Kansas City Christmas

So much for getting acquainted. She’d already guessed that his raspy, low-pitched voice was a permanent thing—due to injury or surgery of some kind, not a temporary cold. And closer observation had shown her that his chocolate brown beard wasn’t unkempt, after all. Instead, the scraggly effect was actually a normal midnight shadow coming in around a splash of scars that dotted his jawline and right cheek.

On the outside, she was learning about—and unexpectedly liking—Edward Kincaid. But no way was he going to let her see the man behind the eyes.

She reminded herself that this wasn’t a date. He wanted to pick her brain about autopsies and corrupted lab reports.

“Let’s see.” Holly sipped her tea and sorted through the information inside her head. The kind of details he wanted had been deleted from her file by the virus, but she retained a mental image of every victim she’d ever worked on in her head and her heart. In her memory, she gently traveled over John Kincaid’s bruised and broken body, stretched out beneath the bright lights of her lab. “He had a wedding ring on his left hand.”

Edward sipped his coffee and nodded. “Mom insisted he be buried with it. Could there have been a second ring?”

Her eyes closed and she drifted back in time to her lab. She tried to picture each hand in her mind. No indentations at the base of any finger, indicating the habitual wearing of any other jewelry. But a remembered notation popped into her head and she opened her eyes. “Wait.” She set her cup in its saucer and leaned forward, gesturing across the back of her neck. “There was a long, thin abrasion at his nape. I thought it might be related to the beating he took. He’d been tied up so…”

A muscle ticked along his jaw as Edward pressed his lips into a thin grim line.

Holly instinctively reached across the table, cursing her own careless words. “I am so sorry.” Just as quickly, she curled her fingers into her palm and drew them back. He was here for information, not sympathy. “It’s a professional thing,” she explained. “I have to stay clinical when I make these kinds of reports—so emotional reactions don’t clog my perception of things—but I know it’s personal for you. You don’t want to hear—”

“I want to hear anything that can help.” His words indicated that he’d learned to detach his emotions from his job as well. “Tell me about the mark on his neck.”

For a moment, Holly was struck by the sheer strength of will it took to go through everything Edward Kincaid had suffered and still be able to get up in the morning, much less carry on a conversation or run an investigation into something so personal, so violent. Maybe she’d just gotten her first glimpse inside the man.

And maybe she’d better shut off her speculation and any resulting compassion or admiration. He clearly didn’t want to deal with his emotions. Holly took another sip of the tea that had grown tasteless on her tongue and continued. “I wish I could review my notes to be sure, but if I remember correctly, the mark was made postmortem. Something like that could be caused by tearing a necklace off someone’s neck. Could your father have been wearing the ring on a chain?”

“It’s possible. If the ring was something he’d had for a while, then it might not fit his fingers anymore. I never knew him to wear one. But then…” he leaned back against the black vinyl seat, “I dropped out of his life for a while.” After losing his wife and daughter to a vengeful André Butler, that was probably an understatement. “I didn’t even know he was looking into Z Group on his own time, so, why would I know about changes in the style of jewelry he wore?”

“Z Group? Your brother Atticus mentioned that when I was working a Jane Doe murder investigation with him. He thought she was connected to your father’s murder—that they both had worked for the same security organization at one time. They were both killed with two shots—head and heart. Both with the same unique type of bullet.”

Edward nodded. “Disintegrators. I’d love to get my hands on one—see if I can find anything that matches it on the underground market.”

“I have a few samples in my lab. But the breakdown rate is extreme once they enter the body and react with our biological chemicals.” It amazed as much as sickened her to think that someone had created something that could be deadly one moment, then decompose beyond recognition the next. “You’re welcome to come by and look at one, though I don’t know how much good it would do you. I guess that’s the point of making them in the first place—so someone can commit a crime and not leave a trail that can be traced.”

“I intend to follow that trail all the way to the source.” Edward’s gaze zoomed in on hers. “I need you to understand something, Doctor.”

Holly nearly had to hold her breath to keep from looking away from the piercing sensation of those eyes. “Okay?”

“If I have to break the law to do this, I am going to find out who killed my father.”

There was no question that he meant every dramatic word. “You’d give up your badge?”

He braced his elbows on the table, steepled his fingers together at his scarred-up chin and leaned forward, eating up the space in the booth. “I don’t know how much my badge is worth anymore since it got my wife and daughter killed. But I know what justice is worth.” A chill of destiny—or maybe doom—washed over her, raising a sea of goose bumps across her skin. “If you don’t want to help me, I understand. I don’t want to jeopardize anyone’s career but my own—not my brothers’, not yours.” Holly couldn’t help it, she crossed her arms in front of her and tried to hug some warmth into her body. “But I owe this to my dad. I intend to do whatever it takes to put an end to Z Group and to prove who killed him.”

It still stuck in Holly’s craw that someone—most likely from Z Group—had hacked into her computer files and deleted key elements of reports relating to the murders of John Kincaid and others. She was always thorough, always precise. But now there were gaping holes in her work. Court orders, exhumation of bodies and second autopsies would allow her to replace most of that missing information—if the bodies hadn’t degraded and embalming hadn’t altered lingering evidence. But unless there was a new lead on a case, KCPD and the D.A.’s office hadn’t been inclined to budget the expense or put the victims’ families through any more pain or false hopes. She’d love the chance to make things right, to stamp a Closed on every corrupted investigation file. Reclaiming the accuracy of her work was a gut-deep need that could put professional and personal frustrations and insecurities to rest.

But to skip protocols or break the law to find her own satisfaction or personal vindication?

“Are you asking me to do something illegal for you?”

His steely eyes didn’t blink. “I’m asking you to turn the other way if I