White Hot

by Elise Noble

  “Maybe this case isn’t so bad after all.”

  At least one person was happy. It was just a shame that person wasn’t me. As the activity in the office wound down for the evening, with the administrators going home and the investigators on the evening shift heading out on the streets, I picked up my handbag, borrowed a pool car, and went back to my apartment.

  The stop was only temporary, though. I had a mind to lose.

  CHAPTER 17

  I’D REHEARSED THIS routine so many times before. Strip, shave my armpits and my legs, then check my bikini-line wax was still good. Take a shower. Moisturise and put deodorant on. Blow-dry my hair. Brush my teeth. Do my make-up. Make sure I had condoms and lube in my handbag.

  I could have done it in my sleep.

  So why, tonight, did it feel so awkward?

  The girl staring back at me from the mirror as I brushed on mascara wasn’t looking forward to going out, and when she touched up her lipstick, she didn’t relish the thought of somebody else sucking it off.

  What’s wrong with me? This was what I did. This was how I got through my life, from one week to the next. It was my drug, my fix.

  Why wasn’t I craving it like the lifeblood it was?

  On my way through the living room, I paused and knocked back a finger of whisky. Then another. That gave me enough courage to go out the door. My destination, Black’s, was a few blocks down. Easily walkable, even in heels. I bypassed the line, one of the perks of Emmy being the owner, and slid past the velvet rope, raising a hand to the doorman in greeting as I went.

  Inside, the music was thumping as usual. I headed straight to the bar.

  “Double vodka and coke, please.”

  The barman raised an eyebrow because I never normally drank double anything. I nodded a confirmation and he shrugged, pouring my drink with agonising slowness.

  Meanwhile, I scanned the crowd with a practised eye for likely targets. I spotted a couple—men attached to small groups, perhaps with a girl or two at the same table. If they were in a pair, I steered clear, as far too often they turned out to be gay, and I avoided the ones on their own at all costs. Ethan White was a perfect example of why picking up a loner was a bad idea.

  I headed for the first of the possibles, but before I could get there, another woman swooped in and landed on his lap. Dammit. I veered in the direction of man number two instead.

  He was available. He made that clear within three seconds of meeting me. But when he slid his arm around my waist and asked what I wanted—and he didn’t mean just a drink—I felt nothing. Not a flutter in my belly, not a throb between my legs. I was dead from the waist down.

  When the same thing happened with the third man, and then the fourth, I felt something all right—a sliver of fear brushing against my ribcage. What was my damn problem?

  These men ticked all my boxes. They were well-dressed, hot, drinking the good stuff, and friendly. On any other night, I’d have been in a cab with one of them or maybe even two.

  I returned to the bar, weary, and got another drink. I had a tab here although I never had to pay it. Emmy may have bitched about me borrowing her cars, but she was always generous with the drinks budget.

  I’d just leaned forward to pick up my glass when someone pressed against me.

  “Can I buy that for you?”

  I twisted around. “I already paid.”

  “Shame. I’ll get the next one.”

  The guy was gorgeous by anyone’s standards. Six inches taller than me with smooth, light brown skin that made me want to lick it. I felt a ripple of heat in my belly as I studied him more closely. Close-cropped black hair, muscled shoulders—if it hadn’t been for his eyes, which were filled with confidence instead of sadness, I could have been looking at… No. I wasn’t even going to go there.

  “Dance?” he murmured in my ear.

  I let him lead me over to the dance floor, and by the time the intro to the first track had played, I knew this would be my warm body for the night. Half an hour, six songs, and another drink later, his confidence had turned to lust and my panties were wet.

  Then one of Ethan’s songs began playing.

  It was like someone had got out a fire hose, turned it on full blast, and hit me in the chest with it.

  “Daniela?” my new friend asked. “You okay?”

  “Can we just go?” I muttered.

  I didn’t need to ask him twice. He steered me out of the club and into a waiting cab, and twenty minutes later, we pulled up outside his place.

  Any heat between us had turned tepid, at least from my side, but I wasn’t backing out now. This was how I worked. This was what I needed.

  At least, that was what I kept telling myself.

  All the way up to his apartment, through his lounge, and into his bedroom.

  When a man peeled off my clothes, it was as if he was peeling away the layers of stress and loneliness and self-loathing. When he thrust into me, he pounded the monsters that lived inside me into submission. When he came, it was an affirmation that somebody wanted me, that somebody cared enough to give me a little piece of himself, and I used that energy to get through the next day. Two or three days if I was lucky.

  I fucked to remember, and I fucked to forget.

  Only that night, it didn’t work.

  I half-heartedly faked an orgasm, and when he rolled off me, all I could do was mumble an apology and pull my dress over my head. I didn’t even bother with shoes. I could run faster barefoot.

  And run I did. I raced along the pavement until I saw a cab, then I leapt into it.

  The driver twisted around, his face a mask of concern. “You want me to call someone? The police?”

  “No, no, I’m fine,” I choked out, even though I was far from it.

  I managed to keep it together until I got home. It was only when I crawled into bed that I allowed myself the luxury of tears. And I didn’t even understand why I was crying them.

  Normally, sleeping with a man left me satisfied, refreshed, even happy at a push, but not today. When the sun shone through the full-length window over my balcony, I just felt…dirty. Like I’d been used and tossed aside, although in reality, it was me who’d done the tossing.

  In the morning, I tried to get out of bed, and the instant I moved, I clutched at my temples. The pounding in my head didn’t come from a hangover, though. Instead, it came from the realisation that in just a few short hours I had to visit the man whose face had haunted my dreams the night before.

  The man whose face I’d seen as a stranger pounded into me the previous evening.

  The man who, in all likelihood, had murdered a girl a decade younger than me in a vicious rage.

  As ice flooded through my veins, I realised I was fucked again but in a very different way.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE THUMPING OF the rotor blades as I flew up to Redding’s Gap didn’t help my headache. Neither did Otis’s incessant moaning on the last hour of the journey. If I had to make many more visits, I needed to seriously consider getting my own vehicle here because, otherwise, the town would have another murderer on its hands.

  I posed for my strip search, feeling an uncharacteristic twinge of embarrassment at the hickey on my left breast. I didn’t even remember getting it, but then again, my mind had been on other things—okay, people—last night.

  As I expected, the prison officer was mighty interested in the photos of the crime scene, and not at all keen to let me keep them.

  “Why not?” I asked. “What’s he going to do, give me a paper cut?”

  “We’re not supposed to let you take anything in.”

  “His lawyer’s allowed to take them in.”

  “That’s different.”

  I plastered on a sickly smile. “How?”

  “Because… I don’t know, he’s a lawyer.”

  “And all that would happen is that I’d write down the questions for him to ask and he’d write down the answers. This just cuts out the middleman.”<
br />
  The officer looked at his watch and sighed. Yup, break time was coming up. “Fine. Keep them. Just don’t tell anyone it was me who let you.”

  This time my smile was genuine. “Thanks.”

  Ethan was already in the room when I arrived. His legs were shackled to the chair, and each hand was cuffed to a corner of the table. He looked up at me with a mixture of sadness and trepidation. What would I put him through today?

  I wasn’t even sure myself yet.

  I settled myself onto the metal seat, the chill from the surface seeping through my jeans. Not even a little bit comfortable. At least I hadn’t done anal last night.

  Ethan’s beard was longer this time, the lines on his forehead deeper. It seemed like being in here accelerated the ageing process. I guess it did, really. Because unless I figured out a way to help him, his life expectancy could be significantly shortened.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  It was a stupid question, but I didn’t know where else to start. For all the time I’d spent thinking about what to say, it hadn’t helped the words to come any easier.

  He gave a tiny shrug. “Not good,” he said, so softly I had to lean forward to hear.

  Had I honestly expected any other answer?

  “Have you been getting the time out of your cell you’re entitled to?”

  An hour a day in the yard, five times a week, plus three showers, each under the watchful gaze of a prison officer. It wasn’t much.

  “Yeah.”

  I noticed a cut on the edge of one eyebrow.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  Nothing. Silence.

  “Ethan?”

  “Someone hit me during rec time.”

  Fuck. He wasn’t cut out for a place like this.

  “Did the guards sort it out?”

  He paled a shade. “They shot at him. From up in the towers.”

  High concrete walls topped with razor wire surrounded the exercise yard. Guards were stationed up there at intervals, and this was one of the few prisons to allow the use of live ammo.

  “Did anything hit you?”

  He shook his head, bottom lip trembling. “I didn’t want to go outside again, but they said I had to.”

  Ethan might have been emotional, but so was I, and that only made things harder. He didn’t belong here. Whatever temporary insanity had caused him to kill Christina, that wasn’t who he truly was.

  “Ethan, I want to help you, but I can’t do that if you won’t help me.”

  “I’m beyond help.”

  “I don’t think you are.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “No, but I’ve spoken to people who do, and they’re worried about you.”

  “Who?”

  “Melinda. Lisa. Ishmael. Eli. Ty.”

  At the mention of Ty’s name, his face clouded over. “Me and Ty don’t get on so well now.”

  “I gathered that. But he hit you and you didn’t retaliate. That says something about your character.”

  “Then why did I kill that girl?” Ethan’s voice came out as a strangled whisper, and the agony was plain to hear.

  I turned the question back on him. “Why do you think you killed her?”

  He looked away from me. “I don’t know. In here, I’ve thought of nothing else, and I don’t know.”

  With little to lose, I decided to push him. Either he’d open up or shut down, but this pissing around was getting us nowhere.

  “What do you remember about that night?”

  He shut down.

  I forced myself to wait in the painful silence, hoping he’d fill the void, but he didn’t.

  What next? I could talk about something lighter, just to get him speaking again, but what would that achieve? Ultimately nothing. He’d still be stuck in here, waiting for Skinner to do his worst.

  How could I convince a man who had nothing, and to whom I could offer nothing, to talk? In the end, I realised there was only one thing I could take away from him: myself. It might make him hate me, and that hurt me more than I cared to admit, but I had to do it anyway.

  I got to my feet.

  He looked up. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m leaving. I can’t help you if you won’t make any effort to help yourself. I’m done.”

  His eyes burned into my back as I moved towards the door, the heels of my boots tapping out a slow beat on the concrete floor.

  I’d lifted my hand to knock, signalling to the guard that I wanted out of there, when I heard Ethan’s voice.

  “Dani, I don’t remember anything.”

  Thank fuck. Not that he didn’t remember but that he was talking. I erased my smile before turning back to him.

  “Nothing. It’s all blank,” he said.

  The door cracked open behind me.

  “Are you coming out?” the guard asked.

  He must have seen me through the viewing window.

  “No, I’m staying.”

  I headed back to my seat, trying to hide the elation that I’d chipped away a tiny bit of Ethan’s shell.

  “You talk, or I walk.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “What’s the last thing you do remember? Anything at all on that day?”

  “I picked lunch up from the deli down the road. A meatball sub. I always liked those. I know I was supposed to play a gig that evening, and I guess I must have gone because that was where they said I met the girl. But I don’t remember it. The last thing in my head is that I was in my studio at home, sorting out records to take with me. After that, it’s all blank.”

  “Had you played at that club before?”

  “A few times.”

  “I’ll admit I’m kind of surprised you’d play a venue like that. How many Grammys have you won?”

  “Six. But I enjoy playing the smaller places. They’ve got their own kind of energy, and I’m right there with the crowds. Liquid was easy because it was close to home.”

  “So assuming you went, what time would you have left your house?”

  “My set was at nine, but I’d have had to get ready first. Probably about seven.”

  “And what would you normally have done after you packed your stuff, before you left?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing much. Maybe hung around in the studio. Played the guitar, messed around with some new mixes.”

  “The studio you ran with Ronan?”

  “No, that’s the commercial place. I’ve got my own in the basement at home. Nobody records there but me.”

  “There’s a video of you in the bar with Christina, and you weren’t wearing your mask. Why not? I thought you always wore it?”

  “That must have been after my set. Sometimes when I’ve finished working, I’ll pack up and leave then sneak back in again. Just to enjoy the music and the atmosphere without people asking for autographs or trying to shove demo tapes in my hand. Not for long, usually. Maybe an hour or so. That was the beauty of the mask. I never wanted the fame or the fortune the Ghost had, the screaming groupies, the hero worship. I look at some celebrities and they can’t walk down the street without being harassed or followed. That’s its own kind of prison. Your life doesn’t belong to you anymore. But when I took the mask off, I was just me again. Just Ethan. I could go where I wanted and live a normal life without all the bullshit that came with the Ghost’s name.”

  “Why do the job you did, then?”

  “An accident, really. I believed in the music, and I liked to share it. More and more people started to listen, and the only way I could give everyone what they wanted was to become someone else.”

  “And how about women when you were just Ethan again? Would you talk to them?”

  “Sometimes.” He looked away. “If they were pretty and sweet.”

  “And you’d take them home?”

  “Sometimes,” he said again. “Not often. Not if I thought they were going to want more.”

  We weren’t so different after all, him and m
e. Neither of us wanted the burden of a relationship. Neither of us wanted to let anybody in.

  “What about Christina? Is she someone you’d talked to in the past?”

  I slid a photo of her over. Not one of the morgue shots, but a candid snapshot taken at college.

  “The police already asked me that. I never saw her before. If I talked to her that night, I don’t remember it.”

  “Is she the kind of girl you would have taken home?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. It would depend on what she was like to talk to. I may have been taking her home because I planned to sleep with her, but I still would have wanted to be able to have a decent conversation.”

  At least he had some standards. I’d have been disappointed if he’d admitted to fucking anything in a skirt. I sensed we weren’t going to get any further with Christina at that moment, and my time with Ethan was short, so I switched to a different tack.

  “You said earlier that with the mask off, you didn’t get recognised, but Lisa said you had a stalker. Is that true?”

  “Yeah. Lavinia.”

  “You know her name?”

  That surprised me. Most people didn’t tend to get that close to the people following them, at least not until the police got involved.

  “She wrote me letters, and that’s what they were signed.”

  “How do you know they were from her?” I asked.

  “She gave them to me.”

  “Hang on. Can we back up a bit here? Start at the beginning. How did you meet her?”

  He fidgeted in his seat, trying to get comfortable, but it was an impossible job. “I played at Liquid a few months ago, but when I left, I wasn’t as careful as I should have been. She must have followed me home, because the next day she showed up on my doorstep with a pile of CDs she wanted me to sign.”

  “And did you?”

  “I tried to say I didn’t know what she was talking about, and that was when she said she saw me play. I figured I might as well sign her stuff, and I asked her if she’d mind keeping my identity quiet.”

  “And I take it she did?”

  “She seemed to like knowing something that hardly anybody else did.”

  “And the stalking?”

  “She used to show up now and then. Sometimes she’d try and talk to me; other times she’d give me a letter or a gift. One week she’d hung around outside the house every day, and that was when I took Lisa for dinner. Lavinia backed off after she saw us together.”