The Experimental Murders (Elysium #2)

Chapter Fifteen

 When Gin awoke a few hours later, her eyes lit up at the sight of Booker sitting beside her. But that joy soon disappeared and was quickly replaced with outrage.

"What did you think you were doing getting yourself arrested?" she said, standing up on the settee so that she was towering over him. "Do you know how worried I was? I thought I was going to have to kill coppers to get you out."

Booker looked to Trinket for help, but she let Gin go on. The girl had every right to be reprimanding him right now.

"Why would you let them take you in? I thought you were supposed to be some smart doctor, but here you go and let the coppers catch you."

"But I'm innocent. I had nothing to do with those bodies," Booker said.

"So? They hate you. They'll take any evidence against you they can get, true or not. Besides, you do plenty of other shady things I'm sure they'd love to bag you for."

"None of the shady things I do are going to get me arrested."

"Oh? So stealing a dead body is perfectly legal?"

"It wasn't even a crime scene yet. Really, if I had known I was going to get the third degree from you two, I would have stayed the night at the station."

Though he protested, he was clearly suppressing a grin.

Trinket turned to Gin. "Would you stay for breakfast?" she asked.

Gin hesitated, her eyes flicking to Booker. "Yes, please do," he said. "I don't think I've gotten enough scolding to teach me a lesson."

The little urchin could not seem to keep a smile from tugging at her lips. "Well, fine. I guess you owe me that much at least."

~

Gin left when breakfast was over, believing she had "put the fear of God" into Booker well enough. Once she had scampered off into the street, Trinket cleaned up in the kitchen. As she washed the dishes in the scullery, Booker joined her and leaned against the sink.

"So what are we going to do next?" she asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

He heaved a sigh and turned to face the sink. "I'm not entirely sure," he said, taking up a dish towel to dry a wet plate. "All we've found out thus far is that the victims died of seemingly natural causes. Our hands-on investigation didn't really give us any more of a lead."

Trinket watched as he finished with the plate and reached for another, so lost in thought that he was oblivious to her attention. She laughed softly and turned back to the dirty dishes. "Could they have died due to complications from the surgeries?"

"Possibly. But then the question is, why did they come all the way from other towns just to be part of an experiment?"

Something told her that they hadn't exactly been volunteers. "An advertisement, perhaps?"

Booker gave a snort of a laugh. "Could you imagine what that would sound like? 'Mad scientist seeks volunteers to be put under, chopped up, and stitched together with animal parts. Death a major possibility.' Who would answer such a thing?"

"So you don't think they were volunteers?" she asked warily.

"If they were volunteers, I doubt they were in their right minds. They would've had to be terribly desperate, maybe even looking for a way to die."

Taking a deep breath, she concentrated on a particularly stubborn bit of charred bacon on the pan in front of her. That sounded very much like her when she met Booker. Had his friend been the one to find her, would she have agreed to become a test subject in hopes that it would kill her?