On the beach, Sidney made sandcastles and frolicked in the waves with her nieces for an hour before joining her sister to sunbathe on the sand.
“You’re good with them,” Samantha said with a drowsy smile.
Sidney warmed at the unexpected praise. “They’re angels. You’re incredibly lucky.”
“Where did you get that suit?”
She glanced down at the blue and white bikini. Under the relentless sun, her tan lines were embarrassingly apparent. “You gave it to me.”
“I have excellent taste,” she murmured.
“Yes,” Sidney agreed. Samantha looked marvelous in a tiny black two-piece, her subtle, sculpted curves displayed to perfection.
“I forget you have a great body,” she said. “You’re always covered up.”
Sidney was surprised by her sister’s faintly envious tone. She often felt like a lurching shadow next to Samantha, who was petite and feminine. Fashionably thin, achingly beautiful and gorgeously blond, men stared at her sister wherever she went. And she stared right back.
“So what have you been up to?” Samantha asked, rolling over onto her flat stomach.
She hesitated. “I met someone today.”
Samantha looked over the rims of her sunglasses. “Oh really?”
Pushing aside her misgivings, Sidney told her sister about this morning’s strange events. True to character, Samantha was more interested in the man than the fact that her little sister’s life had been turned upside down. She’d always been boy-crazy.
“A cop, huh? Is he hot?”
“Yes,” Sidney admitted.
“Mmm. What does he look like?”
“Dark. Hard. Well-built.”
“Hard? How delicious.”
“Not like that,” she said, her cheeks heating. “Tough, kind of. You know.”
Samantha smiled wickedly. “Was he in uniform?”
“A suit.”
“Did he have a gun?”
“Probably.”
“And cuffs?”
“I didn’t frisk him, Sam.”
“Oh, well. Did he frisk you?”
“No,” she said, smiling back at her.
“Ah, but you wanted him to. Right?”
When she shrugged, Samantha ran with it. “I always wanted to do a cop,” she mused. “Something about being overpowered. Or maybe it’s just the handcuff thing.”
Sidney didn’t doubt that Lieutenant Cruz would be willing to oblige her sister on that front. Samantha’s bored, sophisticate attitude and golden girl good looks were probably right up his alley. She wasn’t a bimbo, but she played the part well. And she played men, her favorite game, like a pro.
“He considers me a suspect,” she reminded her sister, and herself.
Samantha was silent for a moment. “Greg and I are getting divorced.”
Sidney laid her head back on the towel, annoyed with Samantha for changing the subject and always putting her own problems first. She and Greg had been getting divorced for years. Sidney hoped they would stop torturing the kids and get on with it.
“It’s for real this time, Sid. I think he’s cheating again.”
Sidney shifted uncomfortably, wishing she could make herself scarce.
Samantha straightened. “You already knew? How could you? I haven’t even touched you today.” She looked down the beach, where her daughters were playing in the sand. “Son of a bitch,” she said between clenched teeth, her blue eyes hard as ice. “He brings that slut around my kids? What does he do, bribe them not to tell?”
“I don’t think they understand. So he doesn’t have to.”
“Son of a bitch,” she repeated. “If I wasn’t sleeping with his business partner, I’d take his ass to the cleaners.”
Chapter 3
The next morning, it wasn’t the sound of a dog barking that rose with Sidney from the depths of her dream to the cold surface of reality. It was a woman’s scream.
She struggled to break free from the cloak of darkness that surrounded her, but her arms were bound behind her back. Thrashing her head from side to side, she fought against the restraints.
A plastic shroud covered her face.
When she opened her mouth to scream, the plastic drew closer, cutting off her airway completely.
She was sinking, drowning, suffocating.
A dark, dank cold invaded her body, seeping beneath the plastic. At first, it was a relief to gain a precious inch of space, a single breath. Then a pungent, earthy smell engulfed her, the scent of decay and sea and wet blood. The cold pressed in, crawling up her spine and around her neck, rushing into her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils…
Sidney clawed the sheet away from her face, gasping for air. Her heart was pounding, her lungs pumping hard and fast, her pulse racing.
Marley was sitting at the foot of the bed, tail twitching, highly annoyed with Sidney for disturbing her slumber.
“Oh God,” she groaned, laying her head back down on the pillow. “This has got to stop.” Her whole life, she’d been fighting against this strangeness inside herself. Now it was fighting back, mutating, stronger than ever. She could wear gloves, shun society and deny touch, but how could she chase away dreams?
The blankets got wrapped around her head while she was sleeping, she rationalized. She’d been tossing and turning all night, bothered by the uncharacteristically high temperatures outside and a deeper, more invasive heat within.
It was no more than she deserved for entertaining lustful fantasies involving Marc Cruz, tangled sheets and handcuffs.
Now she was cold. Chilled to the bone, in fact.
A gentle morning breeze from a balmy onshore flow ruffled the curtains. The oscillating fan in the corner rumbled lazily, barely causing a stir. Shivering, she climbed out of bed to switch it off, rubbing at the gooseflesh on her arms. She closed the window, too, noticing that her nipples were tightly puckered and painfully hard.
Resisting the urge to rub herself there, as well, she hurried into the bathroom and turned the shower faucet all the way to “Hot.”
Marc pulled at the collar of his shirt. It was a sticky day, hazy and warm, almost ninety degrees before 9:00 a.m.
In other parts of the country, where temperature and humidity levels soared, this kind of weather would be a nonissue. For a city whose residents were spoiled by high seventies most of the year, it was damn near intolerable.
Deputy Chief Stokes and a handful of homicide officers were milling around the gravel pull-out on Pacific Coast Highway near Agua Hedionda Lagoon. Literally translated as “stinking water,” the lagoon separated downtown Oceanside from uptown Carlsbad, educated from underprivileged, rich from poor.
Driving along PCH through O’side, one could encounter almost any kind of vice, from prostitution and drugs to adult bookstores and sleazy strip joints. Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, on the northern border of town, supplied plenty of young male clients for the burgeoning