part of her body that she’d grieved?
She heard the bathroom door click open while she was gulping back more tears and then the shower curtain slid back and Alex stepped in behind her and wrapped his arms around her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, turning in his arms so she could get her own around his neck. She wasn’t apologizing to him this time as much as to the girl, but he didn’t need to know that. He held her and kissed her head and bent to kiss her face and they stood there, rocking for a long minute before he said, “I’m sorry, too.”
He’d brushed a hand across her breast and then bent to take her nipple in his mouth and she moaned against him, feeling herself respond the way she always did to his touch. She grabbed him with her hand because she didn’t have much use for foreplay and he shifted her up against the wall so he could slip inside her and then they fucked, made love, whatever either of them wanted to call it, and afterward she’d fallen asleep in the safety of his arms.
So why was she testy again today? Because she knew they should’ve talked? Because he’d made another comment this morning when she’d left early, grabbing an apple for breakfast instead of the eggs he’d offered to make? They would have to talk, but that took energy and time and right now she needed both those things for this case.
Oz picked up the clearer photo of the pentagram and tapped it. “I think this is all the evidence we need to say this was some weird Wicci ritual gone bad.”
“Wicca,” Stephanie said. “I don’t know. Look at the way she was tied. That rope was digging into her skin. I don’t think she was voluntarily participating in this. This looks like a Matthew Shepard thing to me.”
Detective George Wacker, known as Wackjob to his peers, groaned. “Christ Jesus, please don’t go spreading some Broke-back Mountain theory around.”
“Yeah, we don’t need some faggot from the Village Voice up here.” Joe “Fuck-off” Frangione was back with his coffee.
“Really sensitive,” Sean said and then he flushed. He was the youngest next to Stephanie. Midthirties and baby-faced enough to look at least a decade younger.
Everyone paused to look at him for a moment and then Oz laughed and Wackjob said, “Shut up, Puff Daddy.”
“I don’t know why you keep calling me that—it’s Sean Cone, not Sean Combs.”
“Yeah, yeah, Puff Daddy.”
“It’s not like I even like rap.”
“And you’re pretty white, white boy,” Wackjob, who was black and proud, said with an indulgent smile.
Sean flushed again, an embarrassing line of red climbing up his face from his collar. Stephanie’s unsympathetic response was to be glad it wasn’t her.
“Can we focus on the case?” Fuck-off said in between slurps of his coffee. Of the four other detectives in the department he was the only one Stephanie actually disliked. A big man, at least six-four and probably 250 on a doughnut-free day, he liked to throw his weight around with suspects and made no bones about the fact that he thought the only work suitable for women was domestic. He was an asshole, but he was an asshole with a gold badge and a gun and she had enough wisdom to know just how scary that was.
“I didn’t say anything about gay, I just said it looked like harassment,” she said. “Who would allow themselves to be tied up like that?”
“You’re forgetting what we found around her.” Oz tapped the faint circle visible in the photo. “Her own mother said she was into this whole Wicci thing. And let’s not forget that she was drunk.”
That had been one interesting find from the autopsy. Harriet Wembley found traces of alcohol in the girl’s bloodstream. “A trace amount,” Stephanie said.
“It could have dissipated over time. She and her friends do some drinking and then they play this whole little witch game and then they leave her tied to the tree.”
“They forgot her?” Fuck-off took a final gulp of coffee and then pitched the cup behind him into a metal trash can. “Hey, two points! Some friends.”
Oz nodded. “Let’s see if we can’t find someone who can tell us exactly what that circle and those words mean.”
Janice Wycoff had given Stephanie and Oz a short list of names of her daughter’s friends and it was this list they had in hand when they made their way back into the main building of St. Ursula’s.
They were met, almost immediately, by the headmistress. She exuded the same calm that she had the day before, moving almost soundlessly on her plain low-heeled shoes and wearing what looked like the same suit as the day before. Perhaps it was. The blouse this time had lace at the collar. It seemed incongruous.
“I’m sure you understand how upsetting this has been for all of us,” she said, leaving the list untouched between them on her desk, a piece torn from a yellow legal pad, the words scrawled across it in black ballpoint. “I can’t tell you if these girls are students here. That would violate their privacy.”
She touched the list then, picking it up and offering it back to them. “Morgan’s unfortunate death has already disrupted the beginning of the school year and we’re trying very hard to keep things as normal as possible.”
“We understand your concerns, Sister,” Oz said and Stephanie squirmed slightly, thinking that there was something too placating in his tone. Where did this woman get off thinking that she could decide who they could question?
“But we really do need to talk to these girls,” Oz continued. “It’s essential for our investigation.”
Sister Rose let the list hover a moment more and then, seemingly resigned to the fact that they wouldn’t take it back, let it flutter back onto her clean desk surface. She sighed and pressed a hand to her throat for a moment in an absent-minded gesture that reminded Stephanie of someone choking.
“I’ll need to secure parental permission,” she said. “That could take a while.”
Stephanie coughed and Oz glanced at her and gave an imperceptible nod. “Listen, Sister, we don’t have a while,” she said, trying to sound as sympathetic as Oz, but knowing that her impatience was probably not well hidden. “The first hours of an investigation into any crime are the most important.”
“Crime? What crime?” Sister Rose’s voice climbed and for a moment the placid mask cracked and the fear shone through, her pale eyes widening until Stephanie could see the veiny whites fully circling the pupils like variegated marble. “Morgan’s death was an unfortunate accident,” she said. “But it has nothing to do with the school. She made choices that were different from the ones offered here—”
She stopped short and the hand crept to her throat again and then down to fiddle with the edge of the leather blotter on which the list sat.
“Either I or our guidance counselor, Mr. Ryland Pierce, will need to be present,” she said. “That’s the only way I can allow it.”
“Who does she think she is, the Pope?” Stephanie complained when the older woman left to find the counselor.
“She’s just protective,” Oz said. “She’s been at the school
