2 The Dante Connection by Estelle Ryan Read Free Book Online Page B

photos next to each other. In chronological order. At each scene the flower was in close proximity to the safe that had been broken in to. In one photo the flower was on what I guessed to be an eighteenth-century cherry wood wall unit. In another, the red flower was on the desk in front of the wall where the open safe was an empty husk.
    Manny and Phillip leaned in to look at the photos on my desk. They were too close to me, so I pushed my chair a bit back and waited. They were looking back and forth at the photos. The change in their breathing was audible as they noticed the flowers in each photo.
    “Well, I’ll be damned.” Manny slumped back in his chair and looked at me with wide eyes. “Doc, you’ve just seen something that none of the detectives had noticed.”
    I sucked my lips in and bit down hard on them before I angered Manny again by remarking that he also had not noticed this. Phillip was still looking at the photos, so close now that his nose was almost touching my desk.
    “This is most frustrating.” Phillip sat up and nodded at the photos. “In some photos it looks like it could be a tulip, in others a Laeliocattleya.”
    “A whatsit?” Manny looked at Phillip as if seeing him for the first time.
    “It’s an orchid hybrid.” As he looked at the photos, his lips pulled into a brief pout, indicating his uncertainty. “No, it can’t be. Oh, I don’t know. Manny, did the crime scene investigators bag the flowers?”
    “I’ll have to check the evidence catalogue.”
    “Could you do that now?” I asked.
    “Um, sure. Do you think this is important?”
    I glared at Manny.
    “Oh, this is too easy.” Manny laughed. “Doc, you make for such an easy target. I got your goat, didn’t I?”
    “I don’t have a goat,” I said in a tight voice. Manny and Phillip started laughing, so I had to wait until they settled. This was it. I was going to have to enrol in some course to enrich my knowledge of metaphors. I didn’t enjoy being laughed at.
    “Sorry, Genevieve,” Phillip said. “This was very amusing.”
    “So I surmised.” My voice was still tight. It sobered Phillip, but Manny continued looking full of mirth.
    “Give me a moment to phone the office. They’ll check the evidence and we might have an answer.” He got up and walked out of my viewing room, chuckling to himself.
    I wavered for a moment, but then decided I had to know. “What just happened?”
    “Manny was only teasing you, Genevieve,” Phillip answered gently.
    “Why?”
    “With your three degrees in psychology, you don’t know?”
    “Some people tease to establish dominance.” I had written a paper on it in my first year in university in Tokyo.
    “You know this is not Manny’s intention.”
    “No, it would appear that his teasing would fall in the other category. It is done out of playful affection. I can see it in his nonverbal cues.”
    “But you don’t look overly happy with it.” Phillip ended his statement in a question form. In the six years he had been my boss, I had learned to interpret it as his request for an explanation.
    “I don’t understand it. Why would Manny feel affection towards me? I’m nobody to him.”
    Manny returned to the viewing room. He grunted something and put his phone in the breast pocket of his jacket.
    “My guys will check these flowers.” He fell into his chair. “What else did you see in those files, Doc?”
    I was happy to return to a topic of a lesser emotional nature. “Apart from the flowers on the photos, I didn’t see anything you don’t already know, but I haven’t studied the files thoroughly yet. For that I would need some time.”
    “Take all the time you need, Doc. Just make it really fast.” Manny looked at one of the dark monitors on the wall. “It doesn’t compute. From the crime scenes it is obvious that these guys are rank amateurs. Yet they knew where all the security features were, they disabled it and had their sights only set on stealing the most