Dhara cringed as she glanced up from her cluttered desk and saw not one, not two, but three detectives approaching her cubicle, all looking like they meant business.

Damn it, what had she done?

Her eyes fell on the stack of audiotapes still awaiting transcription, some more than two weeks old. One of them was for an arson investigation that had been a constant in the local news but then Detective Riley had given her the witness interviews from a manslaughter case and claimed that those took precedence. With her boss out of town, it was so difficult to know which detective to listen to—and which to ignore.

She held her breath as the men drew close to her desk. Maybe they were looking for Stacy, her cubicle mate and the keeper of the hockey pool scores. Her thoughts churned. Was it hockey season already? No, not for another month. That meant—

“Good morning, Dhara,” a deep male voice said from far above her head. “How are you doing this fine day?”

It was drizzling outside, a fact that seemed to have escaped Detective Cross, one of the men in Dhara’s department, the Criminal Investigations Unit.

She plastered a smile on her face as she looked up at the stocky, red-faced police officer. “I’m good, Detective. How can I help you?”

“And how are you fitting into the CIU?”

“Very well so far.”

She’d spent the first year of her time with the police force in the Recordkeeping Department, a strictly administrative unit, until the highly sought after spot in the CIU had opened up. Due to her previous experience working as an assistant in a law firm, which gave her familiarity with legal terms, she had won out over a dozen other women in the force. She’d been in the CIU for four months already, but in a police force where the veterans usually had thirty or so years of experience behind them, a few months was almost nothing.

“Great,” said Cross. He turned to the two men flanking him. “Let me introduce you to two of our colleagues, both from the provincial police.”

The provincial police? Dhara had never heard of them visiting before.

Cross went on. “This is Detective Sergeant Don Martin”—he indicated a short, thin man with a luxuriant mustache—“and this is Detective Sergeant Jason Rourke.”

Jason Rourke looked much younger than his colleague, perhaps in his early thirties. Dhara’s shy peek at him showed that he was taller than Cross, and blond. Very blond.

“How do you do?” she murmured.

Detective Cross turned to his friends from the province. “Gentlemen, this is Dhara Joshi. She’s the wonderful transcriber I’ve been telling you about.”

Dhara looked down at the computer keyboard in front of her and her fingers lying atop it. Piano-playing fingers, her mother had declared at a young age, except the ears that went with them weren’t terribly musical. But she could type quickly and accurately.

“Dhara,” Cross said, addressing her once again as he settled his ample behind on the edge of her desk, “we have a project for you. I’ve cleared it through the proper channels—”

“Inspector Handler is on annual leave,” she said quickly, naming the head of the division and her boss, “and out of town for the next two weeks.”

“I’ve run it by Superintendent Wilkins,” Cross told her smoothly, referring to her boss’s boss. “He has agreed to spare you from regular tasks for the duration of the project. Someone from another unit will be filling in for you on a temporary basis.”

This project must be very important if they were calling in the provincial police and getting a superintendent involved.

Dhara laced her fingers in her lap to keep them from shaking. Whatever the project was, she knew that she was completely inappropriate for it. She’d only been transcribing for four months! There were women in other units and other divisions who had been doing her job for thirty-five years.

“The project,” a new voice cut in, “involves a possible serial killer.”

The voice belonged to the one named Rourke and it was so cold and so harsh that she felt for an instant as if she was being accused of these heinous crimes. Dhara twisted her head back to stare up at him, hoping that his face wasn’t as implacable, but the decisive features looked just as frozen. It was too bad, really, because he was very handsome with his clear gray eyes and thin sculpted mouth.

“I’ll do whatever I can to assist,” Dhara heard herself saying, almost to her surprise.

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Rourke. “We will begin immediately.”

Dhara cast an appealing glance at Detective Cross, who was watching her, then around the big room. Every eye that wasn’t conspicuously focused on a computer screen was openly staring. The pool of a dozen detectives had greeted her warmly when she had replaced her retiring predecessor. Her friends back in Recordkeeping had joked with her that the CIU hadn’t had a single and pretty assistant for decades. Some of the younger detectives had attempted to make the most of the opportunity, but after a disastrous taste of what it was like to date a police officer over a year ago, Dhara had steered clear.

Besides, her parents would never approve of one of these tough ‘white boys’ as a suitable match for their only daughter. She liked to tease them about acting as if they were still stuck in India, despite having lived in Canada all of Dhara’s life, but she also loved her parents and knew that in a few years’ time, she would give in as her older brother had done and marry someone her parents approved of. That was how things worked in her extended family.

In the meantime, she intended to have some fun, she’d decided that wouldn’t be with another cop.

No way.

“Hey, Dhara,” one of the young detectives named Campbell called out from his desk as soon as the three other men had moved a few feet away. “Are you leaving us?”

She stood up to gather her purse and a few personal belongings. Cross had explained that this job would be based out of the police headquarters a few miles away.

“Just for a while,” she explained. “I’ll be back soon.”

Campbell jumped out of his chair and rushed over to grab her in a big bear hug that lifted her right off her feet.

“Hey!” Dhara laughingly protested. “Put me down!”

Detective Campbell had tried to make a move when she’d first started at the CIU and she didn’t want to encourage him.

“Hey, fellas, Dhara’s leaving us!” Campbell called out to the room at large.

Cries of ‘no way’ and ‘how come?’ went up throughout the room.

Standing in the center of a mass of big male bodies, Dhara had to explain the situation as Cross and the two provincial detective sergeants looked on. She emphasized the temporary nature of her absence twice before the group finally dispersed with a round of hugs and one quick impertinent kiss from her first admirer.

“Popular young lady,” she heard Rourke drawl from his observation point.

“Dhara’s a great assistant,” Detective Cross replied, a little indignantly. “The unit will miss her hard work.”

Rourke’s answering laugh was short and mocking. It made her cheeks sting as if they had been slapped.

Rourke, his eyes on Dhara’s flushed face, said, “That was obvious.”

* * * *

The murder had taken place eighteen years ago just outside a then newly built suburb. The body had been discovered the next day, as a man had walked his dog next to the construction zone. No one on the construction site nor at the nearby farmhouse had seen anything. And none of the victim’s family or friends knew what she would have been doing that far away from her home late in the evening.

“A complete mystery,” Don Martin mused out loud as he spread the old files across the table at one end of the room. On the other end was a small desk, which was to be Dhara’s. “At least, that’s how it’s been for the past eighteen years.”

Dhara peered at a photograph of a blonde girl, smiling and pretty, in a thick blue sweater. She looked so…young. Dhara checked the dates beneath the photograph. The girl, Bonnie Lloyd, had been only nineteen when she was murdered, seven years younger than Dhara was now. Yet, eighteen years ago, this girl would have been older than her. A life cut short. She’d heard the phrase so many times before. But this was what it meant. A girl who ought to have been a woman now, working, independent, perhaps married or even a mother, yet she would forever remain a girl, a student, someone’s child. The thought was sobering.

“What changed?” Dhara asked Martin.

She noticed Rourke had retreated to a corner of the large room behind a stack of pages, apparently deeming it a waste of time to explain to her, as a mere assistant, the case that she would be spending the next few weeks working on.

“Fourteen months ago, we received this.” Martin showed her another photograph. It showed a wooden box, its lid swung open to reveal a set of eight felt-lined compartments, each containing a glittering object.

“It’s an old jewelry case. A woman turned it in to a police force two hundred miles west of here. It belonged to her brother, who had recently passed away, and she couldn’t find any reason for his having it. He was a lifelong bachelor and, as far as she knew, he never even dated. Yet all of the items were used, not new.

“She had her suspicions about her brother for a long time—he was an odd duck—but didn’t expect anything like this. So she turned it in and the police force who received it were able to match two of the items to two cold case victims. Both young women in their teens or early twenties, both strangled to death, both found within a day or two. The killer didn’t make any efforts to hide the bodies.”

Dhara shuddered. “How many of the victims have they identified?”

“Seven,” Martin replied. “With the help of the other police forces, we’ve finally concluded the cases and given some closure to the families. This is our last one.”

Which meant that these two men had been talking to the friends and families of dead girls for over a year. Bitter, nerve-wracking work.

“I’m sorry,” Dhara said. “This must be incredibly hard work for you to do.”

Rourke gave a snort from his corner. “You think?” He put down the papers he’d been holding. “Running around the region, dredging up old tragedies, digging up old pain. It’s the devil’s own work.”

His hostile tone took Dhara aback. What had she ever done to Rourke to make him so antagonistic?

Maybe, she told herself, it was just the nature of his current work that was getting to him. He must be anxious to close this last case and be done with the entire project.

“What would you like me to start on?” she asked brightly, turning back toward Martin.

He bent to lift a banker’s box onto a clear spot on the table. “We’ve got a stack of tapes from the witness and family interviews in here. Like the other cold cases, these matters never went to court so the interviews never got transcribed. Now, before we shut the case for good, we need all of this on paper, and later on computer, before the tapes degrade.”

Dhara stared fearfully at the box. If it was even near full of tapes, she would have days or even weeks of typing ahead of her.

“What do you do with all the evidence afterwards?” she asked. It seemed strange to do all of that work only to have it sit in the archives for eternity.

“After we finish documenting a case, we take it back to the Special Prosecutor that’s been appointed by the ministry and put the entire file in front of her. She needs to sign off on each case before we can consider it truly closed. After this one is done, she’ll probably be calling a special media conference to let the public know about this guy. We need to make sure we have airtight cases before we do that.”

“So it’s almost like you are preparing for court,” Dhara pointed out, “except because the suspect is dead, it’s the court of public opinion that tries the cases, rather than the court of law.”

Martin smiled at her. “Exactly.”

The warm feeling that approving smile gave her was completely destroyed by the sound of a drawling voice from the corner.

“Now how about you let Miss Joshi get on with her work, Martin? Remember that we’ve got some of our own to do.”

As Dhara reached into the box for the first handful of cassette tapes, she realized how quickly she could get sick of that man, Rourke. In fact, she was already halfway there.

Yet there was something compelling about him. It was obvious how seriously he took his job, unlike some detectives she’d met who dealt with seeing horrific crimes every day by joking all the time, often in appallingly inappropriate ways. She understood why they did it—it was the way they were able to cope with doing such a tough job—but she didn’t necessarily approve.

Jason Rourke was nothing like that. He was dedicated to the point of humorlessness. Did the man never smile? With those lips, he must have a lovely smile.

And he was gorgeous.

Dhara hadn’t failed to notice the surreptitious glances that followed his broad-shouldered, lean-hipped form as they walked through the police headquarters to their assigned boardroom. He moved nicely, almost gracefully, for such a tall man, in a way that hinted at an innate athleticism. While it wasn’t unusual to see trim male bodies in the police force, Rourke’s was a particularly spectacular example.

Surely he wouldn’t frown when he was naked. She spent a few seconds creating that image in her head. His body was probably as golden as his face, just lightly sun-kissed, and his body hair would be darker than the pale blond of his hair, almost honey-colored. It would get darker as it crossed his flat stomach, moving toward his hard d—

For the second time that day, Dhara felt her face heating.

She kept her eyes fixed on her computer screen as she hooked up the transcription machine and put on her headphones.

Were the two men watching her? She could almost feel Rourke’s gray eyes on the back of her head. Was he laughing at her? Could he guess her thoughts?

No, she told herself firmly as she opened up a new file and started typing in the date and project name. She would not allow herself to fantasize about another cop. This time, she was looking for a partner, not just a sex buddy. She kept firmly in mind that one day she needed to make her family happy and finally find that ‘good Indian boy’ they wanted.