“If they call, they’ll call you, not me,” she pointed out.

“You have the fixed phone, that antique thing that’s attached to the wall,” he pointed out.

“I have a cell phone,” she said defensively.

“Does it have anything except numbers on it?” he asked with a sarcastic smile.

She glared at him. “I’m going to get a really fancy smart phone as soon as I pay off my new yacht,” she said belligerently.

He turned away before she saw the smile. “Okay, nasturtium. Have a good night.”

“I am not a nasturtium!”

“A likely story,” he muttered on his way out. “I’ll bet my badge you don’t even know what a nasturtium is.”

“I do so!” she called after him.

When he was out of sight, she pulled the pocket dictionary out of her drawer and looked it up.

It was a flower. Well! Maybe he didn’t dislike her as much as he seemed to. She wondered at the irony, because the meaning of her real name was the same as that of the nickname he’d stuck her with. She doubted if he’d paid any attention to her name on the job application. It had been, after all, the department’s interviewer who’d hired her for this job.

She glanced at the sheet she still couldn’t read and put it in her desk drawer. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she’d pin him down and make him take a crack at it.

Meantime, she typed up the reports she could read.

She worried about the cold case Banks was working on. He didn’t know, and she wouldn’t tell him, but the victim had been her grandfather, Dalton Reed. She didn’t want to share any of her private life with her bulldozer of a boss. Even in prison, her stepbrother, Morris Duffy, could have things done to her, or worse, to her little brother, Tad. He’d even threatened that when he went away. Keep your mouth shut, he’d said. Things could happen to the boy, even if he was in prison. He had friends. The threat was still enough to keep her silent.

She’d always suspected her stepbrother, Morris, of killing her grandfather, but the body had never been found. If there was a body. She grimaced. Her grandfather had always been punctual. If he said he’d be there at six, he’d be there at five forty-five. He would never have just gone away from his job and his family without telling anyone. Unless he was dead.