Page 79 of The Hard Way

“Good thing you held off on the whole bloodbath thingy. Nothing worse than a whole bloodbath for nothing.” It was a stupid joke. Nothing felt funny.

“I won’t lie to you, Ice,” he said after a bit. “I very badly want to punish him. It’s gotten into my blood.”

“It’s what you want to do toMahfoud. He’s not Mahfoud.”

“Your parents died because of what Hank did. He should feel guilty for what he did, but instead he keeps going at your family. He won’t stop. That girl could go to jail. You know she still could.”

“We won’t let that happen,” I said.

He didn’t respond. Because things didn’t always work out. Bad people did sometimes get away with bad things.

Right there, some little part of me suddenly opened to Odin killing Hank. I forced the possibility out of my mind, but I couldn’t unthink it. Killing Hank after making him confess would solve a lot of problems, including saving my sister.

“She’s awesome,” Odin said.

“I know. I’m so glad you got to meet her.” I listened to the wind, imagining I could still hear her car, needing to hold onto some scrap of her. Needing for that not to have been goodbye.

Chapter 11

We reconvened at cupid central. Margie was out. I wanted to sit in the nice living room and talk over clues, but my guys couldn’t deal with the cupids and classical music-from-an-unseen-source combo.

Banks invest billions in security every year, but it turns out the combination of cupids and classical music is the ultimate bank robber repellent. Who knew!

The four of us trudged upstairs and squeezed onto my and Zeus’s bed. This bit about the cheese being perfectly fine had turned out to be a huge break.

Thor and Zeus had been in Hank’s place, in the process of downloading copies of his calendar, when my text had come through.

“We’d already looked at his deleted browser history,” Thor said. “We’d found some good stuff—he’d definitely been researching foodborne pathogens, and he’d definitely visited websites of academic research labs, but we thought it was just to study up on salmonella. We didn’t understand the significance of it until your text.”

“Wait, you got into his deleted stuff on his computer?”

“Nothing’s ever deleted on a computer,” Odin said. “The only way you can really ever delete anything is with a sledgehammer.”

“Um…” I said. “Okay. So we have him researching foodborne illnessbeforeit happened.”

“Yet it’s still circumstantial.” Thor pulled up shots he’d taken of the screen with his iPhone. “Check this shit out. These are research facilities across the region. But this one, Wilbur College of Medicine, was visited by Hank often and last. It seems like he was very interested in news of a break-in there—a break-in that happened a month before the cheese incident. Unsolved.”

Odin smiled. “Or as I prefer to put it, not yetfucking-gsolved.”

“Whoa,” I said. “So we were right. That’s how he did the crime. He used stolen research strains of salmonella to infect the cheese.”

Thor pulled me onto his lap. “He got the strains and infected the cheese, and then he probably let it incubate—probably put it in the sun.”

“You think Hank did the break-in? Because I don’t see him breaking and entering. He’s a motherfucker, but to do an actual break-in…”

“He probably hired somebody. Climbing in the window at your sisters’ farm is one thing, but breaking into a lab, he needed a seasoned criminal for that, and he probably paid a lot of money to that person. That’s who we need to find. We find him, and we turn him against Hank. According to the articles, there were no suspects, but they did get prints. Whoever pulled the job isn’t in the system. We need to get the prints and find the guy.”

“How do we steal fingerprints from the police lab? You aren’t thinking about a B&E on the police, I hope.”

“Nah,” Zeus said. “Our guys at Guvvey’s have a few dirty cops on the line. For enough money, they can put a call into the investigating department and say they’re experiencing a string of similar crimes and want to cross-check with this one. Cop shops share evidence all the time. No cop would pass up the chance to get a case cleared for free.”

I nodded, feeling hopeful for the first time since reading that newsletter in that Roman hotel.We might just pull this off.“They can take away our detective agency, but they can’t keep us from being the most badass detectives ever.”

Zeus smiled. “That’s right, bitches.”

“But even if we get the prints,” I said, “how do we figure out who matches the prints? If the cops couldn’t find a match for the prints, how can we? God, this is kind of a hard case.”

“Oh, itwouldbe a hard case…” Thor crossed his legs, looking all suave, blue eyes sparkling, “if we weren’t the kind of detectives who are also criminals.”

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