SATISH
Satish picked up the phone and notebook. White-faced, AnnaSophia groped across the clutter-free countertop. He grabbed the TV remote and placed it in her clammy hand. She flipped on a flat-screen TV as KGO’s late-night newscast started. Ignoring him, she stared at the flickering screen. The lead story opened with a teaser: Mysterious Connection to Three South San Jose Homicides.
TV producers knew how to hook viewers. Four boring stories first. AnnaSophia, silent and stony. The intro repeated. After a decade the anchor added, “Independent sources confirm an under-age girl was seen Saturday night in a bar with the youngest homicide victim. SJPD has yet to confirm the victim’s or the girl’s identity.”
Ben Davis, face tight, eyes averted from the brutal lights, pushed past dozens of microphones as if he’d never heard of the Fourth Estate’s sacred duty to dig into personal lives, speculating when nothing hard turned up.
“Be glad Davis is on the case,” Satish said. “He’s a sphinx.”
“Not a Chief Tobin?” She stared at the TV screen, rubbing the cuticle on her left thumb.
“Tobin fed the media to hide his chummy relationship with your husband.”
“Is Tobin why you resigned—despite your promotion?”
“Yeah. Despite my promotion.” Because of the promotion if Satish wanted to get into details—which he did not. Why tell her his stomach gnawed on itself like an animal in a steel trap chewing bits of its leg every day he worked with the state investigators and the Feebies and CIA and all the other government groups? Hordes of crime fighters stirred up more interest in the dead Michael Romanov than they’d ever shown in the live Silicon Valley tycoon.
The KGO anchor moved on to recap national news and sports. AnnaSophia muted the volume but asked no more embarrassing questions about his resignation. If ... a big if ... if she hadn’t killed her husband, did she set the bastard up? That should matter.
It didn’t because he’d go nuts if he let his screwed-up feelings out of their basement.
“You should get your lawyer on this,” he said. “The story’s a stick of dynamite with a hair-trigger fuse. Some hacker will steal Alexandra’s name from the TV station’s cloud. Or appropriate her records from the school’s files. Or dig up pictures of her in an online chat you’ve always considered private. Stealing nude pictures of celebrities is all the rage right now.”
“Alexandra’s not a celebrity.” AnnaSophia tossed the remote on the counter.
“Her father was.” Satish opened his hands wide, palms up. “That connection’s close enough for the sickos.”
“What about the FBI?” She threw open the fridge, removed a package, and slammed it on the counter. “Can they do anything?”
“Reid said he has a friend—a computer genius—he’d contact.”
Her skin turned the color of dirty dishwasher. “What friend?”
“No idea. Reid likes his power games.” Satish watched her eyes go flat and a muscle tick in her jaw. “I assume the friend might indulge in his own cyberhacking now and again?”
“Without a name, I can’t say.” She delivered her reply in a schoolmarmish tone as if reprimanding a student for asking a stupid question.
So she knows his identity. Their eyes deadlocked. More irritated than he wanted to admit, Satish squashed the impulse to mention Cassie. “If you have to grind beans—”
“I don’t.” She ripped a zip-top off the package and measured ground coffee into the espresso machine. “I’m having coffee. Do you want some?”
“Black, please. Without arsenic.”
Her mouth twitched. “Arsenic’s too easy to trace, you know.”
He grinned, glad the tension around her eyes eased. Behind her, the muted TV anchor’s crimson lips opened and closed—a shark smelling blood. “Never had a homicide by poisoning.”
“Was Maverick’s friend shot?” She poured water into the machine without measuring it.
“At close range. More left of her face than of Maverick’s, but I’m glad she died.”
If the viciousness in his tone surprised her, she let it slide. The slightest quiver in her hands slopped coffee into the pot. When she spoke, her voice vibrated with tension. “Tell me Alexandra is a coincidence—and not the common thread in four killings. Maverick swore they met once. Did Cassie—wasn’t that her name?—go with him to Leather’s?”
“No, she had a date. Got home after he did. I never told her Alexandra’s name.”
“Let’s sit in the family room.” AnnaSophia transferred mugs to a tray and added a pitcher of cream. “The toxicity from this conversation must’ve poisoned food and dishes and everything else in here.”
He took the tray without asking. “I assume if neither of us dies, you won’t have to have the kitchen fumigated.”
“You have a macabre sense of humor, Detective.”
“Ex-detective.” He set the tray on the glass coffee table, and a memory brought back the first time she’d served him a drink. Lemonade. At Belle Haven. So far from being heaven, he wasn’t surprised she’d bolted from the lethal environment.
“You’re frowning, Ex-Detective.” She poured their coffee with a steady hand, then held her mug with fingers laced around its warmth.
“Talking about toxicity reminded me of Belle Haven.”
Coffee sloshed on her knee, but she didn’t flinch. “Why?”
“Reid told me about the incinerator.”
Her mug slipped.
“Watch it!” He lunged, knocking her sideways. Hot coffee sprayed the hand he brought up to protect her face. With his other hand on her shoulder, he couldn’t help but feel her bones.
“When’d you eat last?” When he’d first met her, he admired her soft curves. Not the fashion preferred by the Valley’s anorectics. Despite the sweater, he could feel her vertebrae.
“Adrenaline intensifies metabolism.” She slid to the far side of the sofa, adjusted her sweater, patted her hair. “Like cops, ER docs run on adrenaline and caffeine.”
“That’s why you’ve lost weight?” He reached for a napkin and blotted his blistered hand. “You’re whipping around the ER without giving a thought to that incinerator.”
“What did Reid tell you?” she whispered, taking his scalded hand with the gentleness of a mother examining her hurt child.
“A gruesome story.” The napkin fell on the floor.
She turned his hand over with amazing gentleness, but he winced. “Let me get a bandage.”
“I’m fine,” he lied and fought the adolescent urge to say a kiss would heal his boo-boo.
Heal his boo-boo, but rip open his heart. The room spun. He had to look away to ask, “Did Reid tell me the truth? Did the hazmat company find human teeth in the incinerator?”