“Well, we may have a better lead anyway.” Antonio crumpled his first wrapper into a ball and pitched it into a trash bin before chomping into the second hot dog. “The lab called while you were in there. They just got the Toyota in. Who’d you talk to over there?”

“Jane,” Brandon said.

“Oh yeah? Well, she must like you because they bumped us to the front of the line. They’ve already started processing the vehicle, and get this. The smear on the door? They did a quickie test and confirmed the blood is human.”

Brandon wasn’t surprised. After four years in homicide, he was good at reading stains. The real question was, did the blood belong to Vanessa Adams, who was still apparently missing after abandoning her car on that highway more than fourteen hours ago?

And then there was the pool of blood Antonio had discovered in the woods. It was no small amount, and one look at it had prompted Brandon to get on the phone with his lieutenant to request a team of CSIs out there, stat, to process the scene.

Brandon took out his phone now and pulled up the photo he’d taken last night. The blood pool—still coagulating—had been discovered beside a burned tree stump. The sight had put a lead weight in Brandon’s gut as he tried to imagine what happened. Someone had been injured or worse, and the logical candidate was Vanessa. Had she been shot? Stabbed? Bludgeoned?

Despite combing the area, they’d turned up no shell casings or drag marks—nothing beyond that one pool of blood by the stump in the woods.

At this point, they didn’t know if that blood matched the smear in the car, or if it was Vanessa Adams’s. To determine that, they needed DNA tests, which meant submitting samples to the notoriously backlogged DNA lab, and jumping to the front of that line would take a hell of a lot more than a friendly phone call to Jane, especially since their case wasn’t even officially a homicide.

Yet.

Brandon had a feeling about it, though.

He looked over his shoulder at the courthouse. Counting three levels up and three windows over, he zeroed in on Judge Thielman’s courtroom. He thought of Leigh Larson just before she’d gone in there. For a moment, she’d looked like a deer in the headlights. But then she’d opened the door and walked straight up the aisle, all confidence. It was the damnedest thing.

“You still stuck on that lawyer?”

Brandon turned around. “What? No.”

“Hey, don’t take it personally.” Antonio smiled. “Lawyers lie, man. It’s part of the job.”

CHAPTER THREE