Sense of Evil - Kay Hooper [67]
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