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remembers how Nick saw what her face did when he called her part boy. She couldn’t respond at first because of the tight pressure of what she wanted to say, the way words bunched up in her throat. Nick said he was sorry. He knew that what he had said wasn’t true. She was a girl. He knew that. “Think about how hard this is for me,” he said. “It’s just a job.” “It makes me feel small.” She did not care. She did not forgive him.
Yet even though he had told her his secret, she didn’t tell him hers, not then, and when she eventually did—that she had a chromosome that she shouldn’t, a rare genetic condition—he said, Why didn’t you tell me before?
She feels possessive—or rather, possessed by possession, curled into its damp warmth, held by the way she wants to hold on to Jolene’s transient beauty, the buttery skin and sloppy mouth, silver-fair eyelashes, devoted smile, all something that seems to belong only to Samantha for the very reason that it will be shared with everyone else.
Light slices into the car. Samantha’s heart goes fast. She reaches for the girl’s hand. Samantha wants to say her name, but isn’t sure what to call her. She is still holding her hand when the car behind hurtles into them, running them off the road.
When her mother died and Georgia walked away from the mortgage on their worn little house, she saw the sails in the apartment building’s lobby and imagined them bellied out. What is a sail without wind? Georgia had been working at the Lady for six months then. She was supposed to be twenty-one, but she showed Dale a fake ID when he hired her, and she will be twenty-one soon enough.
The other detectives rib him about working overtime, but since Tess dumped him, he doesn’t have anything better to do. “He loves the uniform,” says Backyard. “I get hard just thinking about how much he loves it,” says Pradko. Holly, though, never says anything, only lifts her dark gaze from her paperwork to consider him. “She’s spooky,” Tess said after she met Holly. Tess would have pitied Holly if Victor had explained, which is why he hadn’t.
He sees his day aging, how his eyes will scum over with fatigue. Close encounters with higher-ups. The paperwork. He wants to call Holly, but he shouldn’t. Not today. She has taken this day off, same as she does every year.
She avoids grocery stores when she can. Too many kids. A Sunday means even more kids than usual. But today she had to go.
“STRANGULATION,” AMADOR SAYS on the drive over. The cell heats her sweaty ear. “There were two people in the car.” “But just one body?” Holly cruises through a red light, wishing the Taurus had more horsepower. “The owner of the car says his girlfriend was driving. Her name is Samantha Lind. No sign of her so far.”
But Holly thought of nothing, nothing at all, the nothingness a loud void, when she learned that Daniel, two months shy of his first birthday, in the full ripeness of summer, had been left, forgotten, in the back seat of Matthew’s closed car.
Rabideaux stared down at the dead girl in the silver dress. His pocket looked fuller than before. It bulged. Victor remembered the two wads of cash in the crashed car, and how Rabideaux had inspected the vehicle. Victor had the feeling that if he looked inside the car again, the money would be gone.
He steps on the brake to start the car but then stops, frowning. Something is jammed beneath the pedal. He reaches down. His fingers go still with surprise. It’s a fold of cash, the thinner of the two he had found in the dead girl’s car.
Melody didn’t like prayers. If God was listening, maybe the devil was, too. Maybe it was a bad idea to say what you wanted out loud.
It makes her impatient, the way people think that a stripper must be some cracked-out whore, like no good woman ever took off her clothes for practical reasons. What is marriage, half the time? Women have sex they don’t want in order to keep the peace and avoid the calamity of divorce, yet everyone thinks that’s perfectly acceptable.
The head of his penis touched the cool glass interior of the jar. He curved, coming into the jar. Peaceful, Ron screwed the lid on. He stuffed himself, still glistening, back into his pants. He labeled the jar and put it in the refrigerator with the others.
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Bella makes an impatient sound in her throat. She abandons the brush and dabs a middle finger into one of the dark reds on her palette. She rubs the color onto Georgia’s lower lip. Georgia lets her mouth open beneath Bella’s pressure. Georgia thinks, This is different. She thinks, Bella is taking extra care. She wonders why. She has a thought and then smothers it. Georgia is falling into the same trap men at the club fall into. They forget or ignore that they have purchased a woman’s attention. Do this for me, and I will give this to you. Quid pro quo is all there ever is, yet some men think
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Georgia was already a CI, in fact if not in name, and Holly could tell when someone was too curious for her own good. What would Amador say, if he knew? He’d say, She’s vulnerable. No one’s forcing her, Holly would tell him. We need information. You’re using her. You want this solved? You are using her as bait.
“I’m not saying the perp is targeting strippers. Not exactly.” “What, then?” “Maybe he goes after women who don’t belong. Who don’t fit his idea of what women should be. Serials have rules about who makes good prey.”
Amador had this way to him. A quiet dignity in his whiskey eyes. A talent for waiting. He was waiting now. Maybe he was waiting for her to tell him what she missed, what she wanted. Maybe it would be as easy as leaning into him, to feel his hand on her, his mouth. Rain drummed the roof. A pressure mounted within her. He would take away her grief if she let him try, if he could. It would be a kindness. It would be theft.
The room gets eerily quiet. “Is he a suspect?” Holly can feel the other detectives resist the idea, how it swells against them like an invisible balloon, but she doesn’t share their cultish feeling that cops must be loyal to other cops, that they must protect their own. Holly is furious. She sees no reason to defend Rabideaux.
Everyone else believed Dale had been in the club the entire night it happened, but when Catherine went to tell him that Lady Jade was high, she couldn’t find him on the floor. He wasn’t in his office. Finally, when she was searching near the kitchen, she saw him coming in through a back door, keys in hand.
He remembered driving back to the club, the crash glittering, tail-lit, in his rearview mirror. Lady Jade was fresh in his mind, yet already fading. A cheap iris, petals curling the instant the stem was cut. Ruby lay in the trunk of his car, unconscious and bound and gagged. He stayed at the club until it closed, enjoying the thought of her in the trunk’s tight darkness. She was waiting for him, and she didn’t even know it.
