there, but he stopped anyway. “Did you?” He had no recollection of her being there.
“Yeah. I was—well, I was going to ask you if you wanted to get lunch sometime—or whatever.”
Nick realized that he had never really looked at her. Her makeup was so thick that it was beginning to crack like the floor of a desert. Instead, though, Nick became aware of the blush of her skin underneath. “Sure,” he said. “That would be nice. Hey—I’d better get going now—I’ve got to get these pictures uploaded if I want them to hit the afternoon edition.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Sheila smiled beneath her oily mask.
Walking on, Nick flinched a little, trying to erase the image of Sheila’s awkward approach from his mind.
Back at his car, he looked up at the sky as he kicked off some of the mud caked to the soles of his shoes. In the last week, the weather had turned. It had gone from late summer to autumn. The rains would get heavier soon, the nights would get longer and colder. Without the sun, the chill would never fully leave the air.
The sight of the mutilated corpse had shaken him. Unlocking his car, Nick decided to stop at the Starbucks he frequented near his apartment for a coffee before heading in to the paper. He wanted time to settle himself, and he could just as easily upload his photographs onto his laptop and send them into the office from there, using the café’s wireless link. He twisted the key in the ignition and flicked on the windshield wipers, unconsciously squeezing his arms against his ribs, tightening his fingers around the plastic steering wheel as he pulled away from the curb.
Lost in his thoughts, haunted by the vision of the corpse lying butchered in the wet grass, Nick had no way of knowing that just a few minutes later Sara Garland would fall into his life, unexpectedly, with the certain grace of a diver swooping without a splash into a deep pool of water.
chapter 3
Beyond the plate-glass windows of the Starbucks, the sky was so low and gray that street lamps were still burning at ten in the morning. A fierce wind was blowing, whipping brown and yellow leaves down the broad street, tossing heavy drops of freezing rain in handfuls against the thick window panes. The café was packed with students from the University of Washington. The line stretched nearly to the door. Nick had been lucky to snag the table in front of the gas-burning fireplace. Unsteady still, he was staring at the screen of his small computer, oblivious to the voices rising and falling around him.
When a green-eyed girl with Nordic blond hair stood in front of his table and spoke to him, Nick hardly noticed her. She was only one more of the rumpled, tired-looking students milling around the room, waiting for an empty table. The blond-haired girl put her slender ivory hand down next to his laptop and leaned closer to him.
“Is anyone sitting here?” she repeated.
His interest piqued by the smooth texture of her skin and her long, delicate fingers, Nick looked up at her. The first thought that crossed his mind was that he had never seen a more beautiful woman. The tall, svelte girl smiled at him, and Nick found himself smiling back at her, stunned by the radiance of her eyes. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No one.”
“May I?” She rested a hand on the back of the chair opposite Nick, but politely waited for him to respond.
Nick shrugged.
“It’s a good place to sit,” she said, slipping into the chair. “Right in front of the fire.”
As Nick pulled his laptop back to clear a space for her on the table, he realized that she wasn’t carrying a coffee.
“I just came inside to get out of the rain,” she said, reading his gaze. “I left my house this morning without my coat. It’s cold out there.”
“Yeah. Miserable.”
Drops of water glistened in the girl’s hair like tiny diamonds. She was wearing a thin white blouse, and her shoulders were wet with rain. Nick’s eyes were drawn despite himself to the lace straps of her bra, visible through the sheer material.
“When I saw this place by the fire, I thought I’d grab it.” She glanced out the slick window at the dark, windblown street. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Nick shook his head.
“Will you hold this chair for me, then?” She twisted around in her seat and checked the line in front of the counter, just as one of the servers raised his voice and announced, Keith, your non-fat cap’ is ready. Keith. “I think I’ll get a cup of coffee.”
Nick was unable to take his eyes off her as she walked to the counter. A number of other heads turned as well as she walked past. She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Assured and elegant, flawless. Nick wondered who she was and what she did. He imagined that she was at least twenty-five—too old to be an undergraduate at the university. She had distracted him from his computer, and he was still watching her a few minutes later when the server behind the counter called her name: Sara. Your tall low-fat latte is ready. She smiled at him on the way back to the table, and Nick felt his face flush. Once again, he was aware of the people watching her as she walked. She moved gracefully, and she seemed nearly to be glowing in her white blouse and tight jeans.
“So your name’s Sara,” he said as she sat back down across from him.
She was holding her coffee up to her lips, blowing on it. “Good job, Detective. Sara Garland,” she said. “And you’re Nick, I take it?”
Nick felt his eyebrows rise in surprise.
“It’s on your cup,” Sara said, smiling lightly. Nick followed her eyes down to the cup of coffee on the table between them, where indeed the server had scrawled his name with a thick black marker.
“Yeah. Nick Wilder.”
“I hope I’m not interrupting you. It looks like you’re pretty busy.”
Nick glanced at his laptop. The screen had long since gone black. “No. I’m glad for the break.”
She looked at him critically, trying to gauge his age as he had judged hers. “You’re not a student. A graduate student, maybe. Or a teacher?”
“I’m a reporter,” Nick said. “With the Seattle Telegraph.”
“That sounds glamorous.”
Nick shrugged. “Not really. It’s a lot of hours, and it doesn’t pay much. The truth is you’ve got to be a little insane to work a job like this.”
“What are you working on now? Are you writing an article?”
Nick shook his head. Sara’s question had brought the image of Claire Scott’s corpse back into his mind. The contrast with the woman sitting in front of him was unsettling. He closed his eyes and brought his hands to his face, running his fingers through his hair, becoming aware at the same time how disheveled he was. He had left his apartment a few hours before without showering or shaving.
“Are you all right?”
Nick noted the concern in Sara’s eyes. “Is it that obvious?”
“You look upset, that’s all.”
“I
