“Well, no, not quite hitting her. He said he was at the intersection, stopped, and she was there in front of him and just kind of collapsed.”
“And of course, the fine upstanding citizen that he was, he hopped out and immediately administered aid and called 9-1-1.”
“No, of course not. He took off, citing the line of traffic behind him.”
“Sometimes I hate people,” Smidge said.
“I think our job gives us a little more license to hate people,” she said quietly.
“Nah, I’d probably still hate people anyway.” Then he hung up.
She chuckled. “He’s in fine form today.”
“He doesn’t like being called out on an old case, never has,” Rodney said. “He gets quite snarky about it, but you seem to get along with him just fine. Why is that?”
She turned to him. “Why not?”
He shrugged. “Can’t say that he and I ever hit it off that well.”
“Nothing to hit off. He’s the guy you got to hit against.”
He looked at her, his gaze narrowing, as he studied her. “Seriously? You go in there aggressive?”
She shrugged. “He’ll be that way regardless. If you can’t give as good as you get, he’ll walk all over you.”
“Great. Here I’ve been trying to be a nice guy and tiptoe around him, while you go in there, like a bowling ball.”
“Yep,” she said cheerfully, “knock him right over. He talks to me. We talk to each other. We don’t have any bullshit back and forth, and he appreciates it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. I’ve been handling all those grouchy assholes over there wrong this whole time. Who knew?” He shook his head and returned to his computer screen, while she sat here, chuckling beside him.
“Doesn’t help much though on that one earlier case.” Kate got up and started two separate whiteboards, one with the bullies and one with this accident and, at the bottom of that one, she added the other accidents annually for the past five years. She put up pictures and reports and a summary of all the dates. Then she looked at it, shrugged. “Not a whole lot here.”
“You’ve got multiple cases there and nothing to even begin to fill the board,” Lilliana said. “That’s how these cases end up cold in the first place.”
“Yeah, I hear you. I’m doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen to this one.”
Colby walked in again, took one look at the empty second board and frowned.
She raised one hand. “Don’t say it. I know nothing’s up there.”
“A few things are. I remember a couple of those accidents,” he muttered. “There was some consternation among us because we didn’t end up with a definitive cause of death. Families really struggle with that. They need to know what happened, so they can work through it and move on. When you can’t do that, it’s really hard on them.”
“So what do you do?” Kate asked.
Colby shrugged. “You make it a little more general, a little less easy to deal with, but you give them closure.”
She frowned. “In this current case, the young woman has a hole from some projectile. Smidge didn’t say bullet, and he didn’t find it in her head. As a matter of fact, it’s not there at all.”
“What? It went in and didn’t come back out?”
She shook her head. “No, it didn’t.”
“Ice,” Owen said immediately.
She turned, looked at him, and frowned.
He continued. “We had a case like that not too long ago. This guy was making ice bullets, and they can kill people. By the time we got to the autopsy, the ice bullets had, of course, dissolved, and nobody could find anything. Maybe run it and see if there’s a history somewhere with it.”