Never Too Rich (24 page)

Lightly she caressed his scrotum through the briefs,
squeezed ever so lightly, then brushed her fingers languidly down
his thigh. His eyes shut; she could hear him gasp, his breathing
growing rapid.

She let his trousers fall.

Suddenly neither of them could restrain this urgency
any longer. In one smooth movement he stepped out of his trousers,
lifted her off her feet, and gathered her up in his arms. She clung
to his neck as he carried her effortlessly up the carpeted stairs
to his bedroom. She snuggled close, leaning her cheek against the
warmth of his chest, listening to the quickening beats of his
heart. She felt as though she was floating dreamily, that the
balustrade was falling away below her as she ascended with him. How
hushed these rooms. What sanctuary this was! He pushed the door
open with a bare foot.

How big this room; how mysteriously dim and
shadowy.

Ever so gently he deposited her faceup on the soft
bed on a spread of textured golden silk. She lay there watching
while he lay down beside her. Then his lips peppered her with light
kisses. Forehead. Lips. Ears. Throat. Breasts. Every touch of his
mouth was exquisite, every sensation torturously deliberate.

He entered her without hurry, guiding himself in
slowly and gently. But once he was inside her, she could no longer
contain herself. Digging her fingers into his back, she clamped her
legs fiercely around his naked buttocks and drew him even
deeper.

His thrusts began slowly and built momentum. For
her, each lunge was a delicious melody, a journey to yet another
level of ecstasy. Making love was a reaffirmation. A resurrection.
She could almost feel a part of her dying while another part of her
was being reborn.

Tears sprang to her eyes and she moaned softly. Her
smooth creamy skin, whipcord taut across her curves and glistening
with a moist sheen, and his bulkier, well-defined male musculature
had merged into one.

“
Oh,
yes!”
she moaned. “Oh,
take me! R.L, take me!
Take me!”

And at her pleas, his movements instantly became
more urgent; earnest;
battering.

Her face puckered in delirious concentration, as
though in unbearable pain, but deep within her eyes a rapturous
fire glowed.

It was then that the orgasms began. They rolled over
her like relentless waves of surf, crashing and receding, crashing
and receding—

This was death. This was life. This was the end of
one and the beginning of the other. The present and the future and
the stars and the moon all rolled into one.

She wanted it to go on forever.
Forever
. .
.

And then she felt him tense. His back arched and he
let out a deep, anguished bellow as he was swallowed up in
shuddering spasms of his own. She clamped him ferociously to her as
he bucked one last time, and clutching each other as though for
dear life, together they screamed in ecstasy and tumbled out of
orbit, out of space, out of the very bounds of reality and time
itself.

Afterward, for long minutes, they lay together,
spent and still joined, their breathing coming in raw, ragged
gasps.

She shook her head wonderingly as she came out of
it. He was cradling her in his arms and she had to twist around to
look at him. Her eyes glowed in the dimness. “I think I’ve just
come back from another planet! Were we always this good?”

He raised himself on one elbow and brushed aside a
tangle of her glorious hair. “Don’t you remember?” he asked softly,
his breaths still quick and raw.

“
It’s been so long, R.L.!” She
tightened her mouth as if she was biting back tears. Then she
looked away quickly and added in a whisper: “So goddamn,
goddamn
long!”

“
Only fourteen years,” he said
lightly.

“
No.” Shaking her head, she turned
her head slowly back to face him. “I meant something else.” Her
eyes held his. “I haven’t slept with a man in . . .
years.”

He stared at her.

Still holding his gaze, she reached out and held his
face, framing it tenderly with her fingers. She regarded him
lovingly and whispered solemnly: “Thank you.”

In reply, he rolled atop her again and pressed his
face into her neck. “But,” he murmured gently, glancing up at her
while nuzzling her throat with his lips, “the night is still young,
and so are we. We have barely begun.”

As if to add emphasis to his words, inside her she
could feel him grow erect once again.

If loving wouldn’t make the hurt go away, she
reflected fleetingly, she didn’t know what would.

Chapter 25

Sharon Mudford Koscina wore blue jeans, one of
Fred’s plaid flannel shirts, and leg warmers. Her feet were bare.
Her hair was long and auburn, secured with tortoiseshell barrettes.
She disliked jewelry, but wore a gold Cartier bracelet her husband
had given her on her last birthday, and she was spread out on the
sofa in their living room, her feet tucked under her.

On any other woman, the pose would have been
seductive, but Sharon Mudford Koscina was no ordinary woman. She
was, her husband often thought, to other women what Paul Bunyan was
to wood choppers—a towering, bigger-than-life Valkyrie who stood a
good two heads taller than even the tallest woman in any given
room. Squarish of body, sharp-featured, and with a lot of jaw, she
had a flat chest, no buttocks to speak of, and sturdy tree-trunk
legs.

Besides being Mrs. Fred Koscina, wife of a cop, she
was also Sharon Mudford, M.D., respected psychiatrist, who
practiced professionally under her maiden name.

The big lumpy detective with the bulbous nose and
the towering horsey woman were both rather sexless specimens, but
their relationship had a certain magic. Even after all these years,
the variety of sex they enjoyed would have made most teenagers
blush.

“
Unh-unh, let’s back up there,”
Sharon said with intense softness. In the background, Billie
Holiday softly “wished on the moon.” The room was dim, lit solely
by flickering votive candles in little glass containers. “The
killer, whoever he is, isn’t
evil,
Fred. You’ve got to
banish that word from your vocabulary. You see, good and bad really
have nothing to do with this.”

He shook his head. “You shrinks never cease to amaze
me. He’s a monster. He’s got to be. Who else would do the thing
he’s done?”

She traced a finger around the rim of her beer can,
took a hearty swig, and looked at him levelly. “Psychiatrists don’t
make value judgments—you know that. Differentiating between good
and evil, that’s for the churches and individuals to decide.”

Despite their differences, he eyed her fondly. Her
shrink talk could drive him up the wall, but there was no one he
would rather talk to. Perhaps other people saw her as a
flat-chested, six-foot-two giant of a woman with gangly legs and a
basketball-player torso, but love is blind. He thought her the most
beautiful and desirable woman in the world.

“
Then you don’t think he’s a
monster?”

Sharon frowned down at her beer can.
“Professionally? No.” She shook her head. “He’s not a monster, and
he’s not evil. He’s not ‘bad’ either, not in any textbook
sense.”

He paused, beer can halfway to his mouth. “Then what
is he?”

“
He’s sick,” she said
simply.

“
Said like a real shrink,” he
acknowledged dryly, “though I can’t say I agree with
you.”

She half-smiled. “I don’t expect you to. You’re a
cop. You see things from a different perspective.”

“
You can say that again.” He took a
final swig out of his beer can, bent it in half, and frowned, as
though listening to Billie Holiday. Then he looked at her
inquiringly. “All right. You’ve told me Dr. Sharon Mudford’s point
of view. Now what’s your personal opinion? What does Sharon Koscina
think?”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “Personally,” she
sighed, “yes, I would have to agree with you. I think he’s a
monster and he’s evil and should be locked up forever. I can’t help
it.” She smiled wanly. “I’m only human,” she offered in
explanation.

“
Thank God for that.”

She plucked the crushed can out of his hand and got
up to get two more from the kitchen. When she returned, she popped
the cans and they discussed other savage killers.

Again she shook her head. “You’ve got it all wrong,
Fred. The so-called Son of Sam, the trailside killer in
California—they aren’t evil per se. They’re different from you and
me—and most people. But something horrible—something ill inside
them—drives them to do these terrifying things. If you scratch deep
enough, you’ll find that somewhere in the past they’ve been
terribly scarred, Fred. Somewhere in their earliest years they’ve
been . . . mentally derailed.”

“
And this scalper. What does Dr.
Mudford think he’s like?”

She sighed again. “The police psychiatrists are
working on a profile?” She shot him a questioning look.

He nodded. “But I trust your opinions more.”

“
That’s sweet of you, but silly.
You have no one to judge me by. Psychiatrists and psychologists
aren’t like riveters, you know. You can’t compare the job results
of one with those of another. For all you know, I could be a lousy
shrink. Sometimes even I wonder.”

“
Well?” he prodded gently. “The
scalper . . .”

She frowned. “From what you’ve told me,” she said
slowly, picking her words carefully, “I’d venture to guess that
he’d been terribly abused during his formative years.”

“
By a woman?”

“
Perhaps, but again, not
necessarily. Remember, we don’t know anything concrete about him
yet. All we can do is speculate, and as a cop, you, better than
anyone else, should know how dangerous speculation can
be.”

“
Yeah.” He gave a mirthless laugh.
“But it’s better than nothing.”

“
Don’t be so sure of
that.”

He watched her as she lifted her beer to her lips,
drank it, and proceeded to wipe her mouth on her sleeve. Nothing
ladylike or shrinklike about the way she gulped beer straight out
of the can. She drank it lustily, like one of the guys: her every
movement sure, without a hint of coquettish delicacy. That was what
he liked about her—that straightforward confidence, that
no-nonsense way she had of being herself.

“
Think it’s possible,” he asked
slowly, “that this guy murdered and scalped for kicks?”

“
For kicks?” She leaned forward and
set her beer can firmly down amid the flickering jars of votive
candles on the coffee table. “For kicks?” she repeated, as though
not believing she’d heard him correctly. “You mean for fun? No
way.” She shook her head definitely. “It may look that way, but
looks are deceiving. Have no doubt about it: this guy is tortured,
Fred. He’s driven to violent excesses the same way some people are
driven to success.”

“
Yeah.” His lips curled up in a
twisted smile. “But there’s one big difference between him and
them.”

“
There is, and there
isn’t.”

“
You
will
agree that we’re
talking psychopath, at least?”

“
Hmmmm.” The sound was maddeningly
noncommittal, like the faint buzz of a bumblebee, and her smooth
brow furrowed into an expression of concentration that added to her
aura of cautious deliberation.

A Supreme Court judge, thought Fred. All she lacks
are the robe and gavel.

“
You might call him that,” she
acknowledged finally with a brisk little nod. “Of course, chances
are that most professionals would call him a sociopath.”

“
Humph.” He beetled his brows as he
frowned. “I keep getting psychos and socios mixed up.”

“
The textbook definition of a
psychopath is ‘an individual whose behavior is manifestly
antisocial and criminal.’ “

“
And sociopath?”

“
That is a person whose behavior is
not only antisocial, but far more important, one who lacks a sense
of moral responsibility or social conscience.”

“
So he has no
compunctions.”

“
None whatsoever,” she
murmured.

“
Sounds like a psychopath to
me.”

“
Mmmmm, on the surface, it rather
does. But you see, if he lacks all sense of moral responsibility,
if he has no conscience to answer to—”

“—
then what he’s done isn’t wrong
or bad,” he finished softly for her. “At least not to
him.”

“
There you have it.” She inclined
her head solemnly.

“
Jesus!” he said in a whisper, and
sat abruptly forward. “Do you realize what you’re
saying?”

“
Yes,” she said, “only too well. If
he’s a sociopath, then he’s very dangerous. And should he feel
impelled to kill and mutilate again, well, then nothing is going to
stand in his way or stop him. Nothing . . . and . . . no . . .
one.”

“
Aw, shit.”

“ ‘
Aw, shit’ is right. Remember, to
a totally unconscionable individual, killing is no worse than
squeezing a pimple or brushing his teeth. There are no rights or
wrongs in his way of thinking.”

He sat back heavily, rubbing his forehead with his
ungainly fingers. “So how do you suggest we go about finding
him?”

“
Through the only means possible,”
she said. “Old-fashioned detective work. Only, don’t count on
getting any breaks, not unless he wants to toy with you or secretly
feels compelled to be caught. He’s liable to be far more clever
than you’ll give him credit for. Sociopaths can be brilliant. Even
if you were to run across him every single day of the week, you
would probably never even suspect him for what he is. On the
surface, he could turn out to be more normal-looking than either
one of us. Who knows? He could be anything. A short-order cook. The
police commissioner. An Academy Award-winning actor. Even the
chairman of a Fortune 500 corporation.”