Out for Blond Read online

  I nodded. “Yeah, I did too. That’s why it’s good too see you again.”

  “It is good to see you.” His voice dropped several octaves, and he moved even closer.

  I shivered again. “I really am cold.”

  He looked into my eyes. “You want to go back to the bar?”

  I shook my head. “No, I like it just the two of us.”

  He swallowed. “You know, Ivy, I don’t want you to get… ideas.”

  “Ideas?” I batted my eyelashes at him.

  “Just because we’re hanging out like this doesn’t mean that I’m going to…”

  “Going to what?”

  “You know I’m married.”

  Damn it. I shoved away from the building. “Right.” Okay, he was going to need more of a push. I sighed. “It was stupid of me to think that you’d be attracted to someone like me anyway.”

  He laughed. “I didn’t say I didn’t think you were attractive.”

  I patted him on the cheek. “You’re sweet, Porter.” I let out a long sigh. “Look, forget it, okay? You think you could just walk me to my car?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  We started back down the sidewalk. I made sure to stay very close, so that our shoulders brushed occasionally.

  Porter didn’t pull away.

  I glanced sidelong at him.

  He was watching me as we walked.

  I looked away, smiling a satisfied smile. Maybe he wouldn’t need much of a push after all.

  When we got to my car, which was in a remote part of the parking lot behind the bar (Brigit had been really confused by my parking job, wondering why I was parking all the way back where I was), I made a show of stumbling over my feet, nearly falling down.

  I stumbled right into Porter, forcing him to catch me, forcing us close, my body pressed into his, his hand clutching my arms to keep me upright.

  “Crap,” I whispered. “Maybe I’m a little drunker than I thought. I don’t know if I should drive.”

  He didn’t let go of me. “You did put away a few shots in there. And you’re such a tiny thing.”

  That was nice to hear. I didn’t know if it was strictly true. I wasn’t overweight or anything, but I definitely wasn’t as thin as I’d been in my twenties. I grinned at him. “Maybe if I just give it a little while? Would you sit with me until I seem sober?”

  “Sit with you?”

  “In the car,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Ivy.” He still hadn’t let go of me. “I really should be getting home.”

  “Not for long,” I said. I pressed my body up against him. I squirmed a little bit, let him feel my breasts and hips move against his flesh.

  He swallowed again. He closed his eyes.

  “Just for a little bit,” I murmured. “It would be a real favor.”

  He let out a shallow breath. The thing was that Porter expected me to be this sexual dynamo—someone who he couldn’t resist. That was my reputation, after all. So he didn’t much try to resist. It became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

  We settled into the car. He didn’t protest again. Then we were sitting next to each other in the dark, both very close. I could hear the sound of his breath, and he sounded excited.

  I put my hand on his knee. “You know, I always wondered about you, Porter.”

  “What do you mean?” His voice was hoarse.

  “I mean, that I thought about you. I wondered what it would be like to… be close to you.”

  I could hear him swallowing in the darkness. He was nervous and guilty, but he was curious too.

  My fingers traveled higher, over his thigh. “Did you ever wonder about me?”

  “Oh fuck, Ivy,” he muttered.

  My lips curved into another satisfied smile. I was pretty sure I had him.

  I let my hand travel even higher. I ran my fingers over his crotch.

  He groaned. He grabbed me, pulling me close, his mouth seeking mine in the darkness. His hands were inside my shirt, seeking the soft curves of my breasts, and I was lighting up, a fire was igniting inside my core.

  I surrendered to his mouth and his touch.

  And I reached over to the dashboard and switched on the camera I’d planted there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Porter’s face was white. He wasn’t wearing his shirt anymore, and his pants were unzipped. I was in a similar state of undress. The sex had been good, which was a nice bonus, because it would have sucked to have crappy sex all in the service of blackmailing the coroner. He reached for the camera.

  But I pulled it out of his grasp. I plugged it into my phone and hit a couple buttons. “I’m backing up the video right now.”

  “Why are you doing this?” he said.

  “I want to see a body,” I said. “Tess Carver. You’re going to take me in to the morgue and show me her body and let me snoop through all the records you guys have on the murder. Or else I’m going to send this video to your wife.”

  Porter gave me a disgusted look. “You bitch.”

  I shrugged. “People have been known to say that about me.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me about the body?” he said. “Why’d you go through this whole game and act like you liked me?”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Porter. I know you. You’d never show me that body if I asked. And besides, I do like you. I really enjoyed fucking you. That thing you did with your tongue on my ear? That was nice.”

  He glared at me. “Don’t patronize me.”

  I shrugged. “It’s no secret I like sex, Porter. I’m not patronizing you.”

  He turned away from me, dragging a hand over his face. “Fuck.”

  “Listen, it’s not so bad. I’ll be in and out of the morgue. One hour, two hours, tops. Then you can go home and pretend this never happened.”

  “If anyone finds out that I let you see the body of that girl, I’ll lose my job.”

  “And if you don’t let me see the body of that girl, you’ll lose your marriage.”

  He slid down the seat. “Fuck. I can’t believe I did this.” He stared at his hands. “If Liz ever found out…”

  “Liz is your wife?”

  “Don’t you say her name.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I don’t give a shit about your wife. You’re the one who’s in love with her.”

  “I must not be.” His voice cracked. “If I could do… this, then how much do I really care about her?”

  “Oh, that’s a common misconception,” I said. “Lots of people do that. They think that if you cheat on someone, you stop loving them. Trust me, I make a living catching cheating spouses, and that’s not the case. People cheat for all kinds of reasons, and it’s only rarely because they don’t love the person that they’re married to anymore.”

  He shot me a venomous look. “This supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Take me to the morgue,” I said.

  * * *

  Tess Carver’s last name seemed very unfortunate in light of what had been done to her body. I stood over the slab in the morgue, cocking my head from one side to the other as I took her in. “What happened to her arms?”

  Porter was on on the opposite side of the slab. “You said that you wanted to see the body. You didn’t say anything about picking my brain on the murder.”

  Okay. Well, apparently, he was still pissed off. Honestly, he’d lived up to his side of the bargain. It wasn’t as if Liz was going to find out about his indiscretions. Why was he in such a bad mood?

  Tess had been dead for several days at this point. Her body was preserved by refrigeration, but she had been badly mutilated. There were marks carved into her arms. They looked deliberate, but they also looked sloppy. They didn’t seem to be representative of anything. They weren’t letters or pictures or anything. Still, the positioning of them suggested some kind of meaning. On one arm, she had two circles with a line going down through both of them, cutting it in half. On the other, three overlapping circles.

  I p
ointed at one of them. “These. What are they?”

  Porter raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Give me something here.”

  “Something?” he said. “I just brought you into the morgue after hours and showed you this body. I’m not supposed to do that. I’m taking a lot of risk here. So I think it’s pretty rich for you to demand that I give you something, when I’ve already given you—”

  “All right, all right,” I muttered. “You think they’re symbols of some kind?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “No one’s been able to identify them as of yet, though.”

  I smiled. “See, now was that so hard?”

  “Stop asking me questions,” he said in a sullen voice. He turned away from the body and from me.

  I started taking pictures of the symbols carved into Tess’s limbs.

  “Hey.” He whirled back around. “You didn’t say anything about photos.”

  “Well, it’s not as if I can memorize this,” I said. “I’m going to need to have some record, to be able to look up these symbols or whatever they are.”

  “If you sell those pictures to the newspapers—”

  “I’m not going to do that!” I was offended.

  “No more pictures,” he said.

  I snapped more anyway. Tess hadn’t been killed by the carving job. She’d been killed by the slash to her throat. I got a shot of that too.

  “Ivy, I mean it.”

  I put my phone away. “Cause of death?” I wanted to make sure I was right.

  “Her throat was cut. You blind?”

  “Just making sure,” I said. “And the time of death? When was she killed?”

  “Around midnight, near as we can figure.”

  “What about the, um, decorations? Were those done post mortem or—”

  “No, he cut her while she was alive,” he said. “You can see that’s why some of these cuts are jerky. She was struggling, trying to get away from the knife.”

  “Not only alive, then, but conscious.” I let out a whistling breath. “Man, that’s sick.”

  Porter nodded. “Yeah, we don’t see shit like this around here that often. Mostly mob hits—bullet to the back of the head. This is a whole other level of crazy.”

  I made a face. “These symbols look different to you?”

  “Yeah, they’re different,” he said. “They’re both different.”

  “No, I know they’re not the same symbol,” I said. “But does it look like they were maybe made with different knives? This one is thicker or something.”

  He shrugged. “Could be.”

  “You can’t say for sure?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Well, which of these was made with the same knife that cut her throat?” I said.

  He furrowed his brow. “Ivy, are you going somewhere with this?”

  “I’m only wondering…” I tapped my chin. “If you’re a guy who’s killing a girl and cutting stuff into her body, do you really bother with two different knives, or does two different knives mean that there’s two different killers?”

  He shoved the slab back inside the refrigeration unit and slammed the door on it. “What the hell, Ivy? You’re working for that nut job, aren’t you? You’re trying to find some evidence he didn’t do it?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Look, he’s guilty.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But what if he wasn’t? I mean, wouldn’t you want to be sure that you put away the guy that did this?”

  “We arrested him already.”

  “The right guy. The for-sure right guy.”

  “He is the right guy.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “If that’s true, then my looking into stuff a little bit isn’t going to change things.”

  He shook his head. “You about done in here?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I couldn’t see the body anymore, after all. There wasn’t much else I could do.

  “Good,” he said. “Then delete the video, like you said.”

  I just grinned. “But Porter, what if I need to see another body again?”

  He clenched his hands into fists.

  I laughed. “Relax. I’ll delete it.” I held up the camera and made a show of deleting it. Of course, it was on my phone too, and it was uploaded to my cloud storage, and… Well, that video wasn’t going anywhere.

  * * *

  Porter insisted that we not leave the station together, so I sat around waiting for ten minutes until he was gone to head back to the parking lot. It was late now, and the warmth of the night had faded. I huddled in my jacket, striding across the parking lot toward my car as quickly as I could.

  I was halfway there when headlights cut across the nearly empty lot and a car careened into the lot at breakneck speed, squealing wheels and everything.

  I jumped back, not because the car had actually come close to me, but because I was afraid at the clearly reckless driver.

  But when the car screamed to a stop, I recognized it.

  That was Miles Pike’s car. Pike might be a lot of things, but generally he wasn’t a reckless driver.

  I hurried over to intercept him as he got out of his car. “Pike, is something wrong?”

  He squinted out into the darkness. “Who is that?”

  “It’s Stern,” I said. “I’ve never seen you drive like that. What’s going on?”

  “Stern?” He was heading toward the station. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I fell into step with him. “Is everything okay?”

  “No,” he said. “As a matter of fact, everything is not okay. But this is police business. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “But it’s got something to do with you. And I want to be here for you. As a friend.”

  He snorted. “Friend, huh?”

  I didn’t respond to that.

  “You and I aren’t friendly, Stern,” he said. “We might be a lot of things, but friendly is not one of them.”

  He was right. We were more agonized and frustrated. “Okay, okay. Bad choice of words. But seriously, Pike, what’s going on?”

  We’d reached the door to the station now. He unlocked it and swung the door open. He went inside. “This doesn’t concern you.”

  “Why? What’s it about? Is it about the Tess Carver case?”

  He gave me a funny look. “Why do you care about that?”

  “No reason.” Maybe I said that a little too quickly.

  “That case is open and shut,” he said. “We’ve got the killer in custody. Nothing else to worry about there.”

  Okay. Well, he was confident about that. “Why are you so sure it’s him? I mean, didn’t those other people turn themselves in, claiming they did it?”

  “We’re not ruling them out. Maybe they helped. But he’s the mastermind. No doubt about it.” He was moving through the hallway quickly.

  I was doing my best to keep up. “No doubt at all?”

  “This isn’t about the Carver case,” he said.

  “So, what’s it about?”

  “I’m not sharing this with you,” he said. “This is police business. Dangerous business that can’t get out. If it’s true…”

  “If what’s true? What’s going on?”

  Abruptly, Pike turned and headed down a set of steps.

  I followed him. “Why are we going down here? There’s nothing down here but the evidence locker.”

  He just kept going down the steps.

  I doubled my pace, catching up. “Is this about the evidence locker?”

  He shot a glance over his shoulder. “Shit, Stern, what the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Talk to me, Pike.”

  He stopped at the bottom of the steps. He sighed. “You’re not going to like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the evidence from Ralph the Hatchet’s case has been divided up, and they sent us some of the stuff that pertained to Madison Webb,
because she was in our jurisdiction, and we’ll be building the case against Ralph locally. You know, for her specific case.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Pike rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s missing.”

  “What’s missing?”

  “The evidence,” he said. “I was signing off on reports at home. I’d taken home some paperwork. And I was looking over what’s supposed to be in the evidence locker for the case, and it’s not there.”

  “What do mean, ‘not there’?”

  “I’m hoping it’s a clerical error.”

  “Why would anyone take the evidence against Ralph?” I said. “It’s not like it matters. He’s going away regardless. There was a mess of body parts in that empty pool, and there was blood all over those mattresses in the hotel and—”

  “That’s probably not what they took,” said Pike. “I mean, they probably took it by mistake. If I’m right, it was situated next to some evidence against some of the O’Shaunessy clan and—”

  “No.” I took a shaky breath.

  “I told you that you weren’t going to like it.” He turned around and stalked down the hallway to the door to the evidence locker. He unlocked it.

  “You’re saying that someone was stealing evidence to clear the O’Shaunessys and they took Ralph’s evidence too, because it was right next to it.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” came Pike’s voice from inside the evidence room.

  “So, that would mean crooked cops, right? Like the people who leaked the location of our witness in the Johnny O’Shaunessy case.”

  “Stern…”

  “Wouldn’t it?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I lurched forward, poking my head inside the door of the evidence locker. “Well, is it there?”

  Still nothing from Pike.

  “We have police on the O’Shaunessy payroll. How are we supposed to enforce any kind of justice when we can’t even trust our own?”

  Silence.

  Then, Pike’s voice. “It’s not here.”

  I shut my eyes.

  When I opened them, he was standing in front of me. I moved away from the door to let him through. “Pike, we have to do something about this.”