Focus
, girl.
Fear, driving rain, a car ride, and a strangely beautiful young man.
Images cascaded, and I remembered everything. Every freaking detail.
Shit!
I jumped to my feet, which were bare, and looked wildly around for the dude who’d rescued me.
No sign of him. Good. I mean, good that he hadn't attacked me in my sleep. Damn, I couldn't believe it. I'd gone home with a total stranger. What had he said his name was? Griff? Yeah. Griff.
He’d treated me a lot better than Crazy Ray had.
I shivered. Ray. That bastard. Had he put something into the beer I’d drunk at LaVerle’s? A single beer shouldn't give me a headache like this one. He must have slipped me a roofie or something? He’d made a move on me at the gas station. Probably thought his drug would make me compliant.
I could almost hear my mother's voice chiding me, “What do you think will happen if you keep hanging out in that part of the city? You'll get hurt or attacked and I'll wake up to find the police at my door. Closely followed by the tabloids.”
My eyes focused on the closed door in the corner. I vaguely remembered from my brief tour of the small apartment that that was the bedroom. He must be in there—the tall, ripped, handsome dude. Chiseled features, a mouth that looked like it was made for sexy times, thick dark hair and soulful blue eyes.
He'd maybe saved my life. Ray had gone completely apeshit when I'd turned him down. He must have been on something. Hyped up on some drug.
It probably hadn't helped when I'd told Ray what a sleaze he was for hitting on me and cheating on LaVerle. I hadn't exactly been tactful.
I was never tactful. Well, hardly ever. My head throbbed again. Oh God, I was such a freak. How did I get myself into these situations?
I try to remember what I’d told Griff about myself. Pretty much the truth…well….as far as it went. No details. He did
not
need to know the details.
There were a few secrets I was much better off keeping.
I wondered what I should do now. Hang out here for a while? I was warm and dry and I hadn’t been propositioned or molested. Maybe I should stay?
The weird thing was that at the moment I had nowhere else to go.
It was spring vacation and there’d been a water main leak or something, which had been the college’s excuse to shut down my dorm.
I didn’t really get spring break. Other students seemed to love it. They saved up to fly to Florida or Cancun so they could lie around on beaches all day, get drunk and have a lot of hot stranger sex. I didn't see the point. Drinking makes me sick, too much sun causes skin cancer, and as for hot stranger sex, if that’s your thing, you can find it easily enough in Cambridge.
Anytime the school came up with some excuse to shut down the dorms was a nuisance for me. Last time it had happened, I'd huddled in my room, door locked, with enough bread and peanut butter to last a few days. They’d caught me, though, so I’d ended up crashing with a friend. Which was what I was supposed to do this time.
My bestie Izzy had an apartment with her boyfriend. When I’d inquired, they'd agreed to let me sleep on the couch. But they'd had a huge fight and Jared, the boyfriend, had kicked Izzy out. When I'd turned up there yesterday, he'd told me to get lost.
So I'd ended up crashing for the night at Mom’s. LaVerle’s.
Which would have rocked, if I hadn’t made the mistake of going out with Ray to pick up a couple pizzas, some beer, and some gas for his car.
I still couldn’t believe that creep had grabbed me and come on to me. Yuck! I’d not been prepared for that at all. Ray was old, drugged up, and besides, he was LaVerle’s honey.
The stranger on the other side of the pump last night had looked safer than Ray, who’d had a shovel and a shotgun in the back seat of his Buick. It had been hard to tell in the pouring rain, but Griff had seemed a better risk than a guy who possessed the tools both to slaughter and bury me.
To his credit, my savior had acted fast, getting us both out of there before Ray could stop us. I hated to think what might have happened if Griff had not showed up at that gas station when he did. Or if he’d refused to give a soaking-wet crazy girl a ride.
I wanted to do something nice for him. To thank him. I looked around the place, wondering if there was anything he needed. There had to be some way I could pay him back for his hospitality.
I used the bathroom and pulled some clean clothes out of my backpack.
That was when I got my first bad shock. My laptop was gone. For a few seconds I panicked. Just about everything that was worth anything to me was on that computer. All my work, all my email and private messages from friends, and even the games that I enjoyed. My own pathetic geekiness was overwhelming at times. Almost my entire life was digital.
He had it. A quick check of the rooms I had access to proved that he must've taken it into his bedroom.
My anxiety receded as I considered the matter. OK. From the faint sound of snoring coming from behind that closed door, I knew he was in there. Taking my laptop to bed with him was a smart move. The rig was expensive and I certainly wasn't leaving without it.
I didn't know him and he didn't know me. He’d found me in a crap part of town and given me shelter. If I've been a druggie or thief I could've made off with some of his stuff while he was sleeping.
Not that his stuff looked all that valuable. Whatever he did for a living, he wasn't making the big bucks. His computer was OK, though. Typical gamer. Gamer freaks were likely to spend money on electronics that they wouldn't even spend on food.
I made another round of the apartment. The place wasn’t bad. I looked out the window and discovered we were at the end of a cul-de-sac. Thick woodlands extended for as far as I could see behind the house. There were other homes on the street, but nothing close.
I went out into the entrance hall and discovered the building had another apartment upstairs, but there was no name plate on the mailbox, no second car in the driveway, and I hadn’t heard any sounds coming from up there.
Maybe I’d gotten lucky? This might be the perfect place to go to ground. I had a week and a half before classes started up again, and I needed to be away from the stress of my last semester, grades, antsy professors, and job hunting vs. grad school decisions.
Not to mention my family—the real stressors in my life. My mother had threatened to show up with her entourage and make a spectacle of my graduation. If there was a grand prize for embarrassing mothers, mine would win every time.
I don’t know why I let them all get to me the way I did. Too sensitive, I guess. My friends always say I project as tough, but that’s superficial. A defense mechanism or something. Yeah, I can stand up for myself, I guess, but inside I’m emotionally gooey.
Sometimes I have to leave all my stormy emotions behind and just veg out for a while. I needed to find something new to think about, some new problem to solve.
I found the pieces of my cell phone in my backpack, and recalled the dramatic gesture of taking it apart. Ok, good for me. My phone was untraceable now and my computer, assuming I got it back, was as secure and well-cloaked a device as anything connected to the net could be.
I wondered if Griff would let me stay.
And what he’d expect in return.
I sat down at his desktop computer. It was password-protected, so I already had a problem to solve. I threw myself into it.
As I'd expected, his security was trivial. Took me a little longer than average to work out his password, especially since I didn't have any fancy tools with me, but I got it eventually. It wouldn’t take me long to improve his security—that was one thing I could do for him in return for saving my ass last night.
While downloading some useful utilities, I made a quick search of his files. I wasn't planning to snoop; I just wanted to make sure he wasn't a child pornographer or something skeezy like that. Or a misogynous asshole troll. I didn't think so, because he’d seemed nice and he’d treated me with respect despite the condition he’d found me in.
Well, maybe not respect, exactly, but with tolerance.
Still, you never knew. If there were any nasty surprises waiting for me here, I wanted to know about them right from the start.
And, holy shit, I sure didn't expect the surprise I found.
Jeremiah Griffon O’Malley had killed his former girlfriend.
Rory
Shit. Had I dived into the deep end, after all?
I was so surprised that I started to laugh. Had I really run away from a guy with the shovel and a shotgun only to end up in the lair of a serial killer?
I almost fled, despite not having my laptop.
He hadn’t seemed like a killer.
Yeah, right, how did I know how a killer behaved?
Would a murderer pick up a stray and offer her food, a bed and a shower?
Maybe, if she was his next victim.
But I’d been alone with him all night, and nothing awful had happened to me.
Maybe he preferred to do his killing after a good night’s sleep.
I leaned my elbows on the computer table and thought about it.
I couldn’t claim to be a good judge of people. At least, I didn’t always pick up on the way they were
trying
to behave. I was pretty empathetic, with a good sense for what others were feeling, as long as their faces or eyes gave some indication.
But some folks were good at hiding their true selves. Talented actors were hard for me to fathom and I’d grown up surrounded by some very gifted actors. I’d been fooled by them more often than I liked to admit.
I ought to be more socially adept than I am. My family was full of charismatic extraverts, but I was the odd duck who hadn’t inherited the people-pleaser gene. Nor did I get the height, the perfect body or the shining hair and eyes of my siblings.
I did end up with the brainy gene, but that had turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. Sure, it had gotten me into college and given me useful skills like math and computer science, but my high school years had been pure misery. No boys would date me. I was voted Most Likely to Grow Old In My Mom’s Basement. I’d had a mad crush on the quarterback of the football team, but the only awkward fumbling sex I’d had in high school was with the treasurer of the Chess Club.
I didn’t think my brains were going to help me much in this situation. Logic told me I shouldn’t stick with a man who was the only suspect in his girlfriend’s disappearance. Because odds were, he’d killed her. It was usually the husband or the boyfriend, right?
On the other hand, if they’d been able to prove it, he’d be locked up.
My head was aching again.
Was the dude I’d met last night smart enough to commit murder and get away with it? Not many people were.
He’d given me peanut butter. Hot coffee. Dry clothes. A safe place to sleep.
What if he was innocent?
I don’t know exactly why, but that idea seemed to punch me directly in the chest. In the heart. What would it be like if your lover vanished and you had nothing to do with it? How would it feel if everyone blamed you and believed you’d killed her and disposed of her body?
It must be a special kind of hell to be regarded as a killer if you’d loved your girl and were just as horrified and mystified by her disappearance as everyone else.
If you’d grieved over losing her and nobody had comforted you.
Oh God, I was such a sap.
The dude was hot and he’d saved my ass. I wanted him to be innocent, but that did not mean that he was.
O’Malley’s computer screen had gone dark. I nudged it back to life and started doing a much more thorough search on the disappearance of Hadley Allison and the case against her boyfriend Griff O’Malley.
Griff
I overslept.
When I woke up, the clock said ten to eight. Shit. I was supposed to be at work by eight-thirty.
I staggered into the bathroom, emptied my bladder, brushed my teeth, and was about to jump into the shower when I remembered that I'd taken a shower just a few hours ago. Good enough. I jerked on a fresh shirt and the same jeans I'd been wearing last night and went into the living room. I could smell coffee. Fresh.
Rory was sitting at my computer, fingers flying over the keys. She stopped typing when she heard me behind her. She turned, closing whatever she was doing so the browser came up. And there, in the middle of the screen, was a big picture of Hadley and me, taken a few weeks before Hadley had disappeared. Right next to it was my mug shot.
Shit. She
had
cracked my password.
She was gazing warily at me. I did not see that half-scared, half-excited look of the killer-fucker chicks, but I wasn't sure what I was seeing. If she'd learned about the murder rap, why was she still here?
“So,” she said coolly. “You're a killer. A good one, too, since they haven't nailed you yet. Well, hey. If you're gonna do a thing, you ought to do it well.”
“Fuck,” I muttered, starting toward her.
She jumped up from the chair and brandished a kitchen knife at me. She didn't hold it the way anyone experienced with knife fighting would. Not that I expected her to know how to wield a knife, but I'd learned the hard way never to underestimate my opponents.
“That's far enough.” She held up her free hand in a stop-right-there gesture. “I haven't decided yet whether you killed her or not.”
I was quick on my feet, and before he'd died, my brother had taught me a lot of ace moves. We used to work out together, Sean and me, and Sean had been a master of a variety of fighting styles. I had Rory disarmed, with both her arms twisted up behind her before the girl could blink.
I kicked the knife across the room. Hard, but mostly for effect. Hell, the whole thing was for effect, since Rory wasn't even kicking or scratching. She did draw a deep breath for what I expected to be a bloodcurdling scream, so I jammed one hand across her mouth and increased the pressure on her arms with the other. “Make one sound and I'll really fuck you up.”