“Yeah,” he acknowledged, gazing into the crimson depths of his glass.
“I thought I was falling in love,” she said. “God, I’ve been stupid.”
“Me too, sometimes. I married my biggest mistake.”
“At least you didn’t kill her off.”
“Divorce; a form of manslaughter.”
“How old am I?”
“Thirty-eight. Why?”
“Thirty-seven and change.”
He said nothing.
“You’d think I’d learn, Morgan.”
“Yeah.”
“This place is a mess.”
There was a stillness about her that he could feel like a shimmering at his temples. Her hazel eyes seemed resolute, her auburn hair was mussed as if she had just made love. Her lean body torqued sensually from the hips as she surveyed her apartment.
“I don’t want the ghoul brigade,” she said. “I’ll do it myself.”
A loosely knit group of volunteers who had lost loved ones to murder or suicide would confront their own nightmares by turning up after the investigators were finished, if summoned, to scrub blood off floors, scrape viscera from walls, clean furniture and rugs, do whatever had to be done. Miranda did not want to deal with the goodness of strangers.
There were professional crime scene cleaners. She had worked with them. They were good, but this was private.
“Morgan.”
“Yeah?
“How come I’m alive?”
I don’t know, he thought.
“Jesus,” she said, “it’s about me, isn’t it? Philip was collateral damage. Oh Jesus Christ Lord God Almighty. This was a message to me.” She smiled. “Swear and a prayer,” she explained.
She looked at Morgan, a recovering Presbyterian and avowed anti-theist. It made him uneasy when she swore. He mouthed some wine and swallowed.
“Amen,” she said.
“It’s not always about you.”
“Sometimes it is,” she said, then repeated: “Amen.”
The next three days went by in a blur. The minutes and hours, daylight and darkness, were undifferentiated in Miranda’s mind. Morgan had taken her to his place in the Annex. Corking the Châteauneuf-du-Pape with a downward blow of his fist, he had grasped the bottle by the neck, scooped up some clothes in a bag, escorted her to the car, and driven even more carefully than usual. He was acutely aware that she disliked his driving. She always took the wheel when they were together, but this was an exception.
While she stayed with him, he slept on the sofa. Incredibly, his random collection of her clothing included changes of underwear and enough variety. But she was uncomfortable being alone in someone else’s bed. She stayed for two nights and then went home because she was lonely.
Now she was gazing across the room at him in Starbucks, just down College Street from Police Headquarters. His back was to her; he was picking up a couple of cappuccinos. He turned and shambled over. She smiled. He was trying to look after her.
When the crime scene was declared open, he had gone back to her apartment and cleaned up, even scrubbed the scrawled blood from her bathroom walls.
She had been suspended with pay. He was posted to a cold case that he could work on his own, and which gave him the time to shadow Spivak and Stritch, since that was what the superintendent knew he was going to do, anyway.
“How are you making out?” he asked.
“Same as last time you saw me, eight hours ago.”
“Ten. I’ve got an update.…”
“On?”
“You, mostly.”
“Shoot.”
“Your prints were on the gun — which was definitely the murder weapon.”
“As expected.”
“And no one else’s. That’s okay, though,” he assured her. “Your gun should have been smeared with layers of your prints. But there was only one neat cluster. At least two rounds were fired. And there were powder traces under your nails.”
“We know that. I was at the range —”
“No, you weren’t at the range that day. It was a couple of days before.”
“Really? You checked?” She paused, trying to sort out memory from reconstruction. “Two days before? My head’s more messed up than I thought — there was only one bullet wound.…”
“Even Spivak agrees the prints were too neat.”
“So where’s the other slug?”
“Good question.”
“But two rounds were fired?”
“Only one bullet was missing from the clip, but forensics are sure at least two were fired. Whoever did this was meticulous, replacing the bullet.”
“What else?”
Morgan looked into her eyes and raised his cappuccino in a gentle salute.
“The kitchen knife, it was yours, it had your prints on it — of course — but no blood on the handle, only the blade.”
“Suggesting what?”
“Well, there’s more. Ellen Ravenscroft called.”
“And?”
“She says the gut wounds don’t match up with the knife. It has a serrated edge. At this point it seems a red herring.”
“And? You’re looking solemner and solemner. Spit it out, Morgan.”
“Well, you and Philip had sex.”
“Often.”
“That night, I mean. I wasn’t asking a question.”
“And?”
“You had sex with someone else as well.”
“What?”
“Seems that way.”
“Then someone had sex with me, goddamn it. Who?”
He shrugged, almost apologetically.
“Oh my God, Morgan. Can they tell a sequence?”
“You mean who was first? No.”
“It had to be Philip,” she said. “Then he was killed. Then his killer … while Philip was in the same bed.” Miranda gagged but stifled the rush in her throat to retch.
“We’ll get the bastard.”
Even with her gut clenched and her head reeling, Miranda acknowledged to herself that Morgan had sworn. A mild expletive, but for him an indication of formidable anger. She was glad he was on her side. Controlled rage was a powerful ally.
She reached across the table and placed a hand over his. “Morgan. Since I was drugged — they’ve established that, right. It was a GHB cocktail. Used for date rape — does that mean Philip had sex with me while I was unconscious as well as the other guy?”
“Miranda —”
“It’s okay. And it seems less likely that his killer would … oh Jesus, it’s sickening … get off in me with a bloody corpse on the bed. No, it had to be Philip offering to share me, then he took a turn on his own, then he died.”
Her eyes were glazed and her voice