Blood Secrets-Valorian 1 by Vivi Anna Page B

senses and intuition, he wouldn’t be doing this lab any good. And Eve was starting to interfere with that. He was starting to care about her in a way that made the case come second.
    He couldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t. Not after all he’d worked for, all he had done for this lab. The sooner they solved this case, the sooner Eve would be gone. And he could carry on with his life—uncomplicated and with a singular purpose—to collect evidence and solve crimes.

Chapter 15
    H ead down, Eve marched down the corridor toward the analysis room. As she walked, she had the distinct sensation of being watched. When she neared the open door, she looked up and spied Kellen down the hall leaning against another doorjamb, eyeing her.
    She met his gaze, expecting him to smile, but he just watched her with a slight twitch in his upper lip. She had the distinct feeling of being ogled from head to toe. His gaze was not of friendly interest but one of predatory lust.
    She quickly dropped her gaze and stepped into the room. She pulled up short when she saw Lyra at the computer, looking at magical symbols projected in large format on the wall.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
    “No worries.”
    “I need to go over the laptop again. Is it going to bother you if I work in here, too?”
    “Knock yourself out,” Lyra said without looking at Eve, as she flipped to another symbol.
    Eve settled herself at the smaller table behind Lyra’s workstation. Trying to shake the creepy sensations left by Kellen’s gaze, she opened up the laptop and attempted to access Lillian’s e-mail account. Maybe she could recover all the e-mails sent to her address even though Lillian had deleted them from her in-box. They still could be in the system somewhere.

    After a half hour of trial and error, Eve couldn’t find any e-mails in the victim’s computer that had been requests for a meeting. All she could find were several notes from vamploverX claiming how much he liked Lillian and had enjoyed talking with her at the concert. Although Xavier hadn’t confessed to being vamploverX, there was no doubt in Eve’s mind that he was. She’d have to wait until they had a warrant before she could access that particular Hotmail account.
    Now she had to call Detective Salinas, which she dreaded more than working a grisly crime scene. She could just imagine what her former lover was going to say about Caine and the situation that had transpired at the Crawfords’.
    Sliding her cell phone out from her purse, she dialed his number and waited with a lump forming in her throat.
    He picked up after three rings. “Salinas.”
    “Aaron, it’s Eve.”
    The silence on the other end was like an icy fog. She shivered involuntarily just picturing Aaron’s stern expression on the other end.
    “I wanted to know if you talked with Lillian Crawford’s boyfriend and her friends.”
    “Yeah, I did.”
    “And?” It was like pulling teeth with him. He had always been a stubborn son of a bitch.
    Macho to a fault.
    He hadn’t started out like that. She had fallen for him initially because of the respectful way he had dealt with her once on a crime scene she attended, and it hadn’t hurt that he possessed those dark Latin looks coupled with a hard, muscled body. After meeting her on the scene, he had sent flowers to the lab every day for a week until she agreed to go out with him.
    A month later, the flowers stopped and so had the respect.
    “The boyfriend confirmed that she was starting to hang out with this Goth crowd. The last time he spoke to her was on the phone Tuesday morning. They were supposed to hook up later at the mall, but she never showed. He thought she was just playing games and it never crossed his mind to track her down or call her parents. He started to get worried by Wednesday afternoon when he hadn’t heard from her. That was when he called her parents and they reported her missing.”
    Eve wrote as he spoke. “And the