to join him.”
“Us?” CJ echoed with surprise.
“Us,” he said with a firm nod. “I need you there.”
“Why?” she asked at once.
“You’re a detective, aren’t you?” It wasn’t a question and he didn’t wait for an answer, but continued, “Well, I was a detective before I was captain, but that was twenty years ago. Evidence gathering may have changed since then. This is the first murder Sandford has seen, and I don’t intend to mess it up.”
“Surely one of your men—” CJ began, only to be interrupted.
“My only detective dropped dead of a heart attack last month. I haven’t hired a replacement yet, and while one of my younger fellows is taking a training course in detective work, he’s just started that. I need someone who knows their business out there to help with evidence collection. So—” he paused and raised his eyebrows “—I figure you can come tell us what to collect and how to bag it and ask Jefferson your questions while you’re at it.”
CJ was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking. “Captain, I’m not a cop. I’m with the Special Investigations Unit; we’re a civilian organization. We investigate cops; we aren’t one of them. I’ve got no business being at a crime scene,” she said firmly.
“You may not be a police officer now, but you used to be,” Captain Dupree said with unconcern.
CJ’s eyes narrowed at these words, and only continued to do so as he proved he’d looked into her background by adding, “In fact, while you started out on patrol like my boys, you moved up to homicide detective before shifting over to CSIS, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. I gather there you were blazing a fine trail of successes as one of the best detectives they had before you switched over to the SIU.”
He didn’t say “and became a traitor to the boys in blue,” but CJ could hear that in the words. Investigating the police for corrupt or illegal activity did not make you a lot of friends. At least not with the police. They tended to see CJ and the people she worked with as traitors to fellow officers. As far as other police officers were concerned, the members of the SIU were one step up from slugs. Or maybe one step down.
CJ didn’t particularly care. She had at first, but she’d gotten used to it, and what she did was important. To her mind, a good cop was worth their weight in gold, but every profession had their bad apples, and bad cops could do more damage than your average dirtbag criminal. She felt no regret or guilt over what she did.
“Well?” Dupree snapped. “Are you going to step up and help out here or what? If you don’t, we’ll have to wait for a detective from the Ontario Provincial Police to come help us. That could take days and evidence has a tendency to walk away or get trampled on if not gathered right away.”
CJ knew that when it came to fires, a lot of evidence was unavoidably damaged by the firemen as they fought to put out the fire anyway. But it was always better to collect whatever wasn’t damaged as quickly as possible.
“Sure,” she said finally. “I’ll help. But I can’t collect or bag evidence. That would affect your chain of custody.”
“You won’t have to. You just tell Jefferson what and how and he’ll do it,” he assured her, some of the stiffness sliding from his shoulders now that he had her agreement. He immediately came around the counter to hand her a slip of paper with an address on it. “That’s where the fire is. You’ll want to take your own vehicle so you aren’t stuck there until one of us is ready to go. You have GPS?”
CJ nodded as she glanced down at the address.
“Good. I’ll—”
“Captain!”
Irritation flickered over his face at that shout from somewhere toward the back of the building, and then Captain Dupree started to back away, saying, “You head on over there. I’ll follow in my squad car.”
He didn’t wait for a response, but turned and hurried around the counter and through the doorway at the back of the room, disappearing from sight just as someone shouted for him again.
CJ folded the slip of paper and headed back out to her car. This wasn’t how she’d planned to start her investigation, but that didn’t bother her. Investigations rarely went according to plan. Hell, neither did life for that matter, and she’d learned