Mean Streak
Page 82
“So what’s that mean?” Grange asked.
“It means he’s either innocent and just looks guilty or he’s goddamn smart.”
“I’m thinking the latter.”
“Me too. But we’ve got to crack him.”
Grange tapped the eraser end of a pencil on the desk. “Could it be that Alice is better friends with him than with Emory?”
Knight popped his rubber band against his fingers. “An affair? Jeff?”
“You think it’s beyond him?”
“No, I just can’t imagine him working up enough emotion or blood flow to get hard.”
“For some men getting hard isn’t about flesh.”
Thinking about it, Knight tilted his head to one side. “I guess. Power. Control.”
“Cruelty.”
“I’m old-fashioned. I like flesh.”
Grange smiled, then turned serious again. “Over the past couple days, there were”—he paused to check his notes—“five calls back and forth between the two of them.”
“She’s a good friend and client.”
“That he talks to late at night? First thing this morning?”
“He explained those calls. Alice is concerned about Emory. ‘Extremely,’ to quote him.”
Grange nodded. “She would be either way, though.”
“Either way?”
“If she’s a friend to both, then, in these circumstances, naturally she would be concerned about them both. Extremely. But she would also be concerned if her lover had gotten rid of his wife—with or without her prior knowledge—in order to clear the way for them to be together.”
Knight mulled it over for a ten count. “Tomorrow, while I’m babysitting Jeff, you drive down to Atlanta, canvass her neighbors, ask if she had any visitors on Friday and Saturday while Emory was out of town.”
Grange grinned. “Bet you a twenty that there will have been sightings of Jeff’s fancy car with the custom leather interior.”
Chapter 19
Doc?”
Emory tilted her head down to the hand resting on her shoulder and rubbed her cheek against the back of it.
“Are you going to wake up or sleep through?”
“Hmm?”
She came awake slowly and opened her eyes. The hand she was resting her cheek against was attached to a long arm covered in ivory cable knit, attached to a broad shoulder that blocked her view of the ceiling.
He was bent over her, his face close. Firelight cast his features in sharp relief, highlighting his cheekbones and strong chin, accenting the silver strands in his hair but etching deeper the lines bracketing his stern lips and making mysterious lairs of his eye sockets.
She wanted desperately for him to kiss her.
He withdrew his hand and backed away from the bed. She sat up. The window shades were still down, but there was no daylight limning the edges of them. Groggy and disoriented, she asked, “What time is it?”