Cutting Edge by Allison Brennan

by sight what he’d last eaten.”
    Pete excused himself and left the room.
    Nora said, “The fire started around one-thirty in the morning. So he’d already been dead for six hours.” That put the latest time of death at approximately seven-thirty Sunday evening, the earliest Saturday afternoon.
    Nora emailed Duke and asked him if he’d yet accessed the security logs for the weekend. What if Payne was dead in the office long before the arsonists arrived? That seemed an unlikely coincidence, but something she needed to rule out.
    “So what do you think caused those marks, Dr. Coffey?” Nora asked.
    “I think the body was transported shortly after death. Rigor mortis set in while lying on a hard, smoothly ridged surface.”
    “Smoothly ridged? That seems an oxymoron.”
    “I won’t put this in writing until I get a mold done and compare with the books, but I think he was in the back of a pickup truck for several hours after he was killed. The truck was likely enclosed or I would have seen evidence of greater insect activity.”
    “And because it would be obvious to passersby that a partially naked dead man was in the back.”
    He cracked a grin. “Right.”
    “So we’re looking for a pickup truck with a camper shell or another similar secure top.”
    “And probably a long-bed. The vic is six feet two inches tall. He was at a diagonal in the truck — you can tell by the ridges. And he was flat — they didn’t break rigor to move him.”
    Pete stepped back into the room. “Fish and Game just arrived at Butcher-Payne. The guy in charge is looking for you.”
     
     
    Sean Rogan slid into a plastic chair in the cafeteria of Rose College, stabbed the salad in front of him with his fork, pretending he was punching Duke in the face.
    Play the part, Duke said. Be one of them, Duke said. You’ll be fine, Duke said.
    Duke could go pound sand for all Sean cared. He hated college, had hated MIT while he was there, straight A’s notwithstanding.
    Straight A’s except for one damn
B minus
in English from that stodgy female professor who didn’t like him.
    Sean slumped in his seat and ate the leaves in front of him. How could people survive on this rabbit food? His nose twitched, the warm, tantalizing scent of grilled hamburgers making his stomach growl.
    Duke owed him big time.
    Jonah is dead
.
    Sean sighed away his anger and devoured the salad. Then he downed two of the four pints of milk in front of him. At least the milk satisfied the hollow feeling in his stomach.
    “You drink
milk?”
    Sean looked up as he wiped his lips with his napkin. A cute brunette who didn’t wear makeup — and didn’t need it — stood in front of him with her tray in one hand and her other hand on her hip.
    “I have problems with my bones,” he lied automatically. “My doctor insisted that I drink milk for the calcium.” He prayed she didn’t ask any details, because he’d have to make them up.
    “You can take pills for that.”
    “He said it wasn’t the same.” Sean didn’t know
what
he was saying, but it sounded good. If he had to pretend to be a vegetarian for the next week or two, he could live — but he was
not
giving up milk. Not even for Duke.
    She put her tray down on the table and her pretty ass in the chair across from him. The raw veggies on her plate wouldn’t be able to keep Sean thinking coherently for five minutes, let alone sustain him for an hour.
    “Doctors are all quacks,” she said. “I have a great nutritionist. I can hook you up with him if you want.”
    “Sounds good,” he said. Nutritionist? What would he tell Sean that he didn’t already know?
Eat a well-balanced meal, stay away from sugar, exercise
. “I didn’t catch your name?”
    “Anya.”
    “Anya. That’s nice. Russian?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. I never asked.”
    “Asked?”
    “My parents.”
    “Why?”
    She shrugged again. “I was never able to talk to them. They don’t understand, you know?”
    Sean remembered