Sex, Lies, and Online Dating (4 page)

“We’ve eliminated Karla Thompson completely,” Sergeant Vernon Mitchell said as he walked into the room. “We just confirmed that she was out of town when the second murder took place.” A pair of reading glasses was perched on the end of the sergeant’s nose, and his white crew cut was cropped so close to his head that he looked almost bald.

Quinn sat and opened one of the murder books. “There’s a relief,” he muttered. Karla Thompson aka sweetpea, the woman who’d smelled like a Marlborough cigarette and sounded like the Marlborough man, had grabbed his ass as they’d stood in line for coffee.

Kurt Weber sat next to Quinn and started to laugh. “I thought I was going to have to bust in and rescue you on that one,” he said, referring to Quinn’s coffee date with Karla a few nights ago.

“Yeah, it was funny as hell,” Quinn grumbled. There were women a guy didn’t mind grabbing his ass. Then there was Karla.

“That’s what you get for being a pretty boy.”

“That’s what I get for letting you write those stupid mushy e-mails. You made her think I wanted to get naked right then and there.” Under normal circumstances, Quinn wouldn’t have minded maneuvering a woman out of her clothes. In fact, getting women naked ranked high on his list, but not with some of the women he’d met lately. The thought of seeing Lucy naked held some appeal, but not when every word would be recorded. And yeah, not when she might be psychotic.

“Quinn, you’re going to concentrate most of your attention on Lucy Rothschild and Maureen Dempsey until we can either clear or charge them.” Sergeant Mitchell pointed to the two photos in front of Quinn.

Quinn looked at the blown-up copies of the driver’s license photos and frowned. Maureen Dempsey, possibly the stupidest woman he’d ever known, and Lucy Rothschild, the woman who wrote about serial killers. He understood why Lucy made the list. She was smart, and if anyone would know how to kill someone and get away with it, it was someone who wrote about it for a living. “I think we can eliminate Maureen. She’s as dumb as a box of rocks.”

“Could be an act,” Kurt pointed out.

Quinn laughed and shook his head. “You heard what she said about those aliens. No one’s that good an actress.”

“She dated all three victims, and we can’t rule her out yet.” Sergeant Mitchell flipped open the top murder book to several different photos of all three victims. They all lay spread-eagle on their beds, as if they’d been posed that way, their noodles limp and pathetic, their mouths open and the dry cleaner’s bag sucked down their throats. “Maybe Kurt’s right. She could be acting, but after listening to the Rothschild tape, I think she’s the more promising. She sounds like she might be bragging. Like she knows how to kill three men and get away with it.”

Quinn flipped a few pages to pictures of sooty fingerprint dust smearing doorways, nightstands, and telephones.

“Maybe she got tired of just writing about murder,” Kurt added as Quinn flipped another page. Black powder covered three different bathroom sinks, toilets, and shower stalls.

“It’s possible she wants to act out what she writes,” Quinn conceded.

The technicians had lifted latent prints off the dry cleaner’s bags, but all of them matched prints of Westco workers. He flipped past various crime scene photos. Three dead men and no solid physical evidence that linked any one person to all three.

“I’d like to get a look at what she might be working on now.” Quinn glanced up at the sergeant. “Maybe we should just pull her in and ask her. All we have to do is catch her in a few lies.”

“Not yet. We can’t risk her lawyering up.” Sergeant Mitchell scratched the back of his neck. “Kurt,” he said and pointed a finger at the other detective. “Work on a couple more of those romantic e-mails from hardluvnman and send them to those two women.”

Quinn cringed. Kurt read romance novels and watched chick flicks, and he and the sergeant thought Kurt knew what sort of mushy shit women liked to hear. He’d been married for more than twenty years, so perhaps he did. “No more shit about how hot they look in their photos,” he warned. “Or that ‘looking for a soul mate’ crap.”

The sergeant chuckled. “Set up dates for a few cocktails this time. Get those women loose. When they e-mail back, let me know.” He turned to leave but said over his shoulder, “Oh, and we need to question the people at Westco again.”

“Kurt and I planned to do that this afternoon,” Quinn said as he watched the sergeant disappear.

An hour later, Kurt finished the “romantic” e-mail. “I just finished this,” he said and handed Quinn a copy. “Sergeant Mitchell thinks it looks good. Maybe my best work yet.”

Quinn glanced at what Kurt had written, and he felt his brain squeeze. “Jesus H. Macy.”

While Lucy’s e-mail program downloaded her mail, she plugged Maroon 5 into her CD player. She grabbed the small gold-framed glasses out of the case on her desk and placed them on her face so she could see without putting her nose on the screen. The problem with getting older was that she’d inherited her mother’s nearsightedness.

Her twenty-pound orange tabby, Mr. Snookums, whom she’d also inherited, jumped up onto the desk and scattered papers and magazines.

Mr. Snookums had shown up at Lucy’s door five years earlier, a skinny stray that she’d nursed back to health and for whom she’d paid more than a thousand dollars in vet bills to save from certain death. Snookums repaid her by being temperamental, totally passive-aggressive, and developing a raging eating disorder. But at night, when she went to bed, he curled up beside her and purred his own brand of pure love and affection. A continuous rattling that Lucy found very comforting.

Mr. Snookums rubbed his face against her feet, then sat and curled his tail around to his front paws. He stared at her as if he could mesmerize her into adding Meow Mix to his bowl, but he was on a diet and Lucy could not be persuaded. Instead, she checked out a Betsey Johnson velvet coat at Nordstrom.com and the newest collection of handbags on the Kate Spade website. She didn’t know which was hotter, Betsey’s coat, Kate’s newest leather shopper, or Adam Levine.

As she and Adam sang about being in love and standing in the pouring rain, she opened her inbox. Up popped fifty-six pieces of spam, three e-mails from her friends, and a joke of the day from her mother. While she deleted the spam, two more e-mails appeared in her reader’s mail file. She thought about opening them but didn’t. Ninety-nine out of a hundred e-mails she received from readers were perfectly lovely, but she never knew when she would get that one incendiary e-mail capable of ruining her day. The one that questioned her research, comma placement, and her intelligence. Opening reader mail was as risky as going to her post office box. Sometimes there was great stuff in there, and sometimes there were letters from crazy people wanting money or warning her that she was going straight to hell. Which was one of the reasons Lucy only visited her PO box once a month or so.

Just as she was about to exit her e-mail program, something popped into the account she’d set up for responding to online men. Lucy straightened and lowered her feet to the floor. Mr. Snookums jumped in her lap like a twenty-pound bowling ball, and she reached around him to open the e-mail.

To: [email protected]

Lucy,

What was wrong with him?

Mr. Snookums butted his head into her jaw, and she shoved him out of her lap. The cat hit the floor with a heavy thud, and he let out an angry meow. Lucy was going to turn Quinn down, of course, but before she did, she forwarded the e-mail to her friends to get their reactions.

Typical of Clare, she thought Lucy should give Quinn points for at least trying to sound romantic. “He did get the color of your eyes right.”

Adele wrote, “What kind of guy writes about sparks and flames? Is he trying too hard?”

Maddie made her opinion known with one short sentence. “Don’t engage the freaks.”

Lucy laughed and glanced at her calender. Next Saturday, she had to speak at the Women of Mystery readers and writers group, but other than that she was free. She talked to her friends all the time, but she hadn’t been out with them for a month. “Let’s get together Monday for chimichangas and margaritas,” she suggested to her friends, then pushed Send. Next she brought up Quinn’s e-mail and clicked Reply.

She didn’t have time for a man, especially a hardluvnman who wanted to gaze into her eyes and turn her spark into a flame.

Quinn pushed the sleeves of his thick olive green sweater up his forearms and reached for the drink menu propped next to the candle. The flat transformer was once again taped to the small of Quinn’s back, just above the waistband of his black trousers. Across the street, Anita sat in the van, with her receiving equipment filtering out background noises, while Kurt waited in the kitchen to snag a glass with legible fingerprints. Tomorrow night, they would repeat the same process with Maureen Dempsey.

The door to the Red Feather Lounge opened, and Quinn lifted his attention from the drink menu. Lucy Rothschild stepped inside looking even better than he remembered. It had taken Kurt two e-mails to coax her into meeting Quinn, but here she was, wrapped up in a black trench coat that tied at the waist and covered her to her knees. She wore red shoes with high heels, and for one brief second, Quinn let himself wonder if she was naked beneath that coat.

She looked right at him, and he stood and moved from behind the corner table. Subdued bar lights shone in the gold hair curling about her shoulders. She walked toward him looking like a centerfold and turning heads. Her hair bounced a little with each graceful step.

Too bad she might be psychotic.

He took the soft hand she offered him. Her fingers were chilled, and he looked down into her face, searching for signs that she was crazy. The kind of crazy that slipped a bag over a man’s head while she rode him like Seabiscuit. All he saw was a hint of humor shining in her deep blue eyes.

“You’re on time,” she said with the same humor curving her red lips. “Your dog didn’t get into the trash tonight?”

“No. I put the garbage in the garage before I left.”

She let go of his hand and set a small red purse on the table. “I was a little surprised to get your e-mail.” She reached for her belt, and Quinn moved behind her.

“The first e-mail? Or the second one, when I had to beg?” The tips of his fingers brushed the smooth skin of her neck as he moved her hair aside and grasped her coat by the collar. She smelled like his mother’s garden in spring, and holding her hair was like holding a bit of sunshine. Like…he stopped. Good Lord, he was beginning to sound like those sappy e-mails Kurt sent. Even in his own head. If he wasn’t careful, before he knew it he’d be listening to Jewel and writing shitty poetry.

She looked up at him over her shoulder, and her cheek brushed the backs of his fingers. “You didn’t beg. You were persistent.”

“Whatever you call it, it worked.” He let her hair go and held the collar as she shrugged out of the coat. He was in the Red Feather to work the Breathless case, not get sidetracked by how her hair smelled or her smooth cheek. Tonight he was going to listen and watch and seduce information out of her. If that meant he was going to have to seduce the hell out of her in the process, he was only doing his job. At some point in the investigation, he might have to slide his hand to the back of her head and bring her mouth to his. And while he did that, he was going to remember that she was the number one suspect in a criminal investigation. It wasn’t personal. It was the job.

“I turned you down the first time because I’m really not dating right now.”

He handed the coat to her, and she hung it over the back of a chair. “Why is that?” She wore one of those fuzzy red sweaters made of rabbit or something equally soft. It clung to the tops of her arms, defying gravity and leaving her neck and shoulders bare.

“I’m extremely busy with work,” she said as his gaze slid lower, down her spine and over the curve of her behind covered in a black skirt that reached just above the backs of her knees.

He held her chair for her while she sat. “At the hospital?”

She stilled for a fraction of a second, then said, “Yeah.”

“Which floor do you work on?” He moved to sit across the small table from her.

Silence as she reached for the drink menu, then, “Maternity. Hmm…let’s see here. What should I have? Martini or mojito?”

She wasn’t all that great a liar. He’d certainly been around better, but not all sociopaths were good liars. Even some of the bad ones still managed to pass a polygraph. But the one thing all of them had in common was a total lack of conscience.

A waitress who didn’t even look old enough to serve drinks approached the table. Lucy ordered a mojito, Quinn, a bottle of Becks. While they waited, he sat back in his chair and tilted his head to one side. Time to get busy. “Tell me about yourself.”

She leaned forward and rested her forearms on the table. “I’m so dull I’d hate to bore you to death.”

“Oh, I doubt you could do that.” The candle in the center of the table flickered, scattering tiny shards of light across her clavicle and bare shoulders. “Tell me about your family.”

“There’s really not much to tell. My mother and father divorced when I was in the sixth grade. They fought a lot, so it wasn’t a big shock when my dad left.” She shrugged, and the little right sleeve of her sweater slid down her smooth arm to her elbow. “After that, my mother worked long hours, and I took care of my little brother.”

“How old is your brother?”

“He’s twenty-four. I’m ten years older than Matt.” She raised a hand to push the sweater back up to the edge of her shoulder. “How about you? Brothers? Sisters?”

“I have a younger brother and sister,” he answered truthfully. He told her about his seven nieces and how loud holidays were with all those shrieking girls running around. “My father died about three years ago, and my mother’s been nagging me to produce a grandson.”

“You’ve had a rough time in the past few years.”

Quinn’s gaze followed her sweater as it once again slipped down her arm. “How’s that?”

“First your dad and then your wife.”

Oh yeah. His wife. “Yes,” he said and returned his gaze to hers. “I loved Millie very much. She was everything in the world to me, but I need to move on without her. I have to try and get my life back. She’d want that for me.” He wondered if the lies about Millie sounded as lame as he thought they did. He wondered if Lucy had worn that sweater to distract him.

“She’d want you to date as many women as you can possibly meet via the Internet?”

Quinn didn’t point out that Lucy was meeting men via the Internet. Possibly killing them too. Instead he said, “Millie would want me to do whatever makes me happy.”

Lucy pushed her sweater back up. “I imagine a lot of women would want their husbands to pine away for them a little longer than six months.”

“Millie is different from a lot of women.” If Lucy continued to do battle with her clothes, it was going to be a very long night. Watching her was like watching a slow striptease.

“Don’t you mean
was
different?”

“What?” He raised his gaze to hers as desire, hot and unwelcome as hell, twisted and tugged and gave a little kick to the pit of his stomach. The woman looking back at him over the flickering candle might be innocent. Might be a mystery writer and nothing more. A victim of circumstance. Or she might be responsible for the murder of three men.

“You said, ‘Millie is different’ as if she were still alive,” Lucy said.

Shit.
He’d let himself get distracted by her sweater. She was sharp, and he was going to have to be even sharper. Which meant he was going to have to pay more attention to doing his job and less attention to the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders. “I meant
was,
of course.”

A tiny crease appeared between her brows. “Perhaps it’s too soon for you to date.”

“No.” He shook his head and gave her his best “trust me” smile. One he’d used many times to put murder suspects and drug dealers at ease. “Sometimes I still refer to my father in the present tense, too,” he lied as easily as he smiled. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know he’s gone. Just like I know Millie’s gone and she’s never coming back. I will always feel the loss of her, but that doesn’t mean I have to stand in one place and feel the pain of it every day. For the rest of my life.”

Her brow smoothed, and he knew the second she decided to believe him. Yeah, she was smart and very perceptive. If she wasn’t a murder suspect, she was just the sort of woman he usually went for. But she was a suspect, and it would be a cold day in hell before a suspect outsmarted Detective Quinn McIntyre. No matter how smart and gorgeous. No matter how hot she was or how hot she made him.