Grant studied her face. It made Hayley feel inexplicably guilty...and hot. "Did you think it was strange when you, what's the word, 'pinged' him three times and he didn't answer?" he asked.

"Well, after three times, I did think it was strange. No, that's not true. I thought it was inconvenient. I didn't think it was strange, per se. And it wasn't like it was a rush job or anything, so I didn't go and bug him about it immediately."

"And you didn't detect anything unusual until you went into his cube."

"You mean why didn't I smell anything." He just couldn't let it go, could he?

Something snapped. It just snapped.

Hayley slumped back in her chair, looked up at him, and waved her hands about in the air. "You think it's possible here to smell the difference between Fred's dead body on the right and the sweating engineer on the left?" She gestured with her head to the cube on the other side, then calmly stared at the detective for a beat before bursting into hysterical laughter.

As she laughed out of control for a solid minute, Grant Hutchinson didn't say a word. The look on his face went from incredulous to possibly amused-although it might have been disgust, actually-before it shut down completely into a blank facade.

Hayley stopped laughing immediately and jumped up from the chair, horrified. And then she burst into tears. Through her tears, Hayley could see the detective take a deep breath and slowly exhale. He put down his notebook and came over to her, putting his arm loosely around her shoulders. With his other hand he pulled a travel-size Kleenex packet from his pocket and handed it to her.

Hayley dabbed at her eyes. The guy really was quite good-looking. He had a solid frame and good bone structure. He was polite enough to call her "Miss Smith" and Fred "deceased" instead of "dead," even if he was somewhat rude and condescending the rest of the time. So what if he'd pissed her off at least twice. And now to top it all, here he was, totally prepared with a brand-new travel Kleenex packet, even.

Good-looking, polite but not so polite that it made you just want to be friends, and prepared.

Good-looking, fuckable, prepared.

Hayley leaned in, tucked her face into the crook of his neck, and sobbed a couple of times.

"That's all right. We'll take it slow," he said, and gave her shoulder an awkward squeeze. He cleared his throat. "We're almost finished with the questions anyway. In fact, I don't need to take notes. We'll just make it a little conversation. Okay?" He propped her back up and Hayley nodded, sniffling into her tissue.

She knew she was supposed to be thinking about Fred and the questions and what a tragedy it all was, but for some reason as she answered the detective's carefully worded questions, she kept focusing in on the oddest little non-Fred details. It was just that it was so difficult to concentrate, what with the cloying heat and the detective being so comforting and all.