Just One Look

by Mary McBride

  Bingo, he thought, before he pivoted on the balls of his feet, turning to her, innocently asking, “Hmm? What’s wrong?”

  “This!” She stabbed a finger at the lower right corner of the front page where Evan Cormack’s “By the Way” column appeared three times a week. “Cormack says that I can identify the Ripper. Listen to this. ‘Sources in the police department have revealed that their witness, in concert with renowned FBI sketch artist John Ferris, was able to come up with an extremely detailed likeness of the serial killer.”’ She snapped the paper again. “What sources? How can he say that? It’s nothing but an outright lie.”

  “Let me see.” Joe took the paper and read Cormack’s column. It hit just the right note, he thought. He owed Cormack, big time. In the past, a case of the journalist’s favorite single malt Scotch had always sufficed, but Joe was pretty sure he’d have to come up with more than a dozen bottles of liquor for this little piece of fakery in pursuit of truth and justice.

  “This is outrageous,” Sara said, grabbing the paper and glaring at it. “I’ve got a good mind to call this Cormack guy and dare him to tell me just who these sources of his are.”

  “That’s probably not such a good idea,” he said.

  “Why not? He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with a he like this.” She slapped the paper again.

  “Maybe Cormack doesn’t know it’s a lie,” Joe suggested.

  “You’re saying somebody in your department actually passed that information along to him?”

  “Maybe.”

  Sara snorted. “What idiot would do a thing like that?”

  “Me.”

  Her mouth dropped open, snapped shut, then opened again with an astonished “You!” Her eyes were so wide he could see the white beneath the deep green irises. “You told this Cormack person I can identify the Ripper?”

  Joe nodded.

  “Why, for God’s sake? That can only...” Sara’s sentence sputtered out, like a hot flame in a chilling gust of wind.

  He calmly finished the sentence for her. “That can only let him know he killed the wrong woman, and that his witness is still alive and well and in full possession of her memory.”

  Having heard that, she shot up from the couch, nearly toppling Joe, and began to pace back and forth in front of the fire. “That’s crazy,” she exclaimed. “You might as well have taken out a full page ad in the Express. Available—one witness for stabbing, raping or simple killing. Call Sara at five, five, five, oh, two, oh, two. Joe, my God! That makes me nothing more than...” Her arms flailed as she searched for a word.

  “Bait?” he asked.

  “Yes, well, that’s a good way of putting it. Or a worm on a hook. Or a piece of cheese in a trap.” She stopped pacing and fisted her hands, ramming them against her hips. “Why would you do that to me? I thought you wanted to keep me safe?”

  “I do,” he said. “Come here.” He reached up, clamping a hand over one of her white-knuckled fists, then drawing her onto his lap. Her whole body was as tense and tight as piano wire. Beneath that, though, he could feel a deep vibrato of trembling. She was scared to death. Well, hell. She had every right to be.

  “Sara, sweetheart,” he said softly, “he can’t get to you while I’m here. I told you that. You’re safe with me. You’ve got to trust me.”

  Her soggy little sniffle didn’t strike him as an overwhelming vote of confidence, so he tipped her chin and made her look deep into his eyes.

  “I will not let anything happen to you. Do you understand that?” When she didn’t respond, he roughened his voice. “Do you?”

  She nodded, the movement shaking loose a tear from one glossy eye. “Yes, but...”

  “But,” Joe continued firmly, “I can’t stay here indefinitely. There’s going to come a time in the next week or so, maybe sooner, when my boss is going to put the screws to me and tell me either I get back to my desk or hand in my shield. I won’t have a choice, babe. My job’s important to me.” He felt his mouth slide into a kind of grimace. “I don’t know how to do anything else. I don’t want to do anything else.”

  “I understand.”

  “What you don’t understand, though, is that I can’t leave you until I know you’re absolutely safe. So that means that I’ve got to flush this son of a bitch out of the woodwork as soon as possible. And that meant I somehow had to let him know that you can ID him and put him away forever. I had to put you at risk now, Sara, while I’m here to protect you. I didn’t have any choice.”

  Still on his lap, her-face close to his, Sara was regarding him with an intense curiosity. That was when Joe realized the burning in his eyes had nothing to do with smoke from the fireplace but rather was the result of a hot sheen of moisture that had suddenly materialized there. I’ll be damned, he thought. Tears. They were a good indication of just how thoroughly, how deeply this woman had gotten under his skin. He was afraid for her life. Maybe even more, at the moment, he was afraid his voice would crack if he attempted to say anything else, so he cleared his throat instead, averting his gaze from Sara’s face to stare into the flames.

  “I understand,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper as she nestled closer against his chest. “And I trust you, Joe. Completely.”

  After a minute, when he was in control of his throat again, he said, “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, maybe I have another reason for wanting to bring this Ripper business to an end. An ulterior motive, maybe.”

  She drew back her head enough to fix him with her green, green eyes. “Such as?”

  “Such as wanting to make love to you without having to keep my eyes open and one ear on the door.”

  She didn’t bat an eye. Didn’t even laugh nervously the way he thought she might have done. She just said, “Well, then, let’s bring the son of a bitch down just as fast as we can.”

  Chapter 10

  It was a good thing Maggie beeped him after Sara’s declaration or he might have forgotten all about the danger of the Ripper while he concentrated instead on the sweet peril of a warm and willing mouth. But when his ever-present pager squealed, Joe broke the kiss with a whispered expletive, moved Sara off his lap and stalked to the phone on the desk.

  “Yeah, Mag,” he said, hoping his partner didn’t notice the husky edge to his voice when she answered.

  When the first thing out of her mouth was, “What the hell are you doing, Decker?” he knew she didn’t mean kissing Sara Campbell’s exquisite lips. “You read the paper,” he said. It was a statement rather than a question.

  “Cobble read the paper,” she exclaimed, “and he’s on his way over there as we speak, you idiot. Where do you get off telling Cormack what you did? Are you nuts?”

  “I’m just trying to shake things up a little,” Joe said.

  “Well, guess what? You did.” She slammed her receiver down in a blatant attempt to deafen him.

  He wasn’t deaf enough, though, not to hear the squeal of tires, followed by a warning blip of a siren in the driveway. The captain must have shattered the speed limit all the way from the precinct to Westbury Boulevard, Joe thought.

  “That’s for me,” he said to Sara. He ran his thumb across his mouth just in case there was a trace of Chocolate Silk, then he raked his fingers through his hair. “I’ll be right back.”

  Joe opened the front door, unsurprised that Frank Cobble remained in his car, thus requiring his lieutenant to come to him. The captain liked to play those subtle little power games. The jerk.

  He had steamed up the windows, and when Joe opened the passenger door, a cloud of unfiltered smoke rolled out. The no-smoking ban for department vehicles never did apply to three-pack Frank.

  Joe offered him a grin he knew would bug the hell out of him. “Hey, Captain.”

  “Get in.”

  After he did, Cobble waved a newspaper in his face. “What the hell is this, Decker? What’s all this bullshit about a firm ID? You were supposed to tell me the
minute the Campbell woman came up with anything.”

  “And I will, Captain,” Joe said. “Cross my heart”

  The man’s entire face seemed to pinch tight. His thin lips closed over his cigarette. His eyes slitted against the smoke before he blew a poisonous stream in Joe’s direction. “You bastard,” he snarled. “She hasn’t come up with a thing, has she?”

  “Nope,” Joe said affably. “I just thought it was time to light a fire under our guy. Cormack seemed like a good way to do it.”

  The captain breathed out an oath along with more smoke. “You thought. You thought. Did you think about running the idea by me first? Did you think it might be a good idea to keep your superiors apprised in the most high-profile case we’ve had since the Bettman kidnapping? Or didn’t that occur to you, Decker? Huh? Or have you just been too busy licking the candy heiress to—”

  “Knock it off, Frank.”

  Joe’s voice was so low, so lethal, that Cobble’s mouth fell open. Slack. Mute. That only lasted for a moment, though, before the man regained his normal nasty composure.

  “I ought to write you up for that, Lieutenant.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Get out of here,” Cobble growled. “You do one more thing that makes me look like I don’t know my elbow from my ass and I’ll serve your ass up to Internal Affairs so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

  Joe opened the door and got out, drawing in a deep lungful of cold, clean air. He had barely closed the passenger door before the captain threw the car in Reverse and shot onto Westbury.

  “See ya in the papers, Frank,” he muttered as he headed toward the warmth of Sara’s sanctuary.

  Sara couldn’t do much more than stare at her computer’s monitor and chew on her bottom lip, wondering who Joe was talking to in the driveway and just how long it would be before the Ripper read the paper and realized he’d murdered the wrong woman. She wondered, too, how long it would take him to find the right woman. Her.

  She thought back over the past week or so, the days that seemed to have changed her life completely. Dr. Bourne had told her not to let her universe shrink to the space of a couple of rooms. It appeared that she’d inadvertently complied with the psychiatrist’s suggestion. Her universe hadn’t just expanded. It had exploded to include Saint Cat’s, the police station, Joe’s pathetic apartment and his parents’ cozy little home on Pearl Street. And at the very center of that unexpected, expansive universe, smack-dab in the middle, there was Joe.

  Sara couldn’t have said exactly when she’d fallen in love with him. Certainly not when he’d called her a nutcase, she thought. Maybe it was when she’d gone to his apartment and been so touched by its disarray. Or maybe when he’d been so solicitous of her at his parents’ party. Probably it was the first time he kissed her and she realized she never wanted him to stop.

  Whenever it was, though, she wished she could take back the moment and steel herself to the emotions that had overwhelmed her. Falling in love with Joe Decker was about the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her life. No. The dumbest thing was believing, even for a second, that a woman like her had any kind of a future with a man like that.

  They were as different as it was possible for two humans to be. Day and night. Apples and oranges. Alpha and beta. Active and passive. That other, age-old significant difference—male and female—was compelling but surely wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that she and Joe had nothing in common except the South Side Ripper and an overwhelming desire to collide in bed.

  Out in the driveway she heard a car door slam, then the front door opened and closed and soon there were lithe footsteps coming up the stairs. For a bleak second, she almost wished it were the Ripper, come to put her out of her misery.

  “Are you working?” Joe asked from the doorway.

  “Sort of,” she said, then sighed. “No, not really. I can’t seem to concentrate.”

  “Not surprising.” He was behind her chair, and his hands were doing incredible things to her shoulders and the muscles of her neck. “Does that help?”

  “Mmm.” Sara closed her eyes. They weren’t focusing, anyway.

  “You’re tight,” he murmured while his thumbs tracked down her spine, sending ripples of warmth through her entire body. Funny, she didn’t feel tight at all. More like vanilla pudding. Or a stick of butter left out in direct sunlight. A puddle of sensations. Silly Putty in Decker’s hands.

  “Mm.” It was the most intelligent thing she could say at the moment, since her brain had acquired the consistency and relative IQ of an oyster.

  He was kneading the muscles at the small of her back. “I’ve got an idea,” he said, allowing her mollusk of a brain to conjure up images of the two of them amid the pillows on her bed before he added, “tonight I’ll fix dinner for you.”

  Dinner? Decker was thinking about food while his hands were playing her like a violin? She should probably be grateful, she told herself, that one of them had a little self-control.

  “That would be nice,” she said even though she wasn’t the least bit hungry. Well, not for dinner, anyway.

  They ate dinner in the den, their plates on the big oak coffee table, their legs folded Indian-style beneath it. Joe had forbidden Sara to come anywhere near the kitchen while he was cooking—a loud process punctuated by the slamming of drawers and more than a few heartfelt curses—because he’d wanted to surprise her. And surprise her he did. It was one of the best meals Sara had ever eaten.

  “You had this brought in from Mama Savona’s, didn’t you?” she asked him after her last bite of the delicious, perfectly al dente pasta with its rich and creamy garlic sauce. “Come on, Decker. ’Fess up. All that banging of pots and pans I kept hearing was just subterfuge, wasn’t it?”

  He looked mortally wounded. “What makes you think I can’t put together a decent meal, Campbell?”

  “I’ve seen your apartment, remember?” Sara laughed. “Anyway, this is the house salad from Mama Savona’s. You can’t fool me. It’s the best salad in town.”

  “Ssh.” He put his fingers to his lips. “It’s a secret.”

  “I know it’s a secret. I’ve tried to duplicate that dressing for years and I haven’t even gotten close.”

  “Well, then, you should have married a Savona, like I did.”

  The fact that he winked when he made the remark didn’t prevent Sara from noticing that his eyes had turned a deeper, more melancholy gray.

  “Oh, Joe. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I never meant—”

  “Sara,” he said, almost sternly, “it’s been three years. Anyway, it’s sugar.”

  She blinked. “What’s sugar?”

  “The secret of the dressing. Sugar. A teaspoon for every cup of olive oil.” He chuckled. “And now that you know, I have to kill you.”

  “I have a better idea,” she said, edging closer to him.

  “What?” he asked suspiciously.

  “You could seal my lips with a kiss.”

  His gaze slid from her eyes to her mouth, held there a long moment before returning to her eyes. “Lady, when this Ripper business is all over, you can count on that.”

  During the week that followed, about all Sara could really count on was Joe’s edginess and the South Side Ripper’s invisibility.

  After that bogus article in the paper, the one that was supposed to shake things up so much, absolutely nothing happened. Not only were there no blatant attempts on Sara’s life, there were no mysterious phone calls. No trash cans turning over in the middle of the night. No footprints in the snow. Nothing.

  What there was, however, was nearly unbearable tension in the house on Westbury Boulevard. To Sara, it felt a little like living in a house with an unexploded grenade. Not that the human time bomb ever got close enough to her to cause any damage if he went off, though. And while Decker kept his distance, coiling tighter and tighter each day, Sara became more and more miserable. She took it personally. How could she not? She was sure his dark mood was b
ecause he resented being cooped up with her for so long. Who in his right mind wouldn’t? Her sanctuary started feeling like a minefield.

  It was time to do something, she decided by the end of the week. If the Ripper wasn’t going to do anything, she certainly could, so after lunch one afternoon, without warning or ceremony, she handed Joe his leather jacket and his gym bag.

  “Go home, Decker,” she said, meeting his shocked, what-the-hell-is-this-all-about? stare. “This isn’t working.”

  “What the hell do you mean, it isn’t working? You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  She tried to keep her tone level, matter-of-fact. “Yes, I am alive, but that’s probably because the Ripper’s a couple thousand miles away, stalking women in Alaska or somewhere. It’s pretty obvious by now, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” He cocked his head, regarding her intently. His voice was deep, gentle. “What’s this about, Sara?”

  What it was about was the fact that she was going crazy with wanting him, knowing all the while that he was going stir-crazy in her little world, that there was no happy medium for the two of them. Mr. Outside and Ms. Inside. Lieutenant Adventure and the wimpy little recluse. No matter how much they cared for each other, this just wasn’t going to work. The sooner he was gone, she decided, the sooner she could get over him. As if she ever would. That was what this was about, and she should have told him that, but she didn’t know how.

  Instead, for a brief moment she was tempted to be cruel, to tell him she was sick of cooking for two, to demand that he begin paying rent if he intended to stay here in her house, to tell him to go back to his own place and rot there. Which, of course, was what he had been doing for the last three years. Oh, God. The mere thought brought a lump to her throat. She swallowed hard to dislodge it.

  “I’m grateful that you’ve been here to protect me, Joe,” she said at last. “I really am. But I just don’t think it’s necessary anymore.”