Kiss And Tell - K. Sterling Page 0,1

it was a department thing,” he complained. Lane shook his head as he leaned back.

“We didn’t want it to get out until we could notify her parents. The search team found her just as I was heading home so I asked Sandra to run dinner by,” he explained. Aiden nodded but his brow furrowed as he brushed the hair away from Lane’s eyes.

“You’re tired. Do you want me to take a look at the scene tonight?”

“Not tonight. It’s definitely a dump and the FBI’s already got a team going over it. They’re sending over all the photos in the morning, with their reports. You can go by the morgue tomorrow, if you want, but Jeff will send you his findings,” Lane said.

“Good. Can you sleep now? It’s been days since you rested.”

“Yeah. I’m just about out of fuel. I’m going to take a long shower and then I’m crashing,” Lane said. He was heartbroken because he never gave up hope but Delia Lewis was finally going home to her mother. He wasn’t sure if he had enough energy left for a shower as he recalled Brenda Lewis’s cries. She was devastated but it was the exhausted kind of devastated and he heard her relief, because she could finally rest. “I’m going to give the techs a day to process Delia and the scene and then I’ll get back out there and find who did this to her,” he vowed. He threw up, when the ME opened the suitcase. After days of seeing pictures and videos of Delia laughing and living, the immediate grief and nausea hit him like a freight train and he cried on the side of the highway. He prayed with her parents and did his best to give them hope, even when the news wasn’t good. “I have to find whoever did this—for her parents.”

“I know but I want you to rest. I’ll let you know if they find anything important and I’ll get a head start, based on what we already know,” Aiden said. He turned Lane toward the stairs and gave him a push. “I’ll lock up and be right behind you.”

“Thanks.” Lane held onto him for a moment then trudged up the stairs. He tugged his tie free and let it fall by the closet and his coat landed on the bathroom floor. He shrugged out of his holster and left it on the counter with his phone, badge and wallet. He avoided the mirror as he turned on the shower because he felt like he’d aged ten years over the last week. They found too much of Delia’s blood in the trunk of her car so it was always a recovery operation, never a rescue, but Lane didn’t want to find her. He wanted her to turn up at a different Greyhound station—in Vegas or LA. He wanted her to be another runaway and still out there. But they found her in a suitcase, on the side of the highway. Lane suspected that the killer murdered her in the trunk of her Civic and parked it at the Greyhound station to make it look like she left town. They shouldn’t have found the suitcase for a few weeks but Lane and Chief grabbed a handful of the FBI’s cadets and reassigned them to the highways around the bus station, so they had extra boots on the ground. It saved the search team days and robbed the killer of a head start. “She didn’t get to finish college. She was just starting to figure out who she wanted to be,” Lane said and he went ahead and cried again as he tossed his shirt at the closet.

“Is your heart still in it?” Aiden asked softly. Lane brushed a hand through his hair as he sifted through the pain and fatigue. I can’t let him get away with this.

“Yeah. My heart’s still in it.” He nodded and sighed as Aiden reached around him and loosened his belt. Lane’s head fell back, onto Aiden’s shoulder and he closed his eyes. “I just hate this about the job.”

“The victims hurt the worst. You’ve never been afraid of dying. You’re afraid of finding them too late and never bringing them home. But we’ll work for Delia Lewis and her family, now. We’ll give them answers and help them get justice for Delia.” He pressed a firm kiss to Lane’s shoulder and he smiled as he reached back and scrubbed a hand through Aiden’s hair.

“Thank you,” he said and