was strangled and the other has slit wrists.”

“Murder-suicide?”

“They were found two weeks apart on different sides of town,” Kyle said. “But we believe they’re connected.”

“Decomp was different, but I think that’s down to weather conditions and the environment they were left in.” Stella swiped the screen of the tablet. “The strangled female was dumped up river, we think, and washed up on the shore of the lake that’s east of town.”

Addie nodded. “I know it. We used to go out there every Friday in summer, and everyone would sleep on the beach after.”

Stella scanned the screen. “The male is the apparent suicide. Aside from cause of death, his injuries are almost identical. He was left in a storage unit, inside a freezer. Discovered when the unit was auctioned off. But the investigating detective didn’t find anything on the previous renter.”

“What were the injuries?”

Kyle took the tablet and ran his thumbs over the screen. “Bug bites over sections of their bodies but concentrated on the legs. Cuts and scratches on the hands and arms, possibly defensive wounds.”

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