Without a mother.
Aleena was dead because of her. Because his face had consumed her for so long, she had been willing to give up anything to bring him to justice.
And she had.
She had given up everything.
And he would go free.
42
The snow made a hushing noise as it struck the glass. The voices of his family were a tinny hum from the main house, Damon’s booming laugh rising above the others. Several blocks away, a car moved through the streets, its tires slurring in the snow. He couldn’t believe he was here. With her.
As Schwartzman looked up at him, all those thoughts vanished to complete silence. The husk that had covered his heart, protected him, had broken open. A narrow fissure, just enough to let loose that tiny seedling of hope. Her blue eyes on his. The way her mouth dropped open. Did she feel it? Was it only him?
“Anna,” he whispered.
What was he doing? She was his colleague, his partner. No. That didn’t matter. She was his friend. His dear, beautiful, resilient friend. But his heart protested. He didn’t want her to be his friend. Since when?
He recalled the way Schwartzman had looked at him at that first scene. The victim, a woman in her midtwenties, had been strangled in her apartment. The space was tiny—the ceilings unusually low and the bedroom a shoebox entirely consumed by the double bed and a bedside table. Hal had gotten down on his haunches, trying to make himself smaller, less a giant, the way he did when he was talking to witnesses—women and children. Schwartzman had been so shy, so small . . . until she’d begun to talk about the victim.
She’d changed as she’d spoken. The timid woman became an expert, a professional, and she grew in front of his eyes.
A small inhale issued from her lips. The air between them vanished. “Am I in trouble?” she whispered.
“Why would you be in trouble?”
“You called me Anna.”
Why had he done that? He had always called her Schwartzman. When did she become Anna?
“You only do that when I’m in trouble.”
Though they were alone, they both whispered, as though this conversation about her name was a secret.
“Am I in trouble?” she asked again.
“No,” he whispered, “but I am.”
She furrowed her brow. “What?”
He’d seen something in her. Even from their first meeting. Something that made him want to protect her and also to draw her out—help her find the strength to emerge. He wanted to know her. “I think I’m in trouble.”
Her gaze tracked to his lips, and he leaned forward, hesitating to give her a chance to—what? Run? Scream? He knew, didn’t he? That she wanted this, too. He knew her well enough. He could read her.
When she didn’t pull away, he leaned forward and kissed her again. Her hands found their way to his face, the skin dewy on his cheeks. Something growled up from inside him, some beast he’d hidden away, its longing denied.
The desire soared toward the surface, and he pulled away. He took a breath, rubbed his thumb across her jaw. “We can wait.”
She hesitated, and he was suddenly terrified that she didn’t want this as much as he did.
“I don’t want to,” he added quickly, reading the confusion in her face. “I don’t want to wait.” His voice sounded breathy in his ears, as though he’d been sprinting. God, he was an idiot. “I’m sorry.” He rubbed his head and shifted on his feet. What had he done? He wasn’t drunk. He was sober. Aware. Alert. On fire. He was on fire.
When he looked back at her, she was smiling.
“What?” he asked.
“I like you, Hal.”
He groaned, closing his eyes.
Her hand on his shoulder, her fingers skimming his neck. He opened his eyes in surprise, and she was there. Right there. “No,” she whispered in a voice that threatened to break the chains of his control. “I really like you,” she said, her cheeks as flushed as he’d ever seen them. “Kiss me.”
And he lifted her up, then. Her lips met his, and he held her, suspended, as he kissed her. Then, gently, he set her down and kissed her again.
“I should say good night,” he whispered.
She said nothing in return, taking his hand and opening the door to the apartment above the garage.
Then she led him inside.
Hal didn’t sleep, and not because they were up all night. They were adults, not teenagers. He remembered the days when he was greedy for as much as possible, as fast as possible, but they understood there was time, that they could savor the slowness. Gone were the mornings when he woke having burned through all the passion in a single, white-hot blaze. The mornings when he woke to every neuron inside him frayed, the circuitry of his body and mind muted, like a motherboard overloaded.
Every time he had started to doze, the night slipped away from him as though he were in a dream. He experienced panic and a stab of fear that he’d imagined this night, her beside him. Schwartzman. Anna.
To dampen the rising fear, he woke himself to confirm that she was there. And she was.
He didn’t focus on how they would handle going home. What they would tell their colleagues. If they would tell them at all. How this might impact their work. That Spencer was still out there. Those thoughts emerged like bubbles off the surface of the sea of emotions he experienced. But he popped them. Gently, firmly, and sent their remnants away.
What kept him up was the sense that he didn’t want to miss a minute of being beside her. With her. To see the beautiful, creamy texture of her skin, the soft way her mouth set while she slept, the dark waves of her hair against the white pillow.
Finally, he must have dozed, because when he woke, she was holding a cup of coffee out to him. He pushed himself up and saw she wore a blue button-down shirt and a pair of shorts. A matching pajama set. Exactly what he would have pictured her in if he’d ever wondered about it. Why hadn’t he?
“I found coffee in the little kitchen.”
He took the mug. “You didn’t want to go down to the main house?”
She smiled as her cheeks flushed, and he laughed. The family would have noticed that he’d never come back. His sisters had probably checked the den for him. He didn’t care. Better than that, they’d be thrilled. He saw how they’d watched Anna the night before.
They liked her.
“You okay?” she asked.
He’d been lost in his own thoughts. “I’m great,” he told her, making room for her on the bed beside him. “How about you?”
She sat on the edge of the bed, facing him. The rosy flush held in her cheeks. “I feel good.”
He reached out to touch her leg. “I’m glad.”
She threaded her fingers into his hand. The little furrow tugged at her brow. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Think.” He set his coffee mug on the bedside table and pried the one from her hands and set it there, too. “Don’t think.”
He leaned forward and kissed her again, afraid of what she would say. He wanted to know what was going through her mind, but he didn’t. He wanted to shut the whole world out for a few minutes more.
He reached for the buttons on her pajama top and sensed her intake of breath as his fingers grazed her collarbone. He unbuttoned them one at a time and pushed the fabric off her skin. She watched him, and he felt the stiffness in her shoulders as her scars were exposed.
She had to know he didn’t care. She was beautiful to him. But he didn’t say anything. He leaned forward and kissed her, and when she kissed him back, he pulled her into his arms.
For a few more minutes, they could shut out the rest of the world.
It wouldn’t last.
There was a killer to find.
A missing woman, a terrified husband.
But right now, there was only Anna.
43
When Schwartzman woke again, the sunlight cut through the edge of the blin
ds and lit the wall beside her head.
She was alone in the bed. She listened for him in the bathroom, but it was quiet. Her phone told her it was after eight a.m. Would Hal’s family know that he had spent the night with her? Would they tease him? Ask for details?
She had woken several times in the night. But rather than the strange, untethered sensation she still felt in her new house, she knew exactly where she was. Odd to feel so grounded in an unfamiliar room, next to an unfamiliar body.
Except Hal was not unfamiliar. Last night she had learned the details of his skin, the way the muscles bunched across his back and abdomen, the sinewy sculpture of his frame, but he was still utterly familiar.
She would never have spent the night with a boy under her father’s roof, certainly not before they were married. If she could have one more hour with her father, it would be to introduce him to Hal, to spend an hour with the two of them together.
She stretched out one leg, running her bare skin across the cotton sheet. She had been intimate with two men in her lifetime. She had been with one good man in her lifetime. The memories of losing her virginity, of the roughness of Spencer’s greedy hands, dragged on the periphery of her mind like the undertow of the ocean. She pushed past those memories to the recent ones, the good ones.
She recalled something Hal had said to her when they’d barely known each other. He’d entered the morgue after Spencer had called her there, taunting her by calling from her mother’s phone. Hal had noticed how distraught she was and asked if she was okay, assuring her that she didn’t need to talk to him if she didn’t want to.
And then he’d told her something that she’d clung to, like a lucky coin, through the period that followed, when Spencer had manipulated his way back into her life. Hal had said, “You might not feel it, but you’re one of us now. And we protect our own.”
And she felt that. Despite the passion of the night before—the need from him and her own need as well—she felt protected, safe.
She rose slowly, showered, and dressed before making her way back to the main house, assuming that whatever conversation had or had not occurred about last night would be over.
Hal’s mother greeted her as she set the long table once again. “You’re just in time for breakfast. Hal’s cooking.”
From the kitchen came the smell of bacon and eggs. The two husbands also moved about the kitchen, dishing up salsa, spreading out plates with corn tortillas, and beginning the process of building them into huevos rancheros.
Hal greeted her with a smile that twitched momentarily on one side, the only sign in his face that this wasn’t a regular morning for them. He paused cooking long enough to pour her a cup of coffee, which she sipped black. Tasha called the children for breakfast, and soon the dining room was full again. Hal’s sister Becca wore jeans and a T-shirt while the others were still in their pajamas.
“This is not a house of morning people,” Faith announced, looking proudly over her brood.
Breakfast was another raucous affair with the Harris clan. Schwartzman sat between Hal’s sisters and across from his mother, listening as they mapped out a plan for Christmas.
“We’d love to have you,” said Becca.
“Thank you.” Schwartzman made no promises.
She detected a shift in Hal this morning as he talked with his family, his mind clearly elsewhere. Did it have to do with her? With them being together last night? Things had been so normal this morning, but he didn’t seem happy now.
That worried her.
Only when they were in the car did Hal tell her. “I got a call back from one of the witnesses from the 2004 assault—a student from the party. His name is Kyle Miller, and he lives just east of Sacramento. He’s willing to meet with us this morning. Okay if we stop?”
“Absolutely,” she agreed. “Did he think of something?”
“He said he told the police everything he knew back then . . .”
And she understood Hal was hoping for a miracle, for some little piece to fall loose and give him a lead.
As he drove, she watched him from the corner of her eye and wondered about what he thought of last night. There should have been a shift in the car—some switch flipped from friends to lovers, from colleagues to mates. But the car ride felt the same as it always had.
Hal slid his hand past the gearshift and touched her leg.
Almost the same.
They navigated to the Starbucks where Kyle Miller was to meet them. A few minutes early, they ordered mochas—hers small and his huge—and took a seat by the window away from the crowd.
A man wearing jeans and an old-style Patagonia Snap-T in yellow and blue arrived a few minutes after eleven a.m., his gaze searching the café. He was about the right age. Hal started to rise when the man walked toward them.
“Inspector Harris.”
Hal shook his hand and introduced Schwartzman. The man took a seat. Kyle Miller had blond hair that was thinning up top and wore small, horn-rimmed glasses that made him look Scandinavian, though she couldn’t say exactly why. He was trim but carried an extra layer around his midsection, visible beneath the fleece.
“You want a coffee?” Hal asked.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I’m fully caffeinated.”
Miller leaned forward in the chair as though coming in for a huddle. “You wanted to know about that night. I’ve been thinking about it all morning. Bitty. God, I haven’t thought about her in years. I had kind of a crush on her back then.”
Schwartzman tried to imagine Tabitha Wilson as a young college student, away from home for the first time. Naive, excited, probably not unlike Schwartzman herself at that age.
“Can you tell me what you remember?” Hal asked.
Miller paused, and Schwartzman steeled herself for him to tell them how long ago it was, how he didn’t remember anything. The brain was more capable than people imagined, but many didn’t want to dredge up old memories, especially negative ones.
“I went that night because Bitty was supposed to be there,” Miller explained.
Hal held his pen casually. “Who were you there with?”
“A couple of my buddies came up there with me, but they left pretty quickly. It was a weird scene.”
“Weird, how?”
“We were used to kegs and beer pong, and this was all wineglasses and guys sniffing Scotch. Plus, the women there looked at us like we were children. Which we were, I guess. It was our freshman year.”
“Do you remember seeing the man who was renting the house?”
Miller shook his head. “I talked to Detective Gambini at the time,” he said. “I might have seen the guy, but I don’t remember him. There were at least ten or twelve older guys there that I didn’t recognize.”
“Older?”
“Well, older than us. Out of college—maybe midtwenties.”
Schwartzman thought about the draw Spencer had for her during her first year of medical school. How grown up and mature, how sophisticated he’d seemed. She’d imagined he might open up her world. Instead, he had become her captor, and she’d lived in his prison.
“Were you able to give descriptions of any of them?” Hal asked.
“We’d had a few beers before we went up there,” Miller admitted. “They all sort of blended together. I wasn’t really paying attention to the guys, if you know what I mean.”
“And you’d gone to the party to see Tabitha Wilson?”
Miller nodded. “She and I talked for a while, but then she sort of vanished.”
“Vanished,” Hal repeated. “Did you notice where she went?”
“No. I’d gone to get more drinks—or maybe take a leak—and when I came back, she was gone.”
Schwartzman could sense Hal’s frustration. The answer was right there, somewhere in the recesses of Kyle Miller’s mind. He had almost certainly seen the women’s attacker, yet the memories were buried in a drunken haze, in the youthful crime of being unobservant.
“How about her ro
ommate, Aleena Safar?”
“I don’t think I saw her either, but I’m not sure.”
“Do you recall where you were in the house?”
“Most of the older guys were in the living room, but we stayed in the kitchen, where the beer was. Like I said, I don’t remember much.”
“So you didn’t go upstairs or down into a basement?”
“No—” Miller stopped. “I did go upstairs once with his grad student.”
Hal made a note. “His grad student.”
“Yeah. She wanted to explore the whole house. She was obsessed. I kind of forgot about that. We didn’t get far because a big dude came out of the upstairs bathroom and told us to get lost.”
“Whose grad student?” Hal asked.
“The professor’s.”
“You mean Professor Ramseyer?” Hal clarified, a new spark in his gaze.
“Right,” Miller agreed.
“But Professor Ramseyer was on sabbatical.”
“He was in India or Turkey or something,” Miller said.
“So if the professor was gone, why was his grad student at the house?”
“She’d been his research assistant for three or four years by then, and she’d never been to his house. He’s some sort of rock star in the history department—or he was. Even as a freshman, I’d heard other girls talk about him—how passionate he was about”—Miller waved his hand—“Ancient Greece or whatever he taught. She said he was über-private, and she’d been dying to see where he lived.”
Hal leaned forward, and Schwartzman could sense Hal’s focus homing in. Maybe there was another witness, someone who might have taken note of the men in the professor’s house.
“And you went with her upstairs?”
“She was my history TA, and she was kind of cute.” He shrugged. “I didn’t stand a shot, but hell, I was a freshman.”
“So how much of the house did you see?” Hal asked.
“Like I said, we went upstairs, but we got stopped, so we went back down. She dragged me into the back part of the house—he had an office back there—and checked out his books and the pictures on the walls.”
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