From the other room, Skye could hear the telephone soliciting that went on for three hours a day as volunteers helped raise the funds to keep their doors open. Volunteers came and went. It was difficult to sustain people's motivation when they weren't being paid. But there were a few who stuck around, usually those who knew someone who'd been killed or raped, and Peter was one of them. He'd lost an older brother to a drive-by shooting and, although only eighteen, he was a pro on the phone.
As distracted as she was, Skye could easily sit and listen to Peter all morning. But she had her own work to do. She had a list of current cases to follow up on and several messages to return. One was from Jonathan, who'd learned that Sean Regan's wife sometimes met a certain heavyset but wealthy stranger for lunch. Another was from a client who'd gone back to the man who was abusing her, always a worry. Skye also needed to find a dress for the fund-raiser, as well as a date. And she wanted to draft a new press release with the details of Burke's release, emphasizing the importance of continued support for charities like TLS.
She began the press release first, hoping it'd ease her mind to be taking some action to defend herself, but it wasn't as cathartic as she'd hoped. She kept stopping and staring at the phone, waiting for word from David. Their earlier conversation hadn't ended well, but she was so tired of hoping for something she wasn't going to get. She needed to permanently relegate David to the realm of platonic friends. But what she felt for him wasn't an emotion she could switch on and off. They'd both fought it from the beginning. And now Burke was getting out, and the whole thing seemed to be starting over. The contact. The worry. The desire. The fear.
She told herself to stop thinking about David and Burke, but it was no good. She felt as if she'd gone back four years. Burke was still a threat.
David was still trying to help her. She was more in love with him than ever.
And he was still trying to get back with his ex-wife. Why hadn't anything changed?
She couldn't stay on guard for the rest of her life....
Shoving away from her computer, she massaged her temples. She had to do more than send out another flurry of press releases. David wouldn't like it, but maybe she needed to be aggressive rather than sitting and waiting and hoping for the best. Maybe she needed to become more familiar with 57
Burke and his lifestyle.
Maybe it was time to fight fire with fire.
After standing for more than five hours, Jane's feet ached. She needed a break, and there finally seemed to be enough of a lull to take one. Sitting in her own salon
chair,
she lit a cigarette and gazed out the large front window advertising haircuts for ten bucks. The kind of cheapskates who wanted a ten-dollar haircut rarely remembered to tip. The last guy had handed her a fistful of change, which he said equaled ten dollars, but by the time she finished counting up all the pennies, he was gone and she was a dollar short.
"Jerk," she muttered. She'd even worn a low-cut shirt. It increased her tip average. The men liked a good view, and she didn't see how that hurt anything. A woman had to get by. But this last loser had leered, then stiffed her anyway.
"Hey!" Danielle, a fellow stylist, wagged a finger at
her.
"You can't smoke in here. The State of California doesn't allow it."
"Screw the State of California. Nobody's in here but you, and you smoke more in a day than I do."
"The boss will smell it," she warned. "And you'll get yourself fired."
"Who's she going to replace me with? No one else will work so hard for so little."
"That's where you're wrong. There's a line of hopefuls right behind you, sugar."
Jane didn't want to hear it. "So? I won't be needing this job much longer." Oliver was getting out on Friday, and he was an educated man.
Before their lives had gone to hell, he'd been making over a quarter million a year and they'd lived in a home that was the envy of all their friends. They'd regain what they'd lost. It was just a matter of time.
"You're quittin' then?"
Disgruntled that she couldn't even smoke a damn cigarette in peace, Jane finally stubbed it out. "Happy?"
Danielle gave her a dirty look. "I didn't make the law. Besides, you have to sweep up the hair around your chair before you take a break."
Getting up, Jane grudgingly swept and straightened her station, then went out next to the smelly Dumpster in back, which was their designated
"smoking area," and lit up again. But she'd barely taken her first drag when Danielle stuck her head out the door. "Someone's here to see ya."
"Is he cute?" she asked.
"I'd go home with him."
"That's not saying much."
Danielle scowled. "Shut up! You're in such a crappy mood today."
58
"You know I'm kidding," Jane said, although she hadn't been kidding at all.
"Doesn't matter, anyway. Neither one of us could get this guy," she responded with a shrug.
Jane studied her coworker. "He's that hot?"
"We're talking two hundred pounds of lean muscle, the tightest ass I've ever seen and the kind of lips that could keep a woman on her back for weeks." With that, the door closed.
Choosing between her desire to smoke and her avid curiosity, Jane put out her second cigarette and followed Danielle inside. Then she wished she'd asked for a name. The guy was gorgeous, all right. With close-cropped dark hair, so dark it was almost black, light-green eyes and a rugged, well-sculpted face, he definitely made an impression.
Too bad he was the detective who'd put her husband away
"What do you want?" she asked.
Danielle glanced up at her waspish tone.
"This guy's a cop," Jane told her.
"Must've heard you were smoking in the shop." Danielle sent him a smile that showed her dimples, but also revealed her crooked teeth. "I hope he brought his handcuffs."
Detective Willis's eyebrows went up, but the grin he wore said he wasn't uncomfortable with the compliment.
"Danielle's getting desperate," Jane grumbled. "The extra weight's affecting her love life."
Looking more surprised by her insult than Danielle's shameless flirting, Willis didn't comment on either. "Will you step outside with me for a minute?"
"Are you taking volunteers?" Danielle asked.
Giving her a more practiced smile, the kind of smile meant to be polite while maintaining a certain distance, he flashed a wedding band, the sight of which surprised Jane. Last she'd heard, the detective was divorced.
"Damn," Danielle muttered. "The good ones are always taken."
"Don't let him fool you," Jane said. "My husband could tell you a thing or two about the great detective."
Willis's intriguing eyes focused on her. "Do you really want to talk about your husband in here?"
His sober tone made Jane nervous. Did he have bad news? She knew he thought Oliver had murdered three women. She already battled nightmares featuring a policeman knocking at her door to tell her it was true.
If this turned out to be that visit, Jane didn't think she could cope. Not with 59
the stress of ending her relationship with Noah while hanging in there for Kate.
"I can't leave right now," she said uncertainly. "You took away the breadwinner in my family, and now I've got bills to pay." You've brought me enough grief. Please, God, make him go away.
But her prayers went unanswered.
"How long does it take you to do a haircut?" he asked.
"Twenty, thirty minutes."
He handed her a twenty. "I just bought a half hour of your time.
Would you prefer I sit in your chair, or can we go for a walk?"
She made a show of tucking the money into her bra, but his eyes didn't lower to her cleavage. Danielle was right. She couldn't get Detective Willis even if she wanted him. At forty-two, she was older, and the years were beginning to show. She had more years on him than she did on Oliver.
Would her husband find her unattractive when he came home?
If he came home, she corrected herself. She wasn't sure of anything now that the detective was standing in the salon.
Wrapping her long purple sweater tightly around her, she went outside with him. "Mind if I smoke?"
"Not if it makes you more comfortable."
She lit up and inhaled deeply. It was a nasty habit, one her old friends would've frowned upon. But it got her through the day. "What is it?" she asked, bracing for the worst.
"Are you still taking sleeping pills?"
She gave him a dirty look. Thanks to him, the D.A. had made a big deal out of that at the trial, claiming Oliver could've done anything while she was unconscious and she never would've known. But she didn't feel he was bullying her. He really wanted to know. "No. For the most part, I can get to sleep on my own now."
"That's good. Have you discovered anything since your husband went to prison, maybe in the move, that might indicate Oliver knew Meredith Connelly, Patty Poindexter or Amber Farello?"
"You think I'd tell you if I did?"
"It's been three years," he countered. "I'm hoping you've had some time to consider the possibilities."
Jane breathed a little easier. So he had nothing new, just more of the same. Maybe she could handle this. "Determined, aren't you?"
She realized his friendly expression was calculated to charm her--yet it still worked. With broad shoulders and the kind of muscles you saw in men determined to stay in top physical shape, the detective was rugged, 60
cocky, intense. In her mentally fragile state, he posed a real threat to her defenses. "What was I supposed to find?" she asked.
"An article of clothing. A piece of jewelry. A knife."
"Why is it so hard for you to believe that my husband isn't what you think? Skye Kellerman was on drugs. She stabbed Oliver with her scissors, for crying out loud."
His thick dark lashes created the perfect frame for his green eyes.
"Skye wasn't on drugs."
"You don't know that. You just can't imagine such a beautiful woman being the one at fault--can you?"
If he heard the hint of jealousy in her voice, he ignored it. "I'm talking about trophies. Some rapists and murderers like to collect them, treasure them, use them to relive their crimes."
Rapists and murderers... She scowled at him. "You're not going to answer my question?"
"Skye's beauty has nothing to do with my reason for being here."
"Yes, it does," she said. "It has everything to do with me being here, too."
"Did you ever wake up to find your husband gone? Or maybe washing up in the bathroom?"
He was so eager to move on she wondered if she could've misread some of the heated looks he and Skye Kellerman had exchanged during the trial. Was it just the emotion of the moment? A common cause and genuine sympathy, however misplaced? Or something deeper? "He was a busy man.
He came home late some evenings, got up early most mornings."
"Were there days when he got up so early you had no idea what time he actually left the house?"
"Of course. But that doesn't mean anything. A lot of wives could say the same. I generally slept later than he did, whether I'd taken a sleeping pill the night before or not. I didn't expect him to clock in and out." She frowned. "But that was in the good old days..."
"Were they all good?"
"What do you mean?"
"Oliver never behaved distantly, strangely? Nothing happened that made you wonder if he was the man you thought he was?"
Jane immediately recalled the weekend she'd avoided talking about--
when Oliver had wanted to experiment with Viagra right after it hit the market. A few days later, he'd brought home something he said would charge her up, make her hungry for sex. So she'd agreed to take it. She hadn't wanted her husband to think she was boring just because she was a few 61
years older. But it'd turned out to be the strangest experience. Oliver claimed they'd made love several times. He had scratches on his body to prove she'd gotten a little out of control. But she couldn't remember ever touching him, and none of those women had been murdered at that time. It was probably nothing....
"Jane?" the detective prompted, and she realized she'd stopped walking.
"He was perfectly normal," she replied and started moving again.
Willis stared at the ground as he kept pace with her. "Remaining silent could be dangerous, Jane."
She was tired of the questions, the constant assault on what she believed.
Or was it only what she wanted to believe? Rubbing her eyes with her free hand, she sighed. "Will you stop?"
Hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his well-worn jeans, he stepped in front of her, blocking her forward progress. The T-shirt beneath his leather jacket stretched across his chest, revealing the contours of his pectoral muscles, which was definitely distracting and made it more difficult to remember that he was her enemy. "Think about what could happen if you're wrong," he said.
He was trying to undermine her confidence, frighten her. And it was working. "I'm not taking sleeping pills, so I'll be more aware."
"You figure that'll stop him?"
"You're worried about nothing," she insisted, but she wasn't as positive as she'd once been. That weekend when Oliver had behaved so strangely had always troubled her, but it troubled her even more now. Still, no one had been hurt that weekend. "You searched my house and you found nothing, remember?"
Rubbing the beard growth that was just beginning to shadow his chin, Willis switched tactics. "At trial, you said you met Oliver at a pizza parlor when you were already working as a hairstylist. He was only a junior in high school, but you were attracted to each other right away, went out that night and became exclusive shortly after."
She laughed bitterly. "And I was worried about the age difference. I never guessed I'd have to deal with anything like what's happened since."
She stared at the handsome detective through the smoke curling from her cigarette. "You can't imagine what it's been like for me, having the father of my child, my husband, convicted of attempted rape."