by L. A. Witt
“You’re finally awake.”
“And you’re out of bed.” I looked blearily over at Andreas, who was standing in the door with one hand around a mug of coffee, the other holding his cell phone. He was dressed, which was a fucking pity after finally getting to have him naked again last night, and he’d clearly showered. How much had I managed to sleep through? “What time is it?”
“Almost eleven.”
“Almost— Jesus.” I sat up and scrubbed a hand over my face, trying to brush the last of my soft sleepiness away. “We’re so late. Just the impression I want to make after yesterday.” Where were my pants? Had they even made it into the bedroom? Did I have any clean ones? Shit, when was the last time I’d done laundry?
“Darren. Quit it.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I protested even as I rolled toward the edge of the bed, scanning the floor.
“We’re not late.” He held up his phone. “Hamilton actually tried to give us the day off.”
Oh, fuck that. “I hope you told him to shove it.”
“Something like that. As it is, he insisted we take the morning, so we’re not expected until a little after one. Paula is saving the conference room for us, the case files aren’t being cleared away, nothing is ending. We’ve just got to regroup.” He held my gaze for a second, and I knew the shape of concern on his face, and the way he wasn’t going to express it. I appreciated that so much, especially after freaking out last night.
I took a deep breath and did my best to calm down. “Okay.” I wasn’t going to lose the well-being an incredible orgasm and twelve hours of sleep had given me just so I could slide down into panic mode again. “All right, we’ll regroup. We can go back over the files, check for a new angle.”
There had to be one. Why else would Brian be sticking around? If he was as smart and careful as his crimes suggested he had to be, why was he still in the public eye? He had to know we’d watch him like a hawk now, especially when the twenty-sixth rolled around. We were missing something here, something vital.
“Okay.” I already felt better, calmer. I considered that for a moment, then laughed.
“What?”
“I just . . . Who would have ever thought that you’d be settling me down, right?” At the beginning of our partnership, I’d been warned by multiple people that Andreas was unreliable, that he didn’t take orders or listen to directions, that he was gonna chew me up and spit me out like he had every partner before me. I was supposed to be the reasonable one, and yet I’d come closer to losing my shit last night than I’d ever seen Andreas get. And he’d handled me like a pro. Like a friend, like a lover.
Speaking of lover . . . I stood up and walked over to him. “I’m filthy.”
“Yes,” Andreas agreed, sipping at his coffee.
“I need a shower.”
“That would be a decent solution.”
“You should join me.” I smiled my most charming smile, wrapped my arms around his neck, and kissed his cheek.
“God, your morning breath is awful.” He kissed me back though, so it couldn’t have been too bad.
“It’ll be better once you give me some of your coffee,” I suggested.
“Oh, hell no.” He moved the mug out of reach. “This is mine. Get clean and dressed and come get your own.”
“But shower.” I didn’t whine it, I didn’t. I was a damn adult. “C’mon, have a dirty shower with me.”
“I want to”—and from the look on his face, he was being completely honest—“but we’re still on a schedule.”
“Screw you and your schedule.” He was right, though. I took a step back and returned to looking for clean clothes.
“Next time we get some free time, you should.”
I grinned over my shoulder. “Screw you?”
“I think you said you’d fuck me into the ground, actually.” It was his turn to smile, a dark, suggestive one that made me want to drop everything and push him up against the wall right the hell now. “I’m gonna hold out for that.”
He walked away, and I watched his jean-clad ass disappear around the corner before I remembered what I was trying to do.
It turned out Andreas had brought back breakfast along with the coffee—bagels from a tiny, hole-in-the-wall place two blocks from here that I’d never even noticed until he’d pointed it out. They’d quickly become my favorite, and I had to remind myself that I didn’t need to bolt my food down like I had most of my meals lately. We still had time, and I wanted to savor the afterglow, good food, and better coffee.
“I can’t fix things.” He’d said it last night, desperate, like it hurt him as much to admit that as it did for me to feel broken. “Say the word. Anything I—” Andreas had given me everything he could, stopped me from self-destructing and waking up this morning with a hangover from hell, hopeless, and lost. He hadn’t fixed everything, but he hadn’t left me alone. He’d stayed, and I kind of thought that maybe he’d keep doing that. It wasn’t the sort of thing I usually let myself consider, given everything looming in my future, but I wanted it with Andreas. And that meant I had to give a little too. I wanted to give something back.
“Thanks.” I didn’t have to specify what for.
“Anytime.” And he fucking meant that, he did.
“I was thinking . . .” My stupid hands were shaking now. I put down my coffee and folded them. “Once we’re done with this case and things have calmed down some, I should—I mean, I think it would be best if I did—if I got the test.” The genetic test would show if I had the early-onset Alzheimer’s gene. It was the sword that had been hanging over my head ever since Asher was diagnosed. My chances were fifty-fifty, but the odds that Andreas would be sticking around were maybe—possibly—tilting higher than that. He deserved to know what his future held if that was the case. And I needed to know.
For the first time, I understood what Melissa had been saying yesterday, that it hadn’t just been her decision to end things with Asher. He was a stubborn ass, but he knew he couldn’t shake me and Mom and Vic. Melissa, though . . . maybe he thought he’d been saving her. Maybe she’d let him.
Andreas wasn’t going to let me make him do anything he didn’t want to, I knew that much. It was a comforting thought.
“You know you don’t have to do that for my sake.”
“I know.” I knew he didn’t expect me to. That made the decision easier.
“Okay.” He reached out for my hand, and I let him have it, gripped him tight enough to make my knuckles go white, but he didn’t flinch. “Okay.”
By three o’clock, I was feeling a little less optimistic, although the sleep at least meant that I wasn’t seeing double when I stared at the files. Patterns, patterns . . . there were the obvious ones to the case, the less obvious one that had tied all the murders to one killer, but when it came to the killer himself, something was missing.
I was no criminal psychologist, but I’d read plenty of write-ups about serial killers, and the way this case was playing out was just . . . strange. It was actually pretty rare that serial killers flaunted their skills, or that they took the sort of risks that might lead to capture and incarceration, not if they were smart. The ones that toyed with the police, like the Zodiac Killer, they were the exceptions to the rule. Most serial killers were caught because they got sloppy, and didn’t cover their tracks as carefully as they should have. With over fifteen kills—that we knew of—Brian McIntosh had obviously been very careful in the past. And we knew so little of that past too. So what had changed? Why was he so bold now?
I didn’t know, and that bothered me.
“I wish we could talk to him.”
“He’s lawyered up,” Andreas reminded me from where he was squinting at his own file. He needed reading glasses, but so far he’d refused to even consider them. Eventually he’d cave, though, and then I’d see him in wire-rimmed spectacles like some sort of sexy, scruffy librarian. That would be a beautiful day.
“What?”
; “Hmm?”
“What’s that look mean?”
“Nothing, totally nothing,” I said. “Just . . . have you ever considered wearing a cardigan?”
The acidity of his glare could have put holes in the file he was holding.
“Okay, okay!” I lifted my hands in surrender. “No cardigans, got it. But what about sweater-vests?”
“I will end you.”
“Pocket protectors?” I pushed with a grin. “Or just a pencil behind your ear, I’d take that. Do we have a pencil here?”
Andreas opened his mouth to eviscerate me, and I tensed with gleeful anticipation. The rapid opening of the door behind us ended whatever retort he might have come up with, though, and the look on his face transitioned from annoyance to— Huh, what was that? Surprise? Delight? Somewhere in between? I turned around to see who’d just come in.
“Daddy!” A blur of purple clothes and dark hair bounded across the floor and into Andreas’s arms.
“Emily!” He scooped the child up and held her close, standing so that she could wrap her legs around his waist. One hand held her steady while the other stroked her hair. “Baby, what are you doing here?”
“Mommy brought me! And Daddy, Erin is here!” She pulled back, and I finally caught a glimpse of her face. Emily Ruffner might just be a little over four years old, but she had her father’s eyes and nose, and something of his attitude too, if the expression she was wearing was anything to go by. “You’re ’posed to tell me when Erin is here, so we can see a movie. Remember? You said.”
“I did say,” Andreas agreed, pressing a kiss to his daughter’s forehead. “You’re right. We’ll have to do that soon.”
“Tonight!”
“No, not tonight, honey. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Emily pouted, and—oh God, she did the scowly eyebrows! On Andreas it was intimidating. On Emily, it was so cute I felt my heart abruptly skip a beat. Holy shit. This kid was kryptonite. “But Mommy said!”
“Well, Mommy is— Wait, Mommy said what?”
“She said you get me ’cause she has things. I said I could do things too, I’m good at things, but she said no.” Emily huffed a sigh.
“Where is your mommy?”
“With Erin.”
Andreas mouthed something silently that I couldn’t make out, but ten-to-one odds were that it was a swear word. He gently set her back on the ground, one hand still touching her hair like he couldn’t quite bear to let go. “Sweetheart, I need to go talk with Mommy, okay?”
“Okay, I’ll come.”
“No, stay here for a little bit. You can sit with Darren.” He glanced at me, and I didn’t hesitate to nod. “He’s my partner, and I’ve told him all about you. He’ll play with you until I come back.”
Well, I could say this for his kid—she was not shy. “Okay. But come back soon.” She turned to face me, and from the look of things, she wasn’t too impressed. “What can we play with?” she demanded.
“Let me see.” I looked a little frantically around the table while Andreas left, shutting the conference door behind him. “I’ve got some paper and pens. We could draw.”
“Maaaybe.” She clambered up onto the chair next to me before I could offer to help her, and grabbed the nearest pen. I snatched up a piece of blank paper and put it in front of her before she could start drawing on a file. She scrawled a few lines, then frowned. “This is blue! I want purple!”
“I’ve only got blue or black, or . . .” I stretched for another one. “Red.”
“But it’s not purple. My tiger is ’posed to be purple.”
“Red looks kind of close to purple,” I suggested. “Or you could use more than one color to draw your tiger.”
That suggestion found favor, and she took all three pens into one small hand and started to draw. I watched for about a minute before she looked over at me and said, “You’re ’posed to draw too.”
“But I don’t have a pen.”
“Oh.” She looked down at the ones she was holding, then offered them up to me. “You can pick one, but not red.”
“Sounds good.” I took the blue one, grabbed my own sheet of paper, and started to draw.
“What’s yours?”
“It’s a bird.”
She studied my paper, and her eyes went wide. “Where’s his wings?”
“I haven’t gotten to them yet.”
“He needs wings,” Emily informed me seriously. “Otherwise he’s fall down.”
“Good point.” I drew in some wings.
“And a tail.”
I added a swoopy, bird-of-paradise tail.
She nodded approvingly. “It’s pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“He needs a mouth, so he can eat bugs.” Emily started in on her tiger’s mouth, which mostly consisted of making a row of Vs across the middle of the page. “My tiger eats bugs too.”
“He sounds like a connoisseur.”
She looked up at me, her eyebrows all scrunchy again, and I had to tamp down on the urge to grin. “What’s that?”
“A ‘connoisseur’?”
She nodded.
“It’s somebody who has excellent taste.” She still looked puzzled, so I added, “Somebody who knows something good when they see it or smell it or—”
“Or eat it!”
“Exactly.”
“My tiger is the biggest comser,” Emily said as she started drawing again. It looked like her critter had five legs. Or maybe one of them was a tail? “He eats all the best bugs.” She turned her big blue eyes on me and added, reassuringly, “But he gives some to his friend too.”
“That’s very kind.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Oh my God, she was just like Andreas in little girl form. I might die.
Drawing was a good distraction from wondering what Andreas and his ex were talking about. He didn’t mention her often, and since we’d met, I didn’t think he’d spent more than the occasional afternoon with Emily. Life had been seriously hectic, and I appreciated that he’d stuck around to help me out, but it was clear from the looks Emily kept casting the door and the way she fidgeted in her chair that she was anxious for him to come back. That or she had to use the bathroom. I really hoped it was the first one.
Emily had finished with her tiger and moved on to the next drawing by the time Andreas came back. He looked a little frazzled, but the second he saw her, his eyes softened and he smiled so wide I almost didn’t recognize him for a moment. “Daddy, come look!” She got up and went to him before he could take two steps. “Darren and me drawed you pictures. This one is my tiger,” she thrust the first one at him, and he took it with an appreciative ooh. He was cooing at his baby, oh my God. I wanted to pull out my phone and preserve the scene forever. “And this one is the bugs he eats.” That piece of paper that was mostly red dots and squiggles. “And I shared the bugs with his bird.” She gestured to me, and I dutifully handed the drawing over to Andreas.
“Very lovely,” he told me.
“Thank you.”
“The fangs are a nice touch.”
“I said to do that,” Emily explained.
“Well, it was very nice of you to help Darren with his drawing, sweetheart.”
“I know.”
He laughed. “Of course you do.” He looked at me, and his smile died a little bit. “It seems like we’re taking the rest of the day after all.”
“Oh.” Oh boy. That was . . . awkward. Not that Emily wasn’t the cutest kid in all creation, but given that we were working a serial killer case right now, the timing left a lot to be desired.
“Yeah. I’ll explain in the car.”
I nodded and started gathering my stuff. This, I had to hear.
When Darren and I got to the parking garage with Emily, my ex-girlfriend was waiting for us with an overnight bag and car seat. We showed her to Darren’s car, and I quickly introduced them before installing the car seat.
Once Emily was buckled in, she said
good-bye to her mom, and while she and Darren waited in the car, I faced Lisa. “Are you sure about this?”
She avoided my eyes. “I don’t really have much choice.”
“Is there anything I can—”
She put up a hand, and I could almost hear walls going up. Jaw clenched, she looked me in the eye and shook her head. “I’ve got it, okay?” She brushed a few blonde strands out of her face, probably hoping I didn’t notice the unsteadiness in her hand. “I just want to make sure Emily’s not there. That’s all.”
I glanced at our daughter, who was happily chatting with Darren. “Who exactly do you owe money to, Lisa?”
Her lips tightened, and she hugged herself, watching Emily through the window and, if I wasn’t mistaken, getting close to tears.
My stomach turned to lead. “Please tell me you’re not using again.”
Her head snapped toward me, and her eyes were suddenly full of anger. “I am not using again.”
“Then what the hell is going on?” I tried to keep my voice even, but it was hard when there was a chance my daughter had been in danger before now. In the past, when Lisa had frantically dropped her in my lap, even for a couple of days, there’d been either loan sharks or drug dealers involved. She’d gotten clean and stayed that way, but her credit was shot, and whenever she had money problems, things could get ugly.
She bit her lip, and damn it, she really did seem scared. That wasn’t a good sign.
I forced myself to speak gently and calmly. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”
She exhaled, deflating a little. “I . . .” Her hand shook as she ran it through her hair. “I couldn’t stay afloat. I had to move out of that apartment, so I needed first and last for the new place. Which I would’ve been able to afford, but my student loans are killing me.”
“Who did you borrow the money from?”