extra-large pizza on the table before them. She reached into her pocket to extract her wallet, but it turned out not to be necessary.
“Your undivided attention when I need some work done,” Luke replied.
Her eyes narrowed. He was playing games with her. “I meant for the pizza.”
Luke’s smile was wide and innocent—and didn’t fool her for a moment. “So did I.”
“Look—” Frankie tried again, not willing to be in anyone’s debt, least of all O’Bannon’s. “I asked for a pizza, you got the pizza, now I want to pay my share of the pizza—”
“Just accept it, DeMarco,” White Hawk advised, helping himself to a slice. “Nobody’s ever won an argument with this guy. You might as well not let your pizza get cold,” he told her. “Or your blood pressure go up.”
She thought of O’Bannon’s response when she asked what she owed him. She didn’t like owing someone something that sounded so vague, but she supposed she had no choice—at least, for now.
“I’ll pick up the next one,” she told O’Bannon.
She expected the lead detective to offer an argument of some sort over that, too, but all O’Bannon said was, “Okay.”
Frankie picked up a slice and began eating, not trusting herself to say anything further to the man. Having her mouth full was a way to curtail that.
“You’re right,” she grudgingly admitted several moments later. Much as she hated to do it, she had to give the man his due. “This is good pizza.”
“I’m always right,” Luke replied. And then, because of the look that she had just shot him, he added, “At least, usually.”
* * *
Less than forty-five minutes later, all three of them were pulling into the rear parking lot of the police station.
Once back in his parking space, Luke popped open his trunk and carefully removed the two laptops he had placed there. Each was securely wrapped within a large plastic envelope to preserve possible prints, although the odds of getting a set of useful ones were small.
“Are you sure I can’t help out by taking one of the laptops to work on?” she asked, giving it one last try. “The search’ll go twice as fast if each of us takes one laptop.”
“Not that Valri wouldn’t appreciate you volunteering,” Luke told her, “but she has a certain way of doing things.” Ways he knew that she didn’t want interfered with, he thought. In her own unassuming way, Valri was a tyrant when it came to operating her area of the computer lab. “And as for the search going twice as fast, you’ve never seen Valri work. That woman’s fingers fly over those keys almost faster than the speed of light—or, at least, it seems that way,” he said, deep admiration resonating in his voice as all three of them walked to the back entrance of the building.
“She’d appreciate hearing you say that once in a while, you know,” White Hawk told him.
Luke looked at him as if his partner was talking nonsense. “Valri knows how good I think she is. How good everyone thinks she is.”
Frankie laughed shortly. She agreed with White Hawk. “Knowing is not the same thing as hearing,” she told him. She couldn’t help thinking that O’Bannon was just being thick.
“Speaking from personal experience?” Luke asked her, his expression unreadable.
“As a human being, yes,” Frankie retorted, opening the door to the stairwell. “But, hey, you do whatever you want to.”
He was about to press for the elevator, but stopped as he looked at her. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Well, since you don’t want me working on one of those laptops,” she reminded him, “I’m going up to the squad room.”
He’d figured that was where she was going, until he saw her opening the stairwell door. “Why are you taking the stairs?” he asked.
She assumed that the answer was self-explanatory. “That was a filling lunch. I thought I’d walk off a little of the pizza.”
If she was looking to burn off the calories, she needed to do a lot more than that. “It’s only five flights up to the homicide squad room, not fifty.”
Frankie shrugged. “Gotta start somewhere,” she told him philosophically.
He didn’t want to take a chance that she was up to something. “White Hawk, you go with her,” he told his partner.
Instead, White Hawk pressed the Up button for the elevator.
“Why?” he asked. “She’s not a suspect. What do you expect she’s going to do?”
“I don’t know her well enough to know what she’s capable of doing,” Luke told him. He looked pointedly at the stairwell.
White Hawk blew out a breath. “If I keel over from a heart attack, it’s on you,” he told his partner, walking over to the stairwell.
“I’ll deal with it,” Luke said.
As far as he was concerned, the man was in a hell of a lot better shape than most of the men currently in the precinct. White Hawk just liked being melodramatic.
Waiting until his partner was inside the stairwell, Luke took the elevator down to the basement to take his cousin the two laptops. In addition to sealing them, he had also labeled them.
He sincerely hoped that at least one of the laptops would yield some sort of information that would finally lead them to a break in the case. They needed to find out just who was responsible for killing all these young women.
Walking out of the elevator, Luke made one quick stop at the breakroom, then turned right instead of left. Left led to where his uncle worked in the crime scene investigations lab. Turning right took him to the computer lab where the chief of detectives’ daughter-in-law, Brenda, and his cousin Valri, as well as several other gifted people, worked their magic uncovering secrets that were embedded within the hard drives of completely innocent-looking computers.
Stopping before the glass-enclosed office, Luke knocked lightly on the door frame. Since the door was already open, he peered in.
“How’s my favorite person?” Luke asked cheerfully.
“Not here,” the petite blue-eyed blonde replied, never looking up from her monitor.
“Yes, you are,” Luke said. “You know that I mean you, Val.”
Valri went on working. “What I know is that you mean trouble every time you turn up, Luke. You’re just like your brother Christian.”
After setting down the laptops he’d brought in, Luke dramatically placed his hand over his heart. He was holding a covered container in his free hand that he’d gotten from the breakroom’s vending machine.
“You wound me, Valri,” he told her. “Chris and I are nothing alike.”
This time she looked up, even though she didn’t stop typing. “You’re right. He doesn’t try to sugarcoat things the way that you do.”
“That’s just because he’s not as charming as I am,” Luke said, pretending to defend himself. “I brought you a big container of your favorite tea. Chai—with that creamer you really like.” He set it down to her right.
Still, she told him, “Bribery is not going to get you anywhere.”
“It’s not bribery, Val,” he protested, wounded. “It’s thoughtfulness. Take a sip,” he urged. “It’s still warm.”
She looked at the container and then back at him. “You got this from the vending machine,” she accused.
He didn’t bother denying it. Instead, he argued, “But it’s still warm.”
Valri