Mr Perfect (30 page)

"He hates women," Sam agreed, coming to stand beside her. His face was grim. "A psychiatrist would have a field day with this."

She sighed, exhausted from lack of sleep and the sheer size of the task before her. She glanced at him; he hadn't had any more sleep than she had, which amounted to nothing more than a couple of short naps. "Are you going to work today?"

He gave her a startled look. "Sure. I have to get with the detective working Marci's case and bring him up to speed on this."

"I'm not even going to try to work. It'll take a week to get this mess cleaned up."

"No, it won't. Call a cleaning service." He put a thumb under her chin and tilted up her face, looking at the bruises of fatigue that shadowed her eyes. "Then go to sleep – in my bed – and let Mrs. Kulavich oversee the cleaning. She'll be thrilled."

"If she is, then she's in dire need of therapy," Jaine said, once more surveying the wreckage of what had been her home. She yawned. "I also need to go shopping, to replace my clothes and makeup."

He grinned. "The kitchen stuff can wait, huh?"

"Hey, I know what's important." She leaned against him and looped her arms around his waist, reveling in the freedom to do so, reveling also in the way his arms automatically went around her.

She suddenly stiffened. She couldn't believe she hadn't once thought about Luna and T.J. tonight. Her brain must be misfiring, that was the only explanation. "I forgot about Luna and T.J.! My God, I should have called them immediately, warned them – "

"I did," said Sam, folding her back in his arms. "I called them last night, on my cell phone. They're okay, just worried about you."

She yawned and relaxed against him once more, letting her head nestle on his chest. His heart thump-thumped in her ear. She was exhausted but couldn't stop her thoughts from circling like buzzards around a fresh kill. If she couldn't wind down, she would never be able to sleep. "How do you feel about medicinal sex?" she asked him. Interest lit his dark eyes. "Does it involve swallowing?" She chuckled against his shirt. "Not yet. Maybe tonight. What this involves now is relaxing me enough so I can sleep. Are you interested?"

For answer, he took her hand and placed it over the fly of his jeans. He had a long, thick growth under his zipper. She hummed with pleasure as she ran her fingers up and down the length of it, feeling the tiny, spasmodic movements of his body that he couldn't control. "God, you're easy," she said.

"Thinking about swallowing always gets me hard." Hand in hand, they walked back to his house, where he relaxed her.

"The evidence techs didn't find a usable fingerprint," Sam told Roger Bernsen a couple of hours later. "But they did find a partial shoe print. Looks like a running shoe; I'm trying to get a make on the brand by the tread pattern." Detective Bernsen said what Sam already knew: "He broke in intending to kill her, and trashed her place instead when she wasn't there. You got a fix on the time?" "Between eight P.M. and midnight, roughly." Mrs. Holland kept a close watch on the street, and she said she hadn't seen a strange car or anyone unknown to her before Sam himself had arrived home. After dark, everyone was inside.

"Lucky she wasn't at home."

"Yeah." Sam didn't want to think about the alternative. "We gotta start running down those personnel files at Hammerstead."

"The C.E.O. is my next call. I don't want anyone else knowing that we're checking the files. He can have them pulled without anyone questioning him. Maybe they can be copied to our computers so we don't have to risk going there."

Roger grunted. "By the way, the M.E. has released Ms. Dean's body. I've contacted her sister."

"Thanks. We need to have someone videotaping the funeral."

"You think he'll be there?"

"I'm betting on it," Sam said.

Corin hadn't been able to sleep, but he didn't feel tired. Frustration gnawed at him. Where had she been? She would have told him, he thought. Sometimes, most of the time, he didn't like her at all, but sometimes she could be nice. If she had been feeling nice, she would have told him.

He didn't know what to think about her. She didn't dress like a whore the way Marci Dean had, but men always looked at her anyway, even when she was wearing pants. And when she was being nice, he liked her, but when she cut people to shreds with her tongue, he wanted to hit her and hit her, and just keep hitting her until her head was all soft and she couldn't do those things to him anymore…. But was that her, or Mother? He frowned, trying to remember. Sometimes things got so confused. Those pills must still be affecting him.

Men looked at Luna, too. She was always sweet to him, but she wore a lot of makeup and Mother thought her skirts were always too short. Short skirts made men think nasty thoughts, Mother said. No good woman ever wore short skirts.

Maybe Luna just acted sweet. Maybe she was really bad. Maybe she was the one who had said those things, and made fun of him, and caused Mother to hurt him. He closed his eyes and thought of how Mother had hurt him, and a tingle of excitement went through him. He ran his hand down his front, the way he wasn't supposed to, but it felt so good that sometimes he did it anyway. No. That was bad. And when Mother had hurt him, she had just been showing him how bad that thing was. He shouldn't enjoy it.

But the night hadn't been a total waste. He had a new lipstick. He took off the top and twisted the base so the vulgar thing slid out. It wasn't bright red like Marci's, it was more of a pinkish color, and he didn't like it nearly as well. He painted his lips, scowled at his reflection in the mirror, then wiped off the color in disgust.

Maybe one of the others would have a lipstick that suited him better.

Laurence Strawn, C.E.O. of Hammerstead Technology, was a man with a boisterous laugh and a knack for seeing the big picture. He wasn't good with details, but then, he didn't need to be.

That morning he had received a call from a Warren detective named Donovan. Detective Donovan had been very persuasive. No, they didn't have a warrant to search Hammerstead's personnel records, and they preferred to keep this as quiet as possible. What he was asking for was cooperation in catching a murderer before he could kill again, and they had a hunch he worked at Hammerstead.

Why was that? Mr. Strawn had asked, and was told about the phone call to T.J. Yother's cell phone, whose number he wouldn't have known was hers unless he had access to certain information about her. Since they were fairly certain Marci Dean had known her killer and that the same man was the one who had called T.J.'s cell phone, then it followed that they both knew him, that, in fact, all four of the friends knew him. That made it highly probable that he worked at Hammerstead with them.

Mr. Strawn's immediate reaction was that he didn't want this leaking to the press. He was, after all, a C.E.O. His second, more thought-out reaction, was that he would do whatever possible to stop this maniac from killing more of his employees. "What do you want me to do?" he asked. "If we have to, we'll come to Hammerstead to go over the files, but we'd prefer not to alert anyone that we're looking. Can you access the files and attach them to an E-mail to me?"

"The files are on a separate system that isn't on-line. I'll have them copied to a CD for my files, then send it to you. What's your E-mail address?"

Unlike a lot of chief executive officers and corporate presidents, Laurence Strawn knew his way around computers. He'd had to become proficient just to understand what the loonies on the first two floors were doing.

"T.J. Yother works in human resources," he added as he copied down Detective Donovan's E-mail address, another talent he had, that of doing two things at once. "I'll have her do it. That way we know there won't be a leak."

"Good idea," said Sam. With that accomplished with surprising ease – he thought he'd like Laurence Strawn – he turned his attention to the partial shoe print the techs had lifted from Jaine's bathroom floor, where the bastard had stepped in the ruins of her makeup and left a pretty good imprint behind. He just hoped it was enough to identify the style. O. J. Simpson aside, when they caught this guy, it would help if they could prove he owned the type of shoe that had made the print, and in the same size. It would be even better if there were still little clumps of makeup caught in the treads.

He spent most of the morning on the phone. Who said detective work wasn't dangerous and exciting? Last night had been a little more dangerous and exciting than he liked, he thought grimly. He didn't like playing "what if," but in this case he couldn't help it. What if he had been called away? What if Jaine hadn't been late, he hadn't been worried, and they hadn't argued? They might have parted with a good-night kiss, Jaine going to her house alone. Considering the destruction of her house, he shuddered to think what would have happened if she had been there. Marci Dean had been both taller and heavier than Jaine, and she hadn't been able to fight off her attacker, so the chances of Jaine doing so were practically nil.

He sat back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head, staring at the ceiling and thinking. Something was getting by him here, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Not yet, anyway; sooner or later, it would come to him, because he wouldn't be able to stop worrying it until he found the answer. His sister Doro said he was a cross between a snapping turtle and a rat terrier: once he had his teeth in something, he never let go. Of course, Doro hadn't meant it as a compliment.

Thinking of his Doro reminded him of the rest of his family, and the news he had to break. He scribbled on his notepad: Tell Mom about Jaine. This was going to come as a big surprise to them, because the last they'd heard he wasn't even dating anyone regularly. He grinned; hell, he still wasn't. He was skipping that part, as well as the engagement, and just going straight to marriage, which was probably the best way to get Jaine there. But the family stuff would have to wait. Right now he had dual priorities: catch a killer, and keep Jaine safe. Those two tasks didn't leave time for anything else. Jaine woke up in Sam's bed a little after one P.M. not really rested but with her batteries recharged enough that she felt ready to take on the next crisis. After dressing in jeans and a T-shirt, she went next door to check on the cleaning progress. Mrs. Kulavich was there, walking from room to room to make certain no shortcuts were taken. The two women who were doing the cleaning seemed to take her supervision in stride.

They certainly were efficient, Jaine thought. The bedroom and bathroom were already clean; the savaged mattress and box spring were gone, the shreds of cloth swept up and put in trash bags that sat bulging beside the stoop. Before going to sleep, she had called her insurance agent and found that her homeowners' insurance, so recently converted from renters' insurance, would cover part of the replacement cost of the household goods. Her clothes weren't covered at all.

"Your insurance agent was here not an hour ago," Mrs. Kulavich said. "He looked around and took pictures, and was going to the police department to get a copy of the report. He said he didn't think there would be any problem."

Thank goodness for that. She had been out a lot of money lately, and her bank account was seriously shriveled. The telephone rang. It was one of the nonfeminine things that hadn't been damaged, so Jaine picked it up. She never had gotten around to hooking up the Caller ID unit, she remembered, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach at the thought of answering without knowing in advance who was calling.

It could be Sam, though, so she hit the talk button and put the phone to her ear. "Hello?"

"Is this Jaine? Jaine Bright?"

It was a woman's voice, vaguely familiar.

Relieved, she said, "Yes, it is."

"This is Cheryl… Cheryl Lobello, Marci's sister." Pain shot through her. That was why the voice sounded familiar; it reminded her of Marci's. Cheryl's voice lacked the smoker's rasp, but the underlying tone was the same. Jaine gripped the phone tighter. "Marci talked about you a lot," she said, blinking back the tears that hadn't been very far away since Monday when Sam had told her about Marci's death.

"I was going to say the same thing to you," Cheryl said, managing a sad little laugh. "She was always calling to tell me some remark you had made that cracked her up. She talked about Luna a lot, too. God, this doesn't seem real, does it?"

"No," Jaine whispered.

After a choked silence, Cheryl marshaled her control and said, "Anyway the medical examiner has released her b- body to me, and I'm making the funeral arrangements. Our parents are buried in Taylor, and I think she would want to be close to them, don't you?"

"Yes, of course." Her voice didn't sound like Marci's, Jaine thought; it was too thick with tears.

"I've arranged for a graveside service Saturday at eleven." Cheryl gave her the name of the funeral home and instructions on how to get to the cemetery. Taylor was south of Detroit and just east of Detroit Metro airport. Jaine wasn't familiar with the area, but she was really good at following instructions and stopping for directions. She tried to think of something to say that would lessen Cheryl's pain, but how could she when she couldn't even lessen her own?

Then it hit her, what she and Luna and T.J. should do. Marci would love it.

"We're going to hold a wake for her," she blurted. "Would you like to come?"