me. “You assume a lot, Miss Monroe.”
“Am I wrong?”
There was a long pause and then he said, “Do you think Cade knows?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know your son very well. How’s he been acting since he moved back here?”
“Fine. A little on edge, maybe. But I just thought it had to do with the case, or looking after his teenage daughter. He’s got a lot of his own things he’s dealing with right now. I didn’t want to add one more thing to the list.”
“Do you mind me asking what’s wrong?” I said.
“Pancreatic cancer.”
“Are you getting treatment for it?”
He shook his head.
“Too late for that now. I felt fine at first, and by the time I realized something was wrong, the doctor told me it had spread. It’s too late to operate—too late to do anything but sit and wait to die. Doesn’t seem fair, but I suppose nothin’ ever does.”
I wanted to say something, but what could I say to a person who knew he was going to die? I was a fixer. I liked to fix things, make things whole again. I didn’t know how to be any other way.
“You won’t tell my boy, will you?” he said.
I grabbed Mr. McCoy’s hand, a gesture that shocked both of us. “Of course not. It’s not my secret to tell.”
He smiled.
“You know what? I like you, Miss Monroe. I like you a lot.”
I liked him too.
CHAPTER 21
“Is it possible to lift a print from an envelope?” I said.
Maddie held her hand out. “Anything’s possible, sweetie. What do you have for me?”
I took the envelope out of my bag, using a tissue to handle the edges and handed it to her. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to put it in anything. I just grabbed it.”
She read the address on the front and peeked inside. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“Cade McCoy has it. They’re probably processing it now.”
“And you didn’t want this processed along with it?”
I ran a hand through my hair. “I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking. I saw it inside the top drawer of Mrs. Tate’s nightstand, and I couldn’t resist. I knew I had to leave the coloring page, but I thought I could get away with nabbing this part, so I did.”
She raised a brow. “All righty, then.”
“Can you do anything with it without being at your lab? I doubt we have access to the chemicals you’d need here.”
She raised a finger. “There is another way—a new technique we’ve been using lately in the lab. Believe it or not, I can get prints off this by using a ceramic hair straightener.”
“You’re not serious?” I said.
“Completely. I’ll need my glasses to see the prints though.”
“You don’t wear glasses,” I said.
“I’m not talking about regular glasses. They’re special goggles with orange lenses. Under a certain light, I’ll be able to see the prints. It would probably be easier just to mail this to my guys and let them do it, but then we run the risk of this getting lost somewhere along the way, not to mention what could happen if one of my guys screws up.”
“They know what they’re doing, don’t they?” I said.
“Lifting prints from paper is delicate. If the straightener is on the paper for too long, the paper turns brown, and the prints are lost. Once that happens, there are no do-overs. They’re lost forever.”
I sighed.
“I shouldn’t have taken it,” I said. “Even if you get a print that doesn’t belong to you, me, the mailman, the processors at the post office, and Mr. and Mrs. Tate, you still can’t run it. Not here.”
It was like my brain was running on half a cylinder. I was practical, not irrational. I thought things through. I didn’t talk first and think later. My words were orchestrated, almost rehearsed. So what the hell was I doing?
“Well, it’s too late now,” Maddie said. “What do you want me to do with this?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t know.”
Maddie grabbed a container out of her suitcase, emptied it out, and placed the envelope inside. Then she shoved it into her purse. “While you’re thinking about things, I’ll go pick us up some dinner.”
Maddie scooped Lord Berkeley up with one hand and walked out the door. I stripped down to nothing and stepped into the shower. I stood beneath the faucet wishing the moisture could wash away a lot more than a few flecks of dirt. In some ways, I felt I was getting somewhere locating the missing girls. I’d found