Read Devil Smoke for Free Online

follow him, but before Lucy could intervene, Oshiro placed a palm on the detective’s arm, holding him in place.
    “You’ll help her?” Oshiro’s question was for Lucy alone, but she answered for her entire team.
    “Yes.”
    “Okay, then. We’d best get back to work. Right, Burroughs?”
    Burroughs narrowed his eyes at Lucy. “Right,” he said grudgingly.
    He and Oshiro moved to the door.
    Lucy followed, intending to check on Tommy. When she drew near Burroughs, he glanced back at Sarah, who’d sat back down, arms folded in a posture of waiting.
    As they stepped into the hall, he said to Lucy, “Watch Worth around her. He’s trouble. If I’d known he was working here—”
    “I can take care of my team,” Lucy snapped. “And our client.”
    He made a sound in the back of his throat but nodded. “Keep me in the loop.”
    “Will do.”
    The two men left, and Lucy turned to the window beside the staircase landing. She could see Tommy pacing along the edge of the bluff, hands balled into fists, shoulders hunched, his entire body twisted into a walking question mark.
    Questions, she thought. She had plenty of those. How to get some answers?
    Before she could decide on a direction, the door behind her opened and TK emerged, followed by Wash, his chair gliding over the polished oak floorboards with ease.
    “Tommy okay?” Wash asked. Despite his frequent joking, Wash was the most empathetic member of the team.
    “Are you sure he’s the best person for this case?” TK asked. “Maybe he needs a little time. Get his head together.”
    Lucy frowned. “He handled sexual assaults and child abuse cases all the time when he worked in the ER. This case should be relatively pain free.”
    Wash and TK both looked away from Lucy. Damn, she hated being the new kid on the block. “Okay, what am I missing? I mean, I know his wife is gone and that’s why he came to work here. But this isn’t a missing person case. We have the person. It’s her past we’re trying to find. If anything, that should bring him some relief or hope, right?”
    “It’s just that Charlotte’s case, the anniversary…” Wash stalled out.
    “It’ll be one year in two days,” TK finished for him. “Still no leads. No idea if she went voluntarily, if someone took her, if she had an accident, or… if she did something to herself. Nada. Not a single blessed clue. Every time the cops start looking, every time he tries to chase down a lead, it just breaks his heart all over again.”
    “You think Sarah’s case is too close to home for him?”
    Both of them nodded.
    Lucy hesitated, watching Tommy out the window. Misery radiated from him as he walked the bluff. She knew from her own experience with trauma that isolation was not the solution. Plus, she wanted to keep an eye on him.
    “Benching him is only going to make things worse,” she decided. “TK, you and I will work directly with Sarah. Why don’t you get started, gauge her baseline?”
    “Baseline?” Wash asked. “The girl can’t remember anything. How are you going to get any kind of baseline?”
    “She remembers more than she realizes,” Lucy said.
    “She dressed herself, remembered how to tie her shoes,” TK added. “Remembers how to use idioms in her speech.”
    “But that’s all like muscle memory.” Wash gestured to his legs strapped to his chair. “After I got shot I remembered how to walk, but that didn’t mean my legs could do anything about it.”
    “Which is why we need to see where Sarah’s memories start, map them out. Like a minefield,” TK said. She glanced at Lucy. “You want a cognitive interview, right? Use her sensory impressions as triggers?”
    “Right.” Lucy added, “Wash, Tommy can work with you on the leads the detectives couldn’t close out.”
    Which basically meant database diving—Wash’s favorite pastime—and dumpster diving, tracking down the origin of anything of Sarah’s they could get their hands on. Including her