“Because he’s an addict. He’scompelledto act out whatever sex-based fantasy he holds in his head. And his need is growing. If Metro is correct, his cooling-off period appears incredibly short, which means he’s devolving astoundingly fast. He’ll crash, make mistakes.” She angled her head and smiled. It shot a spark of irritation through him. “Come here.”
“Joyce—”
“No, listen to me. Thisisa good thing, Jack. It’s a powerful tool. Think about it. You get Zach and his team to spin these terrible sexual assaults as the legacy of a Markham government lax on crime, too friendly to the homeless, not tough enough on street drugs. You tell them thatthisis what a corrupt and inept police board and MVPD has allowed to breed. Four years—” She held up four fingers. “Four—that’s when this rapist apparently first came to the attention of the Metro sex crimes unit. Then another attack a whole year later, and still they did not apprehend anyone in those cases. And now this same repeat offender, if it is him, has been allowed to kill, maybe not once, but twice. Bad closure rates leading to further and more serious crime. You tell your constituents thatthisis why they elected you—to clean up the Markham-Gunnar mess—and you use this as your justification to act harshly and swiftly to sweep the police board clean, to appoint new members who are in synch with your policies. Then, when the MVPD gets close to apprehending this perpetrator, you find cause to axe Gunnar, and you put Antoni Moreno in his place, like you’ve been wanting all along.” She pushed a fall of thick hair off her brow and smiled. “Then, an MVPD under Moreno’s stewardship arrests the serial killer.”
He looked away, inhaled deeply.
“It’s a game plan, Jack,” she said softly. “You have to have a game plan. It’s a way of handling this before it handles us.”
He turned back to face her.
Us.
“We’re good together,” she said.
He gave a derisive snort, but a smile pulled at his mouth nevertheless. “And then,” he said slowly, “a sensationalist sex killer is convicted underyourtenure as ADAG.”
She angled her head and gave him a sly grin.
“You really are gunning for it,” he said. “Minister of justice. Maybe even the premiership.”
“No, Jack, premier is yours down the line.” She came to her feet, padded over to him, lifted her skirt, and straddled him. She cupped his face, angled her head. “Supreme Court will suit me just fine.” And she pressed her warm, open mouth over his. Heat washed into his groin. “We’ve got an hour before I need to be home,” she murmured against his lips.
He slid his hand up the inside of her thigh, and his fingers met bare skin. His heart kicked. She was wearing suspender tights, no panties. He cupped her shaved pussy, and his vision blurred as she moaned and rocked her pelvis gently against his hand. With two fingers he parted her labia. Inside she was smooth and warm and wet and her little nub of a clit was erect. He slid a finger up inside her and massaged, searching for the elusive G-spot, the place that could explode her in an instant. She put her head back, arching her spine, opening her thighs wider, tilting her hips toward him, giving him deeper access as she groaned in pleasure.
CHAPTER 18
Maddocks stepped out into the chill night air with Leo and Pallorino, his mind racing, adrenaline still thumping through his blood. Along with something deeper—a crackling hot sexual energy that had everything to do with the woman who’d walked into the morgue and shocked the nuts off him. What were the fucking odds? Angie—adetective? The woman he’d so badly wanted to screw again, the woman he’d phoned first thing this morning, was now working a case with him that he couldn’t afford to screw up.
It was close to eleven, and the world felt quiet, waiting, breath misting from their mouths as they walked to their cars. Despite the pristine air, death clung to the fabric of their clothes, to their hair. It was inside their nasal passages and on their skin. It was a scent nigh impossible to get rid of, Maddocks knew from experience. Downstairs, O’Hagan and her assistants were winding things up. Once the doc had peeled back what remained of their victim’s face, she’d found fine lines scored into the bone of the forehead in the shape of a cross. Additional ligature marks had presented around the neck, wrists, and ankles—marks that had been made antemortem—and there was severe anal and vaginal tearing, which appeared to have occurred both ante- and postmortem. Their decedent had been through a rough time before she died from strangulation.
Inside the tarp cocoon O’Hagan had also found fragments of dried leaves, a few soil grains, and what looked like grass seed, plus sheep maggot evidence, which implied the victim had been dead on land and had possibly lain outdoors, likely under shelter, before going into the sea. This all might help narrow down location.
Establishing time of death, however, would remain tricky without the context of location and given the extreme below-freezing temperatures of late, which would have delayed the decomp process. As it stood, even in deaths with the same cause and identical environmental conditions, one body could show advanced putrefaction, while another could show little change, O’Hagan had explained. Maggot larvae could even go into a period of suspended animation if conditions did not warrant further development.
Once they’d opened up the body, things had taken a pretty standard timeline of around three hours for the rest of the autopsy. Tox, serology, entomology, odontology, and other forensic lab tests analyzing combings from head and pubic hair would obviously take longer, but they were being expedited, as per the ADAG’s direction. O’Hagan would start the Drummond postmortem at dawn and have a preliminary report for them later tomorrow.
“Anyone up for a late beer and steak at the Pig?” Leo said, pausing to light a cigarette. He inhaled deeply and blew out a long stream of smoke. It made Maddocks wish he still smoked. It was better than the stink of death. And he was on edge tonight, as if needing some kind of fix.
“Not me,” Pallorino said. “Been on over twenty hours straight. Need my sleep.” Her eyes met Maddocks’s in the dimly lit lot, and she glanced quickly away. She knew that he knew exactly why her sleep had been compromised and what she’d been doing last night when she’d gotten the call for Cemetery Girl—riding him at the Foxy Motel.
“I’ll take a rain check,” he said to Leo.
“Catch you both at the butt crack of dawn, then,” Leo said. “My wheels are this way.” He hunkered down into his wool coat and headed around the building to another parking lot.
Pallorino made for a Crown Vic parked alone under a light standard.
“Angie?” he called after her.
She stilled, stood motionless for a moment, her back to him, car keys jiggling in her hand.
“We need to talk.”
She turned. “We do?” Her complexion was pale in the parking lot light, a black woolen hat pulled snug over her sleek, dark-red hair. The scar across the left side of her mouth was shadowed in this light, and it offset her obvious fatigue, which gave her an oddly sexy badass appeal mixed in with a vulnerability. Goddamn if he didn’t find it appealing.
“Is this going to be a problem?” he said, coming closer.
“This?”
