Mean Streak

What?

Myself. If you touch me, I’ll come inside you.

Huskily, she said, “I wasn’t restrained.”

Knight looked over at Grange, and Grange shrugged. Knight came back to her looking thoroughly exasperated. “Okay. We learned from the Floyds where he lives.” He scraped his chair back and stood up. “We thought we’d take you up there.”

“What?” she exclaimed in alarm.

“Yep. I’m betting that when you get there, things you can’t remember will start coming back.”

* * *

He couldn’t believe it.

He fucking couldn’t believe it.

No wonder Emory’s body hadn’t been found. She wasn’t fucking dead!

Cell phone to his ear, Jeff paced the lobby of the SO. That smelly, grimy, unsightly hallway in which he’d spent countless hours already had become a metaphor for his life. Everything about it sucked.

Emory lived.

“Mr. Surrey, are you still holding?”

“Yes,” he shouted into his cell phone. “Did you tell him who was calling?”

“I did.” The law firm’s receptionist apologized again for the delay. “He’s with another client. If you’d rather hang up and let him call you back when—”

“I’ll hold. Put a note under his nose. Tell him it’s urgent.”

“Is it regarding Dr. Charbonneau?”

“Yes.”

“We heard she was returned safely yesterday.”

Yes, about twenty-four hours ago. When Jeff heard her voice coming through his phone, what whizzed through his mind was the irrational thought that she was speaking to him from the other side.

But no, she wasn’t channeling from the land of the undead. At the moment Knight and Grange had barged into his motel room, prepared to arrest him for her murder, she proved herself to be very much alive.

And what a life she had been living!

When he’d placed his hands on her shoulders in a seeming gesture of concern, he’d wanted instead to wrap them around her neck. Who would have blamed him? How much could a man be expected to take before he snapped?

His fury barely under control, he said into his phone, “Get him on the line.”

He was put on hold again. As if the indignity of having to arrange for a defense lawyer for Emory wasn’t bad enough, he was having to wait for the privilege.

When her body wasn’t discovered after the first twelve hours of the search, he’d started rehearsing how to play the aggrieved widower. He’d ranted. He’d stamped and stewed and made a nuisance of himself, pressuring them to find her, when, actually, the longer she remained lost, the better.

Just as he was growing accustomed to her being dead, she had turned up alive.

The receptionist came back on. “He’ll speak with you now, Mr. Surrey.”

The attorney addressed him brusquely. “What’s so urgent, Jeff?”

He couldn’t bring himself to explain Emory’s escapade in any detail. “Emory didn’t come away from her harrowing experience unscathed. She needs a good defense lawyer, she needs one immediately, and money is no object.”