Rachel Gibson: Sex, Lies, And Online Dating

“Maybe.” His intense gaze stared into hers, and she got the feeling that he was watching for something. For what, she had no idea. Quinn opened his mouth to say more, but a gagging sound caught his attention. Lucy looked to her left at Mike and his blonde date. Mike’s hands clutched the sides of the table and his face and neck were turning a deep red.

“Oh my God!” Lucy stood so fast her chair fell backward. “Klondikemike is choking. Somebody do something.”

“Shouldn’t you do something?”

She looked at Quinn as he rose also. “Me?”

“Aren’t you a nurse?”

Nurse? “What?” Oh crap. That’s right. She’d lied about that in her bio. Since no one else seemed to be doing anything, she quickly moved the short distance. She didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver, so she did the next best thing: She thumped Mike between the shoulder blades. Nothing happened, and she thumped him harder.

Mike’s date screamed. Someone across the coffee shop yelled, “Call 911! A man’s choking to death.”

The noise inside Starbucks went from a low steady hum to a wave of shouting and scraping chairs.

“Jesus H. Macy,” Quinn swore. He grabbed Lucy by the arms, picked her up, and moved her out of the way. He hauled Mike up from behind, and with one abrupt squeeze, a coffee bean flew out and hit Mike’s date between her stunned eyes. Mike took a deep, gasping breath. “Thanks,” he wheezed.

Quinn nodded. “No problem.”

The cacophony of raised voices grew even louder as people crowded around Mike to make sure he was all right. Quinn stood with his weight on one leg and his hands on his hips. A frown pulled at the corners of his lips as he watched the commotion in front of him. The gap between the zipper of his jacket widened across his hard chest, and Lucy thought she heard him mutter something that sounded a lot like “Nurse my ass.”

Dick: Seeks Jane for Fun

and Games…

Quinn McIntyre shoved his fingers into the front pocket of his Levi’s and blew the air out of his lungs. His breath hung in front of his face, and his eyes narrowed as he watched the tail-lights of Lucy’s silver Beemer heading down Fairview. She’d taken her coffee cup with her. Short of wrestling it from her hand, there hadn’t been a damn thing he’d been able to do about it, either.

The rain had stopped since he’d entered Starbucks, but inky clouds covered three-quarters of the full moon. Quinn stepped off the curb and headed across the parking lot toward a black Econoline van. Lucy was no more a nurse than he was a plumber, but he’d known that the first time he’d e-mailed her. He’d known all along that her Internet bio was complete crap, and he’d known exactly what she did for a living. By the time he’d met her tonight, he’d known a lot more about her than the color of her eyes and her blonde hair. He’d known her height was five feet seven inches, and that her weight was one thirty. He’d known she’d been born in the hospital downtown and raised in the North End, where she still lived. He’d known that her father had deserted the family when she was eleven and that that could cause a lot of resentment against men. He’d known she was educated and had sold her first mystery novel six years ago. And he’d known that in the last five years she’d received three speeding tickets and two more citations for rolling through stop signs.

What he hadn’t known was that her eyes were deeper blue than they were in either her driver’s license picture or in the publicity photo on the inside dust jacket of her books. Her hair had shiny streaks of gold, and her lips were much fuller. Walking into Starbucks tonight, he’d known he was going to encounter a striking woman, but he hadn’t been prepared for the full feminine assault. From photos, there’s no way he could have known that everything about her, from the touch of her soft hand in his to the gentle sound of her voice, was in opposition to a woman who wrote about serial killers and might be one herself.

Quinn walked beneath pools of artificial light, heedless of the puddles splashing his boots. As he approached the van, the window slowly lowered.

“Did you get all that?” he asked as he reached behind him and pulled his T-shirt from the back of his jeans.

“Yeah.” Detective Kurt Weber’s round face appeared in the window. “Did you get the cup?”

“She took it with her.”

“Shit.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“What was all that commotion toward the end?”

“Some guy was choking on a coffee bean.” He paused to pull at the transmitter taped to the middle of his back. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that Lucy Rothschild not only lied about being a nurse; she doesn’t even have a passing knowledge of CPR.”

“All that serial killer stuff was interesting,” law enforcement technician Anita Landers commented from where she sat in the back of the van beside the receiving equipment.

Quinn had thought so, too. He wouldn’t be surprised if by morning Lucy was the prime suspect in the “Breathless” case, the name they’d given to the woman who met men online and suffocated them in their own homes. An ultrathin wire ran up his side to a tiny flat microphone taped to his right pec. “Shit,” he swore as he ripped the microphone from the bare patch on his chest.

“What was your first reaction to her?” Anita asked.

Quinn handed the transmitter through the window and glanced past Kurt to Anita’s dark outline in the back of the van. The second he’d spotted Lucy sitting across the crowded café, his first reaction had been purely male and purely physical. The kind of reaction a man got when he focused on a beautiful woman. The kind that reminded him how long it had been since he’d had sex. “When I first sat down with her, I thought she was picking me apart, looking for flaws.”

“Maybe she was picking you for her next victim,” Anita suggested.

He’d thought of that too. “Yeah, maybe.” As hardluvnman, he’d been on seven online, five chat room, and three personal ad dates in the past two weeks. Kurt, aka hounddog, had been on about the same number while Quinn had sat in the Econoline, listening to every word. The two detectives’ active caseloads had been shifted around so they could devote most of their time to this case.

Lucy had been Quinn’s second coffee date that evening, and he was exhausted from trying to remember which lines to feed which woman. “I’ll see you two tomorrow,” he said as he zipped up his jacket. By morning, the Lucy Rothschild tape would be analyzed just like all the others. There was no point in standing around, freezing his ass off and talking it to death.

He moved to the silver Jeep parked a few slots from the van and opened the door.

“Hey, McIntyre,” Kurt called out to him as he fired up the Econoline.

Quinn looked over the roof of the Jeep. “Yeah?”

“Is that Lucy woman as hot in person as she is in her photos?”

“She’s better looking in person.” Which didn’t eliminate the possibility that she could be a killer, but it did bring up some interesting questions. Like why would a woman who looked like Lucy and made the kind of money she did seek men online?

“That ought to make your job easier.”

Getting distracted by a pair of blue eyes and soft red lips did not make his job easier. No, it would be easier if Breathless turned out to be his first date of the night, Maureen. But even as he thought it, he recoiled. “See ya in the morning,” Quinn said as he got in the Jeep and shut the door.

Maureen Dempsey, aka bignsassy, was one of the stupidest females he’d ever met. She’d rattled on about her scrapbooks and doll collection as if he’d truly given a shit. She’d kept calling him “Quint” and had topped it off by telling him that she’d read “somewhere” that aliens had landed in the Sawtooth Wilderness Area just outside of Sun Valley and were impersonating humans. Thinking she’d surely been joking, he’d made a joke and managed a laugh. She’d been serious, and he’d felt his IQ drop ten points just sitting across from her. But the truly funny thing was, Maureen worked for the state at the Idaho Industrial Commission.