by Stuart, Anne
“Wouldn’t you rather have a drink?”
“Save the tequila for the eggs. They’d go well together.”
His face felt stiff, strange. Almost as if he’d been socked in the jaw, and not by Adamson. He put his hand up and realized what the problem was. He was grinning.
“You don’t really have to keep every issue of the Chronicle since 1957, do you?” she continued, scooping up a pile of discarded papers from the floor beside the sagging sofa.
“I suppose not,” he allowed.
She tossed them in a garbage bag, then reached for more, and he was too late to stop her. “What’s this?” she said, opening up the folder that had lain haphazardly on the littered coffee table.
She dropped it on the floor, and the police photographs scattered at her feet. The sound she made was small, infinitely moving, a little noise of distress that was all the more shattering for being so quiet.
He moved quickly, pulling her into his arms, pushing her face against his shoulder so that she couldn’t look down and see them. Glossy eight-by-ten full-color photographs of the Ripper’s work, in sickening detail.
He expected her to throw up. He had, when he’d seen the latest victim. But she simply shivered in his arms, clinging so tightly that she was probably cutting off her circulation, and she kept making that quiet little sound of pain. Like a wounded fox, he thought, with her pelt of foxy red hair. He stroked it as he kept her face tight against him, feeling the shivers race through her body, and he made his own murmuring noises, senseless, soothing.
“You shouldn’t have had to see that,” he said finally, his voice low.
“I didn’t know,” she said in a numb voice.
He forced himself to push her away so that he could look down into her face. She looked pale, numb with horror, and he told himself he couldn’t be moved by her. If he was, it would weaken him. “Why do you think they call him the Ripper?” he asked in a harsh voice. She started to glance down again, and he caught her chin, forcing her gaze away from the photographic evidence. “You don’t need to look at them again,” he said. “Go on in the kitchen and I’ll get rid of them.”
“I think,” she said, in a wobbly little voice, “that I might need the bathroom.”
“Straight through the bedroom.” He pushed her in the right direction, watching as she broke into a stumbling run. A moment later, she’d slammed the door behind her, and he could hear her being thoroughly sick.
He wanted to go to her. He wanted to hold her head. He’d been alone with the horror, with the sickness, and he knew what it felt like, puking his guts into the toilet, still seeing the butchered bodies in his mind. He’d been on battlegrounds, seen what modern weaponry could do to the human body, but nothing approached the horror of the Ripper’s work.
He scooped up the photographs with the detachment he’d forced himself to learn, sliding them back into the manila envelope and shoving them in a desk drawer. He went into the kitchen, brewing her tea with calm efficiency, making himself a tall drink. He’d forgotten to replenish his supply of cigarettes, and he searched through the overflowing ashtrays for a butt that was of decent length, lighting it from the glow of the gas burner on the stove, almost singeing his hair as he did it. He heard the sound of the water running, and he decided to risk seeing how she was doing. Telling himself that he wouldn’t be tempted to touch her. To hold her.
She was standing in the bathroom door, surveying his tiny bedroom with a look of comical dismay on her face. “You sleep on that bed?” she asked.
“What’s wrong with it? I believe it’s called a double Hollywood king. I’m a tall man—I like a big bed.”
“Wouldn’t it work better if you didn’t have twelve changes of clothes on top of it?” she said. “Sheets are also a nice option.”
“I usually fall asleep on the sofa.”
She shook her head. She was still pale, but she’d splashed water on her face, and her eyes were bright and determined. “You can sleep there again tonight,” she said firmly. “I get the bed.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, leaning against the door frame. “You can throw the clothes out if you want.”
She stared at him, scandalized. “These are good clothes,” she said. “Italian suits.”
“British, actually. And I don’t wear suits anymore.” He turned, planning to leave her to her ridiculous housewifely urges, when her voice forestalled him.
“Damien,” she said quietly, “what happened to you?”
Her soft words stabbed him as lethally as the Ripper’s blade. He made one attempt at fighting. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s not just the Ripper. It’s been longer than that, even I can tell that much. What happened to you?”
“Persistent, aren’t you?” He turned back and looked at her coolly. “Nothing that astonishing. I watched a woman die.”
“Who?”
“No one I knew. I believe her name was Betty Brinston, though she was going by the name Ashanti Mizrak.”
“How did she die?”
He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to drown out her quiet words, to drown out the thoughts, the memories, the guilt, that had been plaguing him for too damned long. But he couldn’t. He’d finally made the mistake of getting close to someone he couldn’t turn off, couldn’t shut out. All he could do was answer her simple question.
“She set herself on fire.” His voice was flat, emotionless. “I don’t even remember what the hell she was protesting. Some military involvement, maybe, or a new nuclear facility. Hell, she might even have been protesting about saving the spotted owls. It doesn’t really matter. She was a nut case, certifiable. It all came out in the inquest.”
“Did you know her?”
“No,” he said. “I stood there, with a camera in my hand, and I watched her die. And I didn’t do a damned thing to stop her.” He turned away so that she wouldn’t see his face. “Your tea’s ready.”
He took the time to pour the tequila into a glass, but he didn’t bother with ice, with water, with salt or lime. He tipped it down his throat, letting it burn its way into his stomach, waiting for the numbness to begin. He drained it, then reached for the bottle to pour himself some more, determined to get blindly, stupidly drunk, to shut out the voices.
Her hand reached out and covered his, stopping him. She had strong hands, with long, beautiful fingers, short nails. The hands of a craftsperson. The hands of an artist.
“You can’t drink away your demons,” she said gently.
“How the hell do you know?” His voice was savage. “I can damned well try.”
“It doesn’t work,” she said. “Demons are too strong.” And she released his hand, picking up her mug of tea and walking slowly back into the living room.
He watched her go. His eyes skimmed the straight, elegant line of her back, the set of her shoulders, the graceful carriage of her head. And he wondered if her demons came anywhere near his own. Or whether it was something as simple as having been abandoned by a mother and having bad taste in men.
Bad taste that extended to him. He might even go and help her clear off that oversize bed in his room. Because he wasn’t going to sleep on his sagging sofa. They were going to sleep together on that bed, either on clean sheets or on the mattress amid the pile of discarded clothes, he didn’t care which. She was right—he couldn’t silence his demons with tequila. But he could damned well try with her.
Chapter Eight
“YOU LIED TO ME,” Lizzie said, watching him.
There was instant wariness in Damien’s dark eyes. He stood at the kitchen counter, shoveling the scrambled eggs into his mouth with a total disregard for taste or texture, following them with burned toast. He’d scraped the mold off one corner, but Lizzie had still refused the offering.
“You can’t even cook eggs.”
He was managing a little better than that sour smile she’d first seen. It almost reached his bleak eyes this time, and she was determined that, sooner or later, she would make him laugh. “They’re edible,” he said.
“Just barely. Don’t you have anything else here?”
“Not that I know of. Eggs do me fine. Morning, noon and night.”
She’d seen the three cartons in the refrigerator. “And you smoke, too. You must have a cholesterol level of catastrophic proportions,” she said.
“I don’t give a shit.”
“I noticed. If you don’t care what you eat, you might as well eat something good for you,” she countered stubbornly. She’d given up on her own meal long ago and was busy trying to make a dent in what was arguably the filthiest room in the place.
“Sure thing,” he drawled. “We’ll head out for the health food store in the BMW. Just as soon as I finish my last bottle of Evian . . .”
“Cut it out.”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” he said. “I don’t care. I don’t care whether I drop dead from a stroke in five years. I don’t care whether I get lung cancer. I don’t care about a damn thing except finding the Ripper.”
She watched him in silence. He was so cool, so tough, so remote. He would break her heart if she let him. “You’re forgetting one thing,” she said. “You care about saving my life.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, dumping his plate in the sink. It was still half full of congealed eggs. “I just don’t want him to kill anymore. It wouldn’t matter to me who you were—I don’t want to see another hooker die.”
It felt like a blow to the stomach, and she searched quickly for something distracting to say, to keep him from seeing her reaction. “What do you mean, see? You haven’t watched those women die.”
He ignored her comment. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
He pushed himself away from the counter, coming closer to her in the tiny little kitchen area. She’d washed all the dishes and scrubbed the countertops, and she was busy concentrating on the layers of grease that coated the white enamel stovetop when he took the rag out of her hand and turned her around to meet his searching gaze.
“Come on, Lizzie,” he said, his voice unnervingly gentle. “I’ve spilled my deep dark secrets. It’s time for some of yours.”
“You have more secrets than you’ve been telling me,” she said. He was holding her wrist, and his fingers were long and strong, imprisoning and yet not the slightest bit hurtful.
“We all have secrets. Time for one of yours.”
She bit her lip. There was absolutely no reason why she should tell him. After all, he was a reporter—it was his job to find out things. If he hadn’t uncovered that particularly dark time in her life, then there was no reason why he should know. No one else did, with the single exception of Courtland.
But Damien wasn’t about to take no for an answer. “Come on, Lizzie,” he said, putting his other hand under her chin, lifting her face to meet his dark gaze. “Tell me.”
And she knew she was going to. “You didn’t do your research very well,” she said in a harsh voice.
“That surprises me,” he said. “I’m usually very thorough.”
“Not this time. You failed to check my police record. Not in California. In Michigan. Where I grew up.”
His face was cool, expressionless. “Sounds ominous. Why don’t you tell me about it? What were you, a juvenile delinquent? A gun moll?”
“Another hooker.”
He didn’t even blink. “You want to explain that?”
“Not particularly. I learned long ago that people wouldn’t believe me.”
“You forget, I used to be a reporter. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to unbelievable stories. So what did you do, turn tricks in high school to pay for your red Corvette?”
She wanted to hit him. On the one hand, his cool, dispassionate tone took all the melodrama out of it. On the other, she wouldn’t have minded some sympathy. “I didn’t have a Corvette,” she snapped. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t even have a family. My mother abandoned me when I was five years old, remember? And none of my foster parents seemed interested in anything more than the monthly sum I brought in.”
“Tough life,” he said, in that same detached voice. “So you became a hooker in response to your deprived childhood?”
“No!” she snapped. “I made the major mistake of thinking I was in love. You’ve already noticed I have lousy taste in men. That’s nothing compared with Billy Order and Mark Clayton.”
“Two of them?” He raised an eyebrow. “How adventurous of you.”
“I thought Billy was my best friend, my buddy,” she said hotly. “And I thought Mark loved me. I didn’t realize he was paying Billy every time we slept together. Both for the use of Billy’s house, and for the use of me.”
He reacted with no more than cool curiosity. “How’d you manage to get busted?”
His matter-of-fact attitude made it easier to tell him. “Billy decided to branch out. He was working the same deal with a couple of other girls, girls who knew the score and were smart enough to demand their share. One of them assumed I knew what was going on. When I confronted Billy and Mark, they denied it, and when I went to the police, they arrested me.” The shame of that day still burned in her soul. She’d been seventeen, an honor student—and in love. In twenty-four hours she was a criminal, her foster parents had kicked her out, and the school had suspended her.
“Tough,” he said again, his voice oddly gentle. His hand still cupped her chin, the long fingers lightly caressing against her jaw. “But you’re forgetting one thing.”
“What’s that?” She didn’t like the feel of his skin against her flesh. Because she liked it too much.
“They dropped the charges. And your good buddy Billy ended up getting busted for dealing less than a year later, and he did some hard time.”
She jerked away from him in shock. “You did know!” she cried accusingly. “Why did you make me tell you?”
His smile was cool, self-deprecating. “Confession’s good for the soul. Besides, your take on it’s a hell of a lot different from the facts. The facts are, you were picked up on suspicion of soliciting, and within twenty-four hours the charges were dropped. You were a minor, and there isn’t even a record of anything happening.”
“If there’s no record, how did you know?”
“I find out what I need to,” he said. “So if things were different, you could simply forget that unpleasant time in your life, chalk it up to bad experience and lousy taste in men, and forget about it.”
“What do you mean, if things were different?”
“You were once busted for soliciting. If I know it, then the Ripper knows it. And the Ripper preys on hookers. Not good girls. Not housewives. Hookers.”
“Damn,” she said, closing her eyes.
“Damn, indeed.” His voice was cool, dispassionate. “Why don’t you go in and lie down? You look exhausted. I can finish up in here.”
“I know from looking around me that you’re cleaning abilities are even worse than your cooking,” she said faintly.
“True enough. But the place has survived months of neglect. I swear, there are no rats, even if it looks as if the place harbors a nest of them. Go to bed, Lizzie. In the morning, everything will look better.”
“Not in this apartment,” she said darkly. He’d released her hand, she noted with distant regret. She wanted him to hold her hand. For some inexplicable reason, she wanted him to do far more than that. She wanted him to make the night go away.
But he’d turned away from her, staring out into the darkness, tension
riveting every line of his tall, wiry body, and she knew there was no comfort there. She had no choice but to believe him—she meant nothing to him, other than a life to be saved, if possible. A body to be used to lure the Ripper into the open. He probably wasn’t aware of her as a woman at all.
Scratch that. He’d kissed her, hadn’t he? Kissed her quite thoroughly, until they were both shaking. He knew she was a woman, all right. Even though he was doing his best to warn her away.
And she was seven times a fool not to listen to those warnings. Not to remember her ridiculous habit of falling for the worst of all possible men. First Mark, with his blond arrogance and his football-star charisma. Then Freddy, an actor with enough charm to fool even the wariest female, and enough self-absorption to make her regret her weakness. Freddy had been three years ago, and since then she’d tried very hard not to let herself weaken. She’d been on the verge of it with James, but she’d pulled back in time, before she’d had the chance to get physically involved. He’d moved out when he realized she didn’t want to sleep with him, and she’d been relieved to see him go.
She preferred it that way. Sex was overrated, though she certainly expected it could be better than her limited experience had taught her. But all in all, she was just as glad she didn’t know. Life was simpler if she did without it, if she put her energies, her frustrations, her desires, into her masks.
So why was she standing in the kitchen of this derelict apartment, staring at the harsh, unrelenting line of a man’s back, the back of a man so obsessed and withdrawn that she was a fool to trust him? A fool not to consider that he might be the very man the police were looking for?
He turned to her then, his eyes distant. “What are you looking at?” And then realization darkened his face, and he smiled that cool, mocking travesty of a smile. “You finally put two and two together.”