Page 39 of Dozer

CHAPTER 11

Dozer

Kenzi finds it while she's doing something I would've called routine if I knew enough about forensic preservation to call anything about it routine. I’ve realized on this case I don’t know much about forensics. I know how to preserve a chain of evidence, but that’s about as far as it goes.

We've stopped at a rest area outside some town I haven't bothered learning the name of, long enough for her to check the evidence case and the samples she pulled at the morgue, sealed and logged with the kind of meticulous precision she's explained to me twice already because I asked, because understanding the chain of custody matters if I'm going to keep it intact with my life. She has the case open on the trunk of the car, gloves on, her laptop balanced beside it, and I'm doing my usual perimeter check of a parking lot that has exactly one other vehicle, three light poles, a row of trees too thin to provide meaningful cover, and absolutely nothing I like about the place.

I circle the lot anyway. Habit. There are worse things than being predictable about the things that keep people alive.

I'm halfway around the far side of the vehicle when I hear it.

"Dozer."

Something in the way she says my name pulls my attention off the lot entirely. Not panic. Not fear. Something sharper.

I turn. She's holding one of the sample vials up to the light, turning it slowly between her gloved fingers. Her entire posture has changed. Her shoulders are rigid, her head angled slightly, eyes narrowed behind the lenses of the glasses she wears whenever she works, and every trace of the woman who spent the first few hours of this mission filling my truck with commentary has disappeared. This is Kenzi in work mode. I'm beginning to recognize the difference.

"What."

"This shouldn't look like this."

I'm beside her before she finishes the sentence. "Talk to me."

"The preservation solution is cloudy." She holds it up again, examining it from another angle. "It shouldn't be cloudy. Not this fast. Not under proper storage conditions." She sets it down carefully, too carefully, like it might still be dangerous even sealed, which, for all either of us knows, it might be. "Someone introduced a contaminant," she says. "Deliberately."

I look at the vial. Then the case. Then her.

"This isn't degradation," she continues. "This is tampering."

I run the timeline through my head, fast. The morgue. The evidence collection. The motel. The attack. The vehicle swaps. The parking lot. Every point where somebody could've gotten close enough.

"When did you last check it clean?"

"This morning. Before the motel."

"So somewhere between this morning and right now, somebody got close enough to our gear to poison evidence without either of us noticing."

She doesn't answer immediately. Her gaze stays on the vial, and I watch that same flat, working stillness settle over her that I saw at the morgue. This is the version of her that stops talking, her silence says a lot because this woman is almost never silent.

"This is bad," she says.

"How bad?"

She finally looks at me. "Someone knew exactly what they were doing." I wait. "They didn't just contaminate evidence. They contaminated the chain of custody. If the lab sees compromised samples, everything connected to them gets questioned. Defense attorneys will tear the entire case apart. They'll argue the evidence was altered, mishandled, manufactured." She looks back at the case. "And if somebody understands that well enough to deliberately target the preservation solution, they understand forensic procedure."

Which means the leak isn't just feeding our route to shooters. It's feeding someone technical enough to know precisely how to unmake the one piece of proof we're risking our lives to protect. I feel something cold settle low in my gut.

"How many?"

She checks the remaining vials. "Not all of them."

"How many are compromised?"

"I need to test them properly before I know."

"Do it."

She looks at me. "I need better equipment."