Kay Hooper - Sense Of Evil

“I know Sharona-she doesn’t fit the profile, she’s black. She’s missing?”

“Well, her boyfriend claims she is. But her dog is also missing, as well as her car and a lot of her clothes, and her mother says she’s always wanted to see the world, so we’re thinking she might have upped and left.”

“If Ray Mercer was my boyfriend, I’d up and leave too.” Mallory sighed again. “Still, we have to make sure, so keep everybody on it. What about Kate Murphy?”

“More troubling, in that she does fit the profile. Late twenties, blond, successful; she owns one of those new little boutiques on Main Street. Was doing pretty well with it too. Didn’t show up for work on Monday, so her assistant manager has been running the shop.”

“We’ve checked out her house or apartment?”

“Uh-huh. No sign she’s been taken-but no sign she left voluntarily either. Her car is in its slot at her condo, and far as we can tell it’s clean. Haven’t found her purse or keys, though. She didn’t-doesn’t-have any pets, and no family in Hastings. We’re trying to track down relatives now.”

“And still no sign of Cheryl Bayne.”

“No. The station in Columbia has sent another reporter, this one male, to cover this new… angle.”

“How caring of them.”

Ginny nodded. “Yeah, even the other reporters are being pretty scathing about that.”

“While doing their own reports.”

“Uh-huh.”

Mallory shook her head in disgust. “Okay. Let me or the chief know if anything changes.”

“Right.”

When she was alone again, Mallory sat for a moment with her elbows on her desk and her hands cupping her face, fingers absently massaging her temples. She should stay, but Rafe had made it plain she was to go home as soon as the body had been taken from that old building and the forensics team finished.

Both of which had been done.

Mallory was tired but also curiously wide awake. She didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to be alone. She wanted something to get the image of that poor woman out of her head.

With only a slight hesitation, she picked up her phone and called Alan’s cell. “Hey, are you home?” she asked without preamble.

“Headed that way. Pulling into the parking lot now, as a matter of fact.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Nothing you could truthfully define as food,” he replied. “There was something a charitable person might have called a sandwich hours ago, but it may have been just a figment of my imagination. Are you offering?”

“I’m offering takeout Chinese. I’ll even pick it up on my way to your place. Deal?”

“Deal. Stop for wine if you feel like that. My place is dry as a bone. Oh-and I have a splitting headache, so if you could pick up some aspirin as well? I don’t think I have any.”

“Okay. See you in a few minutes.” Mallory hung up, telling herself this wasn’t a bad idea at all. So what if she had spent most of the previous night in his bed? It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t have to mean anything. Alan could be an amusing and entertaining companion, and he was good in bed.

Very good, in fact. And she couldn’t deceive herself into believing she wasn’t looking forward to a little body-on-body comfort, because she was. Two clean, healthy, sweaty bodies tangled together in the sheets sounded like a dandy way to affirm that both of them were alive.

Alive. Not hanging from a beam like a weeks-old gutted fish. Not lying in a boneless, bloody sprawl in the woods off some highway. Not laced into an impossibly tight leather corset and smothered with a hood while a woman with a whip and chains tortured-

“Christ,” she muttered. “I’ve gotta get out of here.”

It took a few minutes, of course, to do what she had to in order to leave for the night, but she took care of things quickly and bolted before anyone could come up with anything that required her continued presence at the station.

She called and ordered the food on her way to the restaurant, so it’d be ready and waiting for her, and did stop for wine even though she wasn’t usually much of a drinker. She even remembered Alan’s aspirin. Still, it was barely half an hour after she talked to him when Mallory entered his apartment with one bag full of little cardboard cartons and another holding the wine and aspirin.

“You look jumpy as hell,” he commented as soon as she walked through the door.

“It’s a jumpy time.” Mallory knew the way to the kitchen, of course, and lost no time in getting the wine out and hunting through his cupboards for glasses. “Jesus, Alan, not a single wineglass?”

“Housewares aren’t a priority with me. Sue me.”

“My life has come down to drinking wine from jelly glasses. Could this day get any better?”

Alan had swallowed several aspirin dry, then began setting out the cartons on his breakfast bar, where they normally ate. He paused to look at her intently. “I heard. Couldn’t have been much fun, finding that body.”

“No.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.” She poured wine into one of the glasses and immediately took a swallow. “I intend to drink at least half this bottle, part of it while I shower away the assorted smells of today, then choke down some shrimp and vegetables. After that, unless you object, the plan is to adjourn to your bedroom and fuck like bunnies. Possibly all night. Unless you still have your headache, of course. Tell me you won’t.”

“I expect the aspirin to work any minute,” Alan replied. “And that plan suits me just fine.”

The Mexican restaurant wasn’t crowded despite the fact that Saturday night was usually one of the busiest. As the owner had told them mournfully when he escorted them personally to a cozy table back in the corner, people were going out less at night since the murders had started. And after what had been found today, undoubtedly most of his usual patrons were home with their doors locked.

So if Rafe and Isabel didn’t have the restaurant to themselves, they did have their own secluded corner of it. With quiet music playing in the background and an attentive but unobtrusive waiter, they were almost in their own world.

Almost.

“You still believe Jamie didn’t mutilate Jane Doe?” Rafe asked as they were finishing up the main course. They had been talking generally about the murders and the investigation, both with too much experience as cops to allow either the clinical details of brutal death or the bloody images they had seen all too recently to affect their appetites. And both shying away from anything more personal.

“I’m positive. My guess is, he was watching Jamie and saw her put the body into the trunk of Jane Doe’s car. I don’t know if she drove the car to wherever she planned to leave it, or if he did-and when she came back either to the playroom or to the car for some reason and didn’t find the body, that was when she really freaked out. In any case, I think he put the body in that old garage. And amused himself with it.”

“That’s sickening,” Rafe said.

“Definitely. He’s very twisted, our boy.”

“So his reasons for picking Jamie as his first victim in Hastings were probably twisted as well.”

“Well, it may have been about Jamie being a dominatrix rather than a lesbian. Her wielding so much power over other women, power he wanted and didn’t have. Maybe sheer jealousy was the trigger. Or envy. Maybe he couldn’t stand the fact that she could control the women in her life.”

“And he couldn’t control the women in his.”

“Maybe. Or it could have been the fact that her partners came to Jamie, willingly put themselves into her hands, submitted to her. And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get that response from women. Ironic, really. He always goes for the smart, successful ones, the ones least likely to allow themselves to be dominated in a relationship, and yet to dominate women is what he desperately wants.”