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detectives somewhere waiting for these results and a victim’s family to consider.
    “I’ll get on it right away,” Mia said, hoping he’d pick up her meaning.
    “Good.” He nodded curtly. “See that you do.”
    Ric found her in the broom closet she called an office, a windowless room adjacent to the Delphi Center’s enormous DNA lab. Mia claimed she liked to work there because it was dark and she often used alternative light sources, but Ric suspected that in reality she was something of a hermit.
    She stood at one of her worktables, hair pulled back in a ponytail, eyes shields over her face. An overhead lamp shone down on the table as, with a latex-gloved hand, she manipulated an electrical cord. She braced her free hand against the table as she folded the cord over on itself and frowned down at it.
    “Practicing your Girl Scout knots?”
    She jumped back and clutched her hand to her chest. “God, don’t do that.”
    “Sorry.” He should have known she’d be jumpy today. “Just dropped by with your afternoon latte.”
    She pursed her lips and watched him. “Who let you up here?”
    “Sophie.” He set the coffee on her counter. “I told her I was stopping by to check on you, and she gave me a hall pass.”
    Her gaze dropped to the VIP visitor’s badge clipped to Ric’s dress shirt. He’d cleaned up finally and even managed to get a few hours of sleep. She looked as though she hadn’t had a wink.
    “You look tired,” he said.
    “Thanks a lot.”
    “What’s that about?” He nodded at the table.
    “Strangulation case. The killer wore gloves, but—” She bit her lip and rearranged the cord. “I’m thinking that if she struggled—which I assume she did, because she lost a fingernail—he would have had to hold her down.” Mia mimicked the action with her free hand. “Which means that in order to tighten the ligature, he probably would have …” Her voice trailed off as she lifted one end of the cord and pretended to clamp it between her teeth. She stopped to examine it. “Aha, there it is. I knew it.”
    “What?” He stepped closer, but all he saw was a brown electrical cord. Could she see saliva on it?
    “Bite marks. See?” She held the cord up, and he did— small indentions in the plastic, about three inches apart.
    “You’re going to get DNA off that thing?”
    “That’s the plan.” She smiled slightly, and he could tell she was pleased with herself but didn’t want to gloat. “I’ll do it in a minute. After you tell me why you’re really here.”
    Her smile faded, and he wondered what she was hoping to hear. They’d found her Jeep. They’d found her attacker. Less than twenty-four hours, and Ric had already made a collar. He wanted to tell her all of those things.
    “Nothing new on your case,” he said instead, and she turned away to tuck the cord back into a paper evidence bag.
    He reached up and repositioned her overhead lamp so that it shone on her face. He tilted her chin up. On her right cheekbone was a faint purple bruise. “What’s this?”
    She didn’t look him in the eye. “He tapped me with his gun.”
    Tapped her. Right. Goddamn it, how had he missed this? He’d seen her twice since then and hadn’t noticed it at all.
    “How’s the arm?”
    “Sore,” she said. “I took some ibuprofen at lunch.”
    He dropped his hand and stepped back. He shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from touching her again.
    “So, if there’s nothing new to tell me, why the visit?”
    Was it his imagination, or was there a subtext there? He hadn’t dropped by her office since last summer. Evidently, she’d noticed.
    “I’m here to, I quote, ‘light a fire’ under you guys,” he said. “Rachel sent me.”
    Rachel was the Hays County DA in charge of prosecutingRic’s murder case. Two cases, actually. The first had been his originally. The second he’d inherited.
    “I just found out this morning.” She stripped off her gloves and eye shields and tossed them