“I’d say your subconscious recognizes your latest victim contributed to her own fate, and if personality follows into death, she’d bitch and cast the blame about.”
“Yeah. She deserved a good punch in the face, but she didn’t deserve murder—or having her last moments splashed all over the Internet and gossip venues. So.” She drained her coffee where she stood. “Morgue,” she grumbled and headed for the shower.
She’d just started to work out the basic outline of her morning when Roarke stepped in behind her, into the hot, crisscrossing jets.
His arms came around her. That hard, wet body pressed against her back, and she lost her train of thought.
“A little life to start off the day.” His hand slid down to her center. “And to counterbalance the morgue.”
“When you put it like that.” She started to turn around, turn into him, and found herself pressed to the tiles.
“We’ll just have to make it quick.”
His fingers slid into her, shot her straight to peak even as his teeth grazed over the back of her neck.
She splayed her hands on the tiles, prepared to push off, pivot somehow, and grab on to him. But he thrust inside her, destroyed her with hard, fast strokes. Her vision blurred—crazed pleasure, rising steam, the pulsing beat of water—so she closed her eyes, surrendered.
She heard the helpless sounds she made, echoing, drowning under the hot rain. And everything in her tightened, clung, hung on that sharp, stunning edge between pleasure and panic.
Then fell.
Somewhere, somehow, she felt his heart pounding against her back and his lips brushing against the side of her neck. Felt his grip become a caress before he turned her.
Once again she looked straight into his eyes, and thought she’d fallen into that perfect blue sea after all.
She skimmed her fingers through his wet hair. “I guess the word’s wow.”
His lips curved as she brushed hers over them. “Something about having my naked wife serve me coffee in bed, I suppose.”
She held on to him another moment, decided dreams of the bitching dead and trips to the morgue really could be counterbalanced.
Then she nudged him away. “Okay, that’s done, now hands off, pal. I’ve got to move.”
She finished showering, hopped in the drying tube and, grabbing the robe off the back of the door, went out for a second hit of coffee. She’d programmed breakfast by the time he came out, a towel slung around his hips.
“Hungry, are you?”
“I am now.”
He grabbed a robe for himself so he could join her. And, after removing warming domes, sat a moment in silence.
“You programmed oatmeal.”
“Yeah, so? I … What? Damn it!”
He sat back, laughing at her shocked consternation.
“You’ve screwed with my subconscious. I should be eating waffles.”
He patted her leg. “Tomorrow, waffles it is, whoever gets to the AC first.”
Since she just continued to scowl at the bowl, he doctored up the oatmeal as he knew she liked—or tolerated. “It’s a good choice. We’re caught in this cold snap, dipping down from Canada. We’ll be lucky to hit twenty degrees today.”
“Canada’s got no business dipping down here so the rest of us have to eat oatmeal.” But she ate it, and comforted herself with berries.
“What can I do to help today, if I manage to find some time for it?”
“You can let me know if you know any rich old ladies with a greedy, murderous son who plays the biddable, and a daughter who can be framed.”
He considered as he ate. “I likely have a passing acquaintance with a few.”
“Next vic. She’ll have her target selected and set up. I don’t know how long she’ll wait to move on it now. Whether she’ll push or step back. But if the bartender comes through with Yancy, I’ll have a face. And maybe Harvo finds something on the damn coat. Maybe we turn up the dreads and get something off them. Loxie made it easy for her, but she still moved too fast, and she made mistakes.
“I’ve got to dig deeper into Delaware,” she continued as she got up to go to her closet. “Especially if I have a face. She had a life there. She lived somewhere, worked somewhere. Shopped, ate, has a history there. Maybe family.”
She thought it through while she dressed, came out to find Roarke knotting a wine-colored tie with thin gray stripes. The gray matched his shirt exactly and came in a few tones lighter than the suit.
As she strapped on her weapon, she saw him pick up the gray button he always carried, slide it into his pocket. And felt a stupefying wave of love.
She rubbed a hand over the diamond under her sweater. Here was the cop, sentimental over a big, fat diamond. And the kazillionaire sappy over some stray button.
What a pair they were.
“Luck’s bullshit.”
He glanced over. “Darling Eve, those are fighting words for an Irishman.”
“Luck’s bullshit,” she repeated, and put a hunter green jacket over a sweater the color of Mira’s tea. “Except when it isn’t. I’m feeling pretty lucky to wake up with you, then there’s the whole getting nailed in the shower, even if oatmeal followed. I can’t say that counterbalances Strongbow’s luck last night, but it’s given me a damn good start to the day.”
Eve filled her jacket pockets with her usual paraphernalia. “She doesn’t have that—not just the waking up and getting nailed. She might have a rush from the kill, but she’s got to be worried. She got spotted, chased, left possessions behind. She has to worry about that. She has to worry about me.”
Now he studied her as she’d studied him. “How will she write you in, Lieutenant?”
“Can’t say, but I can guarantee her story isn’t going to have a happy ending.”
Thinking of stories, of endings, she sent Feeney a long text as she drove downtown along madly slippery streets.
Attached are several writing samples from my prime suspect in the three murders associated with Blaine DeLano’s Dark series. If you’re not up to date, McNab can brief you. Is it possible to run an analysis of the writing, do a global search for similar styles, word uses, blah, blah, focusing on sites for writers? Wannabe types? Especially places where they can put up samples of their work for others to read?
I can have Peabody start a search on social media sites. Suspect wrote a manuscript titled Hot Blood, Cold Mind, but my searches for the title on self-publishing types, social media, and so forth gets bupkus.
On my way to the morgue now to see what Morris can tell me about her third vic. I’ll be in Central in about an hour if you need any clarification. Appreciate it. Dallas
Long shot, Eve thought. She wasn’t confident Strongbow would put her work out there for comments or criticism. But maybe, maybe, there was a hunger that needed feeding. Maybe she’d risk it.
Eve’s DLE handled the ice patches with barely a shudder, and certainly better than the pair of Rapid Cabs she saw crunched together on Ninth between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-fourth.
Still, she couldn’t deny relief when she could get out of the damn car, off the damn streets, and into the white tunnel of the morgue.
Halfway down she heard the unmistakable Peabody clump behind her.
She paused in the air that smelled of chemical cleaning, fake lemon, and death.
Bundled like a candied Eskimo in her pink coat, pink fuzzy-topped boots, a scarf in bleeding shades of blue with pink fringe, an earflap hat in the same pattern with bouncing pom-poms, Peabody clumped to catch up.
“I take it back about the dumb-ass wind goggles. I wish I’d had a pair just for the walk to and from the subway.”
“Blame Canada,” Eve told her. “It’s a changeup from blaming February.”
“I’ve been looking at gardening sites. We’re going to do some window boxes, plant herbs and stuff. I shouldn’t have started thinking about spring.”
“Maybe we’ll blame you then.” Eve kept walking, and pushed through Morris’s double doors.
He’d gone for a black turtleneck rather than a shirt and tie—and who could blame him? It gave the steel-blue suit a sort of artsy vibe. He’d wound his hair into a single, thick braid that hung down the back of his protective cloak.
“Here we are again,” he said.
“She wouldn’t listen. Hit the club, drank the drink.”
“Vodka, a whiff of vermouth, pomegranate juice, and a lethal twist of cyanide. That’s in addition to the Buzz, Erotica, Zoner, and the champagne cocktail—champagne, bitters, sugar substitute, and a splash of grenadine—already in her system.”
“That’s fast work on the tox.”
“I started on her last night. We had several unexpected guests—weather related.”
“You’ve been here all night?”
“Considering the weather and the state of the roads, it seemed wiser to spend the night with the dead rather than risk joining them. I have a very comfortable sofa here. It’s unfortunate my house here doesn’t run to anything approaching decent coffee.”
“Peabody.”
“On it.”
“No, no.” He waved a hand in the air. “Don’t go out in this urban Arctic on my account.”
“Just to my vehicle,” Eve told him. “I have the real deal in its AC.”
“Then I’d be grateful.”
Eve waited until Peabody scurried off. “Plus it gets her out of this part—she hates this part.”
“Some never fully adjust.” He looked down at Loxie Flash, naked, chest still splayed open from the Y-cut. “Here you have a young woman, only a few years over the legal age, whose body has already been ravaged by addictions. Kidneys, liver, heart, lungs all already showing signs of that abuse. If she’d continued down this path, it’s unlikely she’d have seen forty. Of course, she didn’t have the chance to continue or to stop.”
“She had the chance. She didn’t take it. Cyanide confirmed COD?”