“Exactly which part of ‘I just bought those’ are you having trouble understanding?” I barked. “And, if you’ll look closely you’ll see I got a few of them from the library as well.”

My objections had gone unheeded for the most part, and me simply being angry was starting to become me being flat-out, livid pissed. Even as I spoke, the stack of books was being placed in a paper evidence bag.

“Dammit! You aren’t taking those!” I almost shouted.

“Calm down, Mister Gant.” The lead crime scene technician tried to soothe me as his subordinate continued the process of securing the evidence, tagging it, and adding a description to the log.

“Calm down? My wife’s been arrested, you’re tearing my house apart, and now you’re going to take something that belongs to me and has nothing to do with this, all so you can use it against her? Calm down my ass!”

I would have simply pushed the man aside and gone after the technician who was actually bagging the books, but the situation had recently taken on a new layer of complexity. That layer came in the form of two uniformed Briarwood police officers who were presently standing in very close proximity to our heated disagreement. They had arrived at the house within a scant few minutes of the evidence technicians and had been quietly surveying the goings on from the middle of the dining room ever since. Until now, that is.

When they originally showed up, I assumed it had something to do with cooperation between jurisdictions. Keeping each other in the loop, professional courtesy, that sort of thing. While that was probably true to a large extent, they were now quite obviously providing security for the team that was legally ransacking my home.