sure Kristen didn’t mean to be rude.” She shot another severe look at the other girl, who mumbled an apology and disappeared into the crowd of girls.
“I’m sorry that you’ve had such an upsetting beginning to your teaching experience,” Elizabeth said. “I hope it hasn’t negatively affected your feelings about our school.”
Lauren smiled, touched and a little amused by the girl’s unconscious imitation of the headmistress.
“No, not at all,” she said. She glanced around at the other girls milling about the entrance to the chapel and wondered how many of them were asking the same questions that Kristen had. “Were you friends with Morgan?”
“I knew her a little,” Elizabeth said, her gaze moving away from Lauren’s and resting on the woods where the body had been found. “I wouldn’t say we were close.”
Chapter Six
Half the pictures taken of Morgan Wycoff’s body were fuzzy. “Idiot says the camera wasn’t working,” Oz said, slapping them down on the table in the squad room with disgust. “Guess what I bet we find if we check it out?”
“There’s no problem?” Stephanie said.
“Bingo.”
“He’s a new CI, right?” Detective Sean Cone flicked one of the pictures with his finger.
“Yeah. Stupid kid. So freaked out he couldn’t hold the camera straight.”
Detective Joe Frangione shook his graying head. “Don’t they have age requirements? Jesus, why is this place crawling with snot-nosed kids lately?”
He glanced meaningfully at Stephanie and Sean and she gave him an evil smile. “Didn’t they offer you the retirement package already? Maybe they figure some of us need to be here to wipe your ass if you won’t leave.”
“Whoa, someone’s sensitive!” He held up big hands, warding her off. “Warn me next time when you’re on the rag.”
“Sure thing, but I thought Depends would be a better choice for your problem.”
Oz grinned as Joe muttered something about getting coffee and stalked away. “A little testy today?”
“Don’t start with me. The guy’s a dickhead.” She looked at the pictures over and over again and went through them one by one, lining them up on the table and pulling out the case notes. She was a little testy. She’d been tense, tired, and in need of a drink by the time she’d left work last night and coming home to find Alex still sulking hadn’t made her feel any better.
“Do you seriously think one interrupted fuck is worth all this?” she demanded after he’d answered her in monosyllables for ten minutes.
“One, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t refer to our lovemaking as ‘fucking’ and two, you’ve got the mouth of a trucker. That’s really attractive.” He’d been standing with his back to her in the kitchen, chopping vegetables to throw into a stir-fry with some tofu. She hated tofu.
“One, I wish you wouldn’t itemize everything and two, I hate tofu and you should know that by now.”
His back went rigid, then he stalked past her to the silverware drawer, grabbed a spoon, and spent five minutes laboriously removing all the tofu and flinging it into the sink.
She should have laughed, she could laugh about it now, but at the time it just further pissed her off because it seemed so trivial compared with everything she’d dealt with that day.
So she’d called him a jackass and he’d responded by saying that he refused to talk to her when she cursed at him and she responded to that by calling him every foul name she could think of—and after seven years as a cop she knew quite a few—and he responded by shaking his head and giving her his patented disappointed look, at which point she slammed out of the house.
Cooling her temper over a beer at the nearest dive bar, conveniently located one short and fast drive around the corner, she pondered just how weird it was that she was in some sort of gender reversal with her soon-to-be-spouse. She was the cop, he was the gardener. Okay, landscape architect, but it was all about playing with plants. She loved action movies, he preferred comedies and could get misty at so-called chick flicks. She enjoyed cursing and resorted to it under stress, yet she’d never heard him say more than one muttered “shit” when he couldn’t get something to work, and he’d never cursed at her.
All her girlfriends envied her. Alex was so kind and caring, so compassionate, so everything that their apparently Neanderthal boyfriends and husbands weren’t. She might have wondered about his sexual orientation if it weren’t for the fact that he obviously enjoyed sex with women and more importantly with her.
In fact, sex—making love—was the one area where they’d always been in complete agreement. Until lately. Until he’d gotten his license and a job with a great local firm and seemed to wake up to the fact that his girlfriend’s job didn’t come with such regular hours and never would. He’d been proud when she made detective a year ago, but he must’ve misunderstood the job because he seemed to think that she should be home with him at a regular time every night and spend her weekends with him.
And since they’d gotten engaged it was even worse. Snide comments every time the phone rang or her pager beeped. If they were in the middle of something and she answered the phone, he took it as a personal affront. It was as if she’d struck a blow to his manhood when she wasn’t so blinded by his prowess as a lover that she could even hear a summons from the job.
After twenty minutes and two beers, she’d lost the anger she brought with her to the bar, but then she waited another twenty minutes before venturing out on the roads. She had seen enough DUIs to know it was never worth the risk.
The house was dark. Alex was sitting alone in the living room watching a ball game on TV and drinking a beer. He didn’t look up when she came in the room.
“I’m sorry.”
He turned his gaze to her, but his face was cold. Even his eyes, and she loved his brown eyes, were cold.
“I shouldn’t have cursed at you, I’m really sorry.”
He nodded and turned his gaze back to the game. She stood there, feeling stupid for a moment, then went to take a shower.
The tears came when she was under the water and she tried to hold them back. Shitty, shitty day. She was a bad cop for taking it home with her. You weren’t supposed to do that. Cops who did that imploded. You had to separate, find a place inside you that the violence couldn’t touch, only she couldn’t do that with death.
Kids were always the hardest. She didn’t think any cop ever got past the kids. You tried not to think about what they’d suffered, you tried to be objective when you had to catalog bruises blossoming like flowers on a small body or write down which limbs were misshapen from a child being shaken or thrown. You swallowed your anger when you questioned the asshole sitting across from you who’d inflicted those injuries. You played the game because that’s what you were sworn to do—uphold the law—even if the law seemed to protect the rights of useless fuckers while failing to protect their innocent victims.
This girl had been right on the brink. Not a girl anymore, but not a woman yet. Her body
