As soon as her uncle had vacated the building, Dani opened her desk drawer and pulled out the wad of tissues. Blades of grass decorated her desktop calendar as she put the tissue down and unwrapped it. The cigarette butt was a little flatter than it had been when she’d first laid eyes on it, but otherwise, it was intact.
She had no idea what in the hell to do with it, or what good it was to her, but it was something. It was a piece of evidence from a crime scene and that fact made her feel like a bona fide investigator.
She grabbed a pen and used it to gently roll the cigarette butt over. She whispered what she observed. “Cigarette butt. Approximately one inch long. No lipstick detected. Three white stripes circle the top of the filter.”
Unbeknownst to Dani, Terry Randle spotted her from the other side of the room and made his way quietly through the station to her desk. He stood motionless and listened to her describe the cigarette butt to no one in particular. Without warning, he reached down and snatched the filter from her desk. “What in the hell are you doing, little deputy?”
Dani stood like she was sitting on a spring and slapped Randle on the shoulder. “Goddamn it, Terry! You asshole! You’ve got your prints all over a piece of evidence!”
He laughed despite the fact that she’d managed to actually hurt him. “Evidence? For what?”
Dani settled her temper and held out her hand. “Give it here.”
“Tell me what it’s evidence for, first.” Deputy Randle had ten years’ experience on Dani, but lacked even the slightest interest in his law enforcement duties. The job was a paycheck to him, not to mention a few freebies here and there from local business owners. Other than that, he was as much a cop as a security officer at a shopping mall.
“Nothing that concerns you,” Dani said.
He held the filter between his thumb and index finger, and closed one eye as he pretended to study it. When he was sufficiently entertained, he snorted out a laugh and placed it in the palm of her hand.
Dani looked at it as if he had just placed a ticking time bomb in her hand. She grabbed one of the tissues off the desk and wrapped it around the filter.
Randle walked away and said, “In case you’re interested, it’s a Porter 100.”
She watched him move to his desk. “How do you know?”
“Used to be my brand, before I quit.”
Dani opened the tissue and looked at the filter. “I’ve never heard of Porter cigarettes.”
Randle sat at his desk and tapped his password into his computer. “Gotta be a real smoker to know Porter. They don’t advertise or nothing.”
“What’s so great about them?”
“They’re cheap as shit,” Randle said.
She put the tissue with the cigarette butt in her pocket and approached his desk. “They sell them just anywhere?”
Randle clicked away on his keyboard. “Nah, that was the pain in the ass about smoking Porters. Regular stores don’t carry them. You gotta go to one of them discount tobacco places to get a pack. I used to buy them by the trunk-load.”
“Where?”
Randle sat back with a smile as he stared at the screen.
When Dani heard a woman moaning from the small inboard computer speaker, she rolled her eyes and hurried around the desk. She tapped the spacebar on the keyboard causing the porn Randle was watching to pause.
“Hey!”
“Where’s this discount tobacco place?”
“Up the interstate, right off the Briar exit. Crazy Carl’s Cheap Tobacco or some stupid name like that.” He hit the spacebar and brought his porn back to life.
Dani stopped short of running to the front door.
“Hey, Dani,” Randle called out.
She turned to him.
“You want I should tell the state boys you absconded with evidence from their double homicide investigation?”
She was actually impressed that he was able to put that much together. “You want I should tell Uncle Otis you’re watching porn on a station computer?”
Randle guffawed. “Who the hell do you think sent me the link to this site?”
Dani quietly grunted in frustration. “What do you want?”
“A back rub,” he said, flashing a creepy grin.
“Terry Randle, I swear to Christ…”
“I was just kidding. Take my Sunday shift for the next three months, and I won’t say a word.”
“Fine.”
“Really? Shit, I should’ve said six months.”
Dani exited the building before she had the opportunity to break down and confess to Randle that she would have taken his Sunday shifts for the next year or longer. She much preferred her time spent in her uniform over her time spent in her civilian attire. She felt like nothing at all without her badge.