by Josh Lanyon
I rammed him, giving in to the aggression and hunger — his and mine — and he shoved back. We pushed each other, each time a little harder and a little further. It could have been play, or it could have been the prelude to a brawl. He pounded into me, and I drove right back at him.
The hardest part was the silence. Not just the lack of words, because Jake communicated a lot of the time simply through touch. But tonight the touch felt distant, almost impersonal. He brought me swiftly and adeptly to orgasm, and that I did resent a little — as much as you can resent that kind of teeth-rattling sensation — and then he yelled and came himself, in fierce surges of ropy semen.
When it was over, Jake sprawled on his back, staring blankly at the ceiling.
I studied his profile. I knew it so well: that unyielding jaw, the hard sensual line of his mouth, the faint laugh lines spreading out from his eyes — not that he laughed a lot.
How’s Kate? I wondered. How’s that pregnancy thing going? Does she have any idea what you do on Monday and Wednesday nights?
When is this going to end?
Filled with sudden, overwhelming lassitude, I closed my eyes.
Next I knew, the bed springs were pinging again. I opened my eyes. Jake sat on the edge of the bed, his back to me, head in his hands.
The white bandages taping his ribs were stark against his skin. The last hours couldn’t have done him much good, but I didn’t think his pain was physical.
I waited for him to get up and walk out, but the next moment the light snapped out. He flopped back.
Within a minute, his snores were gently ruffling my hair.
Chapter Fourteen
“You feel okay?” Showered and dressed, Jake stood at the stove, turning bacon with a spatula when I walked into the kitchen the next morning.
I shrugged the rest of the way into my shirt. “Fine. Why?” He’d set a clean mug out for me on the counter, and I poured coffee from the machine.
I glanced his way. He turned down the gas on the stove. He looked more relaxed than he had the night before — maybe it was the absence of firearms.
“You were restless last night. Tossing and turning. Talking in your sleep.”
I sat down with my coffee. “I hope I didn’t spill my girlish secrets.”
“Your girlish secrets are safe with me.”
That kind of line works better with a smile, but Jake was not amused by references to my feminine side. He set a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me. “Eat. You’ll feel better.”
“I feel fine,” I said, irritably this time.
Jake had this Nero Wolfe-ian attitude about food. He thought a growling stomach signaled serious illness. In less than a year, I’d had more lectures from him on the importance of breakfast than I had from Lisa during my entire childhood.
He piled his own plate from the pan on the stove, sat across from me, leaning on his elbows the better to intimidate his food.
We ate to the homely sounds of the dishwasher running and coffee machine percolating.
I was deep in thought when Jake’s voice yanked me back to awareness.
“So what’s on your mind? You’re usually chirping and chattering around here in the morning.”
“Well, thank you,” I said. “I appreciate the flattering comparison to Tweety Bird.” I forked in a mouthful of fluffy, scrambled eggs. He was a good cook, and I did appreciate the fact that he fixed me breakfast and did my dirty dishes — and saved my skin on occasion.
I said, “To start with, I think your new partner Rossini smells a rat.”
“Let me worry about Rossini.”
“Happy to.”
“What else?”
“Oh, so we’re talking about this now?”
“We’re talking about whatever is freaking you out.”
“Freaking me out?” I murmured politely.
“You know what I mean.”
Well, actually…no.
But in the interests of keeping it civil, I said, “Okay. What does Angus say?”
“I didn’t interrogate Angus — and we’re not discussing the case except as it directly affects you.”
“What does Angus say?” I repeated.
Grudgingly, he replied, “He says he didn’t do it.”
“Do you believe him?”
“We’re investigating his story.”
“No, I mean do you personally believe him?”
“Don’t be naïve. My personal feelings have nothing to do with it.”
“Come off it, Jake. You’re always talking about a cop’s instinct. You know Angus. What does your gut tell you?”
“Nobody ever really knows anybody,” Jake said.
“You’d be the expert on that,” I said shortly. “I still think you can know people well enough to tell whether they’re homicidal maniacs.”
“Tell that to the neighbors of the serial killer of your choice.”
“Does he have an alibi?”
“We’re checking into it.”
“Did he —”
Jake cut across. “Let’s cut to the chase. He hasn’t said anything about any cult or coven. In fact, he clammed up at the suggestion.”
“What does that tell you?”
“That he decided not to waste his breath and our time.”
I nodded. Speared a bit of bacon.
“I suppose it’s occurred to you that he’s not likely to back our story of casual acquaintances?”
He didn’t respond.
“Okay, answer me this. If she was killed between six and ten o’clock, how would Angus have got back to Lake Tahoe in time to call me at eleven-thirty?”
Jake took a long, deliberate drink of coffee, set down his cup without haste. “Have you ever known me not to do my job?”
I flashed onto the memory of him wiping the doorknob at Angus’s rental. Did that count?
“Well…not exactly.”
“Then chill. Have a little faith in the system. If he’s innocent, it’ll come out. If he isn’t innocent, he deserves to fry.”
“He deserves to fry? Welcome to the Age of Enlightenment. Happily, we gas them here in the Golden State, remember?”
Jake shook his head, not bothering to reply to this old argument between us.
I said, “How much of a fair trial is he going to get with the cops already convinced he’s the man and a public defender straight out of law school?”
Jake raised his brows. “For your information, he doesn’t have a public defender. Martin Grosser has officially taken his case.”
“Martin Grosser, the major league media lawyer?”
“You got it.”
“Pro bono?”
“I guess. I wouldn’t know.” Jake added grimly, “I’m on the other team.”
I chewed this over. After a time I noticed Jake watching me with that sardonic expression.
I pointed out, “You were the one with the theory that Angus was on the fringe of something bigger. A coven would have thirteen members. Maybe that doesn’t qualify as an actual cult, but —”
“The unofficial view is that Angus and his girlfriend acted on their own in the killings of Kinsey Perone, Tony Zellig, and Karen Holtzer.”
Like Daniel and Manuela Ruda, a husband-wife team in Germany who stabbed their best friend sixty-six times, then drank his blood — claiming the Devil made them do it. But even the Rudas appeared to have connections to underground occult groups in Britain.
“Does that mean you have a different take on it?”
He rose, dumped his dishes into the sink, ran water. A well-trained and completely house-broken male: La Cage aux Folles meets Leave It to Beaver.
He turned and faced me. “Look, I’m not discussing the case with you. You’re a witness, remember? A hostile witness at that.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he stopped me with a quick, rough kiss that tasted of coffee and bacon.
“Stay out of trouble,” he said.
A moment later, I heard the front door slam.
*****
“Someone doesn’t like you, Adrien,” Ted Finch muttered, tapping away at my computer keyboard.
Like the majority of writers I knew, published and unpublished, Ted has a day job. He works as a computer programmer and freelance web designer. I pay him a nominal fee to maintain the Cloak and Dagger Web site — and to bail me out of disasters like the present one.
“How bad is it?”
He chuckled. “Not that bad, just mean. Very mean.” He swiveled in the chair. “It’s a freeware prank program. It automatically launched when you opened the e-mail. Do you know who sent it?”
I shook my head.
Ted made tsking sounds. “You should never open e-mail from an unknown address.”
I didn’t bother to reply. Half the e-mail I got was from customers whose e-mail addresses I didn’t recognize.
“So we saw on the news that Angus was arrested for that coed’s murder.” He shook his head. “I bet you saw that coming.”
“Not at all.”
“You’re kidding. Jean and I were saying this morning that you’re probably the one who tipped the police off.”
“Why would you say that?” I can’t say I was thrilled at the notion of me as the local stool pigeon.
“It was in the papers. Your friend, that cop. He was the one who found the body, right? Someone called and tipped him off. We thought it must be you.” He turned back to my computer, began clicking away again, fingers flying over the keyboard.
“Oh, man, I bet you laid an egg when you saw your screen go black!”
What was with the bird references today?
Grinning in geek delight, Ted added, “Of course, we always knew there was something wrong with that kid.”
I said dryly, “Did you?”
“The Barbies are back,” Velvet announced, poking her head in the office.
I glanced up. “Who?”
“Your friends from yesterday. The fluffragettes.”
I muttered something un-familial under my breath and went out.
Lauren, carrying a Gap Kids shopping bag, greeted me. “Natalie and I were in the area, so we thought we’d nail down the details on the party — if you’ve got a free minute.”
Natalie? I thought the middle sib was named Natasha. I tried to remember if I had addressed her as Natasha. I glanced at her, and she was beaming at me in that eerily affectionate way.
Didn’t these women have jobs? Didn’t they have other interests besides this bloody wedding?
Velvet approached, phone in hand. “Did you want to make a holiday donation to the American Family Association?”
The AFA? The people who define a family as one man, one woman, and two-point-three properly baptized biological offspring — no exceptions?
“I think not,” I said.
Velvet moved off to convey my regrets. I watched the Dautens sizing her up with what seemed to be professional interest and felt unexpectedly protective of her brown ordinariness in the face of their air-brushed perfection.
The blue eyes swiveled back my way.
“Maybe we could run out and grab a cup of coffee?” Natalie suggested.
“Great idea!” Lauren chimed in — as though they hadn’t run through their lines on the way over. “There’s a Starbucks a few doors down.”
“I really can’t…” My voice trailed in the face of their dismay.
“No prob,” said Velvet, from behind the counter. “I’ve got it.”
I gave her an ungrateful look.
“Great!” said Lauren.
The three of us marched out, passing Ted’s red Corolla parked on the street. Memory of the red Corolla from the day before niggled at me. The next instant the feeling was gone, Lauren and Natalie nattering happily — about what, I have no idea.
We reached Starbucks, I took their orders for coffee-laced whipped cream, and got into line while Lauren sat and pulled out her Palm Pilot.
“Christmas Night in Harlem” was playing on the loudspeaker as I carried our drinks back to the circle of chairs, picking my way through their scattered shopping bags.
“This is so perfect!” Natalie announced, taking her nonfat mocha Frappaccino with a shot of sugar-free mint and extra whipped cream. “Thank you!”
Coffee-by-the-numbers. Myself, I prefer to patronize the independents, but with one on every corner, Starbucks lays a mean caffeine ambush.
“So…what are Lisa’s favorite songs from the ’40s?” asked Lauren, fixing me with those china doll-blue eyes, one finger poised to type.
Did she have favorite songs from the ’40s? She was born in the ’40s. Did toddlers have favorite tunes?
“I don’t know.”
They looked nonplussed. “Well, what songs were special to her parents?” Lauren prodded helpfully.
This was awkward. Lisa never spoke of her family. I had no idea if she even had family living. I knew my maternal grandparents were dead, but that was all I knew. The few times I had pushed for information, Lisa had been deliberately vague — even for her. I had grown up accepting that this was simply the way it was, but I could see it would seem a little weird to outsiders.
“I think she’ll be happy with…uh…the classics.”
“English classics or American classics?”
For Chrissake.
“Both.”
Incredibly, they looked satisfied with that. Lauren keyed into the Palm Pilot.
“I can’t see how you’re going to put all this together in…”
“Ten days,” said Brigadier General Lauren crisply.
“Right.”
“It’s not easy,” Natalie confided, adding reassuringly, “But the hard part’s done.”
I’d take her word for it. Lauren watched me keenly. “So you’re okay with this?”
I opened my mouth, but uncharacteristically, I failed to think of what to say. They waited politely.
“Er…yeah, why not?”
Good question. Why not? I mean, I had spent most of my life trying to evade Lisa’s overprotective clutches. This marriage was bound to give me breathing space.
“It’ll mean a lot to Lisa,” I said, trying not to sound as stiff as one of my unknown British relatives.
They uttered cooing sounds and made fluttery motions like they were about to enfold me in a group hug. Since this wasn’t physically possible given the seating arrangements, they had to settle for smiling at me and reaching over to pat my arm and knee.
“I’m so glad we were able to talk,” Lauren said. She put the Palm Pilot away.
Apparently the emergency board meeting was over.
“Are you and Lisa still quarreling?” Natalie said sympathetically, as I held the glass door for them on our way out.
“Quarreling?” What had Lisa told these people — these strangers? “Of course not.”
“Lisa didn’t say that,” Lauren said quickly with a quelling glance at her sister. “She only said you were not very happy with her.”
They gave me twin looks of commiseration that still conveyed that I was so in the wrong.
“She said you hate to be fussed over,” Natalie said. “But of course she can’t help it, can she? That’s what mothers do.”
What in God’s name were they talking about?
Lauren looked serious. “It must have been such a shock that boy being arrested. Did you have any idea he was capable of that?”
That Boy. Well, at least now I knew what they were talking about and where they got their news bulletins.
“No.”
“It goes to show,” Natalie said.
We hugged on the sidewalk, then they departed for more shopping. I hot-footed it back to the shop.
I stepped inside. Glanced around. A customer browsed the Gothic section. He smiled. I smiled back. I didn’t see Velvet at the counter. I glanced down the aisle, spotted another customer busily scanning the ending of a book.
I went to the office. Ted had packed and left. Velvet stood at my desk going through
the drawers.
I halted in the doorway.
She had all my stuff out on the desk top. She was holding the plastic vial of my digoxin capsules, frowning at it.
“What are you doing?” I asked from behind her. She started.
Cheeks flaming, she stuttered, “I was tidying in here. I found these. They looked like you might need them.”
Tidying up inside the desk? “Thanks,” I said, holding my hand out for the vial. I kept an extra bottle in the desk in case I forgot the morning dose, although I didn’t plan on explaining that to her. “You don’t need to worry about my stuff.”
“I don’t mind,” she said eagerly.
Was she truly that dense?
“Yeah, well, I’d prefer if you stayed out of here.”
She flinched as though I’d slapped her.
“Fine,” she said stiffly. She brushed past me into the shop.
I opened the desk drawers, swept everything in haphazardly. Then I locked the desk.
It seemed far-fetched to suspect her of being an agent in the Deviltry Network, but then again, she hadn’t come through the temp service — and I hadn’t verified her references yet.
I could practically hear Jake now.
I closed the office door, pulled her application out of the file cabinet, and spent the next half hour calling her previous employers.
The two dress boutiques she had worked for would have hired her back in an instant.
She hadn’t worked long at the veterinary clinic, and they didn’t remember her well, but as the director remarked, that might be a positive.
She checked out.
Chapter Fifteen
If it bleeds, it leads. By late afternoon I had declined an interview with one local news station and three local papers.
What were they hoping to hear? How I’d always known from the way Angus mixed Elizabeth Peters and Ellis Peters that one day he’d run amuck? That his bad habit of sticking price tags smack center in the face of book covers would lead him to ruin?
I ate lunch in the stockroom, catching up on paperwork and listening to the radio. Jake was correct. Angus’s court-appointed lawyer had been immediately replaced by Martin Grosser. Grosser, a high-profile defense attorney, worked as a commentator for Court TV, and pretty much reserved his services for the high and mighty. He did not typically work pro bono, but there was no way Angus could afford his fees. Not that I got how it was in Grosser’s interests to represent the latest pretender to Charlie Manson’s throne.
