The drive to the medical examiner’s office was long enough for Zach to get his anger under control. He’d been shocked listening to the description of teenage boys getting into girls’ pants just to brag with the other guys about how far they’d gotten.

But shit, had he been that bad as a kid? Maybe it only seemed worse because they were able to share pics of the girls to Facebook groups with codes and scoring and shit nowadays. He sounded like an old man as the words back in my day ran through his mind.

He shook his head, thinking back. No, it wasn’t just the technology. He wouldn’t have rated girls and assigned codes to them. He and his friends didn’t make a game out of trying to get a girl into bed just because they knew she wanted to hold onto her virginity. He’d been an asshole at times, but there were limits. He’d never had sex with a woman who didn’t want him, and he never coerced and cajoled to get that consent.

They walked into the medical examiner’s suite and he shoved aside his feelings as he looked at Adrienne’s body covered to her shoulders by a sheet. He couldn’t let his emotions get the better of him right now. Stopping this killer needed to take all his focus.

“Mary Kane,” Dr. Kane said as she stuck her hand out for Shauna to shake. “You must be the detective the state sent to work with our boys.”

“Shauna O’Rourke.” Shauna grinned as she pumped the doctor’s hand. “Your boys?”

Dr. Kane shrugged and returned the smile, but turned almost immediately to her table. She was never one to waste a lot of time chatting.

“Cause of death was, as we suspected, manual strangulation. I trust you saw the images of the marks on the back of the vic’s neck?” She rolled Adrienne slightly and showed Shauna the mark on Adrienne’s neck. Shauna bent and looked at the twisting bruise where they speculated the killer might have used a tool to screw the rope, before moving aside to let Zach and Ronan do the same.

Dr. Kane continued, voice businesslike, but there was a somber edge to it. “I’ve taken oral and vaginal swabs. Semen was present in both. No signs of assault, but I did find evidence of gamma-hydroxybutyrate in her system.” She glanced up at the group. “GHB.”

Zach cursed under his breath. He was doing too much of that, but damn, this case just got worse and worse.

“That’s all new. No drugs and no sexual activity in the old cases,” Dr. Kane said.

Shauna nodded. “No sexual activity with our guy. That’s not to say the killings weren’t sexual in nature, of course. But never any evidence of intercourse or other activity. And no drugs in our vics.” She turned to Dr. Kane. “How long to run the semen through the system? I can send it up to our lab if that helps?”

Dr. Kane nodded. “That would probably be faster. I can put a rush on it, but with our backlog ...”

“No problem.” Shauna looked to Zach and Ronan. “I can run it up to our lab while you guys make some calls and get those hockey players in?”

“Sounds good. We don’t have enough to get warrants on any of these guys yet. I wish like hell we did. I’d love to see if any of these little pissants match the semen you found, Doc.” Zach looked back at Adrienne Edwards. “Maybe we can get them in for voluntary interviews and then pin them down on something that will let us get warrants for DNA.”

Ronan held up his phone. “I’m going to start making calls. Do we want to pull in the whole hockey team?”

“I think so,” Zach said. “One of them will be weak enough to hand over their social media accounts, even if the first line guys stick together and back their captain.”

“Got it.” Ronan walked out, phone already at his ear.

Shauna turned back to the medical examiner. “How sure are you that the rope and the lipstick are a match to the crime scene, Dr. Kane?”

The doctor’s brows only went up a hair, but Shauna noticed. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to question your results. It’s just that so many aspects of this scene don’t fit with the old crimes. I just want to be sure before we link these together.”

Dr. Kane nodded. “I’ll show you.” She waved a hand for them to follow and they moved into a smaller room.

“These are photos of the rope from the last murder before your killer dropped off the face of the earth.” She pulled the close-up images of a length of rope out of a folder and spread them on a small table. One showed the knot used on the rope. A slip knot of some sort. Another showed a close-up of the end of the rope. The third showed an even tighter shot of one of the cut ends of the rope and a fourth showed a similar photo but it was clearly a different cut end of the rope.

“Here.” Dr. Kane pulled the third image toward them and pointed at the frayed edges of the rope. “This is the rope from your last murder thirty years back. Both ends of the rope were cut with something that our killer must have needed to saw back and forth with on the rope. It’s not a clean cut. If you look on this end, you’ll see where the tool must have slipped further along the rope as he was sawing back and forth. What you end up with is a cut where some strands of the rope were cut a few millimeters shorter than the other strands of the rope.”

Shauna and Zach leaned in and the brush of her arm against his did shit to his body it shouldn’t have. Hell, he was in trouble here.

“Oh yeah,” Shauna said, using her own finger to trace the spot on the photo that showed the cuts.

Zach focused back on the rope and saw what they were talking about.

“Now,” Dr. Kane said, pulling out a new photo from a separate folder. “This is one end of the rope we found on Adrienne Edwards.”

She placed the image next to the older photo and Zach watched as Shauna’s mouth formed a perfect oh. He glanced down and froze.

“Wow. That’s—”

“The same rope.” He finished Shauna’s sentence.

“I’ve sent the two ropes off to the lab for them to analyze further, but there’s very little likelihood it’s not the same rope,” Dr. Kane said. “Now, I will tell you I think your killer got smart and got something better to cut that rope with this time around.”

“What makes you say that?” Shauna asked.

“This is the other end of the Edwards rope.” Dr. Kane laid down another photo, this one showing a very clean, even cut end of the same rope.

“Wow.”

Zach grinned at Shauna’s repeated wows but he had to admit, she had the right word for the situation.

“And the lipstick?” He asked.

Dr. Kane moved to a microscope. “I had a feeling you’d want to see it.” She bent over the microscope and fiddled with the dials on the side. “I’ve got both samples set up in here. The sample on the left is from one of the girls thirty years ago. The one on the right came from Adrienne.”

She stood and Zach raised his hand to gesture for Shauna to go first. She looked and murmured another wow. Stepping back, she let Zach look through the lens.

He didn’t see it. “What am I supposed to be wowing over?”

“You don’t see that?” Shauna laughed.

Dr. Kane took pity on him. “The color, the texture, the density. All of it matches.”

Zach bent to look again. It was two side-by-side smears of red. “Okay. I’m going to take your word for it.”

He could see the shared grins on Shauna and Dr. Kane’s faces as he stood.

It was Dr. Kane who spoke. “As well you should. But I also ran tests and the composition is the same. There are two ingredients that were banned from the market fifteen years ago.”

He and Shauna nodded, sharing a look.

“I’ll get you the semen samples to run up to the lab, Shauna. I’ve got a vaginal swab and oral.” Dr. Kane said, before walking out.

Zach hated to think that there might be two separate semen donors, but knew both samples needed to be run. This case made his stomach churn on so many levels. 

Zach caught Shauna’s elbow as she moved to follow. “Shauna,” he said. It was the first time they’d been anywhere close to alone. Never mind that Dr. Kane would be back any minute and there were lab techs right next door.

Shauna looked down at his hand on her arm, then slowly up at him. Her face told him she didn’t appreciate the contact.

He dropped his hand. Clearly, she didn’t feel the same charge racing through her body at the simple touch that he had. “I just feel like we should clear the air since we’re working on this together.”

She gave him a strange look and he was reminded of Liz and her are all adults this stupid? looks. “There’s nothing to clear, Zach. We’re good.”

Did she feel nothing between them? He wanted to step into her. Wanted to challenge her to deny she felt the heat that swirled whenever they were close to each other. The old him would have. Maybe he was no worse than the hockey players he was looking at for rape.

Instead, he stepped back. “Yeah? We’re good?”

Shauna only nodded, once, as Dr. Kane walked in. If the medical examiner noticed anything out of the ordinary, she didn’t comment. But then, she wouldn’t. Dr. Kane was all about the job.

As he walked out of the building next to Shauna, one fact hit Zach in the gut. The draw he felt toward her was even stronger than it had been years before. This time, though, it was different. Yeah, he still felt all the attraction he always had for her, but there was more to it this time. There was something different in how he was drawn to her now. It was more ... real. More substantial somehow.

She was sharp and strong, bringing a passion to her work he could respect the hell out of. The realization made him regret the fact he had screwed up with her so many years ago. That, even though she said she was okay working with him, she probably had this image in her head of a frat boy who only wanted what her body could offer him. He didn’t want that to be the way she thought of him. He wanted to show her there was more to him.

Ronan got out of the car as they approached. “I’ve got two players whose parents are taking this seriously enough to come in this evening. I’m halfway through the list, but so far most of them have said they could come tomorrow or—” he took on an affected tone that Zach assumed was his imitation of some of the people he’d talked to— “they’ll ask their people to call us to schedule something in the coming week.”

“Really?” Shauna said, and Zach grinned at the tone. She would no more allow that than he and Ronan would. “I take it you educated them?”

“I did. I told them we’ll see them in the morning or we’ll show up at their homes in a marked car with lights going to discuss it there.”

Zach let out a laugh. No one needed to know their captain would hand their asses to them if they pulled that move. Right now, whatever got these people in the door was fine with Zach. He wasn’t about to let anyone stand in their way now that they had one dead teenager and another one still missing.

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