"He hates women," Sam agreed, coming to stand beside her. His face was grim. "A psychiatrist would have a field day with this."
She sighed, exhausted from lack of sleep and the sheer size of the task before her. She glanced at him; he hadn't had any more sleep than she had, which amounted to nothing more than a couple of short naps. "Are you going to work today?"
He gave her a startled look. "Sure. I have to get with the detective working Marci's case and bring him up to speed on this."
"I'm not even going to try to work. It'll take a week to get this mess cleaned up."
"No, it won't. Call a cleaning service." He put a thumb under her chin and tilted up her face, looking at the bruises of fatigue that shadowed her eyes. "Then go to sleep – in my bed – and let Mrs. Kulavich oversee the cleaning. She'll be thrilled."
"If she is, then she's in dire need of therapy," Jaine said, once more surveying the wreckage of what had been her home. She yawned. "I also need to go shopping, to replace my clothes and makeup."
He grinned. "The kitchen stuff can wait, huh?"
"Hey, I know what's important." She leaned against him and looped her arms around his waist, reveling in the freedom to do so, reveling also in the way his arms automatically went around her.
She suddenly stiffened. She couldn't believe she hadn't once thought about Luna and T.J. tonight. Her brain must be misfiring, that was the only explanation. "I forgot about Luna and T.J.! My God, I should have called them immediately, warned them – "
"I did," said Sam, folding her back in his arms. "I called them last night, on my cell phone. They're okay, just worried about you."
She yawned and relaxed against him once more, letting her head nestle on his chest. His heart thump-thumped in her ear. She was exhausted but couldn't stop her thoughts from circling like buzzards around a fresh kill. If she couldn't wind down, she would never be able to sleep. "How do you feel about medicinal sex?" she asked him. Interest lit his dark eyes. "Does it involve swallowing?" She chuckled against his shirt. "Not yet. Maybe tonight. What this involves now is relaxing me enough so I can sleep. Are you interested?"
For answer, he took her hand and placed it over the fly of his jeans. He had a long, thick growth under his zipper. She hummed with pleasure as she ran her fingers up and down the length of it, feeling the tiny, spasmodic movements of his body that he couldn't control. "God, you're easy," she said.
"Thinking about swallowing always gets me hard." Hand in hand, they walked back to his house, where he relaxed her.
"The evidence techs didn't find a usable fingerprint," Sam told Roger Bernsen a couple of hours later. "But they did find a partial shoe print. Looks like a running shoe; I'm trying to get a make on the brand by the tread pattern." Detective Bernsen said what Sam already knew: "He broke in intending to kill her, and trashed her place instead when she wasn't there. You got a fix on the time?" "Between eight P.M. and midnight, roughly." Mrs. Holland kept a close watch on the street, and she said she hadn't seen a strange car or anyone unknown to her before Sam himself had arrived home. After dark, everyone was inside.
"Lucky she wasn't at home."
"Yeah." Sam didn't want to think about the alternative. "We gotta start running down those personnel files at Hammerstead."
"The C.E.O. is my next call. I don't want anyone else knowing that we're checking the files. He can have them pulled without anyone questioning him. Maybe they can be copied to our computers so we don't have to risk going there."
Roger grunted. "By the way, the M.E. has released Ms. Dean's body. I've contacted her sister."
"Thanks. We need to have someone videotaping the funeral."
"You think he'll be there?"
"I'm betting on it," Sam said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Corin hadn't been able to sleep, but he didn't feel tired. Frustration gnawed at him. Where had she been? She would have told him, he thought. Sometimes, most of the time, he didn't like her at all, but sometimes she could be nice. If she had been feeling nice, she would have told him.
He didn't know what to think about her. She didn't dress like a whore the way Marci Dean had, but men always looked at her anyway, even when she was wearing pants. And when she was being nice, he liked her, but when she cut people to shreds with her tongue, he wanted to hit her and hit her, and just keep hitting her until her head was all soft and she couldn't do those things to him anymore…. But was that her, or Mother? He frowned, trying to remember. Sometimes things got so confused. Those pills must still be affecting him.
Men looked at Luna, too. She was always sweet to him, but she wore a lot of makeup and Mother thought her skirts were always too short. Short skirts made men think nasty thoughts, Mother said. No good woman ever wore short skirts.
Maybe Luna just acted sweet. Maybe she was really bad. Maybe she was the one who had said those things, and made fun of him, and caused Mother to hurt him. He closed his eyes and thought of how Mother had hurt him, and a tingle of excitement went through him. He ran his hand down his front, the way he wasn't supposed to, but it felt so good that sometimes he did it anyway. No. That was bad. And when Mother had hurt him, she had just been showing him how bad that thing was. He shouldn't enjoy it.
But the night hadn't been a total waste. He had a new lipstick. He took off the top and twisted the base so the vulgar thing slid out. It wasn't bright red like Marci's, it was more of a pinkish color, and he didn't like it nearly as well. He painted his lips, scowled at his reflection in the mirror, then wiped off the color in disgust.