One Little Secret Read online

  Even though we were only talking about silly Halloween costumes, her words and tone produced a shiver of excitement. I loved how we pushed each other, teasing limits and testing willpower.

  She remained a breath’s length away, and her voice dropped lower. “If I want something from you, Miss Miller, I will get it.”

  My insides clenched and I swallowed hard. “Do your worst.”

  Julia laughed musically, and her temporary spell over me broke. I released the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  My relationship with Julia was like a never-ending game of chicken. We pushed each other, challenging each other to blink first. I tended to give in more easily than Julia, but after our handful of months of being together, the balance was tipping more favorably towards me.

  “I miss you when I’m at work, but we live together,” I blurted out. “We see each other all the time, but I still miss you. Is that pathetic?” I worried aloud.

  “No, darling,” Julia said, a smile in her voice. “That’s not pathetic. That’s love.”

  + + +

  As much as I would have loved to play hooky and stay in bed with Julia that morning, I somehow managed to make myself go to work. Sarah and I were on our own again in the office while Stanley dusted off the tops of old evidence boxes, or whatever he did when he was scheduled to be at the Freezer.

  I hovered over Sarah’s shoulder so we could both look at her computer screen. Her fingers moved over the keyboard as she pulled up the various social media accounts for our persons of interest: Chase Trask, Landon Tauer, and Kennedy Petersik.

  “What do you think of my new perfume?” she asked.

  Sarah was smart and quick-witted, and one of her favorite pastimes was making me uncomfortable. She was attractive, and she knew it. She also knew that I had a girlfriend.

  I didn’t divert my attention from Kennedy Petersik’s Facebook page. “It’s nice,” I confirmed before changing the subject. “What do you think about Kennedy Petersik?”

  Thankfully Sarah stayed on task. “You mean is this the Facebook feed of a suicidal girl?”

  “Mmhm,” I confirmed.

  “I can’t tell; it’s private. Everything is locked.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Can we unlock it?”

  Sarah glanced up at me. “Do you not have a Facebook page, Miller?”

  “I was in the Marines for nearly a decade,” I deflected.

  I’d never seen the point of social media. I could count my friends on two hands—I didn’t need an app for that. I was also a very private person; if I wanted someone to know what I was up to, I’d pick up the phone and tell them.

  “You’re like an alien,” Sarah murmured. “Anyway,” she said with more volume, “I can’t get access to most of her content because she’s got her privacy settings set to the highest level. I can only see her full page if we’re online friends.”

  “Is that unusual?” I asked.

  “Not so much for a young woman,” Sarah noted. “There’s a lot of creeps on the internet.”

  “All the more reason not to be on there,” I continued to defend myself.

  Sarah made a noise. “Hmm. Her parents must have memorialized her account.”

  “Should I know what that means?”

  “Not unless you know a lot of dead people.” Sarah tapped at the monitor. “Remembering is posted next to her name. People can share stories and pictures to her page even if they didn’t have access to her content when she was alive. Content Kennedy shared is still visible to her Facebook Friends, but she’s not going to show up in people’s birthday reminders.”

  I sighed. “Death in the age of social media is pretty creepy.”

  Sarah scrolled through the dozens of messages posted to Kennedy’s page. She moved too quickly for me to really read any of the sentiments. “The court of public opinion seems to be split,” she observed. “About half of these comments are about suicide and the other half wants vengeance for her murder.” Sarah spun away from the monitor. “What do you think happened?”

  “I’m not going to speculate,” I refused. “That only leads to bad police work. If I go into it expecting a certain outcome, I might be tempted to ignore a line of questioning or some observation that doesn’t fit with my circumscribed view of the case. One of the worst things a cop can do is start with a conclusion.”

  Sarah nodded thoughtfully. “Makes sense. Luckily, I don’t have to decide either way. Regardless of how Kennedy died, I’m the advocate for her family to help them get closure.”

  “If the case ever gets passed on to us,” I noted. The reminder was more for myself than Sarah.

  “Is it weird that Stanley knew this girl?” Sarah proposed. “Like, isn’t it a conflict of interest for us to be looking into her death?”

  “We’re the only Cold Case division,” I noted. “It’s not like we can pass it on to some other team. Besides, Stanley doesn’t have a badge. He’s not going to be making any arrests.”

  “That’s true.” My reasoning seemed to settle her doubt.

  “Can you tell if Stanley was online friends with Kennedy?” I proposed. “Maybe we can get to her accounts through him.”

  Sarah snorted at the suggestion. “Does Stanley seem the type to be on Snapchat?”

  “Hey, I would never assume anything about a person,” I defended.

  “Like how you immediately assumed I was straight when we first met?” Sarah countered. Her mouth curved into a smug smile.

  “Th-that’s different!” I protested. “You’re very feminine in appearance, and there aren’t a lot of queer women in Minnesota. And you actually are straight, so it’s not like I was wrong.”

  “Easy there, Miller,” Sarah laughed. “You’re gonna give yourself a coronary.”

  My head started to throb from my co-worker’s roasting. I was also frustrated from so many dead ends. We couldn’t even get access to Kennedy Petersik’s social media accounts. I grabbed my leather jacket from the back of my office chair.

  “Where are you running off to?” Sarah pouted. “I hate when you abandon me.”

  I rolled my eyes at her dramatics. “I’m not abandoning you. I’m going to drop in on the crime lab. Maybe I can convince them to hurry up a little on that ballistics match.”

  Sarah scrambled to her feet. “Well don’t leave me behind.”

  I pulled on my jacket and turned up the collar. “I really don’t think this is a two-person job.”

  Sarah ignored my insistence and pushed past me. She walked close enough that her shoulder brushed against mine. “But it might be a two woman job, Miller,” she grinned, showing her teeth. “How else do you expect to get those lab techs to do what you want?”

  + + +

  “Well, shit.”

  The profanity had come from my co-worker nearly the moment we’d walked through the crime lab’s office door.

  I leaned closer to Sarah so I could speak without us being overheard. “Didn’t count on the lab techs being female, eh?”

  Sarah stubbornly lifted her chin. “I’ll just have to find another use for my feminine wiles.”

  I couldn’t hold back my smirk.

  The business side of the crime lab was unremarkable. A half-wall partition separated us from the lab’s all-female employees. Three women in long, white lab coats stood behind computer screens at stand-up desks, but beyond their jackets, nothing else suggested that any evidence testing or analyzing took place in that space.

  One of the benefits of working in a large city like Minneapolis, compared to being a cop in a small town, was the proximity of the forensics lab. Instead of mailing evidence away or having to call someone long distance, I could drop by their City Hall office to check on the status of evidence yet to be processed.

  The Minneapolis Crime Lab Unit provided the police department with a variety of services: computer forensics—which also involved help with subpoenas involving cell phone providers—video forensics, vehicle forensics, and fiel
d operations. They analyzed blood stain patterns, footwear, and tire track marks. They also maintained AFIS—the national fingerprint database.

  Of all of the ways the crime lab complimented the police work we did, I was most interested in their firearm expertise. I needed a ballistics match. If the bullets found in Kennedy Petersik’s car didn’t match those from the Michael Bloom case, I didn’t have anything beyond coincidence to connect the two deaths.

  Sarah loudly cleared her throat, apparently annoyed at the gender of the lab’s employees and that no one had acknowledged our presence.

  “Christ, it’s like trying to get a drink from a female bartender in here,” she muttered.

  “You’ve been going to the wrong places,” I said under my breath. Sarah would have been the star attraction at any gay bar.

  “I’ve been waiting for your invite, Miller,” she returned with a grin.

  “Can I help you?” One of the lab coat women rescued me from Sarah’s wheedling. She left her stand-up desk and approached the half-wall partition that divided us.

  The woman re-adjusted her tortoise shell glasses at the bridge of her nose. Her skin was nearly as pale as the long lab coat she wore. The rectangular jacket obscured her figure, but delicate bones peeked out from the wrist openings. A name was stitched on the right breast pocket of the white coat: Celeste.

  “I hope so. I’m Detective Cassidy Miller, and this is my colleague, Sarah Conrad,” I introduced. “We sent in two recovered bullets last week to determine if they’re from the same firearm. One is from a current possible homicide and the other is from an unresolved case. We wanted to check on their status.”

  “Did you receive confirmation from our office that we received them?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah, but, uh, I was hoping to kind of speed things up,” I floundered.

  The woman’s grey-blue eyes narrowed behind her thick glasses. With her white-blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, she reminded me of a librarian who was determined to have silence in her library. “We process evidence in the order in which it was received, Detective Miller,” she informed me. “It’s policy. We’ll get to it as soon as we can.”

  I held up my hands in retreat. “I’m not trying to cut in line or anything,” I insisted, “but we can’t re-open this old case unless we can confirm the bullets are a match.”

  The formerly severe look on the woman’s face perceptively softened. “You’re from Cold Case.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I confirmed. She wasn’t much older than myself, but the formality tended to slip out when I became uncomfortable.

  “Is Stanley still there? How is he?” she asked.

  The change in her demeanor was dramatic. At first, I’d thought she might rap our knuckles with a ruler, but now she radiated warmth and concern. I was too taken aback to immediately reply.

  “Stanley’s actually the reason why we’re pushing this case so hard,” Sarah jumped in. “He was very close with the victim, and we’re pooling all our resources to figure out what happened. It’s probably not kosher to prioritize a case just because of Stanley, but we’re doing all we can to help out our friend.”

  The woman bobbed her head. “Of course. Let me see what I can do to speed things along. Wait here just a second.”

  The woman turned her back to us and rummaged through a large storage container.

  I dug my elbow into Sarah’s side, but not hard enough for her to make a scene. “Laying it on pretty thick with the Stanley thing,” I quietly observed.

  “I saw an opportunity, so I took it,” Sarah returned. “Don’t be mad that it worked and I didn’t have to show her my tits to speed things up.”

  I covered my mouth and loudly coughed to mask my discomfort.

  “Here it is!” the lab tech proclaimed. She’d unknowingly saved me twice from Sarah’s harassment in a short amount of time.

  When she returned to the half-wall, I recognized the padded yellow envelope in her hand. The envelope bore my handwriting on the address label and contained the bullet samples retrieved from Kennedy Petersik’s car and the Michael Bloom cold case.

  “I’m Celeste, by the way,” the woman confirmed the name stitched on her lab coat. “Celeste Rivers.”

  Celeste opened a hidden gate and ushered us to the business side of the crime office.

  “I really appreciate this, Celeste,” I recognized.

  “Stanley will appreciate it, too,” Sarah piped up.

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

  “Technically, I’m not supposed to be doing this,” Celeste said, looking over either shoulder as if expecting someone to bust us, “but Stanley and I go way back, so it’s the least I can do.”

  I was curious to dig more into the pretty lab tech and Stanley’s shared past, but Celeste asked a new question before I could.

  “Did you check the newer bullet against NIBIN?” she asked.

  My eyebrows knit together. “Sorry?”

  “NIBIN. It stands for National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. It’s the national database of digital images of bullets and cartridge cases found at crime scenes.”

  “Oh. I didn’t even know that was a thing,” I grimaced.

  “That’s okay,” she appeased. “Homicide should have done that when they first processed the evidence, not your team. We can still do it manually from our lab though. Both samples are in this envelope?”

  “Oh, uh, yeah,” I managed. My inexperience embarrassed me, but I supposed that learning about these kinds of procedures would come with time. Good soldiers weren’t made overnight either.

  Celeste led us deeper into the crime lab. The further we got away from the half-wall partition, the more laboratory and less office-like the space became.

  “Most of the forensics work happens off-site at an actual laboratory,” she informed us, “and we maintain our major databases in this office. But we can also conduct a few basic tests.”

  Celeste stopped in front of a contraption that looked like two- microscopes connected by one eyepiece. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and opened the padded envelope that I’d given her. She then carefully positioned the two bullet samples under the microscope’s separate bodies.

  Her blonde bun prevented her hair from falling into her face as she leaned over the microscope to look through the centralized viewer.

  “What is that thing?” I asked.

  “This is a comparison microscope,” she said. “It lets me see both samples—in this case bullets—at the same time. Want to look?”

  “Sure,” I agreed.

  Celeste relinquished the double microscope to me, and I peered through the double ocular lenses.

  “What exactly am I looking for?” I asked.

  I had expected to see the bullets at a molecular level, but instead the two samples were simply magnified.

  “When a gun is fired, the bullet makes contact with the spiral grooves inside the barrel. Those grooves spin the bullet for better accuracy, but they also produce individual markings on the bullet. It’s these unique markings that we evaluate to determine if a bullet was fired from a particular gun.”

  I righted myself. “So it’s like a gun’s fingerprint.”

  “Pretty much,” Celeste confirmed.

  “Do you think it’s a match?” Sarah asked.

  Celeste took another look. “I’d say so. The rifling—the thin lines on the sides of the bullet—seem to match up.”

  “Really?” I’d been hopeful to find a connection that would allow us to investigate the Kennedy Petersik case—if only for Stanley—but I hadn’t let myself become too invested since it was such a long shot.

  “I’d like to still send images of these samples to NIBIN to confirm, but I’d say you all have a match,” Celeste remarked.

  “Wow. This sounds like the easiest open and shut case we’ll ever see. And it’s two cases in one!” Sarah self-congratulated.

  I shook my head. “It’s not that easy.”

  “But we�
�ve got the weapon. The bullets match. We just find out who the gun is registered to and the two cases will basically solve themselves, right?” Sarah proposed.

  Celeste looked to me. “Do you want to tell her or should I?”

  Sarah’s eyes traveled back and forth between Celeste and myself. “What am I missing? What aren’t you telling me?”

  I made a pained face. “There isn’t an actual database that you can use to look up gun registrations.”

  “What? Of course there is,” Sarah insisted.

  “No,” Celeste corroborated. “Most people think gun registration numbers are like the VIN on a car. You find a gun, run some numbers, and find out who it’s registered to. But there’s actually no searchable database for guns. There’s no centralized record of who owns which specific guns. There’s no hard data on how many people own them, how many are bought and sold, or how many even exist.”

  Sarah blinked. “You’re kidding me. How is that even possible?”

  “I’ll give you one guess,” I said.

  Sarah’s features grew grim. “The NRA.”

  “Yep.” I let my mouth pop at the end of the confirming word.

  “But all those police shows on TV,” she protested.

  “All made up,” Celeste said. “It’s been federal law since 1986 that no searchable gun database exist. The NRA doesn’t want the government to know who has the guns in case they decide one day to take them away.”

  “Can’t take away someone’s gun if you don’t know they have it,” Sarah said, the gears in her brain churning away.

  “Exactly,” Celeste confirmed. “The closest thing we’ve got is Martinsburg, Virginia.”

  “What’s there?” Sarah asked.

  “Oh, I know this one!” I chimed in. “It’s where the National Tracing Center is located.”

  Sarah’s confusion returned. “But I thought you just said guns couldn’t be traced?”

  “There’s no searchable database,” Celeste qualified. “But all of the gun records are stored at the Tracing Center. Imagine an old-school library, but without the card catalog. But those are just the records of out-of-business gun retailers. The majority of gun records stay with the stores where someone bought the gun, like a Wal-Mart or a hunting store.”