Her Frozen Cry (Detective Amanda Steele)

While he was gone, Amanda and Trent looked at Tony’s shoes. None were a match to the prints left at the cabin. They waited for Tony to return before going into the garage. The tire treads weren’t a match, and there was no mud or dirt caked in the grooves. Either Tony had scrubbed them clean or he was never at the cabin, just like he’d told them.

Tony thrust the laptop toward Amanda. “The password to unlock it is ‘Abandon’. Now, I’ll get you Tina’s number, and you can go.” Tony pulled his cell phone from a pocket of his pants and rattled off the woman’s number. “You can call her for her address.” He took them to the man door in the garage, unlocked it, and gestured for them to walk through it. The door shut heavily behind them, sort of a hard stop at any possibility of a reconciliation of their friendship.

She flinched. Trent put a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t take this personally, okay? He’s just—”

“Being an ass? Doesn’t he appreciate how much I’ve held back? How, if he were anyone else, I probably would have dragged him in by now?” She looked over at Trent, her expression frozen as her admission filtered back to her ears.

“We don’t have enough. Yet. And we need to build that case against him. Remember?”

“Yeah, you’re right. But if he is guilty, I want you to know that I’m prepared to do the right thing.”

“Who are you trying to convince?” His facial features were soft. “I know you will.”

His confidence had her going quiet. She simply nodded.

They got into the department car, and Trent keyed into the onboard system, searching for Tina Nash’s address. As the computer worked, he faced her. “Why didn’t you mention to him that there was missing pentobarbital at the vet clinic?”

“Not time yet. But I did give him a chance to confess. He didn’t. If we find out the pentobarbital inventory is actually short, we’ll come back to him. He won’t have a leg to stand on.”

“I think we should have pushed him harder.”

“And what? Have him clamming up and demanding a lawyer? I know what I’m doing.”

“I never said you didn’t.”

“No? Well, it sounds like that over here.” She took a few heaving breaths, calming her temper. “We never would have seen his shoes or his tires—or got this.” She held up Alicia’s laptop. “We’d be stuck in bureaucratic red tape.”

Trent raised his hands. “Fine, it seems you have everything figured out.”

“Don’t be like that. I’ve just been doing this job longer than you, and sometimes you have to be very careful about crossing certain lines. Once lawyers get involved—as you’ve probably already seen—everything slows down.”

A painful span of silence, and just when she was certain he wasn’t going to say anything, he spoke.

“I’m sorry if you took what I said the wrong way.”

Not much of an apology, but she reflected back to how the conversation had gotten started in the first place. “You don’t need to be sorry. You were just speaking your mind.”

“I was,” he said as if he were tiptoeing through a minefield.

“Sorry if I overreacted.”

“If?” He smiled.

“Fine. I did.” She rubbed her forehead. She just wanted to believe so badly that Tony was innocent. Was she allowing that desire to cloud her judgment, blind her instincts?