Kansas City Christmas by Julie Miller

Author:Julie Miller [Miller, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Suspense, Fiction, Romance, General, Contemporary, Christmas Stories
ISBN: 9780373693665
Google: -xR-B30A14sC
Amazon: 0263873498
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2008-11-10T13:00:00+00:00

HOLLY WASN’T SURE IF IT WAS fear that she’d be caught or just flat-out excitement that she’d finally gotten her hands on an intact disintegrator bullet that made her drive away from the Plaza lights and her apartment and toward the crime lab facility.

She’d always done her best thinking alone in her lab at night when there were fewer interruptions from coworkers and fewer calls to crime scenes. The quietness of the building and the sleeping world beyond its walls seemed to soothe her nerves and free up her powers of observation and concentration.

Tonight was no different. She’d dumped her coat in her office and kicked off her high heels. She wore the black silk dress with a hand-beaded sweater underneath her lab coat. But the rest of the trappings that put her in a productive mental groove were the same.

With Julie Andrews singing Christmas carols through her headphones, her plastic goggles and gloves on, and her metal clipboard on the countertop beside her so she could jot notes, Holly quickly lost herself in her work. Though she wasn’t the ballistics expert Rick Temple was, she knew the basics about testing for chemical components and running reaction tests. Using sample scrapings from the unfired bullet, she’d already determined a few fundamental facts—the metal jacket was partly fabricated with a dense ceramic compound. And while that compound was resistant to physical stress, it had a tendency to break down quickly when combined with certain chemicals.

A saline solution similar to human tears had no effect. The chemicals in sweat, nothing.

But something inside the human body turned that rock-hard object into mush in a matter of hours. And there were plenty of chemical combinations left to try.

Holly had lost track of the hour by the time she walked out of the lab’s sample bank for blood and tissue. “Glo-o-o-o-o-or-ia…”

She stopped by Rick Temple’s office and wrote out a note requesting a favor. Could he provide a list of chemical compounds that would be resistant to the minute gunpowder explosion that fired a bullet from a gun? Since he was so keen on proving who between the two of them was smarter, she’d give him the chance to strut his stuff.

Maybe he could narrow down whether it was a man-made agent or a naturally occurring element that kept the bullet from blowing up inside the gun when fired, yet made it soften like putty when exposed to something inside the human body. Then she dropped the note and a copy of the sample bullet’s chemical component graph into an envelope and tucked it inside his desk. No sense leaving it in his work-order job box since this would have to be an off-duty request.

Mindlessly singing along with the CD, Holly waved at Floyd at the front desk and hurried back down the stairs so she could prep her next reaction experiment. Holding a vial of a minute fragment of the bullet suspended in solution, she injected a sample of O positive blood, mixed them together in a centrifuge and waited for something to happen.

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