Rachel Gibson: Sex, Lies, And Online Dating

Until it had all come apart.

Quinn took another drink, then lowered the bottle to rest on his thigh. Her name had been Merry, like she should have been happy and cheerful, but there’d never been anything in Merry’s life to cheer about. She’d been a nineteen-year-old whore with a habit to support. Her drug of choice had been black tar heroin, but she’d had a falling out with her boyfriend/dealer after he’d raped and beaten the hell out of her one too many times. The first time Quinn had seen Merry, her eyes had been black and blue and swollen shut. The second time, she’d signed on to be Quinn’s confidential informant and had introduced him to her dealer and supplied him with information.

For the next eight months, Quinn had done what he did the best. He’d laid on the bullshit, slowly making friends with lowlives. Then he’d gotten a phone call in the middle of the night that had blown him out of the water. Merry’s body had been found in a shopping cart in the back of Winco. As he’d stood in a slow, drizzling rain, looking down at her small body and her black chipped fingernail polish, anger had clouded his head and burned a hole in his brain. Eight months of work, down the toilet.

Fuck.

He’d watched a raindrop slide down her forehead and nose. It had dropped on her chin, and something had hit the reset button on the moral compass that had gone horridly off course. A woman was dead, a girl really, and his first thought had been about the job. This time, when he’d looked in the mirror, he hadn’t liked the hard, unfeeling bastard looking back at him. He hadn’t liked what he’d become.

Merry had been Quinn’s CI, and he’d failed her. He’d failed her as a cop, and he’d failed her as a human being. On paper, he’d done everything right. He’d gone strictly by the book, but he should have done more.

In her short life, he’d been just the last man to let her down. Her grandmother had been the only relative to claim her body, and even though he’d failed her in life, there had been something he could do for Merry in death. He’d paid for the funeral, bought the best coffin, and had been one of only a handful to attended the burial. Every year on the anniversary of her murder, he placed pink roses on her headstone. He didn’t even know if she’d liked pink.

Merry had died four years ago, and he still carried the guilt of it in his chest. He figured he always would. A constant reminder to be human, and in a job where he saw the worst in people, it kept him from falling into the us-vs-them mental pit once again.

After he’d put on the suit and transferred to the Violent Crimes Division, he’d concentrated on getting pieces of himself back. Of straightening out his warped view of right and wrong. Good and evil. Black and white. He’d thought he’d succeeded. He’d started to think of maybe having a life outside of work. Of having a wife and a child and one of those kiddie backpacks. But Amanda had proved that some things just weren’t meant to happen. Not for Quinn. He was resigned to it and was okay.

He raised the beer to his mouth and flipped channels on the remote. Light flashed like a strobe as he took a long drink. Quinn loved working in the violent crimes unit. He got off on collecting random clues, chasing disparate leads, and gathering seemingly unrelated evidence. He loved piecing them together until they made a complete picture and gave the investigation direction. He loved taking violent criminals off the streets. But it wasn’t his whole life. He was able to keep perspective and distance. To leave it at the office-except this time. Breathless had to be stopped before she killed again.

Quinn had an inherent talent for stepping back and seeing the bigger picture, but this time there just wasn’t anything to see. There were few clues, truly disparate leads, and the unrelated evidence proved to be just that. Unrelated.

This case was keeping him up at night. The who and why of it spinning around in his head without anything ever falling into place. Whoever Breathless was, she was one smart female. And if there was one thing Quinn hated above all else, he hated to be outsmarted by criminals. Female or otherwise.

Which brought his thoughts around to Lucy Rothschild. He was a cop. Trained to read deception in a person’s body language-and especially the eyes. But several times during the date he’d caught himself staring at her mouth instead of her eyes. Checking out the curves of her body for reasons that had nothing to do with deception and everything to do with the way her breasts filled out her sweater. And in those moments of distraction, the overriding question in his head had been, what made a woman like Lucy date men online? He could understand why men dated online. Asking out women could be intimidating as hell for some guys. But all a woman had to do was stand around and look good. Smile once in a while to let a guy know she was interested. How hard could it be? Especially for a beautiful woman like Lucy.

There was something wrong with her. Had to be. Something hiding behind those big blue eyes. Something that might point to murder.

The only evidence linking Lucy to the Breathless case was her name on the Westco dry cleaner’s customer list, one e-mail sent to her from Charles Wilson, aka chuckles, and one known coffee date with the third victim, Lawrence Craig, aka luvstick. It wasn’t much, but then, the police didn’t have much to go on at this point in the investigation.

The detectives were methodically eliminating suspects, and they had a lot fewer than when they’d started. Yet each begged the same question: what kind of woman would agree to meet a man who called himself luvstick? The police were betting the same kind of woman who would agree to meet someone who called himself hardluvnman or hounddog.

Curious: Seeks Persistent Poet…

The next morning, Quinn watched his hands in the mirror above his dresser as he slid up the knot of his red-and-blue-striped tie. He lifted his freshly shaved chin and moved the knot back and forth until it fit perfectly within the closed collar of his blue dress shirt. He buttoned the points, then reached for his badge sitting on the dresser. He hooked it on his belt and shoved his pistol in the holster on his right hip. He clipped his extra ammo and cell phone on his left side and tucked a pair of handcuffs into his pants at the small of his back. A navy blue jacket lay on the foot of his bed, and he threaded his arms into the sleeves as he headed down the hallway to the kitchen. He fed Millie, made sure the dog door was unlocked, and drank the last of his coffee. On his way out the door, he grabbed his laptop and files. He jumped into his unmarked Crown Victoria and headed toward the office. As he drove across town, he checked his voice mail and jotted down notes on a pad of paper on the seat next to him. He phoned the district attorney’s office regarding a pending court case, and by the time he’d pulled into his parking space, he’d crossed off a number of things on his shit-to-do list.

He made his way to the briefing room set up specifically for the Breathless case and noticed that Lucy Rothschild had been moved up to number one on the marker board, right above Maureen Dempsey. He was the first to arrive, and he set his laptop and files next to the three murder books on the table in front of him.

“We’ve eliminated Karla Thompson completely,” Sergeant Vernon Mitchell said as he walked into the room. “We just confirmed that she was out of town when the second murder took place.” A pair of reading glasses was perched on the end of the sergeant’s nose, and his white crew cut was cropped so close to his head that he looked almost bald.

Quinn sat and opened one of the murder books. “There’s a relief,” he muttered. Karla Thompson aka sweetpea, the woman who’d smelled like a Marlborough cigarette and sounded like the Marlborough man, had grabbed his ass as they’d stood in line for coffee.