Wild Ride: A Changing Gears Novel (11 page)

Duncan jerked as his cell phone vibrated against his hip. He’d turned off the ringer, for obvious reasons. He reached for the phone, the surgical gloves making him slightly clumsy. He checked the call display and shook his head at one of life’s little ironies. It was Alex.

“Hi,” he said into the phone.

“Hi. Where are you?”

“You sound upset.” And she’d sound a hell of a lot more upset if she knew he was currently inside her apartment going through her computer records and e-mails. When she’d headed off to help her cousin, he’d expected her to be tied up for a good long while.

“I am upset.”

“Everything okay with your cousin?”

“No. You know what I like to do when I’m upset?”

“I’m hoping I do.”

“I like to get laid.” Tension crackled in her tone. “I’m on my way to my place. Can you meet me there?”

A silent chuckle shook him. “I’ll be there before you know it.”

In less than two minutes, he’d shut down her computer and left her apartment. He raced down the stairs, slipped out the side door, jogged a couple of blocks to where he’d left his car, tossed the gloves and his lock picks in the trunk, then removed his ball cap and the dark windbreaker and threw them on top of the tool kit.

If anyone saw him arrive at her building, he wouldn’t want them to clue in that he was the same man who’d left there five minutes earlier.

Then he got into the car, sat and pondered his findings. Alex stocked a lot of herbal tea, but drank mostly strong, dark coffee. She collected erotica in a shelf in her walk-in closet, and then alphabetized it.

She kept meticulous financial records on a home bookkeeping program and among her deleted e-mails he’d found some steamy ones from a year back that suggested she’d compensated for a long-distance relationship by having cybersex with the guy when they were apart. The woman was a bundle of contrasts.

But one thing he was certain of. She wasn’t hiding a Van Gogh in her apartment, nor had she left any clues as to where one might be.

Alex wasn’t the only one who was feeling frustrated this evening.

There was another contrast he wished he hadn’t noticed. Her words might be telling him she wanted some raunchy sex, but her tone had been heartbreaking. What that woman needed was a hug.

He sighed. Hug administration wasn’t what he’d have put first on his list, but, in spite of the way he usually acted around her, he wasn’t a completely sex-obsessed brute.

He chuckled silently. Not hardly.

When he arrived at her door the second time that night, this time bothering to knock, he reminded himself that being naked within ten seconds was not the priority tonight.

Oh, but he wished it were.

“Hi,” she said, in her sultry, come-to-bed tone. To torture him further, she’d already managed to lose her clothes and was robed in a thigh-length, dusky-pink silk gown with overblown roses printed on it. He tried to imagine what combination of paints he’d need to capture the colors of her gown, the sheen of her skin, the deep red of her lips, the pale cream of her cheeks, and the sad, liquid gray of her eyes.

A better artist might translate her beauty to canvas. Duncan knew he never could, so he tried to imprint the image on his memory. He’d seen a lot of Alex since he arrived in Swiftcurrent, but not even after the murder had he seen her so emotionally troubled.

“Hey,” he said, kicking the door shut behind him, and suddenly he didn’t need to remind himself this wasn’t about sex. He simply wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, where she nestled like a homing pigeon settling in for the night.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said against his chest.

“Rough night?”

She nodded, her hair silky under his chin, but she didn’t say any more. He put an arm around her, led her to her living room and settled beside her on the couch, a white overstuffed sofa he believed was termed shabby chic, with a lot of girly throw pillows lined up.

He saw the tension and worry tightening the skin around her eyes and knotting her shoulders. He kneaded the tight muscles slowly and she groaned. He sensed she’d feel better if she talked, so he asked, “What happened?”

The tight muscles in her shoulders quivered, but he kept on kneading them. “Gillian’s ex-husband called me. He said he went over to talk to her about the divorce and she freaked out on him. She was wasted. She tripped and hurt herself. She threw him out, so I went over to check on her.”

Her voice was calm but her shoulders were cement arches. “She was hurt, and I suggested rehab. Why didn’t I bandage her up and give her some support? I could have talked to her about rehab in the morning, when she was herself again. She screamed at me and ran out and got into a car and drove away before I could stop her. If something happens it will be my fault.”

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up. This isn’t your fault.” No wonder her shoulders were tight—there was too much being dumped on them and it was pretty obvious she had no one to share her burdens.

“You’ve seen her in the library. She was doing okay. I was beginning to trust her again, and wham. She’s pulled that stunt so many times before. So I lost it.” Alex’s eyes pinched shut for a moment and he almost felt the flash of bad memory after bad memory from her cousin’s past playing themselves in her head.

“She screamed at me and then before I could stop her, she’d rushed off in her car, and I called the cops to go get her. Now I’m worried sick about my cousin, angry with myself for handling her so badly.”

“You went to her. You did your best.”

“I made things worse.” Her gaze went to the coffee table where the latest edition of the Swiftcurrent News, which for once had some honest to God news to report, had wasted no inch of newsprint on anything but the murder. “And on top of that there’s an unsolved murder that involves my library.”

“There’s nothing you can do about any of that now,” he said, admiring her strength and commitment to those she cared about. “You did the best you could.”

“Well, it wasn’t near good enough.”

“Try not to be too hard on yourself. What you need is some sleep.” He kissed her lightly and rose.

“Aren’t you staying?”

“Yeah.” He pulled the toothbrush out of his pocket and waved it in front of her face. “Okay if I leave this in your bathroom?”

“Mmm.”

He rinsed his face and brushed his teeth, leaving his toothbrush in the glass beside hers. This was as close as he came to commitment. He’d better make that clear. But not tonight. He flipped out the bathroom light, entered her bedroom and stripped, crawling into bed with her.

She burrowed under his arm until her head was resting on his shoulder, then gave him a quick peck on the lips he imagined a woman married thirty years would give her husband.

He smiled in the dark. He kind of liked it. He rubbed her back, the bones and muscles fine under the slippery silk.

“Thank you,” she said, half sleepy, but with a husky note that had nothing to do with sleep.

“You’re welcome,” he replied, never changing the rubbing motion on her back.

She reached out a hand and unerringly found his cock in the dark. Then she imitated his rhythm on her back, the slow up-and-down stroke.

He figured he’d been as sensitive as the next New Age guy, giving up sex and offering a back rub. Now she was getting cruel, tormenting him with those excruciatingly slow strokes that had him hardening within her loose, sleepy grip.

Okay, he could be modern about this. She wasn’t trying to turn him on with fulfillment in mind, she was simply patting him the way he was patting her. Perhaps she thought what she was doing might soothe him to sleep.

He felt sweat begin to bead his forehead, and he spent a lot of energy keeping his breathing even, but it wasn’t easy. He wanted to flip that woman to her back and take her so badly he could hardly stand it.

She turned to face him and feathered kisses along his jaw.

“I’m trying to be sensitive to your emotional needs, here,” he said from behind clenched teeth. “You’re not making it easy.”

“You came to me when I needed you. For that I thank you. Now I really need something to take my mind off my troubles.”

“Alexandra Forrest,” he said, rising on one elbow to gaze down at her, “are you trying to use me for sex?”

Her smile might still be a little sad around the edges, but it was clearly a “come to bed” smile. “Yes.”

“All right.” He took her left hand, kissed the palm and cupped his balls with it. She took the hint and while her right hand stroked his cock, her left began to squeeze and play with his balls.

And this time when his hand ended the downward stroke on her back, he slid a little lower, all the way over her round, tight ass and cupped and squeezed her cheeks before changing direction and slipping the silk gown up over her hips.

Her lazy stroking picked up the pace and her hips joined in in silent invitation. He wasn’t a man to turn down an offer like that. While she nipped his jaw, he helped himself to one of her condoms, then he scooped up her legs and scooted them over his hips.

Her thighs fell open and while she was still busy stroking him, he returned the favor, slipping a hand down one creamy thigh to where she was open and wet. He stroked her until she was starting to moan and toss her hips, then he slid inside of her as comfortably as though he’d been doing it for years.

It was the strangest damn thing. For new lovers, they’d so quickly slipped into the comfort of longtime partners. He felt as though he knew her body, could gauge her reactions, her level of excitement, even, as earlier, whether she really wanted sex or simply comfort.

As he felt her close around him, hot and wet, he felt her hand creep down between them and cup his balls. Damn, she was the same with him. He’d barely thought how much he wanted her hand there, and it appeared.

Slow and easy turned to fast and furious but he didn’t worry anymore; somehow they were on the same wavelength and he knew it was what she wanted.

What he wanted was to be deeper inside her than she’d ever taken any man, deeper than he’d ever delved.

With that in mind, he rolled so he was on top of her, her knees hooked around his waist. He pumped, feeling the way she clung wetly to him as though resisting every time he slid out, then sighing with pleasure when he thrust back inside her. There was barely enough light in the room to make out her features, but he stared into her face anyway, mesmerized by the opening and closing of her mouth in rhythmic, silent cries.

He thrust deep, and still deeper, hard and it wasn’t hard enough. Sweat slipped into his eyes, matted his chest, slicked his back so her fingers slid and still he wanted more, dove deeper.

She cried out, clenching against him, her eyes opening blindly, her head tossing as she cried out her climax and as her body milked him, he felt his own orgasm thundering from somewhere deep, rolling up and–

He heard a bang, like someone pounding a fist on a wooden door. Had they been so noisy the neighbors were complaining? Even as the thought occurred, he felt the blinding pain in his forehead. “Oh, shit!”

“What happened?”

“I cracked my head a good one against the wall.”

“I’ll get some ice.”

He held her still beneath him, feeling the tiny squeezes pulsing around his swollen cock. “Don’t,” he thrust almost all the way out and then surged into her, loving her gasp as he filled her.

“Even—” all the way out and this time he poised at the brink, making her wait, before thrusting inside.

“Think—”

“Oh, yes, oh, please,” she sighed.

“About—” and her body was shuddering again.

“It!” they cried out together, while he poured his essence into her body and she milked every drop.

Afterward, while she snuggled against him and drifted to sleep, he gingerly felt the goose egg forming above his hairline. He suspected her apartment was punishing him for sneaking in here and investigating its occupant, and that he deserved the whack on the head.

His snooping had only confirmed what he already knew in his gut. For all she was a mass of contradictions, his librarian bombshell, she also rang true. He’d been watching her closely, clothed and naked and in between. At work, at rest, under stress, in mid-orgasm, and she was always the same person. A woman who craved order, who acted with integrity, whose biggest crime seemed to have been foisting library cards on the unsuspecting.

In his snooping in her apartment, he’d discovered she had a pair of shoes for every fantasy he’d ever entertained. There were cowboy boots to go-go boots, shoes made by designers so famous he’d even heard of them, and garish sandals from the local ladies’ wear shop.

Her wardrobe was top of the trees call girl, which she paid for out of her librarian’s salary. He’d uncovered the startling fact that she paid all her bills before they were due. Her bank balance was respectable but nothing to get excited about. No hidden painting. No sudden large deposits into her bank.

Nothing, in fact, out of the ordinary. He was almost convinced that Alexandra Forrest wasn’t connected with anything unsavory. Or if she was, it was without her knowledge. But his gut also told him that painting was here in town, somewhere.

If Alex didn’t have the Van Gogh, then who the hell did?

Tom Perkins didn’t like the information they’d so far received about Jerzy Plotnik, the dead guy found in Alex’s library. A drug dealer, a thief. What was such a man doing in sleepy Swiftcurrent? Who had killed him and why had they dumped his remains in Alex’s library?

Tom stood in the middle of the break room, which was doing temporary duty as the case room for the murder. Photos of the dead guy wallpapered the small space. Tom was sure he was losing weight since he found he couldn’t eat with that morbid corpse staring down at him.

He’d spent ten years as a cop, investigated plenty of murders before getting the job back home in Swiftcurrent, but he never became blasé about violent death.

Tom wasn’t a particularly ambitious man. He never dreamed of bigger things, because he loved his job. He didn’t secretly hanker for some spectacular crime spree in his jurisdiction so he’d have his picture splashed all over the newspapers, CNN asking him for on-camera updates. He preserved peace and order and he wanted his hometown to be safe for its citizens.

He hadn’t wanted a juicy murder investigation, but he wasn’t evading his duty, either. He might not have as much experience or education as some of the guys on the Interagency Major Crimes Team to which he’d been assigned, but he had one advantage: he knew this town and its people.

Folders and notebooks littered one counter, more folders were pinned to the walls. They contained reports, interviews, statements. For probably the hundredth time, Tom pulled the M.E.’s report, which informed them that the murder weapon was a nine mm semiautomatic pistol. Common as dirt.

The body had been dragged, probably after death, along both pavement and gravel. And didn’t that narrow it down. There was no skin or blood under the fingernails, no DNA at all that didn’t belong to the victim.

There were officers in L.A. interviewing known associates of Plotnik, but they weren’t the sort of characters who tended to cooperate with cops. The guy had a girlfriend who hadn’t seemed too broken up by his death. According to her statement, he’d said he’d be away on business for a couple of days. She hadn’t known where he was going or who else might have gone along. Plotnik had a sister in Michigan, but they hadn’t been close. She knew less than the girlfriend and had been only marginally more upset by the guy’s death.

All they knew for certain was that Plotnik was dead and that he’d been placed, after death, in the library.

Tom replaced the M.E.’s report and dug out the blueprint of the municipal building as though he didn’t know it by heart. Whoever had killed Jerzy Plotnik had entered the library easily. The locks hadn’t thrown them, the alarm system hadn’t tripped them up. They’d waltzed in, placed the corpse, and left without so much as stealing a pencil.

The police had put out an appeal via the media for any information on the victim, included a sketch and photo. He’d personally appeared on local television asking anyone who’d seen the victim alive in the days before his death to come forward.

No one had. Between them, the crime team had canvassed the grocery store, the coffee shop, every restaurant, inn, motel, or hotel within a ten-mile radius. Nothing. Every gas station. Nothing. In a gossipy town where not a lot happened, a stranger got noticed. But not this one. It was as though the man had simply appeared, dead, in the library.

When he’d asked about a stranger in town, a few people thought he was referring to the art professor writing that book of his.

It was an interesting coincidence that the professor had arrived only a day before the murder. But so far Tom couldn’t prove that it wasn’t a coincidence. He’d thought he had a clear case of one outsider knocking off another when Alex had alerted him to the bloodstains she’d seen on Duncan Forbes. That would have been the easy solution, and he wouldn’t have been sorry to learn that this murder was the result of a couple of outsiders having a fatal argument.

But the blood had been paint, and the guy checked out. Forbes was exactly who he said he was. A professor of art who wrote books. He had an interesting sideline that he hadn’t mentioned. He consulted on stolen artworks.

Tom wasn’t ready to say it was pure coincidence that the two men arrived in town the same week and he wasn’t prepared to say it wasn’t. He simply put the information aside and returned to one question he felt would help unravel the entire knot. Why had the corpse turned up in Alex’s library?

He blinked slowly as he noted he referred to the place as Alex’s library. He bet half the town did that. In the same way they talked about Elda’s café, Val’s doughnut shop, and Earl’s pizza.

It had been she who’d discovered the body. He dismissed the notion that Alex had killed a man almost before it occurred to him. But, he was a careful cop who did a thorough job, so he checked her movements anyway. The M.E. put time of death at between midnight and two A.M.

Alex said she’d been asleep in bed at the time. She lived alone and no one had seen her come or go when they shouldn’t have. So, technically she could have killed Plotnik, but he wasn’t wasting his department’s slim resources on that theory.

Why had an L.A. thug even been here? The arrests for drug trafficking had him scratching his chin. Swiftcurrent, Oregon, didn’t have much of a drug problem. There was more marijuana than he’d like turning up in high school now and then in spite of the zero-tolerance policy, a trickle of meth and ecstasy. A couple of ex-hippies who grew their own weed were red-eyed more often than not, but they kept to themselves, turned out a lot of bad pottery they tried to sell in the summer and were mostly harmless. He left them alone.

And there was Gillian.

He frowned slightly and rose from his office chair to go stare out the window, as though the parking lot could give him any bright ideas. Alex’s cousin had returned from her time in L.A. thin, wide-eyed, and brighter than a neon sign. Perpetually drunk, high, or crazy, she’d pulled enough stunts to turn this staid town on its ears, but she got older, as did her boyfriend. They even got married when her grandfather insisted on it and they settled down.

And there was Eric. Tom had disliked him on sight. He seemed to be in the minority, though. Gill’s family had taken to him right away, probably as a way to get Gillian off their hands. And the town seemed as happy to welcome a good-looking, charming young man into its midst as it was unhappy to get Gillian back. They liked him so much they voted him onto city council.

Tom could never figure out why. Was he the only one who saw the obvious? Gillian had drunk more than she should before she left town. Doubtless smoked some pot, but it wasn’t until she hooked up with Eric that she got into hard drugs. Who the hell had introduced her to them if not her boyfriend?

However she’d become hooked, a sneaky but persistent rumor around town had it that while Eric had reformed, she still did drugs.

Whenever there was trouble, Gillian’s name seemed to top the list. He’d check her out because it was his job. But he’d seen a woman in a heap of emotional trouble last night. When she’d begged him to believe her he’d seen—not a woman avoiding the truth, but a woman falsely accused. And a woman who’d been struck.

Was Plotnik her dealer? Had he hit her? Maybe when she couldn’t pay her drug bill? Was that why the man was in town? Making a delivery?

He didn’t like that possibility. He didn’t like it at all.

They’d assumed the library had been broken into by thugs sophisticated enough to get in and out without a trace. But the more obvious solution was closer to hand. Eric, as a city councilor, had both the keys and the code. And Eric’s wife was sporting a shiner. It wasn’t much to go on, but enough so he decided to do some quiet investigating of Councillor Eric Munn. Of course, everyone with keys to the municipal hall was also on the list, as was the custodian who lived with his parents and had no alibi. And, of course, Forbes.

Duncan Forbes joined the mix because he seemed to live in the library, though every time Tom went in the man had his nose in a book or was tapping away on a laptop. Alex would be busy doing whatever she did in her office or out among the books. As far as he could tell there was nothing between them but lust on Forbes’s part, which was pretty normal where Alex and men were concerned, and dislike on Alex’s. That wasn’t normal for her. She was usually nice to pretty much everyone. Forbes had probably acted like an animal. That was the fastest way to piss off Alex.

Duncan Forbes. The first stranger in town. Who had been at the library the day Plotnik was killed. Who had met Alex that day. In the library. He owned a gun which was still on the east coast. Had he bought himself a new one out here? He snorted. The professor in the library with the gun.

He was starting to feel like a character in a board game. And he was feeling more and more like the not-so-bright detective in the game. The one with the thick mustache and over sized shoes.

Come to think of it, there was something unreal and game-like about this whole scenario.

Still, in this board game he could move, too. Which reminded him that he and the professor had a date to go rock climbing.

But first, he had to return to Gillian’s place. It was time they had a heart-to-heart.

He tossed her keys in the air and caught them. Interrogating her wasn’t a task he delighted in, but it had to be done. He should have pressed her last night, but somehow when she’d stared up at him out of that bruised and swelling face he couldn’t do it.

He phoned ahead and the tiny jolt in his gut when she answered didn’t please him in the slightest. It was like an air raid warning going off in his system.

So he was curt. “I’m going for your car now. Is this your house key on your chain?”

“Yes,” she said, her soft voice getting to him like a lost kitten’s. “The one with the blue stripe.”

“Have you got your knee elevated?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t get up and answer the door. I’ll use your key to get in.”

“You’re coming in?” She sounded surprised.

“I want to look at that knee and make sure I don’t have to drag your ass to the clinic.”

“That sounds like police brutality.”

He squelched the urge to chuckle. “Don’t tempt me.”

By the time he’d had Raeanne drive him to Gillian’s car and had driven it to her house, he’d had time to work out what he really needed to know about her.

And what she looked like naked was not going to be top of the list, he warned himself, even as he recalled the sight of her half-exposed breast last night. He’d wanted all of it and more. That was the trouble with Gillian. She always left him wanting more. He had a feeling she was the kind of woman who always would.

But, regardless of the fact that she’d filled him with lust since before he understood what lust was, he’d do his duty. While he was checking her knee, he’d also be scanning her home for any evidence of violence.

He knocked first and then used her key to enter. “Gillian? It’s me.” He contemplated identifying himself as Sergeant Perkins, but she’d made him look like a jackass last night when he’d pulled that. “It’s Tom.”

“Thank you for bringing back my car.” Her voice had a quality, both soft and penetrating. She could whisper and he’d hear her across a football field.

He walked straight to the living room where he’d put her last night, but the room was empty. All neat and tidy. Not so much as the ring from a soda glass.

With a slight frown he checked the kitchen, and noted the gleaming counters, a floor so clean it could star in a TV commercial.

“Gillian?” he called. “Where are you?”

“Back here.”

He followed her voice down the hall and imagined her in the den watching daytime TV, her leg elevated. “I brought you a present.”

He stopped on the threshold as though it were the edge of a cliff. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She wasn’t watching the soaps or one of those beat-each-other-up talk shows. She was in her bedroom. In bed.

Seeing his discomfort, she sent him a mocking smile. “Don’t worry. You’re safe from me. I won’t jump your bones. I haven’t got the energy.”

Suddenly he was eighteen again, feeling as thick and oafish as a dim-witted giant.

“I didn’t–” He cleared his throat. “I thought you were watching TV or something. Didn’t know this was your bedroom.”

What had he expected her bedroom to be like? Bold and erotic, with artsy photos of naked bodies on the walls and the smell of incense and massage oils. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The bed was pale yellow with flowers and frills and way too many little fancy pillows, every single one of which had its own frill. She was propped up against a heap of these with a book in her lap.

“This is your bedroom?” he asked in surprise before he could recover enough to keep his mouth shut.

“It was the guest room, but I moved in here after Eric left. I wanted a new start.”

She wore a short denim skirt, probably to keep the fabric off her sore knee, but he couldn’t help noticing how long and elegant her legs were, making her bruised, swollen knee all the more garish. Her bare feet were long and narrow, the toes painted a kind of pinky orange.

A pale blue t-shirt hugged her torso and for some reason it made him think of the torn flap on her shirt the night before that had given him a glimpse of the breasts now safely hidden.

Her long, blond hair hung straight past her shoulders. She’d worn it that way forever. In some ways she hadn’t changed at all, but for the absence of that dizzying lust for life that used to sparkle from her eyes. And the shiner. That was also new.

He’d seen plenty of black eyes in his time, delivered some, taken one or two. But he hated to see a bruise like that on a woman, especially on Gillian. The red had faded and spread into purple, yellow, and green. The swelling had almost closed her right eye and discolored one temple as the bruise crept into her hairline.

She flinched under his scrutiny, so he dropped his gaze to her legs. “How’s the knee?”

“It’s fine.”

“Can you bend it?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see.”

“I can bend it.”

He wasn’t going to go over there and manhandle her—she’d had enough of that lately—so he decided to trust that she was smart enough to see a doctor if she needed one. “I brought you a real ice pack.” He lifted the flexible pack he kept in his own freezer. It glowed pale blue.