Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
“I know I’m not,” he told her.
“Do you have time,” she asked, her brown eyes so serious behind her glasses, “to talk?”
“Yeah. Sure,” he said, taking a mental inventory of the condoms he’d stored in the side pocket of his cargo pants.
“Really
talk,” she told him, taking her slice of pizza from the micro wave. She looked at him again. “Really,” she emphasized.
“I’d like to talk,” he said, which wasn’t quite a lie, because the verb he really meant also ended in a hard
K
.
“Good,” she said, pizza in hand as she gestured to the door. “Then let’s go.”
Was this really going to be this easy? They were just going to stand up and walk out of here, walk around the corner to her place where—thank you God Almighty—they would finally, finally,
finally
be alone.
To talk.
He would talk. Absolutely. Hell, he was a freaking Navy SEAL. He could multitask.
Dan shrugged on his jacket and followed Jenn out the door.
• • •
“What time is that dickhead Mick Callahan coming in?” Sam asked.
Alyssa looked up at him from her seat behind Maria’s desk. “When you say things like that,” she started.
“I’m not going to kick his ass,” he promised her and Jules both. “I’m just going to sit here, very quietly, and rip him a new one with my eyes.”
“And that’s what I’m afraid of,” she said. “He’s just crazy enough to take offense to that kind of—”
“See?” Sam told Jules. “She thinks he’s crazy, too.”
“You manhandled a cop, SpongeBob,” Jules pointed out, using the silly nickname he’d assigned Sam years ago, even though Sam already had way too many nicknames. His real name, that his parents had bestowed upon him, was Roger. He’d been called a lot of things over the decades he’d been alive though, and somehow
Sam
had stuck. Thank God. Because he’d always hated Roger.
Although he did truly love it when, at certain times, Alyssa caught his attention by addressing him with it.
And Jules’s nickname, SpongeBob, as ridiculous as it sounded, was in truth a term of endearment that Sam appreciated far more than the man’s standard, which was
Sweetie
.
“Is it really all that crazy that Callahan reacted the way he did?” Jules continued.
Alyssa actually came to Sam’s defense. “It did have a … certain unstable quality to it,” she admitted. “A… what’s that word? Not tinge. Like a sepia tone, only a coating …”
“Patina,” Jules suggested.
“That’s it.” She smiled happily at him. “A patina of instability. Lots of little cracks that you can’t see unless you look closely.”
Sam sighed. “Sometimes you guys wear me out.”
“You’re just not gay enough,” Jules told him.
“No, no, he’s
exactly
the right amount of gay,” Alyssa countered.
“There are some who would disagree,” Jules said. “But isn’t diversity grand—that we can sit here and treat him like an equal?” He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Even though he’s not?”
Alyssa’s cell phone rang, interrupting. “It’s Savannah,” she told them. Taking it into the outer office, she answered it. “Hey Van, thanks for calling me back. …”
Please, God, let Savannah have printed out that picture of Alyssa so that they’d have an answer to at least one of their mysteries.
Jules sat down next to Sam. “FYI—I told Alyssa this earlier—the hospitals and morgues are all on alert,” he said, “but there’s been no word from any of them. So, I really like the idea of Winston having a home base in some local basement. That explains why no one’s seen him.”
“Either that, or the homeless thing is a disguise.” Sam laughed at himself. “And yes, I’ve been watching too much TV.”
“I tried that one on Alyssa,” Jules said. “It’s pretty far out there. It defies Occam’s razor.”
Occam’s razor was a theory that said that any time there was a question or a problem, the simplest explanation or answer was usually the correct one. In other words, if there were two possibilities—A) that the killer was a reincarnation of Jack the Ripper, born again into the body of a priest who dressed as a homeless man and who had access to his church’s antiquities which he was quietly selling on eBay to pay for his bloodlust; or B) that the killer was an estranged family member who’d killed Maggie accidentally in anger, and panicked—it was probably going to be B.
“But not everything’s always as simple as it should be,” Sam pointed out. “Why cut out Maggie’s heart?”
“Because … he’s a showman,” Jules postulated. “He wants to make an impact, to be noticed.”
“A dead body’d do that,” Sam said.
“I haven’t told Alyssa this yet,” Jules said, “but there’s something about this case that’s … not right.”
Sam looked at him.
“I know,” Jules said. “That sounds stupid. Of course it’s not right. A woman is dead, her heart cut out and stashed in a desk drawer.” He sighed. “I spent the morning at the local Bureau office, and they’ve looked hard at everyone who benefited from Maggie’s death, including Lulu, her dog. Okay, kidding about that, but… still. There’s no one and nothing that points to anyone who knew her. Her brother’s her heir, and he doesn’t even want the money. He’s giving it all to UNICEF.”
“Out of guilt?” Sam asked.
“I don’t think so,” Jules said.
“Are we looking at this wrong?” Sam asked. “Is it possible it was a burglary? Or maybe Maggie saw something that she shouldn’t’ve seen, and this is the killer’s way of throwing us all off track?”
“Occam’s razor,” Jules said again.
“Okay,” Sam said. “If the killer’s not a family member, then the simplest explanation is … that Maggie was a pawn. That someone wanted to put a human heart in that desk drawer, and Maggie became an unwilling organ donor.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
Then Jules said, “So who’s our target? Maria or Jenn?”
“It was Jenn’s desk,” Sam pointed out.
“But Maria’s office door was locked,” Jules said.
True. The assemblywoman’s inner office, where they were sitting right now, needed a separate key to unlock its door.
“Why stop with Maria and Jenn?” Sam asked. “Maybe the target is one of the interns or volunteers.” All of whom they’d be talking to, this afternoon.
“Or maybe the target is Maria
and
Jenn,” Jules was thinking aloud. “Someone who knew them both.”
“Like Mick Callahan,” Sam pointed out as he stood up and went to the door.
“Yeah,” Jules said, “but I was thinking more along the lines of
the assemblywoman’s missing brother. I don’t buy into coincidences. Why should he pick right now to disappear?”
Alyssa was still on the phone, over by the coffee station, pouring herself a cup.
Their most likely scenario was that back in September, Savannah had printed out a picture of Alyssa to show to Maria as part of a pitch to use Troubleshooters Incorporated as security for a campaign event. Maria had decided against hiring the team, and the picture had been thrown out. It had made its way, with the rest of the office trash, into the dumpster out back where Winston, their homeless man, had found it while sifting through the garbage.
As if Alyssa felt Sam’s eyes on her, she turned—still talking to Savannah on the phone—to look at him.
And she shook her head, no.
So much for Occam’s freaking razor. Unless someone else in the office had checked out the Troubleshooters website and printed out that picture. Or…
“What if the killer’s real target,” Sam said, “isn’t Maria or Jenn.” He turned to look at Jules. “What if his target’s Alyssa?”
“So that’s how it works,” Dan told Jenn, shutting the cover of the control panel on her new alarm system. He’d cleaned up her apartment while he’d been in there this morning—taking out the Chinese food containers and the garbage, washing the dishes that had been in the sink, and turning her bed back into a sofa.
It was extremely thoughtful of him to have done that.
“There’s also a remote control,” he added, shrugging out of his jacket and tossing it over the arm of her couch before picking up a little keychain-sized device from the table upon which she kept her alarm clock. He held it up for her to see as he crossed back toward her.
“Why,” she asked, trying to focus on it instead of the way his
T-shirt fit snugly across his broad chest, “is there a remote control? In case I’m too lazy to take the four steps from my couch to the panel, when I’m ready to go to bed?”
“Oh,” he said, as he handed her the device, “no, you should turn the system on as soon as you get inside. Not the motion sensors, but the rest of it. Remember, there’re two settings. Home and away.”
The thing he’d given her looked like a miniature version of the control panel. “Yes, I remember. Home is when I’m here. Check.”
He smiled, which worked well with the whole nicely fitting T-shirt thing. “The remote’s main purpose is the panic button,” he said, taking it back from her and pointing to the red button on the side. “If you wake up in the night and someone’s between you and the control panel, you just push this, and the alarm’ll go off—silently though. It sends a message
—send help
—to the monitoring system. Push it twice in a row, and you get the message plus the full sirens, which sometimes helps scare away a potential attacker.”
“But why didn’t the sirens go off when whoever’s standing there first broke in?” she asked, watching him put it back on her bedside table. And why hadn’t he jumped her the moment they got inside? She’d fully expected him to.
“It’s really just a hypothetical,” Dan said.
“In other words, I don’t really need the remote control.”
“It’s definitely designed for people with bigger homes,” he said. “It’s … just a second line of defense.”
“But if our psycho-killer got in by disabling the alarm system,” she pointed out, “it’s unlikely that anything’ll happen when I push the panic button, because the system’s been disabled, right?”
“Maybe he cut a hole through the floorboard and climbed up through Mrs. Harrison’s apartment.”
“Maybe it’s Mrs. Harrison who cut the hole and climbed through it,” she said. “Okay, that seems to be an appropriate reason to panic. You sold me.”
“Good,” he said, laughing. But it faded quickly, leaving behind … heat. Yet, he still remained all the way across the room.
“So,” Jenn said, with a bravado that was as completely manufactured and as false as her request that they come here merely to talk had been. Yes, she definitely wanted to talk to Dan. There was a lot she wanted to ask him. Later. “Day two. What kind of sex do we have on day two?”
She barely saw him move, but he had and he was now kissing her, his tongue in her mouth, his body hard against her, his hands on her butt as he pulled her more tightly to him.
God, yes. She opened herself to him, kissing him back as ferociously, pulling his T-shirt up and over his head as he deftly unfastened her jeans and yanked them, with her panties, down her legs.
This
was what she’d expected instead of that tutorial he’d given her on her security system, and she realized that he wasn’t as cocksure as he pretended to be.
And if she truly had wanted merely to talk, he would, indeed, have merely talked—a thought that warmed her the same way his showing her Fred-the-bunny and cleaning her apartment had done.
Which was nice, but not as nice as his exploring fingers between her legs, or the solid smoothness of his bare back beneath her hands, or the way he seemed to inhale her, each kiss longer and deeper and more possessive than the last.
Jenn tried to kick off her shoes, but she was wearing her bad-weather boots, and the laces of the right one were too-tightly tied. She got the left one off though, but remained hobbled by her jeans, even as she pulled Dan free from his briefs.
He was as rock hard as he’d been last night when he’d placed her hand on him, and she wondered if he knew how close she’d been to going into the privacy of the bathroom with him, right then and there—to hell with the fact that everyone would’ve known exactly what they had been doing when they reemerged.
“Ah, God, Jenn,” he broke their kiss to say as she touched him. “I want… I need …”
She knew, because she wanted and needed, too. She tried to kick her jeans free from her shoeless foot, intending to wrap her leg around him and push him deeply inside of her, even as they stood right there, by her front door.
But she wasn’t quite tall enough, and it wasn’t just her jeans that hindered her. Dan pulled back, too.
“Condom,” he said, fumbling in one of his cargo pockets for the little foil package.
Good idea. As he covered himself, she used the opportunity to push her jeans off her left leg, nearly falling over and hopping into the kitchen to catch herself on the counter. “Oh, my God.
That
would’ve been an embarrassing trip to the emergency room.” She was laughing, and he was, too, as she finally got free and could then focus on untying her boot.
But he came up behind her as she was leaning over, and pushed himself inside of her.
“Oh,” she gasped, as he said “Gahd,” and this time she
would
have fallen, if he hadn’t been holding her tightly around the waist.
“Oh, my God,” she said again, her voice filled both with her laughter and her surprise.
He’d started to move, but now he froze. “Oh, shit,” he said his breath warm against her ear. “That wasn’t, like, an invitation?”
She laughed again—she couldn’t help it. Invitation? “Yes and no. The whole taking-off-my-pants thing was definitely an invitation, but—”
He started to pull out, but she pushed back against him, not letting him go, and in fact driving him deeply inside of her.
“That,”
she gasped, “was an invitation.”
“Uhn,” he said, and she had to grab for the counter, using it to brace herself, as the force of him thrusting into her, again and again and again, pushed her forward.
It felt unbelievably good, his hands holding tightly to her hips, but then it felt even better as he moved to touch her—exactly where she wanted to be touched.
“Jenn,” he rasped. “Jesus, Jenni …”
She knew that she liked it when he called her Jenni, but she’d had no idea that hearing him say it could actually make her come-in combination, of course, with the not-very-gentle sex they were having, and the exquisite placement of his fingers and thumb.