16th Seduction (Women's Murder Club 16)

WHILE I QUELLED the fierce bedtime protests from our bambina, Joe took Martha for a walk. When he came back through the door, I realized I didn’t have to say anything about date nights anymore.

I disabled the ringers on all the phones.

Joe took me into his arms.

We went to bed. I was full of so many feelings. That Connor Grant was no longer in our lives. That we were safe. That Joe was home.

Joe was home.

Joe and I held each other for a good long time before kisses turned up the heat and our clothes came off fast. Making love with Joe wasn’t the homey tumble of the last time we’d been together so long ago, and it wasn’t the desperate passion we’d felt when our story first began.

This was both making love with my husband and the release of the anger and resentment I’d harbored for so long. I told him I loved him, and he told me he loved me so much.

“I’ll never let you down again,” he said. “I’ll never let you go.”

We spent the rest of the night talking like we used to do.

We never slept, and we heard Julie calling out for me as the sky began to lighten.

I went into her room and grabbed her up over the “fences” and carried her into our bedroom. She crawled in between Joe and me, turned her head to look at each of us.

“Nice,” she said.

“Isn’t it?” I said, grinning at our adorable, blue-eyed, curly-haired child. It was better than nice. This was all that mattered.

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to Captain Richard Conklin, BCI commander, Stamford, Connecticut, PD; to Humphrey Germaniuk, medical examiner and coroner, Trumbull County, Ohio; and to Chuck Hanni, IAAI-certified fire investigator, Youngstown, Ohio, for sharing their wisdom and expertise. We are also grateful to attorneys Philip R. Hoffman and Steven Rabinowitz of Pryor, Cashman, NYC, for their wise legal counsel. And many thanks to the home team, John A. Duffy, Mary Jordan, Lynn Colomello, and to our amazing researcher, Ingrid Taylar, West Coast, USA.

DETECTIVE BILLY HARNEY rubbed his hands, his breath lingering, frozen, in front of him, a wispy reminder of how cold Chicago can be in the middle of March. Three hours was long enough inside the SUV. He hated stakeouts. Even though this one was his idea. His case.

It started with a dead undergrad, a junior at U of C. The area around the campus—Hyde Park—had some rough spots, and everyone chalked up the murder to urban violence. But they didn’t know what Billy knew from a download of the data on her cell phone—that this young woman made money in her spare time as an escort. She worked through an Internet site that was taken down the day after her death, but her text messages indicated that she had one particular client who had some unusual needs and was willing to pay top dollar for them.

In a nutshell, he liked to choke her during sex.

He was a trader, married with kids, who made more money in a week than Billy made in two years. The kind of guy who could buy an army of

top-shelf lawyers to defend him. Billy wanted this asshole to drop his guard, to relax, so he leaked some news that a suspect was in custody for the undergrad’s murder, that it looked like another garden-variety attack in Hyde Park. And then Billy followed the scumbag trader.

Precisely one week ago, at 9:00 p.m., the trader entered the brownstone down the street. Billy got him on video but wasn’t sure what was happening inside, so he laid low. A little recon work told him that this place was a high-rent brothel.

So assuming that this guy had a regular appointment—and Billy was willing to lay down good money that he did—tonight should be the night. Catch him with his pants down and offer a simple trade: no arrest for the prostitution if you answer a few questions about a dead undergrad. Billy could take it from there. Always better to start a Q and A with the subject sweating his ass off and eager to please.

He pushed back the sleeve of his overcoat and checked his watch. Half past eight. He blew warm air into his hands.

“Sosh, how we doin’?” he said into his radio to Soscia, the cop in one of the other vehicles, two blocks down, staking out the brownstone from the east.

The response came through Billy’s wireless earbud. “Ready, willing, and able,” Sosh said. “Just like your sister.”

“My sister wouldn’t touch you with a six-foot pole. And neither would Stanislowski.”

“Who the fuck is Stanislowski?”

“A six-foot Pole.”

“Harney, get back in the car.” This from his partner, Katherine Fenton, sitting in the warm car just next to him.

“Sosh, how’s your rook holding up?” Soscia had a new detective working with him, a nice kid named Reynolds. “You know I bought him lunch today.”