Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [54]
Nick lifted a thick slice of pizza, pulling it expertly away so he didn’t lose the cheese. He plopped it down onto a paper plate and handed it to Maggie. She could smell green peppers, Italian sausage and Romano cheese. He had done good. She bit off more than she should have, dripping cheese and sauce down her chin.
“Jesus, O’Dell. You’ve got sauce all over your face.”
She licked the side of her mouth while he watched.
“Other side.” He pointed. “And on your chin.”
Her hands were full of pizza and coroner reports. She licked at the other side while she fumbled for a safe spot to set something down.
“No, higher,” he still instructed. “Here, let me.”
As soon as his thumb touched the corner of her mouth, her eyes met his. His fingers wiped at her chin. His thumb rolled over her lower lip where she was certain there was no sauce or cheese. In his eyes she saw that he felt the unexpected surge of electricity, too. His fingertips lingered longer than necessary on her chin, moved up, caressed her cheek. His thumb took its time to leave her lip and wipe the corner of her mouth. Completely surprised by her body’s reaction, she shifted away, just out of his reach.
“Thanks,” she managed to say, now avoiding his eyes. She practically flung the plate with pizza to the side, grabbed a napkin and finished the job, rubbing harder than necessary in an attempt to wipe away the electrical current.
“I think we might need more napkins and Pepsis.” Nick scrambled to his feet.
Maggie looked up at him, and he seemed flustered. From the small refrigerator in the corner of his office, he pulled two more cans and added napkins to the pile already on the floor. This time when he sat down, he kept more distance between them. She noticed his charm had been put on hold, his flirting almost nonexistent since he had discovered she had a husband. So the touch, the caress had caught him off guard, too.
“There are so many discrepancies,” she said, trying to get her mind back on the coroner’s reports. “I don’t know why anyone believed Jeffreys killed all three boys.”
“But don’t serial killers change the way they do things?”
“They may add things. They may experiment. Jeffrey Dahmer experimented with different ways to keep his victims alive. He’d drill holes in their skulls that would incapacitate them but keep them alive.”
“So maybe Jeffreys liked to experiment, too.”
“What’s unusual here is that the Harper and Paltrow murders were almost identical. Both were bound, hands behind their backs, with rope. They were strangled and their throats slashed. The chest wounds resembled each other almost exactly down to the number of puncture wounds. The same knife was used to carve the X’s. Neither boy appeared to have been sexually molested. Their bodies were found in different remote areas near the river.”
She referred to several documents laid out in front of her, leaning carefully so she wouldn’t soil them. In the last hour she had started to feel the full impact of her exhaustion. Her eyes blurred as she looked over the coroner’s scratchy notes. George Tillie had not been as precise as he should have been. The Paltrow report was the only one to mention the body being clean with little residue found. None of the reports indicated a smudge of oil on the forehead or anywhere else on the body.
Maggie glanced at Nick, who slumped against the hard credenza and rubbed at his eyes. His hair was tousled from too many reckless run-throughs with his fingers. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, revealing muscular forearms. He had gotten rid of the tie and had undone several buttons on his wrinkled shirt, exposing enough of his chest to distract her. She shook her head, grabbed a report off the floor and tried to stay focused.