She’d opened her window, and the breeze blew her hair, and the moon was sending glints of silver through the gold.
Often, when Martinez looked at this woman, he got the kind of fanciful thoughts about love that he’d never really allowed himself before, though if someone had pressed him to explain why, he didn’t think he’d have been able to. Until now, it had simply felt easier for him to be alone.
‘You’re everything I want in this world,’ he told her.
Getting there at last.
Jess turned to face him fully.
Her eyes were shining now.
He knew it was going to be OK.
So he asked her.
Dug the fingertips of his left hand into his seat, and popped the goddamned question.
Finally.
‘Jessie, will you marry me?’
The answer was already there in her face, nakedly clear, but she whispered it anyway.
‘Yes.’ A tiny pause. ‘Thank you, Alejandro.’
Martinez sent up a prayer of thanks.
He thought about Sam, who might still be in the office, working.
His good friend would be happy for him.
Right now, Martinez felt happy enough for all mankind.
Two young guys, laughing as they passed the car, stooped to stare into the Chevy, but he didn’t give a damn, just started the engine, moved the car toward the exit, put out his right hand and laid it on Jess’s knee, felt warmed through as she covered it with her own hand.
‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I think I need to go home.’
‘Sure,’ Martinez said. ‘We can stay at your place, if that’s what you want.’
The fact was, they almost never stayed at Jess’s place up in North Miami Beach because his house was a whole lot more comfortable and more convenient for them both for work, but tonight he could care
less
where they stayed, so long as they were together.
‘No,’ Jess said. ‘I mean, I think I need to go home alone tonight.’
‘Why?’ Martinez felt a pang of dismay.
She saw his expression. ‘Don’t look like that, Al.’
He’d stopped his car, just inside the exit. ‘You’ve changed your mind.’
‘Never,’ she said. ‘It’s the exact opposite.’
‘So why don’t you want to be with me, tonight of all nights?’
She took a moment, wanting to get the words right.
‘I guess this may be hard for you to understand,’ she said. ‘Because you’re a guy, and you’re a little older, and we both know you’re much more experienced.’
‘I never asked anyone to marry me before,’ Martinez said.
‘And I never had a proposal,’ Jess said.
‘Honest to God?’
‘I wouldn’t lie about it,’ she said earnestly. ‘I feel this is the most important thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life, and I don’t know why, but it’s made me feel kind of . . . old-fashioned, I guess.’
A horn honked behind them, and checking in his mirror, Martinez saw it was the kids who’d gawped at them earlier, but now he felt less benevolent about them, and if they did that one more time . . .
‘That’s why I want to go home alone,’ Jess went on. ‘Because I want to drink in the fact that the man I’m crazy about has asked me to be his wife. I want to go to bed on my own and think about you and how it’s going to be.’
The car horn sounded again, but Martinez’s aggression had melted away again, and he lifted a hand in apology and drove out on to the street.
‘OK,’ he said to Jess, and knew that it really was, that he hadn’t blown it after all, that it was all going to be better than wonderful.
‘Does that make any sense to you, Al?’ Jess asked.
He glanced sideways at her, saw her looking at him, saw the love in her eyes.
‘All the sense in the world,’ he said.
SIXTEEN
‘
Y
ou’re much too tired to drive,’ André told Elizabeth as she was piling her files into her attaché case before leaving. He stifled another big yawn. ‘Me, too, it seems.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Elizabeth insisted, ‘so long as I go right now.’
‘Or we could just go to sleep and set the alarm early so you can go home then and iron a blouse.’
‘Except I don’t have anything clean
to
iron.’
André knew when there was no point arguing with Elizabeth, and it was an easy drive to her place, which was in a safe neighbourhood, besides which he had no strength left
to
argue tonight, felt he was almost drooping with fatigue, so instead he saw her down to her Honda in the parking garage. They had no significant crime issues in this area either, but André liked to think he was a gentleman and anyway, Elizabeth was the most precious person in the world to him.
‘No one like you,’ he told her after a last kiss, leaning against the car.
It was something he said often, and always meant.
‘Nor you,’ she said back to him.
Meaning it too, with all her heart, or at least all of that segment of her heart that was not devoted to her career.
She knew she’d never find anyone like André again.
Knew they truly were a perfect match.
SEVENTEEN
W
hen Martinez had found his neat little foreclosure one-storey house on Alton Road near 47th about eight months back, he’d had some qualms about taking on a piece of serious freehold property as a confirmed bachelor, not to mention as a police detective with few hopes, or even ambitions, of serious promotion. The odd lonely moment aside, he’d always liked his life pretty much the way it was, so in the midst of negotiations he’d wondered exactly why he was taking such a step at forty-five. A roof to maintain, his own windows to hurricane-proof; most of all, a mortgage which, even though he could afford it, having spent a lot less in his life to date than most guys he knew, was still going to be a stretch.
Within a week of meeting Jessica Kowalski, the house had suddenly begun making sense.
Everything
had begun making greater sense.
Coming home tonight, he thought he could even begin to understand what Jessie had meant about going back to her place alone to let it all sink in.
His house looked different to him tonight.
His whole life felt different.
She’d said she was crazy about him.
Those words felt
fat
inside him, were filling him with warmth and goodness.
Because Jess was exactly those two things to him.
He considered phoning Sam, but like his fiancée – and that was a word he’d been known to mock in the past, but never again – he thought he’d just be quiet with it for a while, maybe grab himself a beer and do what Jessie was doing, go to bed by himself and think about her and their future . . .
Together.
EIGHTEEN
T
he road where Elizabeth lived, a gated cul-de-sac where every vehicle entering or leaving was recorded, was quiet.
It was usually quiet here, with a sense of tranquillity and understated affluence.
Elizabeth had felt safe ever since she’d moved into her town house.
This evening no exception.
She passed under the raised security barrier, vaguely aware of another vehicle passing through behind her, its lights disappearing before she touched her remote to open her garage door and automatically switch on the lights, and then she slowly drove the Honda inside, closed the up-and-over door behind her and turned off her engine.
The garage light went out.
‘Shit,’ she said, though she was too sleepy to care, and there was enough light coming through the high glass panel in the door for her to be able to see to pick up her purse and attaché case.
She got out of the car, dropped the keys on the floor and stooped, feeling abruptly woozy, fumbled to find the keys, then straightened up and turned to the door that connected the garage to the rest of the house, barely managing to fit the right key in the lock.
‘What is wrong with you, girl?’ she murmured.
Unwashed laundry flitted back into her mind, but she knew she was too damned out of it now to contemplate washing anything, and she could have stayed over at André’s . . .
She got the door open – but suddenly she felt a weird, alarming sense that someone else was in the garage with her, and she started to turn, but her reflexes were off-kilter, and there
was
someone . . .
‘Hey,’ she said, fear rising.
Something landed on her mouth, a
hand
, and instinctively she tried to scream and bite it, tasted and smelled latex, but another hand was pushing at her back, propelling her inside, into her house, and she wanted to fight, but she didn’t have any strength . . .
‘That’s it, Elizabeth,’ a voice said right against her ear. ‘No more talking now. You just sleep tight.’
NINETEEN
S
am climbed carefully into bed, trying not to wake Grace, but she rolled over toward him, slid one arm under his shoulders, the other over his chest, and wrapped her legs around his.
Full body hug, just the way they both loved it.
She was naked.
‘I was going to say I’m sorry I woke you,’ Sam said. ‘But that would be a lie.’
‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ Grace’s voice was a little husky.
‘Oh, my,’ Sam said. ‘You’re horny.’
If anyone had asked him, as he’d climbed the staircase after greeting Woody and locking up, if there was a chance in hell he might be up to any kind of sex tonight, he’d have laughed his bone-weariest laugh.
But first he’d looked in on Joshua, and the sweet curves of their little boy’s cheeks and lips and lashes had affected him as they always did, making love swell in him till he was fit to burst. And now his beautiful naked wife was wrapped right around him, and it seemed there might be just a little life left in this old dog yet . . .
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Grace said. ‘If you’re too tired . . .’
He knew she meant it, but his body was waking up.
Was it
ever
.
‘Oh,’ she said, as she felt him. ‘How lovely.’
Sam thought, for just a moment, about Martinez and Jess, thought that if they were destined to have one-tenth of what he and Grace still had after more than ten years together, they’d be blessed.
And then he stopped thinking about them.
‘Hi, Gracie,’ he said. ‘I’m home.’
And rolled over to face her.
TWENTY
February 12
‘
A
ndré,’ Elizabeth said.
It was the third time she’d said his name.
He did not answer.
She had come to a few minutes ago and, almost immediately, had wished with all her soul that she had not.
This had to be a nightmare, the worst ever.
She was lying on a cold stone floor, felt the chill and the hardness over the full length of her body.
Knew that she was naked.
There was something around her right ankle, something even colder than the stone beneath her.
Steel.
She opened her eyes and saw that it was a cuff, like a shackle, and that a chain led from it to a thick, vertical metal bar.
One of many bars.
Because Elizabeth was in a cage.
A cage within a padded room.
There were only two runs of bars, one along the wall behind her, the other straight ahead, a gate with a lock in the centre of that run. A pool of dim light wanly illuminated her and the area around her, the light coming from a single overhead bulb screwed into the ceiling.
She couldn’t see what lay beyond the bars ahead of her.
Only darkness.
And within the cage, she was not alone.
André was there, too, which was a mystery to her, because she’d been alone when she’d been taken – and his presence ought to have been some comfort to her, but was not, because he was lying on the ground several feet away from her.
Naked and shackled, like her, and almost certainly unconscious.
If not worse.
Elizabeth had tried repeatedly to rouse him, had called his name softly, warily, then more loudly, even though she was deeply afraid that whoever had brought them both here would hear her voice and come.
But André had not responded, and because he was lying with his back to her, and because the light was so poor, she couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not – she couldn’t
hear
any sounds of breath.
So she was terrified that he might be dying or already dead.
This had to be a nightmare.
Had
to be.
Elizabeth thought about her father in Sarasota, how proud of her he’d always been. She thought about her mother, long dead to cancer. About her younger sister, Margie, in law school and all set to follow in big sis’s footsteps. Thought about what this would do to them.
Whatever
it
turned out to be.
She and André were here for a purpose. Someone’s purpose.
The one who’d been waiting for her in her garage.
She thought about that voice now, about how hushed it had sounded so close against her ear, and she didn’t even know if it had belonged to a man or woman, did not know anything for sure.
‘André,’ she called again.
Nothing.
She’d already moved as close to him as her chain would allow, but now she tried again, felt the pressure of the cold steel shackle on her ankle.
She began to cry, and thoughts began to clamour in her head.
About why they were here, about what it meant.
She thought about rape. She thought about being left here forever, in this cage, with her unconscious, maybe dead, lover. About being left to starve and, over time, to rot away. She thought about torture.
She considered the wisdom or folly of screaming for help.
Her nakedness had stripped away more than clothes or warmth or even dignity. It seemed to have removed almost everything that had made Elizabeth Price special.