My phone rang as I headed back into the city, the Bluetooth thankfully connected, and I answered.
“This is Mills.”
“It’s me,” Thatcher told me, his voice hurried. “Where are you?”
“Heading back now. I’ve got some interesting notes about some of these plants, sir.”
“Good. Crowe’s found some interesting stuff too, and Dr Olsen’s on her way in.” Dr Olsen? Things were moving.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I told him, speeding up a little as I hit the city outskirts. Thatcher hung up without much further ado, and I focused on the road, zipping through the streets as fast as I could, trying not to run over slow-moving herds of tourists or cyclists that seemed to emerge in great swarms of Lycra. My brother was one of them, to my horror, and I was doing all I could to keep the boys from donning their own spandex and joining him. Luckily, my sister-in-law was also on my side, so we were doing well on that front.
I reached the station before I knew it, parking the car and heading into the station, where I directed myself straight down to Crowe’s lab. I found Thatcher leaning against the wall outside, two cups balanced one on top of the other in one hand and his phone, that he grinned down at like a schoolboy, in the other.
“Sir,” I called as I strode over to him. He looked up, put his phone away and past me one of the cups of coffee.
“We’re just waiting on Dr Olsen,” he told me. “Lena’s upstairs giving her report to Sharp, so she’s locked us out until she gets back.”
“She’s very trusting,” I said dryly.
“I knocked over one beaker,” Thatcher groaned, “One, about five years ago, and now I need to be supervised in there like an eight-year-old, apparently.”
“What was in the beaker?” I asked him. He gave me a sheepish look and took a large swig of his coffee, very much looking like he wished it was beer instead, or indeed something stronger.
“Very nosy today, Mills. Tell me about your tattoo. What was in the beaker?” He parroted.
“Yes, tell me about the tattoo, I haven’t forgotten. And we’ve got time to kill.”
He glared at me, spared by the sudden arrival of Lena, who appeared in the hallway on silent feet.
“Good, Mills is here. You’ve got some plants?” She asked. I patted my pocket where my notebook sat. “Good,” she unlocked the lab door, “we’ll need that.”
Eighteen
Thatcher
Mills hay fever came as a small blessing, the cup of tea and plate of chips in the roadside café really hit the spot and put me in a much better frame of mind to talk to Crowe and see what she had found. I drove us back to the station, having ignored most of the curious glances Mills cast my way over the drive, and clambered from the car, running an annoyed eye over the muddy, dusty state of it. One thing that I did not miss about living out there: the bloody mess of it all.
As I walked into the station, Mills drove off, a familiar, burning idea in his eyes that I had learnt was best to let him pursue. He was right more often than he was wrong, and when he got an idea stuck in his head, it stayed there, much like my own self. Whatever had caught his eye in Kask’s garden, I wanted to know about it too. There was something about the botanist and his vast garden that niggled at me, but I shrugged the thoughts aside. Let Mills root around that particular problem. I had a date with a dead body and a gay pathologist to get to.
I stopped in the kitchen, making two steaming cups of coffee and carried them both down to Crowe’s lab, knocking on the door with the back of my hand. The door opened, and she looked out at me with a confused face.
“It wasn’t locked,” she pointed out. I wordlessly held out the coffee, and she nodded in understanding, taking it from my hand. “Ta, muchly. Come on in,” she held the door open, letting me through to the cold room. “No Mills?” She asked, glancing out into the hallway.
“He had something he wanted to follow up on,” I told her.
She looked me over with a knowing smile and sipped her coffee. “You look a bit sad without him,” she observed. “Like a little lost lamb.”
“Lena,” I groaned.
“And to think, it wasn’t all that long ago when you couldn’t keep a sergeant for toffee.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I defended myself, leaning against an empty desk, cradling my warm mug.
Lena just raised a brow at me sardonically and turned around, walking over the sheet-covered body that lay on her metal table.
“Ready?” she asked, taking one more sip before her coffee safely aside. I followed her over, watching as she pulled the sheet carefully away from Sonia.
Her olive skin had turned drab and grey in death, shiny black hair dull. She wasn’t as badly bruised as Abbie, I noted straight away. She looked like there had been less of a fight that ended her up here, which was a little strange to me.
“Puncture mark,” Lena waved me over to the other side of the table, and I left my coffee behind, walking over to stand beside her. I followed her glove covered finger to Sonia’s neck, where a small, but visible puncture mark had bruised the skin slightly.
“There’s some light bruising on her wrists as well,” Dr Crowe told me. “I’m guessing our killer held onto her,” she demonstrated on me, pinning my two hands together, “and drove the needle in from here. It’s on a slight downwards angle, so I’d say whoever did it came from above. Someone taller than her.”
“Stronger too, if they were able to hold her steady enough,” I observed as she let go of my wrists. She’d have been awake then, I
