In her, he found his own release, and it was so intensely satisfying he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the pleasure of it. With his head pounding, and dark flashes pulsing across his eyelids, he wondered if the reality of touching her could ever live up to the fantasy.
Too bad he’d never find out.
Greg called during her lunch break. “Where are Samantha and the girls?”
Sidney pressed her fingertips to her aching temple. “Still at my house, I suppose.” If he was really worried, why hadn’t he called earlier? “She came in late.”
He cleared his throat. “Did you two, uh, get a chance to talk?”
“No.”
His relief was almost palpable. “Listen, Sid, I’m sorry about last night. I don’t really remember what happened, but I do have the vague notion that I made a total ass of myself. Forgive me?”
She didn’t, and his insincere apology, in which he couldn’t even own up to what he’d done, let alone take responsibility for his actions, only salted the wound. “Since you called, I need help,” she said, refusing to pardon his behavior. “You know my…boyfriend-” she felt her cheeks heat, even though no one could see her “-the investigator?”
“Yeah. I don’t like him.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“He threatened to beat me up. I think. Details are a little fuzzy.”
Sidney was absurdly pleased Marc had bothered to defend her.
“Well, he’s been, um, videotaping me. And recording me. Is that legal?”
“Not if you don’t agree to it, baby.”
She frowned into the phone before she caught up with his dirty mind. “Oh! No, not like that. I mean I’m under police surveillance.”
“What the hell for?”
Sidney told him about finding Candace Hegel’s dog and falling under suspicion. Like most of her family members, Greg knew about Sidney’s “special abilities” and dismissed them as hysterical female silliness, so she didn’t go into too much detail.
She never should have given Blue that first, comforting pat, she thought with a sigh. Her need to touch and be touched, despite its inherent dangers, was so often her undoing.
Greg’s mind was elsewhere. “Last night, when your boyfriend came over, it was because he heard me?”
“Yes,” she said, wondering how many other private moments and personal conversations Marc had been privy to.
“That son of a bitch,” Greg said, terribly concerned for his own welfare.
Every cloud had its silver lining, she supposed. Apparently Greg remembered more than he let on. Making him feel accountable, after he knew he’d been taped, was better than nothing.
“So is it legal?”
“Yeah, it is. A judge has to sign an order first, but it’s just a formality.”
She let out a frustrated breath. “What can I do?”
“Let me get this straight-a homicide cop is dating his suspect? You can sue his pants off, and the department, for gross misconduct.”
“No,” she said quickly. “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
He was silent for a moment. “Okay. Leave it to me. I’ll take care of it.”
That sounded even worse. Her brother-in-law had always been protective of her, in a way that was disturbingly unfamilial. “No, Greg. Just drop it. You have enough to worry about with Samantha.” She paused for a moment, dreading what she was about to do. “She says you want full custody.”
“Stay out of this, Sidney,” he warned. “It’s none of your business.”
“You made it my business last night. On tape,” she reminded.
Greg was wise enough to bite back his anger, and his response.
“Don’t drag her through the mud, Greg. If you can’t come to an agreement with her, fine, use your lawyers. But don’t try to get the girls on grounds of infidelity. Don’t make Dakota and Taylor pay for Samantha’s mistakes.”
“She’s a drug addict, Sid,” he said softly.
Tears flooded her eyes, spilling over onto her cheeks. This was an incredibly ugly thing to face, and she didn’t want to. God, she hated getting involved in Samantha and Greg’s problems, being pushed and pulled between them, stuck in the same role she’d been forced to play with her own parents. “Let’s do something about it,” she urged. “Put off the divorce, and convince her to go to rehab.”
“My girlfriend wants to get married,” he said. “I’ve been trying to convince Samantha to kick the habit for years. I can’t do it anymore, Sid. I need to get on with my life.”
After Sidney hung up the phone, she stared at it for a long time, wondering why she was so worried about everyone else’s life when she couldn’t begin to manage her own.
Marc drank himself into a mild stupor, slept it off all afternoon, and woke up feeling refreshed instead of hung over. He showered, raided the refrigerator and went for an early evening jog even though it was still hot.
On impulse, he stopped by his next door neighbor’s house on the way home. Tony Barreras was the kind of friend he never knew he wanted and wasn’t sure why he had. Whatever the reason, they’d been close for years, and he was always there when Marc needed him.
Tony answered the door shirtless, barefoot, clad in ragged fatigue shorts. A colorful hand-woven bandana held his dark, shoulder-length hair out of his eyes, giving him the look of a bohemian vigilante. At his feet, an ancient white pit bull thumped his tail against the ground.
“Hey,” Tony said in greeting. “Where’ve you been?”
Marc shrugged. “Around. Working. You know.”
He walked away from the door, leaving it open in welcome. The dog, having known Marc too long to expect any kind of attention, returned to his lounging area beneath the front window. “You want a beer?” Tony asked, looking over his shoulder. “Water?”
“Yeah. Water.”
He grabbed a plastic bottle out of the refrigerator and chucked it at Marc, then plunked himself back down on the couch in front of the tube. “So what’s up?” Tony asked, his eyes on his favorite video game, Doom or Duel or Death-whatever the name of it was. His focus was on the screen, but Marc knew the way his friend’s mind worked. He could hold a conversation, wield the video controls and listen with another ear for the phone or the doorbell, one of which was always ringing.
Tony had some warped kind of ADD. He multitasked like a whiz, but couldn’t concentrate on one thing at a time. Trying to talk to him when he wasn’t also listening to music or playing video games was actually more difficult.
“Hard day?” he continued when Marc didn’t respond. Tony didn’t need to look at his face to know his mood.
“You know homicide,” he said vaguely, watching a soldier bloody everything in his wake on screen. Having first met Tony in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, Marc had always found his taste in entertainment strange. “It’s always hard.”
“Another body? A woman?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
That pretty much summed it up, so he drank his water in silence. He didn’t know how he’d forged this strange friendship, but it had become a comfortable one, in which he didn’t have to explain himself or even talk, if he didn’t want to. Sometimes he sat on Tony’s couch and watched him play video games while his mind drifted, neither of them saying a word.
“You know what you need?” Tony asked.
“To get laid?” he replied, feeling moody.
“Well, yeah. Always.” Then he frowned. “What happened to that hot little blonde? She dump you?”
Marc didn’t know which one he was talking about, but it didn’t really matter, because his relationships always ended the same way. “A while ago.”
“What’s wrong with you, dude? Don’t you know how to tell a woman what she likes to hear?”
Marc pondered that. “What if you didn’t have to? Wouldn’t you rather find one you could be totally honest with?”
“Being honest is one thing. Doing it with finesse, rather than bruta
lity, is another.”
“Thanks for the advice, Mr. Finesse,” he muttered. “Where’s your woman?”
Tony didn’t have an answer for that, because his notoriously short attention span extended to his dealings with the opposite sex. He stood up and switched off the video game monitor abruptly. Reaching into the cigar box that was always on top of the television, he pulled out a Baggie and some rolling papers. “This is what you need. Maximum Relaxem.”
“No,” Marc said shortly. “I don’t.”
“Sure you do. You’re wound up so tight you’re about to snap.” Tony sat down and started rolling a joint. “This stuff here is purely medicinal. Like taking a pill for anxiety.”
Marc didn’t like being thought of as anxious, or uptight, but compared to Tony everyone was. “You know I can’t. Besides, pot makes me paranoid.”
“Not this kind. It’s one hundred percent guaranteed to cure whatever ails you. Either that, or knock your ass out.” Tapping a silent tune with his bare foot, he licked the paper, securing it in place.
“You do realize you’re soliciting an illegal substance to a cop.”
Tony just laughed. Marc had been looking the other way while Tony sold pot for years. He’d known what Tony did long before he moved in next door to him, so Marc didn’t think it would be fair to bust him now. “This isn’t solicitation. It’s a gift.” He put the joint into a plastic bag to keep it fresh. “Give it to your mom if you don’t want it. Maybe it’ll help her more than that curandero you’re always complaining about.”
Marc shoved the bag in his pocket, having no intention of turning his mother on to marijuana. The so-called faith healer she visited once a week had been fleecing her (and Marc, for it was he who supported her) for the better part of a decade. Once, she’d even stopped taking her insulin for a short period of time because that damned witch doctor said he could cure her diabetes with “spiritual cleansing.”
His mother’s mental and physical health was fragile enough; she didn’t need to start doing recreational drugs. “Can dogs get stoned?” he asked suddenly.
“Sure. Whispers ate my stash once,” Tony said. “He got really faded.”
Marc glanced at the dog lying beneath the window, whose tail had started thumping at the sound of his name.
“Want to go to the gym?”
He shrugged his assent, and when Tony left the room to get ready, Marc took out his cell phone to call Gina at the lab. “Did you run Blue for marijuana on the toxicology screen?”
“No. We don’t usually add it on, unless specifically requested.”
“Can you?”
“Sure, if I had another sample. THC stays in the system for quite some time, so urine would work.”
He thanked her and hung up, his heart rate quickening, not because he may have discovered a break in the case, but because he had an excuse to see Sidney again.
Chapter 9
Thursday morning dawned in dismal gray layers, peeling away inch by inch until the sun was revealed like a hazy, shimmering orange fireball. Thunderclouds rumbled in the distance, more bluster than threat, for there was only a twenty percent chance of precipitation.
As he jogged in a steady loop around the beautifully manicured grounds of the San Luis Rey Mission, Marc prayed for rain, and release. The oppressive air surrounded him like a steamy blanket, and his mood was as heavy as the weather.
He hated having time off.
If he had any control over the situation, he might have breathed a little easier. Instead Sidney Morrow had turned his life, and his investigation, upside down.
By the time he got home, the morning newspaper was resting innocuously at the base of his front steps. Sweating up a storm, he sat on the stoop and opened it, cursing when he saw the headline: “Police Department Works With Psychic.”
He should have known Crystal would approach Sidney for the story on her own. She was infamous for her back door dealings; he’d discovered that the day he showed up unannounced at the station and caught her blowing her boss in her dressing room.
It was three years ago, but he remembered the scene, and how he’d felt coming upon it, like it was yesterday.
He could still see himself, standing like a fool in the open doorway, the flowers he’d brought to surprise her slipping from his hand, forgotten. If he’d arrived a moment later, he might never have known. If he’d arrived a moment earlier, Crystal might have been able to jerk away from Carlisle and leap to her feet before Marc walked in on them.
In a cruel twist of fate, he entered the room at the exact moment another man was coming in his girlfriend’s mouth.
Marc didn’t say a word, he just turned and left her doing what she did best.
Shaking away the remnants of that unpleasant recollection, he turned his attention to the newspaper in front of him. The caption below the photograph read: “Lieutenant Marc Cruz carries a fainting Sidney Morrow away from the public rest rooms at Guajome Lake Park, near the scene where the body of Anika Groene was found.”
It could have been worse. He read on, considering himself lucky the article wasn’t entitled “Police Officer Suspended for Hitting on Suspect.”
“Local psychic Sidney Morrow may be aiding the homicide division with their latest investigation. Victims Candace Hegel and Anika Groene were taken within weeks of each other, under similar circumstances, and perhaps by the same assailant. Lieutenant Cruz had no comment on Morrow’s involvement with the case, and Deputy Chief Amanda Stokes has stated that the Oceanside Police Department does not consult psychics.
“Sidney Morrow has offered her assistance to the police department before. More than fifteen years ago she helped solve a missing persons case in neighboring Bonsall. A local girl, Lisa Pettigrew, was found trapped in a well on a rural piece of property. Miss Morrow disclosed the girl’s location to police officers, stating she’d seen the place in a ‘psychic vision.’
“An unidentified source at the Bonsall Fire Department indicated Pettigrew couldn’t possibly have fallen into the well without sustaining considerable bodily damage. Due to the minor nature of her injuries, it was suspected that Pettigrew and Morrow, who were in the same grade at Bonsall Middle School, had perpetrated a preteen prank.
“Deputy Chief Stokes has named no lead suspects in either of the latest killings, nor has she confirmed the brutal slayings are related…”
As he sat there, glaring at the page and condemning Sidney Morrow to an eternal damnation he no longer believed in, the clouds overhead broke open and it began to rain.
When Sidney arrived at Pacific Pet Hotel, Marc was already there. He’d called last night to ask if he could pick up a urine sample from Blue.
Ignoring her jittery pulse, she opened the gate and drove through it, parking in her usual spot beside the building. When she got out of the truck he was striding toward her.
From across the expanse between them, she could feel his anger, shimmering like a mirage on hot asphalt. It had rained for a few moments, just a teasing sprinkle, before the relentless sun returned and evaporated every drop of moisture from the baking earth.
Now the air was as muggy as shower steam.
Judging by the hard set of his jaw, another kind of storm was brewing. It was too bad he looked mouthwateringly good in a plain white T-shirt and navy-blue trousers, because she had a feeling he was going to ruin the effect when he opened his mouth.
“Here,” he grated, shoving a sterile cup at her chest.
Refusing to rise to the bait, she took the small container placidly and retrieved Blue from his kennel. True to form, the dog growled at Marc, teeth bared, hackles up.
Again, Marc didn’t seem surprised by the dog’s reaction, and Sidney wondered at the animosity between him and man’s best friend. Once bitten, twice shy?
“Will he piss on cue?” he asked.
“He’s a male, isn’t he?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Intact dogs like to mark their territory,” she e
xplained.
“Intact?”
“Not neutered.”
She led Blue through the front gate to a tree-lined median, letting him sniff the area’s most popular target. Sure enough, he lifted his leg. She stuck the cup under him, capped it when he was finished, and thrust it at Marc, a self-satisfied smile on her face.
“Thanks,” he said tersely, his expression far from grateful.
“So what are you testing for?” she asked as he walked away. Her eyes lingered on the way his T-shirt fit across his broad shoulders, the fading scratches on the back of his neck, the still-raw patch on his elbow.
He arched a backward glance at her. “Marijuana. Do you think that’s what he was on?”
She shrugged. “Could have been, I guess.”
“Aren’t you familiar with the effects?”
“I’ve never tried it.”
“Right,” he scoffed, setting the sample on the top of his car.
“I suppose you have?”
“Many times.”
Sidney wasn’t sure she believed him. He didn’t strike her as a free-loving, experimental type, but perhaps he hadn’t always been so iron-willed. “Were you one of those wayward boys who turned his life around by joining the other side of the law?”
“No.”
She urged Blue to sit by tugging on his leash. “What were you like, as a child?”
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I was very responsible.”
“So you went away to college and cut loose?”
“No. I went away to Saudi Arabia. And I wouldn’t call killing people cutting loose, although some of my comrades seemed to find it entertaining.”
She searched his face. “I would never have guessed that. Are you saying you were introduced to drugs in the military?”
“Yes.”
“Did it help?”
His whiskey-brown eyes met hers. “No.”
The intensity with which he spoke, and the underlying rage she sensed in him, made her uneasy. “You have to know I didn’t have a choice about the photo in the newspaper,” she said to fill the silence. “Is that why you’re angry?”
Dangerous to Touch Page 10
