“Simple. You talk dirty.” A brief silence to let his words sink in. “You’re good at that, aren’t you?”
She rolled her eyes despite the fact that he couldn’t see. Definitely a bright spot of anger there in his voice. “I know what I’m supposed to do. I meant what are the mechanics? Do I have to go to the police station to do this or what?”
“You’ll be at home. They”—presumably McKaverty and Schulz—“switched the service to your number. Bethany was on from midnight to two a.m. You got her shift. Starting tonight. Answer the phone. Talk. They’ll do the rest.”
“Are they going to tap the phone?”
“Worried they’re going to catch you making your own kinky phone calls?”
She huffed. “Are you baiting me, Long?”
“I’d say you’ve already baited yourself, sweetheart.” An endearment? Not.
She decided to placate him. She’d get all the answers she needed later. When he wasn’t quite so ... touchy.
“Okay. So I answer the phone. I keep the ... um ... clients talking. They”—again, the ubiquitous McKaverty and Schulz—“will take care of the rest. Do you want me to signal if I recognize the voice?”
“Signal?”
“Yeah, use a code word or something. Like—”
“Don’t play James Bond, Max. Ya don’t need a code word since I didn’t tell them you’d been eavesdropping on Bethany Spring’s last night on earth.”
Party pooper. She hated not being able to see his face. She couldn’t really judge his tone. She changed the subject to avoid an argument. “So, how did you lead them into the phone sex thing? Did you use the headset like I told you?”
He snorted. “They figured it out without you, Max. Case is almost twenty-four hours old. She had records, and she wasn’t trying to hide what she was doing in her spare time.”
Hmmm. “Did you tell them we wanted to help?”
“Told them you were possessed by the dead woman’s ghost, and you had to solve her murder to exorcise her.”
Holy shit. She hadn’t told him that. Had she? “Yeah, right.”
“Don’t like that one? Fine. Told ’em you’re sexually insatiable, I can’t satisfy you, and this is your way of getting even.”
For one terrible moment, she thought he really had told them that, though they hadn’t even had sex yet. Except in her dreams. Most probably in his dreams, too.
“You’re such a liar.”
“Also told ’em you were in for one damn big surprise because I ain’t even started playing the game yet.”
She could hear the wheels of his mind turning. Man, if he hadn’t even started, she was in trouble. Big trouble. She’d already been close to crumbling like a cookie way more than once. Last night, for instance, when he’d whispered in her ear. “Give it up, Long, and tell me the scoop.”
“You ask too many questions. I got you what you wanted. What d’ya care how the hell I did it?”
For an instant, she felt a bit left out of his other life, his cop life, his work life. As if he turned all of that off when he turned her on. And vice versa. He had secrets. Just as Cameron had had secrets. Like the case involving Bethany’s father. Max hadn’t heard word one about that from the man she’d been married to, not then, not now. Cops and lawyers lived in their own world. They dealt with secrets on a minute-to-minute basis, either exposing them or keeping them. They were invariably good at keeping their own to themselves. Max wanted to break that barrier down. Just once.
“Humor me, Witt. Tell me what you told them anyway.”
“Promised them my firstborn.”
The words flowed down her like a bucket of ice. Babies again. Her throat was suddenly parched.
Witt went on as if he hadn’t expected an answer anyway. “You got your phone line. You got what you wanted. What the hell more do you want?”
Okay. This was the wrong time to flex her muscles. She couldn’t tell whether it was his mood flipping or simply her interpretation. The baby thing bugged her, too, as if it were a slap in her face. On this one, Witt definitely sounded pissed.
“What’s wrong?” Ooh, stupid question. She really didn’t want to know.
“Feeling sorry for myself, that’s all.”
Yeah, like she’d been feeling only seconds ago. She really, really, really didn’t want to know why he was. A gray seventies gas-guzzler cruised slowly past. “Why?”
“Because you’re using me—”
“I am not.”
“—and I think I like it.”
She had no idea what to say to that. So she ignored it and asked another question guaranteed to pop them both into another mood swing. “Are you going to listen to the tapes of what I say on the phone?”
The ensuing silence stretched her nerves. Finally, “Guess.”
Bastard. In that one word, she heard the last vestige of his anger slip away. Ire was replaced by a thread of sexual tension thrumming across the airwaves between them. She headed him off at the pass. “Did you look at Cameron’s Spring file?”
“Yep.”