Page 32 of Long Way Down

“Call me hot and I’ll throw this at you.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Detective. I may be old and married, but I’m perceptive.” He tapped his temple like a total dork, and it reminded her of Pongo, for some reason. “I could sense the vibe. There were sparks.” He made a little firework motion with his hand.

“I’m gonna put in an official request for a new partner,” she deadpanned.

He grinned…and then sobered. “The only problem is…paint thinner.”

She sighed and took another sip. “I know.”

“The note our guy left in the vic’s underwear,” the last he said in an undertone, “had paint thinner on it. The note was around the stuff. And what is Tobias? A painter.”

“I thought of that.” And she had. It was one of the reasons she was struggling with her instant physical attraction to him. Their profile, limited as it was, pointed to someone who knew her schedule, knew where she lived, and had access to paint thinner. Tobias met all those criteria. “But he offered us DNA samples.”

“Because he knows he didn’t leave any physical evidence at the scene and he’s not in the system?”

“Could be.” She tried again to picture him on the floor of Lana’s apartment: sweaty, panting from exertion, rumpled from their struggle…and what he’d done when he got her subdued. The long, blunt-tipped fingers she’d admired sliding the note…

No. She still couldn’t visualize that. “I don’t get that vibe from him, though.” Contreras’s brows went up. “This guy, whoever he is, was driven to extreme violence. He didn’t chloroform her or choke her out – he beat her unconscious. Raped and sodomized her. Repeatedly. And left a note as tribute to a convicted rapist.”

“We think.”

She tipped her head in impatient concession. “Yeah, we think. But you were here, too, looking at him and listening to him. Is obsessive, psycho rapist the vibe you got off of him?”

“No. But I don’t know him. We spent an hour talking to a group of them.”

“A group with another man in it. What about Mark?”

“Mark’s not an artist.”

“But he’s friends and study partners with them. He could have contaminated the note at Lana’s – she paints, too.”

“Deming said there were no other orange Post-Its in the apartment.”

“Well, maybe it was the last one!” She realized a beat too late that her voice had become shrill and tight. She cleared her throat. Sipped her coffee. Fought not to squirm beneath her partner’s regard. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll admit that, so far, he fits the bill. We can think of him as a possibility.”

He nodded, seeming satisfied with her answer. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Seven

From Starbucks, they went back to the precinct, and their desks, and played phone jockey for a few hours, checking alibis and searching databases for similar rapes, coming up empty on the latter. The lab was backed up, so none of the prints or DNA they’d collected today had been run yet, and Lana – spoken to over Skype call – didn’t remember anything else. Melissa started to relay the message from Tobias, but decided it would be better to do so in person.

She’d had too much coffee, and rather than wake her up, it only left her stomach empty and churning. She was personable as a wet cat, and knew it, but couldn’t seem to do anything about it.

“Go home,” Contreras said at the vending machine, before she could purchase some regrettable Cheetos. “We’re not gonna get anything else done tonight, and you might as well eat real food and catch some sleep. I’m heading out,” he said, when she made a face. “We’ll meet back here in the morning.”

Lacking all will to argue, she switched off her computer and headed home.

Her reaction to Tobias replayed in her mind all the way there – plagued her, truthfully.

There were two things that she could acknowledge fully. One: she was a woman with functioning eyes and a healthy sex drive, and she could admit that a man was good-looking. That he stirred a pulse of want inside her. Two: the man who’d proved a horror, a true-life monster who stalked her nightmares still, was not a man she’d ever found good-looking.

Why, then, was she always so afraid to let attraction dictate her behavior? Why did she forcibly shove romantic thoughts aside?

The department shrink Contreras had mentioned would probably have an answer for her, but she wasn’t interested inthatconversation. She was Southern, after all: a person’s baggage belonged in the bottom of a closet, strapped down tight and locked with a key if necessary. Strangers didn’t need to sort through all the dirty laundry that threatened to bust the hinges.

Attraction or not, she still trusted her instincts, and her instincts told her Tobias wasn’t their guy.

But it could be someone else Lana knew. Someone in art class. A fellow painter who was, perhaps, a secret admirer that Lana had never noticed before. That was often the case with stalkers: the object of their affection didn’t notice they were the center of a stranger’s universe until something violent happened.

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