Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  “Oh, God. Travis. Yes. Please. More. Fuck me harder.”

  And when he’d gotten a hand around in front of her and begun to stroke, and she’d gone up like a rocket, calling out loud until she’d lost her words and had started to wail . . . When the contractions had been so strong around him that he’d actually thought he couldn’t stand it, and had pulled him into an orgasm so intense, it had just about broken him . . .

  Oh, yeah. Her saying the word had worked just fine for him. It would work just fine right now. He’d happily do that to her any day of the week, and hear that from her, too.

  Now, she scowled at him, and he put the idea aside. For now.

  “Quit it,” she said. “Stay focused. Would you be able to give me a ride to work?”

  “Of course I would.” Walk into the building with her? You bet he’d do that. “I’ll pick you up tonight, too.” And if she had to come by the Computer Science department to tell him she was ready to go? That would suit him fine. Wes’s office was two doors down. A hand on Rochelle’s back, a dismissive glance . . . Oh, yeah. That worked. “But wait a minute.” He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her, which wasn’t exactly a hardship. There was a whole lot of Rochelle, and every inch of it was terrific.

  He forced himself to concentrate on the matter at hand. “Your car’s in the shop? How did you get home after work yesterday?”

  “Walked, of course,” she said, stepping into her underwear and pulling it up over her hips. “It was hot as hell, too.”

  “Why didn’t you call me for a ride?”

  She was leaning over to pick up her bra now, and he might have gotten distracted again. He’d looked at her naked for half the night, but apparently he wasn’t tired of it yet. Looking wasn’t enough, though. His hands needed to be all over her. Right now.

  “What?” she said. “I should have assumed that you’d be happy to drop everything and drive me home?”

  “Yep. You should have.” She’d managed to destroy the last remnants of his self-control, because he reached for her waist, pulled her over to him, and tugged gently until she was sitting in his lap with a knee on either side of his hips. And then he might have had to spend some time kissing her, not to mention filling both palms with those luscious breasts.

  “Travis,” she gasped. “Work.”

  “Mm,” he answered, sending a sneaky hand down to stroke her through that pale-pink fabric, feeling the dampness there with a thrill that wasn’t one bit lessened by the number of times he’d had her last night. “You sure? There’s such a thing as calling in sick. And right now, I’ve got a real bad fever.”

  “Except that I’d be the one who was supposed to be sick,” she said, then squirmed and made a tiny sound of protest as his mouth found a rosy nipple he hadn’t had nearly enough of yet, and his hand slipped inside those tiny pale-pink bikinis.

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That felt good.

  “Travis,” she moaned. “No.” But then she wriggled, and he was just about too far gone. “Tonight. Wait.”

  “Right,” he said, not willing to let her go quite yet. “Does this mean you’re going to go dancing with me again, finally? We’d better have pulled into the fast lane now.”

  “Yes. Geez, you’re going to be a demanding boyfriend.”

  He laughed, gave her a slap on the butt that felt just fine, too, and said, “Oh, baby. You know it.”

  Carol wasn’t outside when they left, which made Travis a little sad, because he’d have liked to have said good morning. On the other hand, when they arrived at Rochelle’s house, Rochelle’s neighbor was out sweeping her front steps, her little dog sniffing around the garden and lifting his leg on a rosebush. If you had a secret, this town might not be the easiest place to keep it.

  “Morning, Dell,” Rochelle said.

  “Well, good morning to you,” the old lady said, walking down the steps and coming across the yard. “Have we finally made it to the formal introduction stage?” Her sharp gaze took in Rochelle’s rumpled appearance, the stubble on Travis’s jaw.

  “You could say that,” Travis said. “Morning. Travis Cochran.”

  She pulled off her pink flowered gardening glove and shook his hand. She was wearing a blue muumuu today with earrings to match, the biggest ones yet. “Dell Sawyer. Pleased to meet you. We going to be seeing more of you around here?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “That’s my plan.”

  “I need to go get ready for work,” Rochelle said. “Come on in and make yourself some breakfast, Travis.”

  “You not cooking for him?” Dell asked.

  “Nope,” Rochelle said. “Not this morning, anyway.” She didn’t explain any more than that, just took off into the house, and Dell looked speculatively at Travis again.

  “Well, good for her,” Dell said. “You let a man get too comfortable, he starts thinking he owns the place, and you right along with it.”

  Travis laughed out loud. “Probably so. We’ll see if I can talk her into taking turns. What do you think?”

  “Honey,” Dell said, “I think you’re on the right track.”

  DIGGING DEEPER

  As far as Jim was concerned, a few days after the three deputies had questioned the girls in Macho Taco, the pieces were definitely not falling into place. He sat at the conference table and frowned down at his hands while DeMarco talked.

  “So what have we got?” the detective asked. “A pregnancy, maybe a married guy. Somebody with something to lose. Pills. And too many suspects, with the evidence pointing in two main directions. Opposite directions. We heard some of the same names at the taco place and the bar. Those guys with the chew in their back pockets. Call them Group One. And the guys from town. Group Two. Which looks like a more likely direction on the one hand, because the only place I’ve heard much about pills is on campus. And we haven’t heard about anybody dealing at all, not in pills. But she got them somewhere, and she couldn’t have afforded to buy them.”

  “Campus is where that mostly goes on,” Jim said, “and they get it the old-fashioned way—from their parents’ medicine cabinets, and their friends. We’ve talked to the university cops and the city cops and heard the same thing. Yeah, they’re up there, all around. Passed around at parties, mostly, and friend to friend. We don’t even have proof Heather had a habit. No residue in her body, nothing on her clothes. All we have is her roommate’s hint that she was using Vicodin, but I think we can believe that. I’m thinking amateur prostitution, feeding that habit.”

  “Anyway,” Mark Lawrence said, speaking up for once, and Jim looked at him to encourage him to go on. Lawrence had grown up on a farm and was years younger than Jim, and both things could be helpful here. “For the country boys, it’s more about drinking and weed, unless you’re talking meth, and we’re not, not with that crowd. And also—the city guys, the college guys—they’re just . . . random, right? I mean, no connections. Not to each other, and not to drugs, either.”

  He shut up, then, flushing a bit under DeMarco’s scrutiny, and Jim picked it up. “Yep. Nothing tying any of those guys together at all. Just a group of individuals. But those country boys . . .” He stared out the window at the scene along Pine Street without really seeing anything. “When do you talk to this many guys who know each other, play them off against each other like we have, and nobody wants to rule himself out? The town guys—they caved right in, gave us those DNA swabs. It was the country boys who didn’t. Like they’re hanging together, like they all decided not to talk. But why? For nothing I know of. No tie I can think of that should be that strong. Not like we’ve got organized crime out here, and if we did, those boys wouldn’t be the ones doing it. And the lentils. It’s the farm boys who aren’t talking, but those lentils . . .” He shook his head. “Doesn’t fit. Two opposite directions, like you said. The pills and the lentils on one hand, which says ‘town’ to me. Or ‘university,’ more likely. And the not-talking on the other.”

  DeMarco said, “You keep talking about those lent
ils. I don’t buy it. A field’s a field at night. You said it’d look the same.”

  “No,” Jim said. “I said it’d look the same if you didn’t know farming.”

  “All right, then,” DeMarco said. “Assuming you’re right about that. Everything makes sense, right? If it isn’t making sense to us, it’s because we’re looking at it the wrong way around.”

  “Right,” Jim said. “And?” They’d gone over this again and again, of course. This shouldn’t have been so hard, unless the girl actually had been picked up by somebody random. Somebody passing through. Picked up off the street. But it didn’t smell like that to either of them.

  It was the alibis. They had six country boys giving each other alibis for Sunday night, because they’d all been at the same party. In and out, though, there and gone, and none of them admitting to seeing the girl there. A party, they’d all said. Just some music and a lot of beer. Just Sunday night with the guys. Which was likely enough, if it hadn’t been for the refusal to get swabbed.

  They’d narrowed the probable time of the murder down to sometime between Sunday afternoon, when Cheryl had finally remembered last seeing Heather, and Monday morning, when Heather hadn’t showed up to work. Almost all those boys had been working on Sunday, and all of them had been at the party, and none of them had admitted to seeing Heather at all.

  A party, though. A bunch of low-caliber guys drinking, out in a lonely house in the country? On the same night when a girl had gone missing, the night she’d most likely been murdered, with her body dumped out there? A girl who’d been seen with some of those guys? Any cop’s nose would’ve twitched at that.

  Too many miles of back road, though, that was the problem. Everybody driving fifteen, twenty minutes to get back to his own place from wherever he’d been, and even farther to town. Everybody working by himself, moving from field to field, dirt farm roads and gravel back roads and paved highways. As an investigation, it was pretty much a nightmare.

  “So,” DeMarco said, running through it one more time, because that was what you did. And to give him credit, DeMarco didn’t just talk. He listened. “If we’re thinking it’s the farm boys who know something, because they’re the ones who aren’t cooperating? Then let’s go back to square one. If it doesn’t make sense one way, it has to make sense another. Maybe the lentils mean something else.”

  Jim frowned down at the table. “You’re talking about Cal Jackson.”

  “Who did let us swab his cheek,” DeMarco said. “And who came up negative as the father, and who was home with his wife and new baby on the nights in question. In the fields during the day, but then where did the girl come from?” He shook his head. “Although his baby would’ve been, what? Ten days old? I’ve got a kid. I could’ve been dancing on the bar with a Hooters waitress for an hour when my kid was ten days old, and I don’t think my wife would even have noticed I was gone. But Jackson found the body, and he told us. All he had to do was leave it there. So unless he’s a stone-cold psychopath who’d get off on ‘discovering’ the body and fooling us—”

  “Which he isn’t,” Jim said. “I’d know. He’s my cousin, and besides, he played in the NFL for almost ten years. If you’re a stone-cold psychopath, your teammates are going to know it. He’s not stepping out on Zoe, either. You want DNA? Cal’s got ‘loyal’ stamped right into his. You and I both know you never can tell. Except I can. It’s not him.”

  Mark nodded. “I agree. Not him. I’d have said, not possible.”

  “Or, if it is one of those guys, the farm guys,” DeMarco went on. Not dropping it, not quite. They had to find out who’d done this, because otherwise, that little bit of cloud was going to hang over Cal forever, and Jim thought Cal knew it. “If it was a guy who’d know lentils, like you said, then he dumped her there for a reason. Because it was Jackson’s field. So I’ll ask what I asked you before. Who hated him?”

  “Hated,” Jim said slowly, “that’s a strong word. Cal’s a hard guy not to like. Jealous, maybe, though—a few people. Probably quite a few. But that could be anybody. Cal’s been a star his whole life. I was jealous of him a time or two myself, growing up. And I’m his cousin.” Until he had grown up, enough to realize that having it all wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and to know the man inside. Cal felt hurt like anybody else, and he’d felt it plenty.

  “Who’d be jealous enough to dump a body on his land?” DeMarco pressed.

  “Hard to say,” Jim said, “because it still seems stupid. Unless somebody wanted it found, like you said. Unless somebody was sitting back enjoying the drama. A stone-cold psychopath.”

  “Or somebody who got carried away,” DeMarco said. “Who thought it seemed like a good idea at the time. Probably not quite a domestic, like we said. Not really premeditated, either. Crime of opportunity. Because she’s pregnant, or just a fight. He’s going to pull off the road somewhere. Sees Jackson’s road, knows it’s his. He’s not even thinking he’ll kill her, maybe. A fight, or scaring her, or even rough sex in the bed of the pickup, where you said that would happen.”

  “If it was outdoors, yeah, probably in the bed. But her jeans were fastened,” Jim reminded DeMarco.

  “Still possible. But probably not. So say he hates Jackson, and he’s hating the girl, or he’s not hating her, but he’s been too rough and he’s been drinking. And he thinks, ‘I’ll dump it here. That’ll show him.’ Who’s that guy? Of those six guys who are hanging together, refusing those swabs. Who’s that guy?”

  “I don’t know,” Jim said. “They’ve all got a reckless streak. All got quite a bit of the underachiever about them. That’s why they’re friends. I’d ask, who would they be scared of? Or just who’s the leader? Because somebody’s telling them not to talk, and somebody’s backing that up.”

  “And who’s that?” DeMarco asked.

  “Couple guys,” Jim said. “Dave Harris. And maybe Lake Farnsworth, of course. The party was at his place, which made him the most noticed there. Everybody would give him an alibi, even if he wasn’t there every minute. Everybody would think he had been.”

  “Harris is married,” DeMarco said. “Something to lose. And the meanest, I’d say. The hardest.”

  “Agreed,” Jim said. “And Farnsworth is barely on our list. Never seen with the girl. Never danced with her. Never left with her. Nothing to do with her.”

  Lake Farnsworth had been questioned, just like everybody else who’d been seen in the bar when the girl had been there. But nobody had ever seen him at Macho Taco, or even talking to Heather, and other than the party being at his house—they had nothing. Jim got a tingle all the same, just the trace of it up his arms. “He’s real tight with that group, though,” he said slowly. “Good-time boy, not much mean to him, I’d have said. A fighting side after a few, yeah, but that’s about it.”

  “A fighting side after a few,” DeMarco repeated.

  “Yeah, which makes it possible. Hot blood, yes. The heat of the moment, I could see that. Maybe. But what would be the motive? Divorced, doesn’t have two cents to rub together. Spends his paycheck down at the bar, and always has. Never hit his wife when he was married that I know of, and with Rochelle?” Jim smiled. “You’d know, because she’d have clocked him with her frying pan and walked out the door. Count on it. What kind of threat would that girl be to him?”

  “The rough sex, maybe,” DeMarco suggested.

  “Maybe,” Jim said dubiously. “I’d peg Harris more for that, both ways. But Rochelle—” He sat up a little straighter, and the tingle got stronger. “His ex. She works up at the university. Always has. He’d know people up there. There’s that connection.”

  “You saying Rochelle’s in it?” Lawrence said. “They didn’t have what you’d call a friendly split. And Rochelle’s pretty straight.”

  “No,” Jim said. “I’m saying he could have university connections. Pills—distribution—you’re talking about the university.” He shook his head in frustration. “Just a thought. Just a flash.”

>   “Right.” DeMarco shoved back from the table. “We talk to all of them again, that’s all. Especially Farnsworth. We start over. We put enough heat on, and somebody’s going to crack. Somebody always does.”

  A TWISTY MIND

  The man’s phone buzzed, and he glanced at the number. Restricted call. He pushed the button and said, “Yeah.”

  No preamble on the other end. “This is getting way too close.”

  “And once again, I’m working. As I’ve mentioned. I’ll call you later.”

  “You told me there was nothing to worry about. I’m not stupid. There’s something to worry about.”

  “No. There really isn’t. So a girl died. Very sad. She was a girl a lot of guys danced with, and some of them might even have been seen leaving a bar with her, too. A drifter with a low-rent job and a low-rent life who met a sad end. Unless the cops get a hot tip, that’s where it’s going to stay. And they’re not going to get a hot tip. All my guys want to keep earning that extra tax-free income, and they might be scared of what might happen to them if they talked. And that might be wise. I’m not worried, and if I’m not worried, you shouldn’t be worried, either.”

  “That’s right,” the voice said. Ah, trying a shift in tactics now. “I don’t have to worry. All I’m doing is scribbling on prescription pads. I’m not the one juggling a workforce of however many runners, with a biker gang I don’t even want to know about on the other end. And I won’t be the one holding the bag if it goes south.”