Wild Montana

He took out his phone and glanced down at his screen. “No...it’s fine. Grant hasn’t gotten back to me yet. There’s nothing more for me to do until I hear from him.”

“What all did he say?” she asked as she gingerly walked to the old, tattered brown couch and sat down. There was a threadbare quilt that hung over the back, one her foster mother had made her back in grade school. There was even a bit of purple nail polish she had carelessly spilled ages ago.

“The drugs are missing. He’s going to go back to the scene and check to make sure he didn’t miss anything.” Stuffing the phone into the breast pocket of his jean jacket, he sat down in the recliner across from her. “And he found a receipt.”

“A receipt? What do you mean?”

“It was jammed into the corner of the green bag.”

“I swear I looked everywhere in that thing... But I guess I could have missed it. Wait, do you think someone planted it, Mr. FBI?”

He cringed, but she wasn’t sure why.

He opened up his phone and pulled up the photos of the bag that they had taken on scene. “Regardless of how it got there, because we screwed up the chain of custody, the receipt can’t be used in court for anything. We can’t prove that it was or wasn’t there without reasonable doubt.”

“But it could help us figure out the vic’s identity, right?”

“I suppose,” he said, giving her a weak smile. “Right now though, you need to take care of yourself and just focus on getting some rest.” He stood up and grabbed the quilt off the back of the couch, wrapping it around her shoulders.

She caught his familiar scent and closed her eyes. She imagined pulling him down on the couch beside her, wrapping him in the blanket and letting him hold her. They could spend the day together, huddled in each other’s embrace and away from the hurt that filled the world around them.