Second Chance Colton

“—is still Greta’s,” she said, completing his sentence. “I’m sorry, Ryan. I had the test run a total of three times using three different samples from three different areas on the broken glass. I ran two of the tests and had someone else run another one.” To back herself up, Susie held up the three separate printouts that had resulted. “It came out the same each and every time. It’s Greta’s DNA. The blood found at the scene belongs to your sister.”

Ryan took the printouts from her and stared at the results on the top sheet. The findings on the two sheets beneath it were identical.

He felt as if someone had driven a knife into his stomach—and was still twisting it.

“There has to be an explanation,” he insisted, talking more to himself than to the woman perched on the stool.

“Ask her,” Susie suggested matter-of-factly. When Ryan looked down at her with confusion in his eyes, as if he had suddenly realized that he wasn’t alone in the room, she said, “If you really think that this doesn’t make sense, then ask her why she broke the stable window. Maybe she didn’t do it to get into the stables. Maybe there’s another plausible reason why the window was broken.” And why the stables were vandalized, she added silently.

“You don’t believe that,” he said, going by the expression on her face.

Susie shrugged away his observation. “What I believe—or don’t believe—isn’t the point here. I’m the forensic expert, you’re the detective. It’s up to you to take what I give you and arrange it into some sort of a complete picture that gives you the plausible answers you’re looking for.”

It almost sounded cut-and-dried—but he knew from experience nothing ever was.

He frowned, looking down at the printout Susie had given him. “This doesn’t give me any answers, just more questions.”

“It’s a start,” she told him crisply. “Use it to help you get those answers.”

“So now you’re telling me my job?” he asked, recalling that she had accused him of doing the same yesterday. He wasn’t being defensive, he told himself, just curious to see what the woman would say if he asked. “What is this, a demonstration of ‘turnabout is fair play’?”

Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything to him, Susie thought. She’d run the tests, done her job and given him the results. It was now up to him to work with what he had. Her part in this was over. She had to keep telling herself that, keep reminding herself to keep her distance, even though something inside her still insisted on holding out the hope that...

That nothing, Susie upbraided herself. There was nothing between them anymore except for business. He’d seen to that.

“Just trying to make the results more palatable for you, Detective Colton,” she told him.

Ryan winced. He could almost feel the frost encrusted around her words. “Ouch. That’s pretty formal. But I guess I deserve that.”

Yes, you do. That and a hell of a lot more, she added silently. “See, you’re detecting already,” she told him, doing her best to keep distancing herself from Ryan. She knew if she didn’t, if she allowed just a crack to open up, no matter how small, he’d somehow seep into her system, and just like that she’d be vulnerable all over again. In danger of having her heart ripped out again. She’d been down that route once and had no desire to revisit it. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got cases other than yours all clamoring for my time...” She allowed her voice to drift off as she deliberately made a show of getting back to work.

“No. Sure. Thanks.” The single-word sentences came out of his mouth in staccato fashion, as if he was firing each word one by one, pausing in between each.

She heard Ryan begin to walk toward the exit. This was where she was supposed to continue looking down at the work on her desk, the work she was already supposed to have finished but had moved aside so that she could run those additional DNA tests in hopes of finding another suspect, one that wasn’t Ryan’s sister.

All she had to do was hold out a total of thirty seconds. Fifty, tops, and he would be gone, Susie told herself.

There was really no need for her to say anything more to the man than she’d already said.

No need at all—except, perhaps, to satisfy her own curiosity about a man she had once believed herself to be madly in love with.

Once?

Hell, you’re still in love with him, you big idiot. You think you would’ve learned by now, Susie upbraided herself, annoyed at her own lack of discipline, not to mention a certain dearth of self-respect.

But for her internal lectures never took, no matter how driven they were by common sense, and she found herself turning all the way around on her stool. She was just in time to see Ryan about to step over the threshold, out into the hall.

Two more seconds and she’d be home free.

One—

“So what are you going to do?” she heard herself asking Ryan.

Apparently already lost in thought, Ryan jerked his head up. He’d heard her voice, but not the words that she’d said. “What?”

“So what are you going to do?” Susie repeated, enunciating each word.

Ryan crossed back over the threshold, but only took a couple of steps toward her before he stopped. He had to admit he was surprised that she was interested enough to ask him that. “I’m going to call Greta and do just what you suggested. I’m going to ask her what she was doing in the stable and why she had to break the window in order to get in.”

Susie thought for a moment. “Your sister’s a horse trainer, isn’t she?”

He was surprised that Susie had taken the time to find that out. It wasn’t as if they ran in the same circles these days. And back when they were together, their worlds had contained only each other, to the exclusion of everyone else. That meant family members, as well.

“Best in the business,” Ryan confirmed.

“Maybe she was passing by the stable at that hour for some reason, looked in and thought she saw smoke coming from the stable. Or maybe she thought she saw a horse in distress. The fastest way from point A to point B is still a straight line.” She shrugged carelessly, unable to come up with any better explanations at the moment. “Maybe that was why she broke the window.”

Although he appreciated her effort, he thought that Susie was definitely reaching. “And she didn’t stick around to tell anyone what she did?” Ryan asked skeptically.

Susie took her theory to the next step. “She was probably too embarrassed about breaking the window for no reason so she didn’t hang around, waiting for someone from the family to hear her out. Most likely, she’s just working up the nerve to answer for what she did. Nobody likes to admit that they made a mistake or acted rashly,” she pointed out.

They were talking about his sister, and Susie was giving him ammunition to defend Greta’s actions, but he really wasn’t convinced.

“I suppose that sounds plausible enough,” he allowed. “But I’ll believe it when I hear it from Greta’s own lips. Last I heard, she’s not even supposed to be in Tulsa right now.”

“Well, she might not be, but her blood certainly is,” Susie said, indicating the printouts he was holding. “I don’t have to point out that you can’t have one without the other.”

“Unless someone’s trying to frame you,” Ryan said as the idea suddenly occurred to him. The only thing that wasn’t occurring to him was why someone would go to the sort of trouble that actually framing his sister would require.

But even as he began to vaguely entertain the idea, he saw Susie shaking her head.

Exasperation seeped into his tone. “What?” he asked.

She had to stop him before he got carried away with the idea he seemed to be embracing. “If someone for some obscure reason actually did manage to have a sample of your sister’s blood—and I’m talking about enough to smear on the jagged edges of the window—it would have started to coagulate in a vial. There are certain characteristics of stored blood that would have shown up in the blood workup that was done. They didn’t,” she informed him flatly. “This blood was fresh when it came in contact with the broken glass.”

“I was afraid of that,” he murmured, again more to himself than to her.

Susie’s slender shoulders rose and fell, not in a show of indifference, but to signify that some things just couldn’t be changed no matter how much one might want them to be different.

“So, go back to your initial plan,” she told him.

“Which was?” he asked, wanting to see what Susie thought his plan had been.

“You said you were going to go question your sister and ask Greta what she was doing there at that time of night. Ask her why she thought it was necessary to break into stables that she could have just as easily accessed the proper way—through the door.”

Susie was right of course. But the more he thought about it, the more this proposed conversation with Greta was not going to be a conversation that he was looking forward to. Added to that was the fact that Greta had been a little jumpy since their mother had been found battered and beaten.

In the past couple of months his normally cheerful little sister had become increasingly uneasy, at times acting almost paranoid, and questioning her about the acts of vandalism and the break-in at the Lucky C was definitely not going to help the situation or Greta’s frame of mind, he thought.