“Yes.”
Dominique pulled me in for a kiss, and we stayed like that for a long time, pressed against the bookshelves, relishing a languid exchange of mouths and plenty of touching. The rush of exhilaration simmered, yet there was no end in sight. The nightwas young, and as tired as I’d been earlier, I was ready to take the handsome pathologist to bed and act out any role he wanted.
Unfortunately, a lack of supplies prevented us from exploring further that night.Yearsof celibacy meant Dominique was unprepared for activities of that sort. Regardless, he took me to bed and offered to return the favor. I wasn’t about to say no.
Part of me was curious how many men Dominique had been with in the past. He’d claimed to be married for fifteen years. That put him in his early twenties. How long had he and Angelique dated prior to their marriage? Maybe I was the first. A test run? An experiment? Maybe there had been several men.
Either way, when Dominique took me down his throat and brought me to orgasm, he seemed to know exactly what he was doing.
23
Kobe
The days leading upto Christmas dragged. In lieu of interviews—setting them up had proved impossible—Rue delegated me to reviewing street cams and all the video footage we’d managed to get our hands on to see if I could spot our killer. It was menial labor usually delegated to a lowly constable on desk duty, but since so many officers had taken time off, there was nobody else.
I suspected it was punishment for my behavior, but I sucked it up and did as I was told.
Rue, on the other hand, attended Navid Kordestani’s funeral since his body had been released and his distant family had arranged a small service. She wanted to observe who was in attendance, convinced our killer might make an appearance.
Navid’s murder was the only one that didn’t stand a chance of having been caught on video. The trails where he ran were far out of the range of street cams and accessible by so many entry points, we wouldn’t have known where to look if we wanted to.
Jesse’s murder by the outdoor rink was sketchy. The community center in the area had outdoor cameras, but they didn’t cover where the body was located. The rink itself was unmonitored by technology. We had procured street cams from the surrounding neighborhood access points, but they weren’t likely to be much use.
We put all our hope on Ford Carrigan’s murder and the university cameras that covered some of the quad.Somebeing the operative word. Their positions over doorways gave us no more than an arc of twenty or so feet, leaving much of the area out of camera range. Not only were the angles bad, but the resolution was worse. Still, like a good little detective trying to win points with his superior, I spent two days combing every inch of footage, trying in vain to catch our perp in action.
I found nothing.
On Wednesday, December twenty-third, two days before Christmas, Rue and I hijacked a conference room, chart paper, and the only working black marker in the entire department to go over the evidence we had collected.
Again.
We started by summarizing everything we knew and making comprehensive profiles of our victims. Not for the first time, I pointed out Jesse and Navid’s poor reputations. Ford, so far as we could tell, had no reputation to speak of. Especially since he had spent the past couple of years in a pit of depression, barely leaving his house and not socializing with anyone.
“Suspects. I don’t care how loosely they fit or how impossible they seem. List them.” Rue poised the marker over a clean sheet of poster paper that hung beside the others she had tacked to the wall.
I skimmed the table full of papers and notes we had studied meticulously over the past hour. Endless charts and interview transcripts from the people we had talked to at the hospitaland on campus. Autopsy reports. Lists of names we had yet to connect with.
“Fatemeh.”
Rue clutched her chest with feigned astonishment, gasping dramatically. “A woman? Are you sure?”
I scratched my nose with my middle finger extended.
My partner, far too smug for my liking, wrote Fatemeh’s name on the chart paper, underlining it twice. “Okay. Why?”
“For her ex-husband’s insurance money. Because she seemed outraged when I mentioned Jesse and his sexual exploits on campus. Because she publicly tore Navid a new one when she learned her husband voted to keep Jesse in school. Because she hates men. Full stop.”
I displayed my palms and continued. “Abrasions on her hands, which she claimed were from picking at her gym calluses, but they could have been caused from strangling three people. And, I begrudgingly admit that she has the physique of someone who could subdue a man twice her size.”
Rue scribbled everything down and added a note of her own.Medical knowledge.
“Shit. I forgot about that. Good point.”
“Next?”
I ran a finger over a page that listed the dozens of people we’d chatted with, stopping when I arrived at a name I hadn’t considered in a while. “How about Neo Freely, Blaze’s brother? He didn’t like that his sister dropped the charges against Jesse. He showed clear hostility surrounding the assault. He’s a medical student, and for whatever reason, he didn’t seem to like Dr. Kordestani. He and his sister claimed they couldn’t see a connection between Kordestani and the other two, but if we consider that Jesse was peddling drugs or used date rape drugs at parties and Neo or Blaze knew this, it could have fueled his rage.”
Rue tipped her head side to side, conveying uncertainty over my choice of suspect, but in the end, she added Neo to the list.
