“Are you okay?” Alex asked kindly.
“Are you, Dr. Ladd?”
“I’m fine. I promise. I’ll call you later today. Don’t worry.”
Not until she drove away did Alex turn back. This time, as she strode up her walkway, she had Smilow in her sights.
“What the hell are you doing here? I had a patient and—”
“And I have a search warrant.”
He produced the document from the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
Alex looked toward the three other officers loitering on her porch before her eyes swung back to Smilow. “I see my last patient at three o’clock. Can this wait until after that session?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“I’m calling Frank Perkins.”
“Be my guest. But we don’t need his permission to come inside. We don’t even need yours.”
Without further ado, he motioned his men forward.
Perhaps the thing Alex found most offensive was the plastic gloves they pulled on before entering her home, as though it and she were contaminants that needed to be guarded against.
* * *
First she cried.
Waking up and finding herself in the worst nightmare a single woman can fathom—at least a single middle school teacher from suburban Indianapolis—Ellen Rogers sat up in bed, clutched the sheet to her throat, and sobbed her heart out.
Hungover. Naked. Violated. Abandoned.
Reliving the events of last night, it first had seemed that she had dropped into one of her own fantasies, in which a good-looking stranger had chosen her over the younger, prettier, thinner girls in the nightclub. He had made the initial move. He had chosen her to dance with and buy drinks for. The attraction had been instantaneous and mutual, just as she had always imagined it would be when “it” finally happened to her.
Furthermore, he wasn’t vapid and shallow. He had a story. His was a tale of love and loss that had wrenched her heart. He had loved his wife to distraction. When she became ill, he had dedicated himself to her care until she finally succumbed. Despite the hardship it had imposed on him and his business, he had done all the cooking and cleaning and laundry. He had performed personal tasks for his wife, even the most unpleasant ones. On the rare occasions that she was able to go out, he had applied her makeup.
Such sacrifice! That was what love was all about. This was a man worth knowing. This was a man worthy of all the love Ellen had been storing up for years and wished desperately to share.
He had also been a fantastic lover.
Even with her experience being limited to an older male cousin who had once forced a French kiss on her, a sweetheart who had talked of love through two awkward couplings in his car before jilting her, and a married teacher with whom she had carried on an exciting but unconsummated flirtation until he was transferred to another school, she had recognized that Eddie—that was his name—was exceptional in bed. He had done things to her that she had only read about in the novels she collected in labeled boxes in her basement. He had exhausted her with his passion.
But now, the rosy glow of romance was dimmed by the dark terrors accompanying one-night stands with total strangers. Pregnancy. (Hey, it could happen to women in their forties.) STDs. AIDS.
Any one of those consequences would dash her dream of marrying one day. Her shot at matrimony had been growing slimmer with each passing year, but last night’s indiscretion had made it a truly impossible dream. What man would want her now? Not a decent man. Not now that she had a past.
Her situation couldn’t get much worse.
But it did.
She’d been robbed, too.
She discovered that when she finally left the bed to go into the bathroom to assess the damage. She realized that her handbag wasn’t in the chair where she had dropped it the night before. She remembered distinctly. It wasn’t something she was likely to forget because that had been the first time a man had ever come up behind her and started grinding his… you know… against her. He had reached around her and put his hand inside her dress to caress her breasts. Bones virtually melting, she had dropped her purse on the chair. She was certain of that.
Nevertheless, she searched the room frantically, berating herself for not heeding the television commercials that strongly urged never to leave home without traveler’s checks.
Whether it was that blistering self-incrimination or recollections of the ease with which glib Eddie had convinced her of all his lies, Ellen Rogers suddenly stopped her futile searching for the handbag and stood stock-still in the center of the hotel room. Still mother-naked, she placed her hands on her hips, stepped out of her decorous self, and swore like a sailor.