“Lucy?”
Sean touched her damp face carefully, as if she were precious to him.
Tell him you love him. Tell him.
She kissed him.
“I need you.” She hated that she couldn’t say the words. She wanted to, but fear shut her down. Sean wanted her to; it hurt him that she hadn’t, though he’d never tell her that. She saw it before he hid his disappointment.
But if she said the words out loud, she feared what was so special between them would suddenly end.
“I’m here, Princess.” He held her face, planting soft, gentle kisses on her lips, the kind of kisses that made her melt, and in her current state melting would turn into a meltdown, and she couldn’t have that.
You overthink everything.
She turned off her inner critic, which seemed to be taking Sean’s side in everything. Lucy needed to be in control. She couldn’t give it up, and love meant no control. It meant sacrifice and heartache and being lost in another person. If she could just keep the barrier up a little while longer, to figure out what this all meant, where it was going, how she was going to survive.
Lucy straddled Sean, reaching for the hem of his shirt and pushing it up, her cold hands warming against his chest as she opened her mouth and kissed him fully, no soft sweetness, no doubts that she wanted to make love. No more talking about her feelings or his feelings or thinking about anything. She could lose herself in the moment because that’s what this passion was—a moment in time.
She needed to be lost. She needed to stop thinking.
Sean wanted to savor Lucy, to show her that he needed her as much as—maybe even more than—she needed him. He was arrogant and fun-loving and he played it loose with the law if he had to, but at heart he’d been waiting for a woman like Lucy to give him purpose and meaning in his wayward life. She completed him, and he needed her to understand what that meant to him.
But she didn’t give him time to think, and he never wanted to go slow when Lucy turned on the switch and craved him. He needed that from her, her faith and passion, because now was the one time she gave herself over to him, trusting him with her body and her deep, unspoken need for unconditional love.
In the back of his mind warning bells rang that something was going on with Lucy, that it was important, and maybe now was the time to push her hard and force her to tell him what that beautiful head was thinking. But when he opened his mouth to speak, she locked onto him, her kiss hot and unstoppable. Not that he wanted to stop. Her hands massaged his chest, her fingers digging into his muscles just short of the point of pain. She didn’t stop moving, her hands, her mouth, her long legs pressing against the outside of his thighs as she sat on him fully arousing him.
His hands moved under her long T-shirt, skirted over her hips, up the soft curves of her athletic body. He loved how she was both soft and hard, her muscles tight and strong but her skin smooth and delicate. His thumbs reached for her nipples, pushing in gently but firmly until he heard that pleasurable gasp he loved, emanating from deep in Lucy’s chest.
Sean watched Lucy pull off her shirt, revealing her body. The scars that cut across her breasts still made him angry, but he never showed it. She’d close up, cut him off, worry … Right now, all he wanted was to show Lucy she was perfect.
He brought her breasts to his face and kissed them, savoring the weight of them first in his hands, then in his mouth. She leaned into him and he almost didn’t realize she was pulling down his boxers with her toes until they were tangled around his ankles. Her full body pressed against his, and he wrapped his arms tight around her, but she shrugged them off as she sat back up.
She touched his penis and he groaned. “Luce—”
His voice was scratchy. He wanted to tell her to wait, slow down, let him relish her, but it was too late. She rotated her hips until he started to penetrate, then all at once she pushed down.
Sean grabbed her ass and held her tight against him as he attempted to regain control. But that was a fruitless endeavor because Lucy didn’t sit still. Slowly, she moved her hips in circles, giving and taking pleasure. She reached for his hands and clasped them, pushing their joined fists into the bed for leverage. She adjusted her knees on either side of his body and picked up the pace of her lovemaking. Her back arched, and he watched her, amazed at how beautiful and sexy and innocent and wanton she looked, all at once. Her head tilted back, her long, elegant neck begging to be kissed, but he couldn’t lean up without breaking the intense moment. Her eyes were closed, her skin flushed and slick, her mouth parted. She licked her lips, not intending to arouse him further, but because she didn’t know what a turn-on it was, it made him all that much more greedy for her body.
Lucy had made her mind a blank. No thoughts, just the physical sensations that drenched her body, drowning her inner voice, burying her fears. Sean was inside her, his hands clutching hers, his muscles clenching and relaxing, then contracting even tighter as he came closer to the edge she was about to go over. Fast, little foreplay, but she didn’t need it or want it. She was learning more about her body and Sean’s body and ways to set them both off. The explosion was becoming seductive, a drug she craved more now than ever before.
“Kiss me,” Sean said, his voice gruff.
She leaned down, shifting her pelvis, and he groaned beneath her. He let go of one of her hands and grabbed her head, bringing her mouth to his, devouring her lips, his tongue mimicking his penis. He wasn’t moving in and out, he was moving in and deeper, and her body shuddered all on its own, shaking as his orgasm ignited hers. Sean swallowed her cry as he held her body tight against him, his muscles rigid.
“God, Lucy,” he muttered as she felt his final release.
Sweaty, she collapsed on top of him, all liquid and hot and satisfied. She sighed, her mind still empty as her body came down from overdrive. Sean’s rapidly beating heart soothed her. She could stay like this forever.
Sean felt Lucy drifting off to sleep. He shifted her to his side, and she murmured into his chest, “That was nice.”
“Only nice?” he whispered, trying to pull a blanket around Lucy even though she wasn’t budging. He maneuvered the comforter back onto the bed and put it over them. Too hot for him, but Lucy would get cold.
“Very nice?” Her eyes were closed but she had a half-smile on her lips. He kissed her. “Perfect?”
“Honey, that was too fast to be perfect.”
“That’s okay.”
“Why?”
“No time to think.”
Long after Lucy fell asleep, Sean thought about her comment and wondered what she meant—or if she even realized what she’d said.
TWELVE
Lucy didn’t know what she’d been expecting to find in the mine when she and Sean ventured into the cavern on Friday morning, but nothing jumped out at her as odd. In the storage room, she stared at the spot where the dead woman had been lying two days ago and saw nothing but rock and dirt.
“What do you want me to do?” Sean asked.
She hadn’t wanted Sean to come down with her. He still wasn’t one hundred percent after his fall, and though he tried to hide the pain she knew his leg hurt. However, now she was relieved she wasn’t alone in the dark, frigid space. It seemed ridiculous to be scared of something that wasn’t even here. It was like being in a haunted house. Purely fiction, the imagination creating all sorts of implausible outcomes because of fear.
She gestured to the alcove. “She was right there.”
Their breath was visible. Though nearing fifty degrees topside, it was still below thirty here underground.
Why would someone keep the body in the mine?
To store it.
Down here it was as cold or colder than the crypt at the morgue. A body would decompose slowly or, if frozen, not at all.
Sean took her hand. “Do what you need to do,” he said.
She closed her eyes. She wanted to see the woman as she had been, the unique and musty scents of the cave trigg
ering Lucy’s memory.
Her hair had been limp and darker than true blond, but that could have been because of the moisture. The skin had been only slightly molted, very pale, showing no obvious physical decomposition. But in these cold environs, the body could have been there a week or for months.
“She was laid out straight, flat on her back,” Lucy said, glancing at Sean. “Her arms were crossed over her chest. She wore dark slacks—not jeans—and a very dirty white blouse. No jacket or sweater.”
“Odd for this climate.”
Lucy nodded. “Her skin tone was almost identical to the corpses in the cold storage room at the morgue, but given her clothes, it stands to reason she was killed in a warm place, or at least not outdoors. I can’t see why the killer would have removed her coat, but not her other clothes, unless there was something on it that would identify him.”
“What about her shoes?”
Lucy sighed. “I didn’t look.”
“You saw them—you just don’t remember. Close your eyes again.”
She did, but didn’t know how this would help. She hadn’t made a conscious observation about the dead woman’s shoes, and she didn’t want her imagination conjuring something.
But as she mentally assessed the body as she’d seen it, she realized she had seen something. “Dark. Flat. No shoelaces. Loafers maybe, some sort of slip-on.”
“Good,” Sean said.
She smiled, pleased that she’d remembered the detail.
“Last night you said something bothered you about her hands. What?” Sean asked.
Her arms had been crossed … but something else was there, something had caught Lucy’s attention.
It hit her.
A flower.
Lucy opened her eyes. “I didn’t really register it before, but there was a flower on her chest, between her hands. Not in her hands, but laid on her chest, the stem tucked under her wrist. It wasn’t big, and it was shriveled and brown, but I was too distracted to notice more.”
“Distracted how?”
A chill went down her spine. “The maggots. In her mouth.”
Sean ran his hand up and down her back. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want to think about it.”
“What kind of flower?”
“It looked more like a weed, all dried out like that. But it’s clear—someone intentionally placed it on her chest.”
“As if visiting her grave.”
She shivered. That meant nothing—the killer might never have come back after leaving her here. He could have killed her and left the flower as a sign of remorse or part of some sick ritual. She wouldn’t know until she knew more about the victim herself.
She inspected the area closely with her flashlight. There didn’t seem to be any trace of bodily fluids or signs of blood or struggle. That didn’t mean they weren’t there, only that they weren’t visible to the naked eye.
However, where the woman’s head had been, Lucy spotted several strands of dark blond hair.
“Sean!”
He saw them, too. “Do you have plastic bags?”
“I can’t tamper with evidence.”
“I didn’t see any crime scene tape up. Or warning sign. And where are the cops?”
True. After talking to Deputy Weddle yesterday, it was clear that the Sheriff’s Department wasn’t taking Lucy’s statement seriously. Maybe they believed her, maybe they didn’t, but Sean was right: they weren’t here searching for evidence, nor did they blockade the area off.
She handed Sean her flashlight. “Shine the light there—I’m taking a few pictures.”
Though she had no cell phone reception, the built-in camera took photographs just fine. She snapped several of the area, then zoomed in on the hair. She wished she had a high-end digital camera for better quality, but her phone would have to do.
“Her head rested here,” she said.
Emboldened, Lucy gave the alcove a thorough examination, taking more pictures, before moving on to the area surrounding the slab. There were faint footprints in the hard-packed dirt, but there was no telling which ones might have belonged to the men yesterday or to whoever removed the body. A serious police investigation would get impressions and compare the footprints to those of the two rescue workers, as well as hers and Sean’s. If one set didn’t match anyone, it might lead to the person who had moved the body.
“A dead body isn’t easy to carry,” Sean commented.
“But not impossible. He was strong, or had a partner. There are no drag marks—dragging her body would be noticeable, even on this hard floor. If we assume she was here for a while and frozen—”
“It’s still twenty-eight degrees here, and it’s already nine,” Sean said, looking at his phone.
“Can you get historical data when we get back up?”
“Absolutely. What do you want? I’ll run it as soon as we get in the truck.”
“Temperature, high and low, for the last year,” she said, brow knitting. “I don’t know how to extrapolate it into underground temps, though.”
“I can write an algorithm for it, but it won’t be perfect. Underground, both heat and cold are retained, depending on the surface temps. You’d want a geologist to interpret the data, based on the location of this room, the type of rock, pulling in any data from when the mine was operational.”
“I’ll write down what I need if you can figure out how to get the information.”
“That I can do.”
“The maggots are important—if it was warmer, flies would breed and lay eggs at a faster rate. The maggots would turn into flies in days. But the cold inhibits them. They could have been dormant for weeks—months. It’s too cold down here for insect activity.”
“What are you thinking?”
She didn’t want to speculate, because she honestly had nothing to go on but conjecture. But Sean liked to brainstorm.
“This might sound stupid …” she began.
“Try me.”
“Under normal temperatures, the life cycle from egg to adult fly is twenty-four days. It’s very predictable. What affects their life cycle most are cold temperatures.”
“And it’s too cold here for a twenty-four-day life cycle?”
She nodded. “If she was killed here, then any flies would have remained dormant until the temperature rose.”
“I haven’t seen a fly down here.”
“Neither have I. It’s still too cold, but they could have been here at some point if there was a change in temperature. I’m not an entomologist, and this is all coming from a long-ago forensic biology class, but the larvae I saw in her mouth were about three days old. They wouldn’t have gotten to the pupa stage for another five to six days.”
“So you think she could have died three days ago?”
“Five days—three days before I found the body. If she was killed then, it wasn’t here.”
“Because there are no flies.”
“Exactly. The key point is that flies lay eggs within minutes of death,” Lucy continued, “so if she was killed in town, for example, the eggs would have been laid there.”
“So you think she died five days ago?”
“Possible, not likely—not based on her skin tone.”
“Can eggs be laid and then not hatch?”
“Yes.”
“So she could have been killed months ago, and only because it’s spring and the weather is warming the eggs hatched.”
“Exactly.”
“But not last summer, because they would have hatched long ago.”
She smiled. “You should be a scientist.”
He shrugged. “Well, I did go to M.I.T. I might not have been paying too much attention, but some basic knowledge seeped into my thick head.”
There was something about his tone that sounded odd to Lucy, almost regretful. She wondered what had happened back then that had him unusually melancholic. Before she could ask, Sean continued.
“A frozen body wouldn’t
have been easy to move.”
“Quite right,” she agreed.
He shined his light slowly around the eerie space while Lucy looked more closely at the ground.
Yesterday, when she’d been down here with Hammond and Getty, the men had walked down each of the two tunnels for several yards. She considered it now, only because Sean was here with her. But Tim had warned them that there were cave-ins, holes, any number of dangers. And she had no idea where the tunnels led, or how to get to the main entrance from here. They could follow the tracks, but the dangers in the mine stopped her from suggesting it. Still the tracks were a clue. There was no evidence that the killer had moved the body up the mine shaft that Sean had fallen down. And the cart was missing. She wasn’t foolhardy—she wasn’t going to risk her life wandering down a deadly labyrinth without solid evidence.
“We should have asked Tim to take us to the entrance of the mine. The killer took the cart to move the body, he couldn’t have gone up the shaft.”
“When we’re done here”—he glanced around—“maybe we should go down the tunnels—”
“No,” she interrupted. “There are too many unknowns. We’ll go down a few feet, but that’s it.”
“What specifically are you looking for?”
“Anything that looks out of place. We should start where I saw the mining cart.”
They walked over to the narrow tunnel, just wide enough for a cart and little more. Its ceiling was low, just an inch taller than Lucy’s five feet seven inches.
Sean squatted, resting his weight on his good leg. “The tracks are freshly scraped, see?”
She saw the rust missing in gouges, possibly from the metal wheels of the cart. “How long ago, do you think?”
“Two days.”
“How about if you didn’t know I saw the cart here just two days ago.”
“I’d say these marks were made not more than a few weeks ago, at most. Seriously, the rust would have started to grow back. Not fully, but enough to lose that sheen.”
If I Should Die Page 9
