“That looks bad,” Brandon said.

“Bike versus SUV. Hit-and-run.”

“I heard about it on the scanner yesterday. Didn’t we get a license plate?”

“A partial one. But don’t worry, we’ll get him.” The CSI held up his tweezers. “He left behind some good paint chips.”

Brandon headed into the next room, where he found Jane hunched over a glass chamber. From the superglue smell, he could tell she was doing cyanoacrylate fuming.

“Good morning,” he said.

She turned around and switched off the noisy vent above the fuming chamber. “Hey.” She pushed a pair of goggles to her forehead, and her gaze went to the Starbucks cup in his hand.

He held it out to her. “Double shot caramel latte.”

Her eyes narrowed. “How did you know?”

“I’m a detective.”

Smirking, she walked over and took the coffee. “Uh-oh. A bribe.” She took a big sip and closed her eyes. “Wow, I needed this. I skipped breakfast this morning.” She gave him a suspicious look. “You must be here about the shoe print from the law firm break-in.”

“How’d you guess?”

“Maybe because you’ve left me two messages since yesterday?”

“It’s a priority case,” he said. Which was why he’d decided not to wait around for a junior detective to follow up. The guy hadn’t yet figured out how to light a fire under people.

“Yeah, I caught that,” Jane said. “That’s why I was here late last night working on it. Want to see what I found?”

“Yes.”

“You heard the print from that windowsill belonged to someone at the law firm, right?”

“I heard.” Brandon had expected it to be a dead end, but they had had to try. Now in terms of forensic evidence, they were down to a shoe print. He was hopeful, though, because the print had been found in a key location—the exact location Brandon would have chosen if he’d wanted to see people coming and going from the law firm while remaining concealed and avoiding the building’s security cams.

Jane led him to the opposite side of the room and brought a computer workstation to life with the tap of the mouse. Not bothering to sit down, she clicked open a photograph of the shoe print that had been taken by the forensic photographer Thursday night. By shining a spotlight at an oblique angle, the photographer had managed to heighten the detailed ridges in the dirt.

“Normally, this would take a while, but I’ve got a friend at the Bureau who specializes in footwear evidence. I asked him to take a look for me.”

“Thanks,” Brandon said, grateful that she’d called in a personal favor.

“He came back with good news and bad.”

“Let’s hear the good.”

“Okay, well the good is that he can definitely identify it as a Merrell Zion Peak hiking boot, size fourteen.”

Brandon’s gut clenched. “Fourteen?”