He didn’t even hesitate: “No.”
Jane stared at him . . . and then slowly exhaled. One thing that was true about her hellren, one thing you could always take to the bank, was that Vishous didn’t lie. For all the faults he had, that was not one of them.
“All right,” she said. “You know where to find me. I’ll be in our bed.”
She was the one who turned away and started walking in the opposite direction. Even though the distance between them broke her heart, she wasn’t going to badger him into something he wasn’t capable of, and if he needed space . . . well, she would give it to him.
But not forever, that was for sure.
Sooner or later, that male was going to talk to her. He had to or she was going to . . . God, she didn’t know what.
Her love wasn’t going to survive forever in this vacuum, though. It just couldn’t.
FIFTEEN
The fact that José de la Cruz hit a Dunkin’ Donuts drivethrough on the way into downtown Caldwell was one hell of a cliché. Collective wisdom had all homicide detectives drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, but that wasn’t always the truth.
Sometimes there wasn’t time to stop.
And man, screw the television shows and the detective novels, the reality was, he functioned better on caffeine and with a little sugar in his bloodstream.
Plus he lived for the honey dips. So sue him.
The call that had woken him and his wife up had come in at close to six a.m., which considering the number of nighttime ring-a-dings he got was almost civilized: Dead bodies, like live ones with medical problems, didn’t play by nine-to-five rules—so the nearly decent hour had been a novel benediction.
And that wasn’t the only thing going his way. Courtesy of it being a Sunday morning, the roads and highway were bowling-alley empty, and his unmarked made excellent time in from the burbs—so his coffee was still pipin’ hot as he piloted himself down into the warehouse district, pulling rolling stops at the red lights.
The lineup of squad cars announced the location where the body had been found even better than the yellow warning tape that had been wound around everywhere like ribbon on some fucked-up Christmas present. With a curse, he parked parallel to the brick wall of the alley and got out, sipping and walking his way over to the knot of grim-looking blue unis.
“Hey, Detective.”
“S’up, Detective.”
“Yo, Detective.”
He nodded at the boys. “Mornin’ all. How we d
oing?”
“We didn’t touch her.” Rodriguez nodded over to the Dumpster. “She’s in there and she’s had initial photographs taken by Jones. Coroner and the CSI types are on the way. So’s the man-sogonist.”
Ah, yes, their faithful photog. “Thanks.”
“Where’s your new partner?”
“Coming.”
“He ready for this?”
“We’ll see.” No doubt this grungy alley was plenty familiar with people tossing their cookies. So if the greenhorn lost his proverbial lunch, s’all good.
José ducked under the tape and walked over to the Dumpster. As always when he approached a body, he found his sense of hearing grew almost unbearably acute: The soft chatter of the men behind him, the sound of the soles of his shoes on the asphalt, the whistling breeze off the river . . . everything was too loud, like the volume of the whole damn world was cranked up into the red zone.
And of course, the irony was that the purpose of his being here, on this morning, in this alley . . . the purpose of all the cars and the men and the tape . . . was perfectly silent.
José gripped his Styrofoam cup as he peered over the rusted lip of the bin. Her hand was the first thing he saw, a pale lineup of fingers with nails that were split and had something brown under them.
She’d been a fighter, whoever she was.