Marie’s feet didn’t budge.
“I mean,” Marie said, “I like you, I mean, as a friend, but I’m not like that. I mean, I don’t…”
Nessa watched her, almost clinical, as Marie’s stammered denials sputtered into silence.
“All done now?” Nessa asked. “Finished? Did you get it all out?”
Marie’s head bobbed once. A tiny nod.
Nessa closed in on her. Taking her time. She reached up and slid her finger around a strand of Marie’s dirty-blonde curls, toying with her hair.
“I told you about lying,” she murmured into Marie’s ear. “This once, just this one time, I’ll let it slide. Do it again, and I’ll have to punish you.”
Her other hand rose to Marie’s chest and rested on her breastbone. The thud of her heart felt powerful under Nessa’s fingers, like the pounding hooves of a racehorse. She chuckled.
“Oh, your pulse is racing. Can you feel that? It’s okay if you’re a little afraid, Marie. To be honest, I think I like you being a little afraid. But I’ll tell you this much: I’m not going to do anything to you that you won’t enjoy, even if you’re too ashamed to admit it.”
Their cheeks brushed together, feline. Nessa pulled back and looked her in the eye.
“I understand, you know. Out there, fighting the evils of an entire city. Always on your guard, always in control.” Nessa’s smile broadened. “Would you like to know a secret?”
“Yes,” she breathed, frozen where she stood.
“Inside this house, behind these walls, when it’s just the two of us…you’re not in control here. I am. And you will do as I say. But here’s the real secret: that’s exactly the way you want it. Watch, I’ll prove it to you. See, I can do this, and you won’t stop me.”
Her finger, twined around a lock of Marie’s hair, pulled a little tighter. An unspoken threat, or a promise.
“And I can do this,” Nessa said, “and you won’t stop me.”
She let go of the curly lock and suddenly, swiftly dug her hand into Marie’s hair and grabbed hold with her fist. Marie gasped as Nessa jerked her head to one side and pressed up against her, trapping her, pinning her to the wall.
Marie’s lips parted, her breath ragged and fast. Nessa wore a smile of cold triumph.
“And I can do this,” Nessa said, and kissed her.
Their lips met and Marie’s paralysis shattered like a dam bursting wide. Every feeling she’d bottled up, every guilty longing, every buried hunger exploded at once and now she was nothing but her raw, aching need. She clawed at Nessa’s back, bit at her bottom lip, trying to devour her. Nessa’s grasping fingers slid up her thigh and yanked her body close. Her grip on Marie’s hair tightened. She forced Marie’s head back, baring the tender curve of her neck to Nessa’s hungry kisses and her pearly, nipping teeth.
“Bedroom,” Nessa hissed, “now.”
They stumbled together, staggering, wrapped up in each other’s arms and careening up the hall. Then over the threshold. Nessa shoved Marie backward, the mattress jolting, and swooped down upon her like an owl diving after a scurrying mouse. She yanked out her hairpin and tossed it, letting it clatter across the floorboards. They rolled across the bed together. Marie was on top, just for a moment, her desperate hands hiking Nessa’s black dress up around her hips. Then she was rolling again, or the world was rolling around her, and they laughed together as Nessa straddled her waist and pressed her shoulders to the mattress. Giddy laughter, relieved laughter, hungry and mad laughter, and Nessa shot a gleeful look at the bedroom door and flung out her hand.
A gust of wind from nowhere, as hot and fast as the blood pumping through Marie’s fevered heart, surged through the room.
The door slammed shut.
* * *
After they were spent, after the last strangled cry and the last kittenish whimper, Nessa watched Marie sleep. She’d drifted off in Nessa’s arms, slipping across the river of dreams. Nessa smiled contentedly at the slow rise and fall of her lover’s chest, her naked body sprawled beneath the Egyptian cotton sheets. I imagine you don’t sleep much, she thought, or well, when you do.
You will tonight. I’ll make sure of it.
Her lover. A phrase Nessa had never expected to use. She supposed she’d had designs on Marie—she supposed she had since the moment they met—but it wasn’t a conscious plan. More like an invitation to the dance. She just let the music play and let her body move as it wanted. Everything about this felt…natural. Right. Like they’d known each other for years. Their lovemaking had a strange spark of the familiar, like she knew, on instinct, all of Marie’s little secret places. The things that made her shiver and gasp in the dark. And Marie certainly had a natural talent for finding hers. Nessa shut her eyes and beamed, the fresh memory spurring a warm, tingling ripple in the pit of her stomach.
Life was uncertain. Life was chaos. But here was something uniquely, wonderfully hers. Something she could keep. Carving out a sanctuary in the heart of the storm, just big enough for the two of them. You’ll protect me, she thought. Her fingers lightly trailed along the curve of Marie’s bare shoulder, needing to touch. And I’ll protect you.
A phone trilled. Not hers. Nessa frowned as Marie shifted and groaned, the tranquility broken.
“Let it ring,” Nessa told her.
“Can’t.” Marie leaned off the side of the bed, fumbling for her phone, her other hand rubbing at her bleary eyes. “That’s the ring tone I use for work. I’m on call, twenty-four seven.”
Nessa crossed her arms and bit back a surge of jealousy.
“Reinhart.” Marie fell silent as she listened. Nessa could make out a man’s voice on the other end, chatty and quick. She felt a black mood settling in as their time together slipped away, stolen by Marie’s devotion to the law. Their night was over, and Nessa wasn’t done enjoying it yet.
“No,” Marie said, “this is good, thank you. I really appreciate—yeah, I’ll meet you there. Thanks, Jefferson.”
She hung up. Nessa’s eyes narrowed as she stared at Marie’s naked back.
“You’re leaving,” she said.
Marie turned to her. She squeezed Nessa’s hand.
“I have to. It’s my job. I’m sorry.” She paused, contemplating Nessa’s expression, trying to read something there. “So was this…was this a one-time thing, or…?”
She’s afraid, Nessa realized. She reached up and traced Marie’s cheek with her fingertips.
“No,” Nessa told her. “I’m keeping you.”
Marie swallowed hard and smiled.
“We’re a thing now,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” Nessa said. “We’re a thing now. And if I could tell you what that means, or where we’re going with this, I would, but honestly I’m just playing it by ear. It’s like dinner. Complicated salad. We’ll figure it out.”
“Together,” Marie said.
Nessa sat up in bed. She leaned close, kissing Marie’s shoulder. Then her lips.
“You’re going to need to find more time for me,” Nessa warned her. “I don’t like to share. The next time we spend the night together, I want all of it. Any more interruptions like this and I’m going to start making you wear a leash.”
Marie laughed. She rummaged through their pile of rumpled clothes on the hardwood floor, hunting for her underwear. “Funny,” she said.
“What’s funny,” Nessa replied, her voice dry, “is that you think I’m joking.”
Thirty
After a few years on the beat, even before she’d earned her detective’s shield, not much could shock Marie. She’d worked scenes with all kinds of corpses. Gunshot wounds, stabbings—after a while what was once stomach-churning became abstract. Her first month on the job, still wet behind the ears, she’d gotten called up to a tenement where a shut-in had died maybe a week earlier. One week, rotting in a sealed-up apartment with no air conditioning and a swarm of flies, in the dog days of July.
Looking back on it now, she was thankful: to this da
y it was the worst thing she’d seen or smelled in her entire life. Everything got a little easier after that. All the same, walking into a morgue always brought back a little of that revulsion reflex. The faint choke at the back of her throat, triggered by the smell of industrial antiseptic and the glow of the hot lights. Human shapes on gurneys, draped in white, hiding their faces and their secrets. A gallery of the violent dead.
Jefferson met her there. The portly detective came equipped with a plastic jar of Vicks VapoRub. He scooped up a dollop of cream and smeared it across his upper lip, just under his nose, before offering Marie the jar. She followed his lead.
“Thanks,” she told him. “And thanks for calling me in. I mean it.”
Jefferson hadn’t spelled out his motives on the phone, but he talked around the edges enough to paint a picture. Helena Gorski’s comment, out on 5th Avenue—he knew Marie had heard her say it, just like he knew he hadn’t stood up for her. Apparently it had stuck in his craw, and when he saw a chance to make amends, he jumped at it.
“Hey, you know me, I just want to do right by everybody. My partner’s a good cop, she’s a good person—she really is. She just says some cruel shit sometimes. Speaking of, you gotta be in and out before Helena gets here, or it’s my balls on the line.”
“I’ll be quick as a bunny. And I owe you lunch.”
“Deal,” Jefferson said. He gave her the side-eye. “Did I, uh, interrupt something when I called?”
“Only my beauty sleep. Why?”
“You’re smiling. Like…a lot.”
“Let’s meet the stiff,” Marie told him, “and see if I still have a reason to.”
The medical examiner, a severe, thin-faced man who looked like he should be teaching at an English boarding school, led them to a gurney. He shot a disapproving look at the glossy cream under the detectives’ noses.
“This may be troubling if you have sensitive dispositions,” he said.
“Thanks for your concern, doc.” Jefferson nodded at the white sheet. “Let’s go.”
The medical examiner unveiled the corpse. All four pieces of it. The naked man had been carved into fractions, a math problem solved in body parts.
“Jesus,” Jefferson breathed. “What happened to the guy?”
The medical examiner gestured to the bisected torso, running a gloved hand over the seared and jet-black wound.
“I’m not remotely prepared to render a conclusion. These wounds are perfectly cauterized. From the lack of blood, I’d say they were burned shut almost immediately after the cuts were made. At the same time, in fact. Though I can’t begin to guess how it was done.”
Marie leaned in, furrowing her brow as she studied the dead man. “What was the weapon? A chainsaw?”
The medical examiner shook his head and pointed to another cut. “No. A chainsaw would have left tears along the tissue; it would pull as it ripped through the body. These cuts are almost impossibly clean. Again, far too early to say, but if I had to guess? You’re looking at a very fast, very sharp instrument. Like a guillotine blade.”
“A guillotine,” Jefferson said, “which was on fire at the time.”
A memory, a scene from one of her favorite books, sparked an idea. “What about a sword?” Marie asked.
“Possible,” the medical examiner told her. “The problem is that most modern swords are reproductions for collectors; they’re art pieces, not weapons. The blade that did this was incredibly sharp. And it still doesn’t explain the cauterization effect.”
“A sword which was on fire at the time,” Jefferson said. He reached for the severed arm and looked to Marie. “Or a lightsaber. Maybe we should put out an APB on Darth Vader. Anyway, that’s not what I invited you in for. The uniform who caught the call is a buddy of mine. He told me about—yeah, here we go.”
Jefferson turned the pale arm. On the underbelly of the wrist, faded but clear, was a tattoo the size of a quarter.
“Exactly like the one on the vic in Monticello,” Jefferson told her. “We don’t have an ID on this guy yet, but I’ll bet a Hamilton we find out he’s got mob connections too.”
“And the body was found out on the street?” Marie asked.
“On the sidewalk, literally. Some little old lady found him, walking her dog. Hell of a way to start your morning. But here’s the kicker: Mr. Jigsaw here was just a few doors down from the Kissena Boulevard Gym. Wanna guess who owns the Kissena Boulevard Gym?”
Marie stared at him. “Roth Estate Holdings.”
“Hell of a coincidence, huh?”
Marie pursed her lips, thinking fast. “Too much of one. We’ll never get a search warrant. Maybe if the body was right on the doorstep, but it’s just one business on a crowded street.”
“All the same,” Jefferson said, “two dead guys with the same tattoo found in or near a Roth building? I’d draw that connection in pencil, not permanent ink, but it’s still a line.”
“The Five Families are swearing up and down that they’ve got nothing to do with the ink trade. They want to find these guys as bad as we do. Given that the first vic was found murdered at a stash house, maybe the mob drew the same connection we did. Maybe they sent their errand boys to check out Roth’s other properties and see what they could find out.”
Jefferson shook his head at the corpse. “This guy found something, all right. Or it found him. Which doesn’t say a lot for Richard Roth’s innocence. Go snooping around his stuff, end up dead.”
And I’m having an affair with the man’s wife, Marie thought. Complicated salad.
“Exactly what the hell is going on here?” said a voice from the doorway. Helena, coming in with a full head of steam and a beet-red face. “Jefferson? I’m sorry, did you switch partners and nobody told me?”
Jefferson hunched his shoulders and ducked his head like a turtle trying to escape into its shell. Marie got between them fast.
“It’s not his fault,” she said. “I found out where he was going and invited myself along.”
Helena jabbed her finger in Marie’s face. “Maybe we’re having a communication problem. This. Isn’t. Your. Case. Nothing related to this is your case.”
“That tattoo draws a connection to the murder in Monticello. The Monticello house has a connection to my abduction victim—”
“Oh my God.” Helena gaped at her. “Seriously? We’re chasing down a major narcotics ring, and you’re still obsessed with some missing whore? You’re a fucking train wreck. You know that, don’t you?”
“Come on, Helena—” Jefferson started to say. She cut him off.
“No. Don’t you even open your mouth. This is the kind of case that makes careers, and I am not going to have some crusading wannabe superhero stomping all over my scenes, endangering my investigation.” She turned, aiming her wrath back at Marie. “One more time, and I go straight to the captain and lodge a formal complaint. And I’ll tell him how you were harassing Richard Roth while you were on admin leave.”
“Interviewed, not harassed. And you said I could.”
“Did I?” Helena gave her an ugly smile. “I don’t remember having any such conversation. But if you want to screw up your career and your partner’s, go ahead and keep pushing me. I’m saying this as clear as I can possibly make it: stay out of this. Mind your own business. And do your fucking job.”
Marie moved in close, toe to toe. Her voice was a cold and dangerous whisper.
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
She turned and pushed her way through the morgue’s double doors like an old west gunslinger on her way to a showdown. They swung back and forth in her wake.
* * *
Marie rode a crosstown train, chasing the dawn. The car was almost empty, rattling and swaying on the tracks as it hummed through the dark, and she curled her arm around a metal pole and smiled to herself. Life was crazy, or maybe she was, but it was all right. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Nessa’s face. She felt the memory of Nessa’s touch, and how her skin
was soft and smelled faintly like lavender under Marie’s fingers, under her lips.
I’m having an affair, Marie told herself. With a woman. With a married woman. With a married woman whose husband might be connected to a narcotics syndicate.
“Definitely complicated salad,” she said out loud. A few seats down, a grizzled old man in an army-surplus jacket gave her a curious look.
Still, treacherous as these waters were, she felt like she could sail to the horizon’s edge.
Her phone trilled. She glanced at the screen, then picked up.
“Hey, partner,” she said. “You back in action yet?”
Tony’s voice was distant. Softer than usual.
“Yeah. Well, technically later today, according to the paperwork. You know how it goes.”
“I hear you,” Marie said, “and I hope you had a lovely vacation, but we are officially back to work. What do you say, wanna saddle up, go chase some bad guys?”
“I’m already…I mean, I got a call.”
Marie’s smile faded. “You okay, Tony? You don’t sound happy.”
“Listen.” He sighed, a sound of quiet resignation. “There’s a construction yard in Bushwick, over on Johnson Avenue. Meet me there, soon as you can, okay?”
“Tony? What’s going on with you?”
“Just…meet me there.”
He hung up the phone.
Thirty-One
Marie changed trains and changed direction, from Queens to Brooklyn. She hopped a cab and made it to the construction site just as the sun crested the city streets, shining the first light of a new day through the muddy clouds. A couple of cruisers were parked outside the wooden fence, a wrap-around advertising a new condo development. A uniform out front, a fresh-faced rookie, chewed on his bottom lip like it was made of bubble gum. He moved fast to stand in Marie’s way.
“It’s okay.” She flashed her shield. “Detective Reinhart. I think my partner’s already here?”
“Yeah.” He shot a nervous look over his shoulder. “Yeah, he is. Go on in, Detective.”
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