going to.”
Hurley scrutinizes my face for a moment and my ears start to feel really hot. “And you think this Owenby woman was seeing your husband?” he asks.
Oh, she’s seen him all right. “I’m pretty sure they had a…relationship,” I mumble.
“His name?”
“Whose?”
Hurley’s eyes fire tiny arrows at me. Man, he’s good.
“Winston,” I tell him. “Dr. David Winston. He’s a surgeon.”
I see Hurley’s mental wheels spinning and can practically smell the burning rubber. “How long you two been split up?” he asks.
“Couple of months.”
“And how long has he been seeing this Owenby woman?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. This answer is an honest one. I have no idea how long, or even if, David was seeing Karen before that fateful night in the OR.
Hurley cocks his head and gives me a funny look. It dawns on me that he might consider me a suspect—the woman scorned and all that—and I am about to act insulted when I remember that a murderous thought or two has crossed my mind in the past couple of months. One of the side perks of having a career where you’re saving lives all the time is that it gives you an endless source of ideas on how to end them. I’d mentally exercised some of my more devious ones on Karen countless times.
Hurley whips a pen out of his shirt pocket and a little notepad out of his jeans pocket—mighty nice fitting jeans, I note—and scribbles something down. “What’s your phone number?”
“I don’t have a phone.” The look he gives me suggests that I better not be lying.
“Do you have an address? Or do you live in a refrigerator box?”
I almost laugh at that one, but something tells me Hurley might take it the wrong way. So I give him my address—Izzy’s address, actually, since the little guest cottage doesn’t have one of its own. Then he asks for David’s address. When I give him that, his eyebrows shoot up.
“You live next door to your ex?” he asks, askance.
“Sort of.”
“That’s a bit masochistic, don’t you think?”
“Are you a detective or a shrink?”
“A little of both, actually,” he says, flashing me a crooked grin.
I’m about to come back with another witty retort but I’m rendered temporarily speechless when my mind conjures up a vision of a psychiatrist’s office with me stretched out on a couch and Hurley standing beside me. He bends down, his face moving closer to mine….
“Anything else, Detective?” I ask, clearing my throat and putting my mental mini movie on pause. I’ll store it for now and play the rest of it out later.
“Yeah. Given your, uh, proximity to this case, I think it would be best if you weren’t involved with the autopsy.”
“Understood.” And fine with me. The thought of doing an autopsy on someone I know is discomfiting, to say the least. I may hate the woman, but that doesn’t mean I want to see her dressed like some hunter’s ten-point kill. Besides, I have places to go and things to do. At the top of the list is getting my underwear back.
Chapter 6
The sun is coming up as we leave Karen Owenby’s house. Izzy says he’ll drop me off at the cottage on his way to the morgue and suggests I come into work around ten, giving him plenty of time to finish the autopsy on Karen.
I take advantage of the ride home to quiz him about my latest interest. “So what do you know about this Steve Hurley guy?”
“Not much. He moved here a few months ago from Chicago for reasons no one quite knows. He was a homicide cop there, too, and rumor has it he pissed off someone higher up in his department and got blackballed out of the place.”
“Pissed them off how?”
“Who knows? I’m not even sure that’s the truth. It may just be speculation.”
“Is he good? I mean, does he know what he’s doing?”
“He seems quite good, actually,” Izzy says with a tone of respect. “I imagine he has a lot more experience than most of the other cops here given that he spent fifteen years on the force in Chicago, four of those as a homicide detective.”
“So why here? Why Sorenson of all places?”
“I have no idea. Maybe he got tired of the big city and wanted a taste of small-town life.”
“Does he have a family?”
Izzy shoots me an amused look. “Quit being so damned cagey, Mattie. I could tell you were practically drooling over the guy. Why don’t you just come out and ask if he’s married or dating? That’s what you really want to know, isn’t it?”
“No,” I say, indignant. “I was just trying to make polite conversation. Excuse the hell out of me.”
“Oh, okay.”
“And I wasn’t drooling.”
When we reach the house I unfold myself, climb out of the car, and spend a minute leaning on my door, shifting from one foot to the other as I wait for the feeling to return to my legs. Stalling. Hoping. But Izzy can always outlast me, damn him.
“Fine,” I say eventually. “Give it up. Tell me what you know.”
Izzy smirks. “He’s single.”
“Is he seeing anyone that you know of?”
“I haven’t heard anything definite, but word has it Alison Miller’s been sniffing around.”
Like me, Alison is a Sorenson lifer. We went to school together. Now she does double duty as a reporter and photographer for the local paper, which comes out twice a week on Monday and Thursday mornings. I don’t consider her interest in Hurley as any real threat.
“If I know Alison, she’s most likely just using Hurley,” I tell Izzy. “Hoping to get an inside scoop. Besides, I happen to know she has a thing for bald men.”
I send Izzy on his way and, once inside the cottage, I waddle into the bathroom, turn on the water in the tub, and strip. I hesitate before climbing in, aware of the painful throb I can still feel between my legs. My nurse’s training tells me I should apply ice for a while to try to minimize the swelling, but the thought of sticking an ice pack down there gives a whole new meaning to the term frigid. In the end I give in to the soothing warmth of the tub.
After half an hour of luxurious soaking, I climb out, dry off, wrap myself in a towel, and down another handful of aspirin. Then I collapse onto the couch and start digesting everything that’s happened.
I
