Cooling her temper over a beer at the nearest dive bar, conveniently located one short and fast drive around the corner, she pondered just how weird it was that she was in some sort of gender reversal with her soon-to-be-spouse. She was the cop, he was the gardener. Okay, landscape architect, but it was all about playing with plants. She loved action movies, he preferred comedies and could get misty at so-called chick flicks. She enjoyed cursing and resorted to it under stress, yet she’d never heard him say more than one muttered “shit” when he couldn’t get something to work, and he’d never cursed at her.
All her girlfriends envied her. Alex was so kind and caring, so compassionate, so everything that their apparently Neanderthal boyfriends and husbands weren’t. She might have wondered about his sexual orientation if it weren’t for the fact that he obviously enjoyed sex with women and more importantly with her.
In fact, sex—making love—was the one area where they’d always been in complete agreement. Until lately. Until he’d gotten his license and a job with a great local firm and seemed to wake up to the fact that his girlfriend’s job didn’t come with such regular hours and never would. He’d been proud when she made detective a year ago, but he must’ve misunderstood the job because he seemed to think that she should be home with him at a regular time every night and spend her weekends with him.
And since they’d gotten engaged it was even worse. Snide comments every time the phone rang or her pager beeped. If they were in the middle of something and she answered the phone, he took it as a personal affront. It was as if she’d struck a blow to his manhood when she wasn’t so blinded by his prowess as a lover that she could even hear a summons from the job.
After twenty minutes and two beers, she’d lost the anger she brought with her to the bar, but then she waited another twenty minutes before venturing out on the roads. She had seen enough DUIs to know it was never worth the risk.
The house was dark. Alex was sitting alone in the living room watching a ball game on TV and drinking a beer. He didn’t look up when she came in the room.
“I’m sorry.”
He turned his gaze to her, but his face was cold. Even his eyes, and she loved his brown eyes, were cold.
“I shouldn’t have cursed at you, I’m really sorry.”
He nodded and turned his gaze back to the game. She stood there, feeling stupid for a moment, then went to take a shower.
The tears came when she was under the water and she tried to hold them back. Shitty, shitty day. She was a bad cop for taking it home with her. You weren’t supposed to do that. Cops who did that imploded. You had to separate, find a place inside you that the violence couldn’t touch, only she couldn’t do that with death.
Kids were always the hardest. She didn’t think any cop ever got past the kids. You tried not to think about what they’d suffered, you tried to be objective when you had to catalog bruises blossoming like flowers on a small body or write down which limbs were misshapen from a child being shaken or thrown. You swallowed your anger when you questioned the asshole sitting across from you who’d inflicted those injuries. You played the game because that’s what you were sworn to do—uphold the law—even if the law seemed to protect the rights of useless fuckers while failing to protect their innocent victims.
This girl had been right on the brink. Not a girl anymore, but not a woman yet. Her body changing every day at that age. She’d been pretty, but she probably didn’t know it. Not yet, not ever. Probably thought she was too fat or too thin or that her hair should’ve been straight or a different color. Skin that pale wouldn’t tan. Had that been another part of her body that she’d grieved?
She heard the bathroom door click open while she was gulping back more tears and then the shower curtain slid back and Alex stepped in behind her and wrapped his arms around her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, turning in his arms so she could get her own around his neck. She wasn’t apologizing to him this time as much as to the girl, but he didn’t need to know that. He held her and kissed her head and bent to kiss her face and they stood there, rocking for a long minute before he said, “I’m sorry, too.”
He’d brushed a hand across her breast and then bent to take her nipple in his mouth and she moaned against him, feeling herself respond the way she always did to his touch. She grabbed him with her hand because she didn’t have much use for foreplay and he shifted her up against the wall so he could slip inside her and then they fucked, made love, whatever either of them wanted to call it, and afterward she’d fallen asleep in the safety of his arms.
So why was she testy again today? Because she knew they should’ve talked? Because he’d made another comment this morning when she’d left early, grabbing an apple for breakfast instead of the eggs he’d offered to make? They would have to talk, but that took energy and time and right now she needed both those things for this case.
Oz picked up the clearer photo of the pentagram and tapped it. “I think this is all the evidence we need to say this was some weird Wicci ritual gone bad.”
“Wicca,” Stephanie said. “I don’t know. Look at the way she was tied. That rope was digging into her skin. I don’t think she was voluntarily participating in this. This looks like a Matthew Shepard thing to me.”
Detective George Wacker, known as Wackjob to his peers, groaned. “Christ Jesus, please don’t go spreading some Broke-back Mountain theory around.”
“Yeah, we don’t need some faggot from the Village Voice up here.” Joe “Fuck-off” Frangione was back with his coffee.
“Really sensitive,” Sean said and then he flushed. He was the youngest next to Stephanie. Midthirties and baby-faced enough to look at least a decade younger.
Everyone paused to look at him for a moment and then Oz laughed and Wackjob said, “Shut up, Puff Daddy.”
“I don’t know why you keep calling me that—it’s Sean Cone, not Sean Combs.”
“Yeah, yeah, Puff Daddy.”
“It’s not like I even like rap.”
“And you’re pretty white, white boy,” Wackjob, who was black and proud, said with an indulgent smile.
Sean flushed again, an embarrassing line of red climbing up his face from his collar. Stephanie’s unsympathetic response was to be glad it wasn’t her.
“Can we focus on the case?” Fuck-off said in between slurps of his coffee. Of the four other detectives in the department he was the only one Stephanie actually disliked. A big man, at least six-four and probably 250 on a doughnut-free day, he liked to throw his weight around with suspects and made no bones about the fact that he thought the only work suitable for women was domestic. He was an asshole, but he was an asshole with a gold badge and a gun and she had enough wisdom to know just how scary that was.
“I didn’t say anything about gay, I just said it looked like harassment,” she said. “Who would allow themselves to be tied up like that?”
“You’re forgetting what we found around her.” Oz tapped the faint circle visible in the photo. “Her own mother said she was into this whole Wicci thing. And let’s not forget that she was drunk.”
That had been one interesting find from the autopsy. Harriet Wembley found traces of alcohol in the girl’s bloodstream. “A trace amount,” Stephanie said.
“It could have dissipated over time. She and her friends do some drinking and then they play this whole little witch game and then they leave her tied to the tree.”
“They forgot her?” Fuck-off took a final