by Lisa Regan
By the time Stryker arrived, the coroner was ready to walk them through the scene. Connor, Matt, and Stryker donned protective Tyvek suits, complete with shoe coverings, and followed coroner Roger Zeliff along the side of the Rohrbach home. The backyard, lit by the crime scene unit’s portable lights, was large, with a jumbo trampoline in one corner and a blue garden shed in the other corner. It was separated from the properties flanking it by flower beds, and from the property behind it by a row of Japanese boxwood shrubs. The shed doors hung open. A white tent had been erected just outside of the doors. Connor looked around, noticing for the first time all the neighbors watching from the windows at the backs of their houses.
Zeliff walked over and waited at the entrance to the tent. Matt pointed toward the house behind the Rohrbachs’, on the other side of the boxwood shrubs. “There’s a decent-sized opening between two of those shrubs. I think the perp came through there. From where Jade was parked, she would have had a direct sight line from her car, down the side of the house to that point.”
“At which point she got out to pursue him,” Stryker said.
Matt nodded and walked across the yard, past Zeliff and the tent, to the flower bed that separated the Rohrbach yard from the yard of the next house over. The mulch was disturbed, the brown mud beneath it tracked into the next yard. The begonias had been trampled, their white petals crushed into the ground. “I think she pursued him into the next yard and the yard after that.”
“They stopped right before she got to the Irving house?” Connor asked.
“I think so,” Matt said. “Nothing in the Irving yard is disturbed. It doesn’t look like anyone tried climbing the fence.”
“Rachel Irving said they didn’t hear anything,” Connor said.
“I think Jade turned back before she got there,” Matt said. “Like I said, it doesn’t look like they went through the Irving yard, but there are some trampled flower beds and overturned lawn furniture in the other two yards. I think the perpetrator must have circled back and hid in the shed. You can’t tell with all these lights, but it was pretty fucking dark back here when I got here. It would have been easy for the perpetrator to lose Jade—or make her think he did. I think he knew his way around. She probably just turned around to head back to the car.”
They followed Matt to the mouth of the tent, where Zeliff waved them in. Jade lay in the grass, face up. Her eyes were open and fixed upward. All the things that made Jade Jade were gone from her face. Her eyes were just vacant glassy bulbs. Her lips were parted, her skin a pale, waxy color. There was a purple bruise beneath her left eye. Above that eye, a laceration gaped open, extending from her left eyebrow into her hairline. Dried blood crusted on the side of her face and in her hair.
“Jesus,” Connor said.
“It’s from a shovel,” Zeliff said. He motioned toward the corner of the tent, near the open doors of the shed. Connor saw a yellow evidence marker. Beside it, discarded a few feet from Jade’s head, was a steel shovel with a wooden handle at least two feet long. It had an open back and a round point at its edge. In the hands of a bigger opponent, with the element of surprise, it would cause a lot of damage.
Connor heard Stryker’s voice from beside him, low and calm, like this nightmare was happening to someone else. Stryke had always been good like that. “He hid in the shed? Popped out and hit her with the shovel? Was there a lock on the shed?”
Zeliff squatted next to Jade’s right hand. “No lock. I believe he knocked the gun out of her hand. I can’t be sure if he did it before or after he hit her in the head, but he broke her radius just below the wrist.” Gingerly, he pushed her sleeve upward, revealing an unnatural curve in Jade’s forearm. “I’d need an X-ray to confirm it, but I think it’s pretty obvious.”
Connor’s stomach churned. Stryker said, “We’ll need to see if we can get prints from that shovel. So he used the shovel to knock the gun out of her hand. Hit her over the head. Is that what killed her?”
Zeliff stood and walked away from Jade’s body to where a yellow plastic evidence marker stood beside Jade’s gun. “You’re right, Detective. Her gun went this way, her flashlight went that way.” He pointed across the tent where another evidence marker stood beside her flashlight. It still emitted a dim glow, running off the last of its battery strength. “Like I said, it’s hard to say which body part he struck first, but she sustained substantial injuries to her arm and her head. I’m not sure that’s what killed her, though.”
Zeliff walked back toward Jade’s body and squatted again, this time near her head. Her left arm was extended upward, almost over her shoulder. He didn’t want to do it, but Connor looked again at Jade’s face. He felt the hot sting of tears behind his eyes and blinked them back. His gaze trailed downward, searching for additional injuries. Her clothes were still on. It didn’t look like she’d been raped. Her blouse was torn, her white camisole showing a sliver of cleavage.
“Here,” Zeliff said. “This is what you need to see.” He pointed to her neck. Both Connor and Stryker stepped closer and leaned over to get a better look. Then Connor saw it, showing from beneath the edge of the collar of her shirt, where her throat met her collarbone.
A bite mark.
Bile rose in the back of Connor’s throat. “Fuck.”
Beside him, Stryker’s voice sounded, emotion breaking through for the first time since he had arrived on scene. “That motherfucker.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“Talk to me,” Claire said.
Connor sat on the edge of her bed, shirtless, his head in his hands. He’d been that way for so long, she was starting to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. He’d come to her like this at 5:00 a.m. Numb, silent, on some kind of automatic pilot. He was in shock. She recognized it well. He had told her some basic facts in a voice that didn’t sound like his at all. Jade was dead. She’d been beaten and strangled. They suspected the Soccer Mom Strangler. Once her body was removed from the scene, Boggs had sent the detectives home to get a few hours of rest while the coroner performed her autopsy. He needed them rested for the day to come.
Wilson had initially tried to comfort him, but had finally given up and now lay snoring heavily from his bed in the corner of the room. Claire sat on the bed behind Connor. His back was a wall radiating heat. Tentatively, she reached up and traced the hard planes of muscle cut into his back.
“Connor, please. Talk to me.”
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” he said finally.
It was so hard to believe, Claire almost hadn’t. For a split second, she had wondered if it was some kind of joke. But of course Connor would never joke about something like that, and she had never seen him so broken. She’d been trying to process the news since he showed up, and she still couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
He’d asked if he could stay, and she’d said yes. He’d asked if he could take a shower. She had said yes. He’d gotten his shirt off and one shoe, and then he’d frozen just like this on the edge of her bed. She drew closer to him, pressed her lips to the back of his neck. His skin was warm and salty. She felt him relax just slightly, felt the wall give way just a little.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“We woke up Holloway while we were canvassing,” he said finally. “His mom was already up. She heard all the activity going on outside. She got Holloway out of bed. He seemed like he’d genuinely been sleeping. Had indents on his face. We don’t think it was him. I guess he could have snuck out of his house, killed her, and gone back to bed, but God, that’s so ballsy.”
It wasn’t what Claire had meant when she’d asked him to talk to her, but this was where he needed to start—with facts and evidence and theories. “Even if it wasn’t Holloway, it was ballsy,” she said. “Why was the Strangler there prowling anyway? He had to have seen the news vans and Jade sitting outside.”
Connor shrugged. He still didn’t look at her. “I don’t know. No one saw or heard anything. No one reported any attempted breakins. I’m
not sure why he was there. I don’t get it. And Jade. I don’t—I don’t—why didn’t she wait for backup?”
Claire’s fingers left his back. She put her hands in her lap and stared down at them. Tears threatened to burn her eyes. “She must have thought she could handle it. She was armed. She knew backup wouldn’t be too far behind. Maybe she was afraid she’d lose him completely if she waited.”
“But I’ve seen her take down guys twice her size,” Connor said.
“But, Connor,” Claire replied, “you said yourself he hid and snuck up on her.” She had a sudden flash of one of the first times Reynard Johnson had beaten her. He had stridden across the room, fists flying before he even reached her, his punches raining down on her in rapid-fire fashion. Her body had been like a snare drum. She’d hardly had time to suck in a breath in the time it took him to beat her to the edge of consciousness. “A blitz attack can be hard to fight,” she added. “Even with quick reflexes and fighting experience, there are no guarantees in a fight, especially when the other person fights dirty.”
Another flash. Claire at nineteen, doing dishes, her back to the kitchen. Johnson had snuck up behind her and smashed her head into the windowsill above the sink. The gash had bled something awful. Fighting dizziness from the blow to her head, she hadn’t had the time or wherewithal to do anything except brace herself against the sink while he tried to rape her. But she’d been too old for him by then, and he had given up. Still, by that time, she had become attuned to the sounds of his movements, always on edge and ready for the next beating or rape. She had never stopped fighting. That was the fourth year of her captivity, and he had still been able to sneak up on her.
Connor’s words broke through her thoughts. “It must have happened so fast. It didn’t take long for Matt to get there. He had already left. I told him to stop and get her food, but still, he was close by. The coroner thinks the cause of death will be strangulation.”
Again the unwanted images swept past her defenses. The memory played like snapshots flashing in machine-gun bursts across her mind. Miranda Simon again, Johnson’s old brown belt looped around her neck, sinking into her flesh. The girl’s eyelashes wet with tears. The life receding from her eyes. “It doesn’t take that long,” Claire croaked because her throat had constricted, her voice weakened. “To strangle someone. It takes no time at all, really. Unless you have to watch.”
Slowly, Connor turned, lifting his legs onto the bed and sitting cross-legged so he could face her. He rubbed her arm. “You’re shivering.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be.”
“No,” she said. “About Jade. I’m so sorry. It’s—” A horrible way to die. She swallowed the words. He already knew how horrible Jade’s death was; he had seen her body. His colleague. His friend. “It’s very sad,” Claire said instead. “Is there anything I can do?”
He smiled and touched her hair, her cheek, wrapped a hand around her neck and pulled her toward him. “You’re doing it,” he murmured.
Their lips met slowly. She felt his pain in every small movement of the kiss. When she touched him, she felt his pain in every tensed muscle of his body. His hands caressed her as gently as ever, roving over her like he was blindly searching for something. In his touch, she felt something new, something different. His need to forget. His need to be so close to her that she would displace his grief, if only for a few moments.
They lay back on the bed, side by side, limbs tangling, still moving with slow, purposeful movements. She felt his need to bury himself so deep inside her that he would remember nothing. It was a need for absolute and utter oblivion. The blessed absence of pain.
This, Claire could relate to. For ten years of her life she’d been achingly desperate to forget the bad things, to be free from such pain. She had just never imagined that physical sensation, that release, could get her there. But now she felt every light press of Connor’s fingers, every heated probe of his mouth like a tiny prayer on her skin. She felt him and nothing else. She inhaled his scent, ran her fingers through his hair and down to his shoulders. She pushed him away from her and stood up long enough to pull her clothes off. Connor moved to the edge of the bed, sitting up and watching her, his eyes wide, and his expression filled with panic and hope, fear and elation.
“Claire,” he said, and the sound of her real name whispered by the man she loved was like a stitch in the wounds left behind. Inflicted by someone else. Someone cruel and inhuman and gone. Someone who could never hurt her again.
“Say it again,” she told Connor.
“Claire.”
She smiled and stepped toward him, standing between his legs. She took his hands, placing them on her breasts, her skin hot and tingly beneath his touch. “I want this,” she said.
He didn’t pull her down onto the bed, as she expected, so he could roll on top of her and fit his body over hers. Instead, he slid his palms around her body, cupping her bottom and pulling her into him. His hands ran down the backs of her thighs, urging her to wrap her legs around him and fit herself into his lap. He raised his face to hers, and she felt like she was falling into his eyes. She kissed him. One of his hands stayed splayed across her back, holding her gently while the other explored her. She could feel his hardness beneath the pants he wore, and she found herself rocking against it until she began to feel an alien sensation between her legs.
Pleasure.
She broke from the kiss. “It feels good,” she gasped.
His mouth was already at her throat, his tongue flicking along each collarbone, one at a time. “You feel good,” he said into her skin. “Claire.”
She threw her head back, reveling in the sensation, enjoying his mouth on her body as it worked its way to her breasts. She focused hard on it. She wanted to remember it. His beard tickled her skin, rough but soft at the same time. The sensation woke every cell in her body. More, she wanted more. That feeling inside her—it was building, working toward something. It was an exquisite fullness like she had never, ever felt, and she wanted release.
It didn’t take much negotiating to free Connor from his pants. He was quite ready for her. Once he was naked, she pushed him back into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. There was some awkwardness, especially when she pulled a box of condoms from her nightstand—a relic of her ill-fated time with Too-Concerned Todd. She’d only used one from the box. She’d often thought she should throw the box away, but that had felt like throwing away all hope of a normal relationship. Now she was glad she’d clung to that hope. The mechanics of getting the condom on gave her the giggles momentarily, but then her nervousness gave way to pregnant silence as she sat astride Connor once more, shifting on his lap until he was poised to enter her.
He said, “Claire, maybe we shouldn’t do this right now,” and then she seated herself on him. She was shockingly ready for him—her body had never been so welcoming of a man. A soft, shivering sigh pushed its way from between her lips. Connor made a noise in his throat, and then he was very still, his forehead resting on her sternum, his hands at the small of her back, gathering her into him.
The intense feeling of pleasure was still there. But Connor wasn’t moving, wasn’t even breathing. She rested her elbows on his shoulders, pulled at his brown hair. “Stop holding your breath,” she said into his ear.
He let out a shaky breath. “Oh my God, Claire.”
She moved, just a fraction, using his shoulders for leverage, tightening her thighs around him. The feeling was still there. It felt even more intense when she moved. Friction, she needed friction. So she moved. She moved and shifted and wiggled until she worked herself into a rhythm that sent that pleasurable feeling into a frenzy. Connor let her, moving only to caress or kiss her skin, to look up and watch her face. He rubbed his beard against her tender skin and whispered her name until the explosion inside took her, sending her over an edge into a chasm of such exquisite forgetfulness, she cried out and seized in Connor’s arms.
Af
terward, they sat fused together for a long time, their chests heaving. Connor’s skin was sticky against hers, a fine sheen of sweat enveloping them both. The room suddenly felt close and hot. Claire didn’t want to separate, didn’t want to remember again. She wanted to stay in his arms, hot and content, the aftershocks of their lovemaking shuddering through her body every now and then. She wanted this moment to last forever. She wanted to remember every last detail. Every sensation, every touch, every smell.
Connor reached up, smoothed her hair away from the side of her face, and kissed below her ear. “I love you,” he said.
She smiled and moved her head so she could capture his mouth. Then she said, “I love you too.”
They showered together. This too was something new for Claire. She felt like she had won a war. On the other side of the battle was uncharted territory, and it was hers for the taking. She knew that many rape survivors were unable to orgasm after being attacked. She had never come close before, even with Connor. She had talked with her therapist at length about whether she would ever be able to have a normal sexual experience with a man. She had known that the odds were not in her favor. She also knew that this single experience didn’t erase the years of trauma she had endured. But here she was—she had had a pleasurable sexual experience with a man she loved. She wanted to revel in it, to drink in every crazy, new second of it, but Connor needed her. The lovely forgetting that the act had brought them was already receding. Claire felt the heavy grief of Jade’s death like a specter looming over them. Beside it was her own guilt. She had disliked Jade on sight, based on nothing more than the woman’s relationship with Connor. Claire had never given her a chance. Now she was dead. Claire knew that her private jealousy had had nothing to do with the woman’s murder, but that didn’t stop her from feeling guilty. Connor had obviously cared for her.