Unfiltered & Uncensored

by Payge Galvin

  She was like an addict: aware her habit wasn’t doing anyone any good but unable to quit. Normal women coped with breakups by just eating obscene quantities of ice cream.

  She watched as the video came up with the day’s footage. She told herself she should log out and shut the laptop down, but instead she fast-forwarded through the static footage of Max’s daytime apartment while Kitty gave her a baleful you-know-better look.

  Abruptly she stopped fast-forwarding. There—she’d seen a flicker of movement in Max’s doorway.

  That wasn’t right. Something uneasy, the same instinct that told her when to turn around in dark alleys, crept down her spine. It was Friday. Max should be at his internship. The internship that, she had to admit, he actually seemed to be sticking with.

  She kept watching the screen as a figure stepped into Max’s bedroom and began to walk, slowly and deliberately, across the room. Just as deliberately, the intruder began emptying Max’s drawers, one by one, as if he were looking for something.

  Claire needed to get over there. She needed to ... the time stamp reminded her this had been recorded hours ago. Whatever had happened, it was over. At least Max hadn’t been home. Too many people got killed trying to stop intruders who just wanted to take their TV and run.

  Watching the silent footage, though, she had no idea what this intruder wanted. He moved on to the closet, then kicked the walls, clearly frustrated. Whatever the man was looking for, he obviously hadn’t found it. Slowly, he turned around.

  No.Claire’s blood went cold. No fucking way.

  She hit pause, because she knew the dark-haired, gray-eyed man glaring across the room toward the camera. She’d been staring at pictures of him all day.

  It was Jason. Jason Fucking Chamberlain.

  Chapter 7

  Max

  Max locked the front door, and then he spent the next fifteen minutes cussing loudly. He’d been stupid, so stupid to bike right by The Coffee Cave like that, over and over again. He’d hoped to catch a glimpse of the killer, but instead the killer had caught a glimpse of him.

  Because on all his trips past the Cave on his way home, Max had shown them exactly where he lived.

  Fuck.

  He was shaking. He went to the kitchen, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and downed it in a few swallows. As the cool liquid flowed down his throat to his gut, he realized two things.

  First, that if someone really wanted him dead, they could have just waited inside and shot him as he walked in the front door. Whoever had left that note, he was looking for the cash and the drugs. He probably wanted to scare Max, too—but he didn’t want him dead. Not yet. Max thought of the definitively dead Douglas Coughlan. Of the unknown Thomas Holloway. Each death the killer committed would leave that much hotter a trail for the authorities to follow. If the killer really believed both that Max didn’t have the money and that he’d been intimidated into backing away from the story, they might back off too. For now, at least. Later—like, later when they realized Max hadn’t backed off from the story—was another matter. For now, Max might be in some deep shit, but it wasn’t deep shit that was likely to take him out. Not yet.

  He’d said he wanted this story no matter what it took. Had he meant it, or hadn’t he?

  He’d meant it. Max felt anger grow inside him as he looked around the disheveled apartment. How dare the killer try to intimidate him. Did he—or she—think Max was just a nice guy with a nice smile, too? As Max surveyed the damage, he became more and more determined to prove otherwise, to prove it to them all.

  Which made the second thing he’d realized all the more important. Whoever had left Max the note had left something else behind, too: fingerprints. Max had probably smudged the prints on the front door, but the ones on the bedroom door might still be good.

  Screw the fact that his chances of dying a horrible death before this was through had just shot through the roof, and screw the defeatist attitude that went with looking at things that way. This was Max’s first real break. It was the first potential piece of real evidence he’d found since he’d swiped that coffee cup, and damned if he wasn’t going to use it.

  He returned to the bedroom, carefully not touching the doorknob as he walked by. The killer—or whoever the killer had sent— had to have touched that knob on his way into the room. Max crossed the bedroom, threading his way through the piles of dumped out clothes to get to the closet. The boxes in the back had been dumped out too, but he made his way through them until he found the books and notes from his forensics major classes, which he’d stuck with longer than either chemistry or drama or even computer science. Among the books, he found what he was looking for: his old fingerprint dusting kit.

  He set it down on the dresser and pulled out a small tin of gray dust and a brush. Max drew a few deep calming breaths. He needed to be calm and focused and most of all not rushed if he wanted to get this thing right. If he smudged the prints, there’d be no second chances.

  Just like there were no second chances during the final exam when he was supposed to be focusing on getting prints and instead was focused on Jasmine, the lab partner whose bed he’d shared the night before the final, back before he’d met Claire. Max had totally tanked the exam, and the course was required for the forensics major. Max could have taken it over again, but instead he’d just shrugged and moved on. At the time, it had just seemed easier. Not like there weren’t other things he could major in.

  Jasmine had aced the exam, or at least Max assumed she had. She’d graduated right on schedule and immediately landed a job as a crime scene examiner for the Rio Verde police force, though as far as he knew she and Claire had never worked together.

  Max returned to the bedroom door. He examined the doorknob, then dipped the brush into the powder and got to work. As gently as he could, he brushed the powder over the bedroom knob, as well as the surrounding wooden door. Then he waited for the dust to settle and—hopefully—stick to the sweat the intruder had left behind.

  He forced himself to be patient, as he hadn’t been the day of that final, until enough time had passed and the prints were beginning to settle out. Only then did he lightly blow the dust away.

  Three perfect gray prints were left behind, one on the door, two on the metal knob.

  Now came the tricky part. Ignoring the chaos around him, Max pulled out a strip of tape and pressed it to the first print. Slowly, slowly, he pulled the tape away.

  His gaze caught on a T-shirt of Claire’s tangled among his own clothes as he pulled the tape away, and his hands shook. One glance was enough to tell him he’d smudged it.

  Focus, he told himself. There were some things neither a disarming smile nor a nice-guy rep could get you through. He turned to the second print.

  His hands were steadier this time, and he didn’t look away or let himself get distracted. He lifted the print from the door and pressed it onto a white card, also from the kit. He lifted the tape slowly away, leaving behind a perfect gray print against the white cardboard. There.

  He took the third print. Just as perfect.

  Now all he needed to do was ID them. Taking prints was easy, relatively speaking—any kid with a graphite pencil and a roll of masking tape could do that. Accessing criminal fingerprint databases, on the other hand, wasn’t something he could do on his own. The only person he knew who could do it without him going and turning the whole business over to the police and losing his story was Jasmine.

  He hadn’t spoken to Jasmine since the day he’d blown the final—no, he admitted to himself ruefully, since the night before the final, as they lay gasping on the narrow twin bed of her dorm room.

  Finish what you’ve started. Megan’s mocking words echoed through his head. Jasmine was one more bit of unfinished business he’d left behind with a smile and a change-of-major form. Max checked his phone. Jasmine’s number was still in there. He took a deep breath and called her.

  Jasmine didn’t answer, so Max left a message. He didn’t know if she�
��d call back, so he turned on the TV and began cleaning up his disheveled room while he thought about what to do next. At least he always took his laptop to work with him. There was a good chance the guy who’d done this would have trashed the computer, too, or, worse, gone through his bank records. That safe deposit box for the cash was looking like a pretty good decision, too.

  Max found himself more and more hesitant to use any more of that money than he had to, and not only because he might draw attention to himself. With an uneasy laugh he wondered if it was a conflict of interest to solve a murder using money you got from that murder.

  He turned the volume up on the TV to drown out those uncomfortable thoughts. The new season of American Voice was on, and Max shoved clothes back into drawers to a thoroughly mediocre rendition of the theme from Phantom of the Opera. He was glad when the song ended, putting singer and audience alike out of their misery. They must still be running the auditions. Max turned to hefting the mattress back onto the bed as a new singer took the stage.

  He stopped abruptly, because this guy was actually good. Max turned back to the TV as the singer belted out U2’s “Beautiful Day” with no musical accompaniment.

  “Oh, no fucking way,” he said aloud as he read the name on the bottom of the screen.

  It was Dillon Varga, the singer from The Coffee Cave. Apparently he hadn’t hesitated to use his dirty cash to get to Vegas, where the auditions were taking place. Max watched as the judges looked at one another. It was clear they were impressed, too, even that one guy, Gavin, who was never impressed by anyone.

  Max stared at the screen as it panned back to Dillon. Now there was someone with a reason to want that money. Max was just following that thought to its logical conclusion when his phone chimed a call from Jasmine. He muted the TV and grabbed it.

  “Hey, Max. What’s up? You okay?” Her voice was quiet and concerned. Being concerned about people was what Jasmine did. When she wasn’t digging up causes of death, she volunteered serving soup at the local kitchen and rescuing kittens from shelters, honest to God. “You sounded upset in your ... message.” She tactfully didn’t mention that it was the first time he’d called her in, well, in a very long time.

  “I’m fine,” Max said. She’d sounded concerned in the weeks after that final, too, when he’d dropped his forensics major. He’d declined to get together to talk about it, and after a few calls he’d stopped picking up the phone, too. Having someone worried about you wasn’t exactly a comfortable feeling. He’d take Claire’s anger over that any day. Yet now Max forced a smile and said to Jasmine, “I need to ask you a favor,” as if that was a reasonable thing to do after a couple years of radio silence.

  “Sure, Max,” Jasmine said, as if it was. “Anything, you know that.”

  Which totally wasn’t the answer he deserved after that silence. Max pushed a twinge of guilt aside. “Can you come over?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You still at the same place?”

  “Yeah,” Max said, swallowing a bitter laugh, because that was true in more ways than one.

  “On my way,” Jasmine told him.

  Max stared at the phone, thinking that it really was possible to be too nice and too good. The truth was, Jasmine had always assumed he was just as nice, and unlike Claire, never had looked any deeper.

  He felt more than a little guilty, using that niceness to call her over here now. But this was about something bigger. Two somethings: proving himself to Claire and finding a killer.

  Those thoughts didn’t make Max feel any less uneasy though. He focused on finishing getting the mattress back on the bed and everything else back off the floor. He especially made sure he got the pair of Claire’s red satin underwear that she’d left behind with her T-shirt off the floor. Both pieces of clothing still smelled faintly of her. Max tucked them under his pillow as he made the bed, knowing that still-familiar scent would follow him into his fantasies in the nights ahead.

  He heard a knock on the door and he crossed the apartment to look through the peephole. No sense taking any chances. Claire was the one who always said that, and Max was the one who always laughed and threw the door open anyway. Not anymore.

  But it was indeed Jasmine who stood outside, her luxurious dark curls framing soulful brown eyes. Max opened the door, making sure it was closed and bolted behind her before letting her pull him into a hug. Inhaling the smell of Jasmine’s skin so soon after Claire’s was disconcerting—to put it mildly.

  “Missed you, Max,” Jasmine whispered into his ear. She didn’t know anything about Claire, as far as he knew. “Been worried about you.”

  It suddenly seemed crazy, asking an ex to identify fingerprints for him. Why would any sane person agree to do that? Even Megan had required ... persuasion ... to agree to analyze that coffee cup.

  Could Max persuade Jasmine, too? Persuade her in ways that kept it all about her needs and not about his?

  If he’d felt uneasy before, uneasy didn’t begin to cover how he felt about that idea. Being fair to an ex-girlfriend and fair to a one-night stand were not the same thing at all—and that was before he even thought about being fair to Claire.

  Not that Claire’s past couple of months of radio silence had exactly been fair, either.

  Max had to get this story. He’d do anything to get it, and then to make sure Claire knew he’d gotten it.

  It wasn’t like he and Megan had done anything she hadn’t wanted—hell, anything she hadn’t practically demanded. He wouldn’t do anything Jasmine didn’t want either. That had nothing to do with being a nice guy. It had to do with being a decent one.

  The way Jasmine’s mouth had lingered by his ear, and the way her tongue was tentatively now tasting the curve of it, seemed reasonable evidence that Jasmine might want things, too. Max didn’t have to be a hard-hitting journalist to know that.

  “Missed you too,” Max told her, telling the uneasiness inside him that this was actually true. He had missed her. He just left out the part where he’d missed her as a friend more than a lover. He hadn’t missed sleeping with Jasmine when he’d left the forensics department, but he actually had missed talking to her.

  She let her lips trail down Max’s neck as they drew apart. “So what’s going on?” The words she’d just spoken weren’t the only question in her wide eyes.

  Max leaned toward her, which was a question of its own. Jasmine leaned toward him, brushing her lips against his: an answer. She tasted of sugar cookies and vanilla, nothing like Claire’s earthier cinnamon-and-rain taste. Max faltered and reminded himself that he needed to do this. For the sake of Claire and the story.

  He moved his hand gently to Jasmine’s back and deepened the kiss, his tongue teasing her as his uneasiness grew. He trailed his hand down to the small of her back, slowly, so she could pull away any time she wanted, even as that troublesome don’t-do-this voice in his head told him in no uncertain terms that he should be the one pulling away.

  Jasmine slid her hands down to his arms, her touch lingering on the inside of his elbow just long enough to make his breath speed up, and then her hands found their way beneath his shirt and up his back. Her hands felt warm against his bare skin. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine Claire ...

  But that wasn’t fair. Max kept his eyes open as he trailed his kisses down to Jasmine’s collarbone, and she made an appreciative sound. “God, where have you been hiding, Max?” She pushed up against him as her hands slipped down into his back pockets to knead his ass. She made a lower, throatier sound as Max hardened against her—some responses were automatic, after all. She leaned back against the closed door as Max’s hands found their way beneath her shirt, skimming the waistband of her jeans suggestively on the way.

  Jasmine tugged on Max’s belt in response, and pushed him just far enough away to begin undoing it.

  Max went cold inside. How would Jasmine feel, once she knew the real reason he’d called her?

  How would Claire feel, once she knew what had go
ne on here? Somehow, Max doubted she’d care he was doing this for her.

  Claire’s the one who walked out, Max reminded himself, but deep down he knew that wouldn’t matter if Claire found out. Yet what did he think he was going to do, just lie and hide this from her when they got back together? If Claire really was keeping secrets, she wasn’t the only one. That had been true the moment Max left The Coffee Cave. It was more true now.

  Max’s head hurt. He needed to get this over with, to tell Jasmine why he’d called her, sooner rather than later. He moved his lips into Jasmine’s silky hair—she did have glorious hair—as a treacherous voice told him he should keep waiting. Men and women were both more likely to agree to all sorts of things in the warm fuzzy afterglow of sex. Max reached beneath Jasmine’s shirt for her bra, tentatively, hands teasing her nipples through the fabric. They hardened at his touch, and Jasmine purred appreciatively even as his hands skimmed around to her back. She pressed against Max, encouraging him to undo the bra’s metal clasps. Just a little further, Max thought.

  How far was too far? Just how much was Max willing to do to get this story? Would he be cheating on the woman he was trying to win back if he slept with Jasmine? Would he be cheating less if he only teased her into multiple orgasms?

  Claire’s the one who walked out. An even more treacherous part of Max wanted to go all the way with Jasmine, not for the sake of those fingerprints, but to show Claire just what could happen when you ditched your long-term boyfriend without warning.

  Max pulled abruptly back, because that really would be a dick move.