Sex, Lies, and Online Dating (6 page)

He lifted his face and spoke just above her moist mouth. “See me again.”

It wasn’t a question, and she nodded. “Okay.”

“Monday.”

“Okay.”

He dropped his arms and took a step back. Dazed, she stared into the variegated shadows of his face and raised a hand to the tender skin below her bottom lip where his chin had abraded her. She wondered if he’d left a mark.

“Did I hurt you?”

The little patch felt raw to the touch. “I’m okay.”

He placed his fingers beneath her chin and tilted her face toward the streetlight. His thumb brushed her jaw, and he leaned forward to lightly kiss just below her bottom lip. “I’m sorry.” She felt his whispered breath on her skin. The warmth of it brushed her chin and slid down the side of her throat. “I got a little carried away.”

She closed her eyes and waited for the return of his mouth to hers.

“Lucy.”

“Yes.”

“Either you leave now, by yourself. Or you leave with me.” He stepped back and cold air separated his chest from the front of her coat but did little to cool her heated cheeks. “What’s it going to be?”

Lucy opened her eyes and cleared her throat. “I’m leaving.” She did not believe in love at first sight. “By myself.” She left that up to romantics and romance writers like Clare. But lust…lust was different. Lust at first sight was something that Lucy did believe in. She was staring it right in the face. It heated her blood, pooled in the pit of her stomach, and made her want to follow wherever Quinn might want to take her. Instead she turned and reached for her purse.

One kiss had sucked out her rationality and reason. She was going to see Quinn again. She hadn’t meant to say yes when there were so many good reasons to say no. She didn’t really know him and didn’t know if she believed half of what he said. There was something about him that was just a little too intense. Something that told her he was moving too fast. There was something wrong. Something she just couldn’t see, but for some inexplicable reason, none of that seemed to matter.

“Good night, Quinn,” she said and moved around to the other side of her car. She glanced across the roof of her BMW at his outline against the soft glow of the printer’s shop behind him. He was tall and dark and absolutely gorgeous. With one kiss, he’d turned the “curiosity thing” into a real date.

“I’ll get in touch with you about Monday.”

With her car separating them, her thoughts cleared a little, and she recalled her Monday night plans. She’d been given two tickets to a hockey game as a thank-you for speaking at a Writer’s League meeting. She’d been meaning to ask Adele to go with her, since Adele loved hockey as much as Lucy. “I forgot that I have tickets to the Steelheads for Monday night,” she said. It was a perfect excuse to get out of the date. Instead she asked, “Want to go to the game with me?”

“Dinner first?”

“Sure.” She’d had the perfect out, but she hadn’t taken it. She was going to see him again, and God help her if he ever touched more than the back of her head.

“You sure didn’t kiss Maureen like you kissed Lucy,” Kurt managed through a huge grin as he entered the room and sat next to Quinn.

“Jealous?” Quinn asked through a smile as he pulled back the cuff of his dress shirt to look at his watch. One minute after eight. Kurt had waited a whole minute. If anything, Quinn was surprised that Kurt hadn’t razzed him about it Saturday night when they’d met before his setup with Maureen.

“Not jealous. Impressed by how fast you work.”

“I had to convince Lucy she needed to see me again. Maureen didn’t need convincing.” He turned a page in his notes. If his date with Lucy had been a real one, he’d have used more finesse. He would have taken his time and asked for her phone number. If he’d had time, he would have charmed her into giving him what he wanted instead of grabbing her and kissing her into submission. When given a choice, Quinn always preferred to take his time, although he had to admit that grabbing her up and getting to it hadn’t been too bad. Not at all. In fact, it might have been a little too good.

“By the sound of Lucy’s moan, that was some convincing.”

“It’s a dirty job, Weber.” He hadn’t expected it to be so easy, either. He’d expected Lucy to pull back and slap him.

“But somebody’s gotta do it. Right?”

“Right.” Instead of slapping him, she’d done the unexpected and melted into his chest. Her response had surprised the hell out of him, and for a moment, as he’d tasted her mouth and felt the warm pull of desire, he’d forgotten who she was and exactly why he’d been standing there kissing her on a downtown street. For a few moments, she’d been just a beautiful woman and he’d been just a man. He’d let the heat of her response go straight to his head, and lower. For a few moments he’d forgotten that he’d just been doing his job.

“I don’t blame you for not wanting to tongue tangle with bignsassy,” Kurt said, pulling Quinn’s thoughts away from kissing Lucy. “After listening to the most recent tape, I’m convinced you’re right. She’s as dumb as a doorknob. I don’t understand how the woman can keep a job.”

“Maureen works for the government,” Quinn explained. There was no confusing the quick hug and kiss on the cheek he’d given Maureen for the DNA transfer he’d exchanged with Lucy. He’d always been able to tell if a woman would be any good in bed by the way she kissed. Lucy’s kiss had knocked him on his ass.

Anita Landers entered the briefing room, followed by Sergeant Mitchell. They went over the latest reports from the print lab. Quinn wasn’t surprised to hear that neither of the sets of prints from Lucy and Maureen matched any of the prints found at the three crime scenes. None of the prints at the scenes matched each other. Long blonde hairs found on all three victims had matched each other but were synthetic. They still had nothing solid.

The discussion moved from prints to the latest tapes. “Tell me anything new that you got the other night,” the sergeant said.

Quinn flipped a few pages to the notes he’d taken while listening to the last tape. “Lucy Rothschild is still claiming to be a nurse. She admits that she hasn’t been out of town in the past few months and said she quit dating because she was becoming bitter and jaded. She lied about knowing any of the murdered men, and she seems to know that we don’t have a lot of evidence.” Although he couldn’t say why, he felt compelled to add, “All of that is completely circumstantial.”

“True, but we know she met Lawrence Craig. Why would she lie about that if she didn’t have something to hide?” Mitchell asked.

Quinn shrugged. She was a habitual liar, but that didn’t prove she killed anyone. “We could always bring her in and question her,” he reminded the sergeant.

Mitchell thought about it, then shook his head. “Not yet.”

Next, they discussed Maureen Dempsey. Quinn thought they should concentrate less effort on Maureen, if not cross her off the list completely.

“She believes those stories printed in that
Weekly News of the World,
” Kurt pointed out. “She’s crazy as all hell.”

“Crazy enough to kill three men?”

“Maybe crazy enough,” Quinn pointed out. “But I doubt she’s smart enough.” Maureen had been so easy to lead. She’d admitted having met all three victims and that she’d been sorry to hear about their deaths. She’d told Quinn she’d prayed for their families and made donations to various religious organizations in their names. She’d said she lived in the grip of grace and danced with Jesus. Quinn had been educated in Catholic schools, but he hadn’t had a real clue what she’d meant.

Mitchell scratched the top of his crew cut. “When are you seeing her again?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“If we can’t eliminate her completely, she stays on the list.” The sergeant rocked back on the heels of his wingtips and asked, “What do you have, Kurt?”

They talked about the other suspects Kurt had set up for dates and about pulling in more resources so that Quinn and Kurt could concentrate on the top four or five. After the meeting broke up, the sergeant asked, “What do you two have going today?”

“After we finish here, I’m going to follow up with the victims’ families,” Quinn informed him. “Later we’re heading over to Barnes and Noble again. We need to talk to some of the workers who were off the last time we were there.” He flipped a few pages in his notes. “Two of them will be working this afternoon.”

A few minutes later, Quinn headed to his office. He had two other investigations he was working besides the Breathless case. Wednesday he had to testify in
United States v. Raymond Deluca,
an arson case involving a gasoline accelerant, resulting in the deaths of Mr. Deluca’s wife and her three children from a previous marriage. The toxicology report indicated that all four victims had ingested large amounts of phenobarbital, the medication Mrs. Deluca took to control her epilepsy. Raymond claimed his wife had been depressed and must have waited for him to go out of town to kill herself and her children. He had a receipt from a Holiday Inn in Salt Lake for the night of the fire, but as Quinn had discovered, there was also a debit card transaction at 2:35 a.m. for five gallons of gas purchased at the Shell station a few minutes from the Deluca house off Maple Grove. A half hour later, a neighbor had smelled smoke and called 911.

The prosecution would present a new woman and an insurance policy as motive for the crime. Raymond Deluca’s attorney would try and disprove the motive as he worked to shred Quinn’s time line. Quinn needed to reread his notes before he entered the courtroom Wednesday.

Quinn spent the rest of the morning chasing down leads and searching for information about Lucy on the Internet. He visited her website again to see if it had been updated in the past few days. It hadn’t. At noon, he and Kurt jumped in an unmarked car and headed to Barnes and Noble. They met with the two employees in a room filled with boxes of books.

Jan Bright was short with long, kinky eighties hair. She wore some kind of plaid dress that she’d buttoned around her throat. Cynthia Pool’s platinum blonde hair was cut close to her head, and her white blouse had an embroidered Mickey Mouse climbing out of the pocket. Both women were very thin and in their mid to late forties.

Quinn pulled a piece of paper out of his notebook. On it were the photos of Charles Wilson, Dave Anderson, and Lawrence Craig. He handed it to Jan Bright. “Do you recall seeing any of these men?”

She shook her head and passed the paper to Cynthia Pool.

“Yeah, they look familiar. Especially him,” Cynthia said and pointed to the second murder victim, Dave Anderson. “I think he used to come in quite a bit on Friday nights.” She looked back up, and her nose scrunched. “He was one of those.”

“One of those?”

“Those single guys who come in looking for single women,” Cynthia explained. “Bookstores are the new singles bars. Men and women come in here on Friday and Saturday nights to hook up.”

Quinn and Kurt glanced at each other. They’d known each other long enough, worked enough cases together, to know what the other was thinking. Men and women hooking up in bookstores was not only news to both of them but it was also a valuable piece of information.

Kurt asked, “Did you ever see any of these men meet with women or leave with anyone?”

“I don’t recall. Do you remember, Jan?”

“No. I really don’t pay attention to who’s hooking up with whom in the aisles.” She folded her arms across her chest and looked at a point somewhere above Quinn’s left shoulder. “I think it’s disturbing.”

Cynthia shrugged her shoulders and handed over the paper. “So, those are the men who were murdered?”

“Yes.” Quinn slid the photographs into his leather notebook. He and Kurt pulled out their business cards. “If either of you ladies remember anything else, give one of us a call.” Cynthia took the cards, while they practically had to slap them in Jan’s hand.

As the two detectives passed the café on their way out, they spotted a poster with Lucy’s name on it. The green-and-beige sign sat on an easel beside a table stacked with her books. The sign advertised a meeting of the Women of Mystery, with guest speaker, mystery writer Lucy Rothschild.

Kurt pointed at the poster. “That’s this Saturday.”

“Wonder what goes on in a Women of Mystery meeting?”

“Maybe we should check it out.”

“Maybe.” Quinn picked up one of Lucy’s books and thumbed through it. “Right now, I’m more interested in what Cynthia Pool and Jan Bright had to say about people hooking up in the aisles of bookstores.”

“You think Breathless picks up men in bookstores?”

“Could be.” Quinn set the book down and glanced at the café to his right. A couple sat at one of the small square tables, while a man with a laptop sat at another. Quinn imagined the place packed. The perfect hunting ground. “We need to put someone undercover in here. Not me or you. Someone the employees won’t recognize.” He returned his attention to the stack of Lucy’s books. “Someone who’s unknown to the suspects we’ve met or interviewed,” he added as the two detectives turned and headed for the doors.

The afternoon sun hit Quinn full in the face, and he reached for the sunglasses in his breast pocket. He slid them on the bridge of his nose as they moved through the parking lot to the unmarked police cruiser. He still wasn’t convinced Lucy was Breathless. Yes, she’d told some lies and could be tied to two of the victims. But she just didn’t seem…aggressive or kinky. She’d responded to his kiss, and within his hands, she’d turned warm and willing. Not the kind of woman to go to a man’s house after a few dates, cuff him to his bed, and snuff out his life. No, she seemed like the kind of woman who’d have entirely different plans for a man cuffed and at her mercy.

Of course, that could be his dick talking.