“I’m not a total fool. I took Sienna with me, and she was armed. She’s really scary when she’s in her cop mode.”
“I bet. So, you were right about Ken. What made you follow him tonight?”
“The fact that he never fenced the items was telling. I thought he was a kleptomaniac, but after I talked to Dr. Thompson, I found out that he might be an addictive/compulsive thief. She told me that they tend to react to a tension-filled situation. I watched him and sure enough, he had a run-in with his father. It was a nasty fight. I figured he needed to blow off steam. Now I need your help.”
“In what way?”
“Get me a court order for a DNA sample.”
“I’ll wake up Judge Drury. She likes me.”
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, Kate had her court order. She walked into the interrogation room and presented the court order to Ken’s lawyer, who had shown up thirty minutes ago.
The man read it. “You’ll have to comply, Mr. Mitchell.”
Kate took out a swab on a long wooden stick. “Open your mouth, Mr. Mitchell.”
“This is all your fault, you bitch.”
Ken went to rise, but Jericho was there, placing his palm in the middle of Ken’s chest and pushing him forcefully back into his chair. “Touch her and I’ll break your arm.”
Kate looked at the grim lines of Jericho’s face and she realized with shock that he meant it.
Ken sat in the chair and the anger seemed to drain out of him. He opened his mouth with a sullen look on his face.
Kate swabbed his mouth, which was rich with cells, secured the sample, and left the interrogation room. Back in the lab, she got busy breaking the DNA down in the process of DNA testing.
She heated the DNA strands in a glass test tube to ninety-four degrees, separating the molecules completely. Carefully adding primers to combine with the strands of the DNA, she lowered the test tube temperature. Adding a DNA enzyme—polymerase—Kate prepared the samples to go into a thermal cycler to rebuild a double strand of DNA, effectively duplicating the DNA. The machine would repeat this process over and over in thirty cycles to yield more than one million copies of the DNA.
Close to the end of the process, the lab door opened, and two strong hands settled on her shoulders. Kate would know his scent anywhere. She leaned back into Jericho’s chest, moaning softly at the glorious feel of his hands massaging her shoulders.
“How much longer?”
“Almost done with the first step. It’ll take at least forty-eight hours to complete the whole process yielding preliminary results,” she said wearily.
“Time to go home?”
She looked up at him. He looked as tired as she felt. “You’ve been in with the DA?”
“How did you guess?”
“You have that look.”
“He’s royally pissed.”
“At me?”
“Yes. He said you were removed from the case and he’s mad that you went beyond your boundaries.”
“I had a hunch and I followed up with it. He should want his investigators to be relentless. Besides, I had a detective with me. The very one working on the Phantom Bandit case.”
“I think he’s more pissed that you’ve jeopardized my funding for my campaign than anything else.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“The funding?”