The Secret She Kept (Blake Wilder FBI Mystery Thriller Book 5) by Elle Gray

Author:Elle Gray [Gray, Elle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

Macpherson Hall Medical Labs, Washington State University; Pullman, WA

“Do me a favor and shoot Rick a text,” I tell Astra as I hold the door open for her. “Ask him to do a deep dive into Ben’s financials. Your question about a possible gambling addiction was a really good one. I think we need to see if there’s a money trail.”

“What makes you think I didn’t ask him to do that already?” she chirps.

I arch an eyebrow at her. “Did you?”

“I was just about to.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. “Still, good idea. Good question.”

“I honestly doubt it’s going to come to much. It was a shot in the dark,” she tells me. “But you never know. And to quote you, that’s why we do our due diligence.”

We share a laugh as we walk down a flight of steps that takes us down into the basement of the science building. We pass different labs for prosthetics, robotics, and biology. They’re all filled with students working on a hundred different projects. If what Avila said about Ben’s friendships not extending outside the lab is true, I doubt we’re going to find much here. Just another dry hole, but that’s the job. We’re paid to run down as many dead-end corridors as are necessary until we find the one that leads us to the truth.

It takes us a minute and several very literal dead-end corridors until we find the anatomy lab Ben most often worked in. The doors slide open with a pneumatic hiss, and all eyes turn up to us as we step inside. There are half a dozen students in white lab coats huddled around various machines and implements that look absolutely alien to me. I couldn’t tell you what ninety-nine percent of the equipment in here does.

“Can I help you?”

I turn around and find a tall, thin Asian man approaching us. He’s lean and has straight dark hair that falls to his shoulders, dark almond-shaped eyes, warm, fawn-colored skin, and a little feather duster of a mustache on his upper lip. Of course, his apparent inability to grow a full and thick mustache makes him look more like a little kid who’s desperately trying to look older.

Astra and I badge him, stopping him in his tracks. He suddenly looks nervous, caught in that moment between fight or flight.

“You alright?” I ask.

“Fine. I’m good,” he says. “I just haven’t dealt with the police that much in my life, let alone the Feds.”

At the mention of the word “Feds,” everybody seems to stop moving all at once—as though it was choreographed. All eyes turn back to us and there is a palpable tension in the room. I look at each studen in turn, eyeballing them closely as I search their eyes for signs of something—guilt, maybe? I’m not sure. But this crowd looks as if their worst crime is not eating their vegetables with dinner. I refuse to tease them or call them nerds, though, since it’s entirely possible that at some point in the future, my life will very literally be in their hands.

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