“We’ll do it again soon. Maybe with more finesse, though.”
She had to laugh, and he joined her quietly. But her gaze was drawn back to the tablet, and a moment later he withdrew his touch, reaching for his own computer.
“I can’t help it,” she said after a moment.
“Help what?”
“I can’t stand an unsolved case. It won’t leave me alone, not for anything.”
He reached out and this time covered her hand with his. “It’s okay. It’s who we are. It’s what we do. We’d be lousy investigators if we acted like it was just a regular day job.”
She smiled, feeling a bit better that she’d explained herself. She wasn’t trying to ignore him, not at all, but this case gnawed at her, and the gnawing hadn’t eased one bit with the appearance of a possible suspect.
Probably the wrong guy, given how most things went, but she was willing to chase it all the way to the end. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be overlooked.
Twenty minutes later, her hopes faded. The DMV database showed that Calvin Sweet had never let his license lapse.
She looked up. “Don’t we have an integrated DMV in this country?”
“They’re working toward it. Slowly. Forty-six states share information about major infractions. Minor infractions can vary. But as for general information...not yet. So unless this guy committed an offense bigger than a parking ticket, or in many cases a speeding infraction, you’re not going to find out where else he might have had a license without a warrant.”
“DMV just shows his license is up-to-date, last renewed six years ago. Nothing else at all. So if he lived elsewhere, he either never got an in-state license there or he never turned in his Wyoming license.”
“It’s not all that uncommon,” he said. “Especially the part about turning in your old license. Unless the state requires it, most people don’t bother. They just get a new one. And sometimes the new states don’t even ask you to turn in your old one. And then there are folks that never get a new license.”
“True.” She sat back, rubbing her eyes briefly. “Dead end. I sure as hell don’t have probable cause for a warrant to get information on his residency in the other states.”
“We’re not done yet.”
Of course they weren’t. She stood up and went to get some more coffee, turning everything around in her mind. Maybe she’d been too quick to leap on Calvin Sweet. Just because he’d said he’d visited Houston and lived in Boston didn’t mean he had anything to do with this horror.
Cade had asked her if she’d had any kind of vibe, and she’d answered that she hadn’t. Didn’t mean anything one way or another. It wasn’t as if evil radiated off someone. In fact, in her experience evil seemed to have a benign face all too often, like that guy who had raped her, like so many others she had investigated.
At least not unless you were psychic, a thought that twisted her mouth wryly. She’d never claimed such a thing and didn’t really believe in it. Some people were just better at intuition than others. If you looked really hard, you could probably find a reason for what seemed like a supernatural insight.
Which had been Cade’s essential question. Did anything about Calvin Sweet bother her at any level? She’d been so focused on her responses to what he’d said about where he’d been that she might have missed something.