The One That Got Away by Simon Wood

familiar to Beck.
    The camera captured a muffled confrontation with the detectives. Just as it looked as if the blonde was heading to the drunk tank, she unzipped her dress and pointed furiously at her lower hip just above her panty line.
    A tingle of recognition crackled throughout Beck’s body.
    At a sickening speed, the camera zoomed in on what the woman was pointing to.
    He knew what the lens would capture—his mark.
    He fell back in his chair, tuning out the remainder of Dinah Ortiz’s report. It wasn’t important. Something amazing had just happened. It’s her—the Vegas girl, he thought, the one that got away.

CHAPTER SIX
    When the cops didn’t cuff her, Zoë took it as a good sign. It meant they believed her or at least took her claim seriously. The inspectors simply put her in the back of their car and drove her to the Hall of Justice. They didn’t talk on the short drive, not to her and not to each other. She guessed they wanted anything she had to say to be on the record.
    They whisked her through the building and dumped her in an interview room. They took her driver’s license, snapped a photo of the scar on her hip, and gave her a bottle of water. She knew the routine. They were checking up on her. Good. She wanted them to. Then they’d get past the bullshit and could focus on the case.
    Of course, checking her out came with its own problems. They would confirm that she’d been abducted, but they’d also see she’d been drugged and drunk at the time. Credibility was everything, and hers was a little shaky. Maybe they were just taking their time to let her cool off. She had crashed a crime scene, after all. That was fine with her. She took long, cleansing breaths as Jarocki had taught her and felt her body calm down as she waited.
    It was close to an hour before the younger of the two inspectors entered the interview room.
    “Hello, Ms. Sutton. I’m Inspector Ryan Greening. Sorry to have kept you waiting. I hope you’re up for answering some questions.”
    “Yes, and I have some of my own.”
    Greening took the seat opposite her. “And I’ll answer them if I can.”
    She thought it interesting that only one of the inspectors was interviewing her, and of the two, it was the youngest. Did they think she’d connect with someone closer to her own age? Maybe she was overthinking it. So suspicious, Zoë , she thought.
    He handed back her ID and smiled. “Your hair was longer when this was taken.”
    Reflexively, she ran a hand across the back of her head until she touched her bare neck. “Yeah, I keep it short now. Don’t you like it?”
    “Sure, it just makes you look different. Before we get started, I just wanted to inform you that this interview is being recorded. Is that OK?”
    “Fine.”
    He eyed the scratches and bruises she’d picked up on her elbow and shoulder when they’d tackled her. “That wasn’t a very smart thing you did tonight. You could have gotten seriously hurt.”
    “I needed to speak to the people in charge.”
    “There are better ways of doing it than breaking a police cordon and contaminating a crime scene. You could have called or checked in with a station.”
    She didn’t like that Greening was trying to put her in her place. Cops always wanted things done the cop way. Newsflash, the world didn’t operate the cop way, or she wouldn’t have been abducted and they wouldn’t have found a dead woman tonight. “Yeah, but I would have gotten the runaround if I’d done that.”
    Greening didn’t have an answer. Instead, he eyed her left temple and winced. “It looks as if you’ve got a bruise coming.”
    She guessed the makeup she’d put on to hide the bruise had worn off. “You didn’t do that. I picked that up at work.”
    “Really? What do you do?”
    “Mall security.”
    Her answer spurred a raised eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have guessed. How long have you been doing that?”
    “About a year. Can we get back to what happened tonight?”
    “Sure. Can