Murder on Lovers' Lane (Brody and Hannigan Mysteries) (4 page)

Dr. Flanders smiled brightly.  "Well done, Ms. Harris."

The rest of the class turned around to look at her, and once again heat burned its way up her spine into her cheeks.

To her relief, Dr. Flanders continued in that vein, moving on to a comparison of the bawdy pub songs of early America with the sermons of the era, drawing the class's attention back to her.

"Teacher's pet," Brody whispered, his breath warming her neck.  She couldn't stop a tiny shudder from running though her, scalp to toes.

She forced herself to ignore how close he was sitting and how good he smelled, and opened her notebook.  She sketched a map of the small classroom, three long rectangles representing the trio of long tables that filled the classroom.  At each table, six or seven people sat, side by side, notebooks open on the tables.

She noted male or female, basic descriptions such as "blond male" or "plump brunette female with nose ring."  Dr. Flanders occasionally called names, and Hannigan added names to the descriptions.

To her right, Brody seemed to be playing absently with his phone, but she saw that he was actually taking snapshots of the room with the phone's integrated camera.  Smart, she thought, shooting him a look of appreciation.

He turned his head and pinned her once more with that smoldering gaze that made her insides turn to fire.

"Mr. Bronson?"  Dr. Flanders' voice drew her out of her musings.  Hannigan started to scan the room, hoping to add Bronson to the list of names on her room layout, when she remembered Bronson was the fake name Brody had chosen.

"Like Chuck," he'd said with a wry grin.

She nudged him with her elbow, making him frown.

"Teacher's calling on you," she whispered.

He looked up at Dr. Flanders.  "Yes, ma'am?"

Dr. Flanders' brow furrowed.  "Yes, doctor, is sufficient," she said with a hint of displeasure.  "I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the influences of human sexuality on the sermons of Jonathan Edwards."

Hannigan felt a rush of sympathetic panic, but Brody showed no signs of discomfort.  He merely nodded.  "Actually, I was thinking that his unusual interest in the person of Eve, as the mother of all mankind, may have been less a sign of incipient feminism, as some scholars suggest, and more a sign of earthly pleasure in the idea of a woman running around in public stark naked."

The rest of their classmates laughed at his remark, and even Dr. Flanders smiled. 

As Dr. Flanders moved on, Brody turned a smiling face to her, evidently proud of his impromptu success.  She smiled back, but hidden in the mirth was a hint of despair.  For even as she envied his easy wit, she was left with the sense, not for the first time, that she was entirely out of his league.

"Well, if nothing else," Hannigan drawled on their way out to the car after class, "we at least got the class's attention."

"You rocked it with the Hawthorne commentary," he said, hooking his pinky through hers.  Heat rolled up his arm in a pleasant wave, and he edged closer, determined to enjoy the fruits of their cover identities, guilt free.

She looked up at him, her gray eyes glimmering in the yellow light of the tall lamps flanking the parking lot.  "Your naked lady quip was better."

He let go of her finger and put his arm around her, drawing her against his side.  "Nah.  Just funnier."  He caught sight of one of their male classmates looking their way and took advantage, turning to nuzzle his nose in her hair.  She smelled like green apples and sunshine, and he wanted to bury himself in her, bathe in the tart, sweet heat of her until they both came like bottle rockets.

Fortunately, they reached the car before his desire overcame his good sense.  He let her go, with both reluctance and relief, and opened the door.

"So now what?" she asked a moment later when he slid behind the wheel.  "We cruise all the make out spots?"

The very thought nearly undid all the good work he'd just done controlling his inconvenient libido.  "What are the odds he'd strike again so soon?" he asked.  "Before this last murder, he hadn't killed in a week.

"True, but before that, it was two weeks.  He seems to be escalating."

"So we go from parking spot to parking spot, peering into windows?  Won't we look like a couple of cops?"

"We
are
a couple of cops."

"You know what I mean."

"So we don't just cruise the places, then.  We stop.  We park.  We pretend we're one of the writhing masses."

He nearly moaned aloud.  "But won't they see we're not...writhing?"

Her lips curved.  "I doubt they'll be able to see out of their fogged up windows to notice.  Or care."  She leaned forward and turned on the radio, twisting the dial until she found a baseball game airing.  Braves versus the Mets, fifth inning.  "Donelli's pitching."

Baseball, he thought.  Think about baseball.  As he pulled out of the college parking lot, he drove his mind toward the mental gymnastics of baseball stats, listening to the numbers the announcers were dropping here and there and trying to calculate batting averages, earned run averages, on-base percentages and slugging percentages.  By the time they reached Parkwood and eased into the lot overlooking the river, he felt reasonably in control of his body.

The parking area was only sparsely populated on a Monday night, weekends obviously the more reasonable time to find large numbers of young people out tempting nature and hormones.  But there were a couple of cars parked near the bluff, and enough empty spaces to accommodate two more.

Brody pulled into an empty slot and parked, leaving the battery engaged so they could hear the game.

"Should we at least sit closer?" he asked.

Hannigan's eyes cut toward him.  "Not unless you get a car without a console."

He looked down at the offending gear console and didn't know whether to weep or thank the heavens.  "Good point."

She reached for the controls to increase the radio volume.  "Next time we'll take my car."

Next time?

"Next class," she clarified, correctly interpreting his silence as a question.  "Wednesday?"

"Right."

"Don't forget to email me the photos you took so I can make us a class chart."

He managed a smile and pulled out his phone, happy for another distraction.  He sent the photos one at a time.  "Did anyone in the class look like a prime suspect to you?"

"We were the most suspicious-looking people there," she said with a half-smile. 

By the top of the sixth inning, they agreed to move on to another spot.  They tried Buck's Bluff—utterly deserted, given the recent murder—and went on to Capital Drive, where an abandoned grammar school, shuttered during the city's latest round of budget cuts, had become a popular hangout for young people looking for trouble.

They parked at the school awhile, keeping an eye on the teens and college-age hell raisers there as well.  The pickings were slimmer than they'd have been on the weekend, but there were a dozen or more people under the age of twenty-five who'd made their way to the old school on a Monday night.  Plenty of pot-smoking and heavy petting in sight, but what seemed to provide the biggest draw for most of them was the abandoned playground equipment left behind.

Monkey bars, sturdy swing sets, even an old metal merry-go-round proved an irresistible temptation to bored youth.  Brody felt a tug of nostalgia himself, just watching them.

"When I was ten," Hannigan murmured, "some older kids put me on the merry-go-round and spun it around so fast I puked up my lunch.  All over them."

Brody chuckled.

"I didn't even really have to puke that bad," she admitted.  "But since they wanted me to hurl, I didn't see the point in disappointing them, especially if I could make them sorry they ever tried to mess with a Hannigan."

"Did you get a lot of grief in school?"  He'd thought he knew everything about his partner, but the shade of melancholy in her voice caught him by surprise.

"When you're the poorest kid in class, you draw attention," she said.

"How poor?"  He didn't know why it had never occurred to him to ask the question before.  It made him wonder what else about her he might be missing.

Her gray eyes lifted to meet his, full of old pain.  "My mom couldn't work because we'd never be able to afford childcare even on two salaries.  My dad worked a factory job seven to three, then a night shift job four to midnight, so we could move to a bigger city where we might have more opportunities.  But that meant we shopped at bargain bins and thrift stores, took hand-me-downs and said thank you very kindly."

His life had been so far removed from that experience he had to struggle to imagine it.  "Did you go hungry?"

She shot him a fierce look.  "My mother would have starved herself first."

"Of course."

"We grew vegetables in the back yard.  Bought meat in bulk and froze it in a little second-hand chest freezer my dad bought at a yard sale.  He had to defrost it every few weeks or it would stop running and the meat would spoil."  She grimaced.  "The first couple of times it happened, we had to throw the meat out and lived on canned soup and canned tuna for weeks until we could afford to buy more meat."

He started to say, "I'm sorry," but stopped himself, knowing she'd resent the slightest show of pity.  "How long did it last?" he asked instead.

"Once my brother David was fourteen, and old enough to watch the other boys and me, Mom got a job as an office assistant.  She'd worked hard, when we were little and she was home watching us, teaching herself how to type.  My dad bought her an old manual typewriter and a used typing manual." Hannigan smiled.  "One of my most enduring childhood memories is the sound of that typewriter clacking away."

On the radio, the seventh inning stretch arrived.  "Should we try another place?"

Hannigan nodded, and they drove across town to the wooded outskirts, where meandering Magnolia Park provided the most secluded of parking places the city could offer.

There were only two other cars in the gravel lot near the edge of the man-made lake in the center of the park.  The interiors of both vehicles were fogged up, affording no view of the occupants.

"I don't think the killer's going to strike tonight," she said quietly.

He agreed, but he didn't want the night to end, either.  "Want to go grab something to eat before I take you home?"

She shook her head.  "I ate before class."

He stifled his frustration.

A bright flash of headlights lit up the interior of the car.  Brody squinted at the new arrival and saw that it was a marked police cruiser.  A second later, it pulled even with the parked cars and the blue dome light started flashing.

The blue strobe was a catalyst that put the other two cars into immediate action.  They cranked in unison and nearly collided in their haste to leave the parking area.

The policeman in the cruiser rolled down his window and shined a bright-beamed flashlight at Brody's car.

Hannigan made a growling sound and shielded her eyes.   "Cut it out, guys!"

She didn't have her badge on her—where in all that tight denim and cotton would she hide it?—but Brody had slipped his shield into the billfold tucked in his jeans.  He pulled it out and shoved it toward the beam of the flashlight.

The officer in the cruiser moved the beam away.  "Sorry, Detective.  We've had orders to try to keep these places clear."

Brody waved him away.  "No problem."

He followed the cruiser out of the parking area and headed back across town to Rosedale Drive and Hannigan's snug little Craftsman Bungalow with the newly painted shutters.  Parking at the curb, he ignored Hannigan's look of confusion and walked with her to the front door.

She unlocked the door and turned to look at him.  "If you're hungry, you can raid my fridge and see if you find anything you want."

It wouldn't be the first time, but he shook his head, not sure why he'd walked her to the door instead of dropping her off as he'd done dozens of times in the past.  Maybe it was as simple as wanting the night to go on forever.  A dangerous conceit, fraught with perilous consequences, but it seemed he'd been tossing caution to the wind all night, since he'd first set eyes on that gold ring piercing the skin of her navel.

She followed his gaze downward.  "For grief's sake, Brody.  Just touch it already."

His gaze snapped up to hers and he saw her smoky eyes glittering with amusement and something he couldn't quite identify.  But the offer was serious.

"Touch it?"

"Demystify it."  Her tone held a note of laughter.  "It's an earring in a little hole.  Just get it over with."

Slowly, with no thought of getting it over with any time soon, he ran the tip of his finger lightly over the tiny gold hoop, heat sparking low in his abdomen as the hint of pressure tugged the skin of her navel, stretching it taut.

He heard Hannigan's soft intake of breath.  Felt a rush of heat wash over him as her pale flesh reddened beneath his finger.  His gaze moved slowly up her body, past the small, firm breasts, their hardened peaks visible beneath even the layers of cotton shirt and lace bra.  Past the low scoop neck that bared her delicate collarbones and the flushed swell of her upper breasts.  Up the slender column of her neck and the full, trembling lips, until he reached her storm cloud eyes.

He saw the unexpected, something he'd dreamed during long, fevered nights but had never sought in daylight.

Arousal, writhing and helpless, burned in her eyes.

Oh, shit.

Chapter Four

Brody took Tuesday off, which suited Hannigan well enough.  His hasty retreat the night before—his frantic, quasi-comic, feet-making-wheels-like-a-cartoon-character escape—had been humiliating enough without spending a day waiting for the inevitable talk.

We're partners, Hannigan.  I don't feel the same way, Hannigan.  Sure, I can get a little hot and bothered by a navel ring, Hannigan, but that's because I'm a man.  Man up and stop thinking like a chick, Hannigan.