Not knowing she’d end up dead and spread out on his car like a biology experiment gone wrong.
The blood was everywhere. Her blood, Quinn corrected himself. A part of him wanted to check to see if she were okay, as if she’d somehow survived someone slashing her open and peeling the skin back from her torso. LeAnne’s head rested on the windshield, her eyes open and emptily staring at him as if she knew he’d come across her, too late to do anything but choke down his own cries. She was clothed, barely. Her killer’d pulled up her shirt to expose her belly and sliced her open at least once. Quinn couldn’t be sure. Her pants appeared to be up but were soaked through in blood, her exposed skin pale against the drying umber wash.
Quinn couldn’t stop staring at her belly, or what her killer’d left of it. The carve was deep and vicious, slicing her apart in a jagged half-moon stretching under both sides of her ribs. Gravity or her murderer pulled her insides out, her intestines a loose spill of mass, pouring out of the crater carved out of her belly to dangle down between her spread legs. The punctured loops dripped copiously, nearly weeping fluid, seeping down the Audi’s front bumper and onto the parking garage floor.
It was the sickening rotten green of her torn guts he’d smelled on the wind and the taint of her blood chasing its foul stench with a metallic thread. Her blood was sticky wet, a drying crimson pool on the Audi’s white paint, and Quinn backpedaled when something dark slithered out of the cut above her mons and nearly slid free of her body. It caught itself, pulled back on a stringy mess of greenish-beige ligaments, bouncing back up in a yo-yo spiral against her ribs.
“Coronary ligament.” He hated the machine-gun fire of information his brain was offering up to him. Quinn didn’t need to know he was staring at LeAnne’s hepatobiliary tree or the left lobe of her liver. Neither did he care about intestinal contents being isotonic or anything else the fucked-up part of his mind decided to dish up to him.
There was enough sense left in him to stumble back out of the parking structure. He had to be sick, but it couldn’t be too close to the scene. There was evidence, probably footprints in the damp grass and mud he’d walked through. Quinn needed to get farther away, distance himself from contaminating the area, but he’d gone only a few feet when he lost control of his stomach, and the coffee he’d drank all afternoon burned up his throat and into his mouth.
Bent over, staring at the grass now covered in his vomit, Quinn found he had the taste of LeAnne’s death on his tongue and the stink of her slaughter on his conscience.
This time it was easy to find his phone. Blindly dialing, Quinn wasn’t even sure who he called until he heard a rough light bit of Irish brogue answer and his own last name barked back at him.
“Kane? This is Quinn.” He shivered, wondering if he’d ever be warm again. “I need you to come here. There’s been a murder.”
Chapter 11
Rooftop at Sunset
Damie: How much coffee do you drink, Sinjun. Give it a guess.
Miki: Not as much as I’d like. Why?
D: Think about how much more calm your stomach would be if you cut it in half.
M: I think about cutting you in half because I’d be calmer, but then common sense kicks in. So I don’t.
D: And you’d miss me. Admit it. You’d miss me.
M: Not as much as I’d miss coffee.
YEARS OF nuns, rulers, and long walks down to the principal’s office should have inured Rafe to hard, cold stares and off-the-cuff judgment. He’d had bottles thrown at him while playing and more than once been booed off stage by a crowd and stared down by truckers at two in the morning in a roadside diner skanky enough to star in its own horror flick.
But nothing prepared him for the stone-cold hard stares of Damien, Miki, and Forest when he walked into the Sound’s rear studio carrying his bass and a cup of Starbucks.
“Okay, first rule—you drink coffee, you get it from next door,” Forest grumbled loud enough to be heard over the hiss of the air-conditioner vent pumping mildly cold air into the room. “We’ve got people to feed, and if you’re going to fork over four bucks for a latte, give it to them.”
“Got it.”
He saluted Forest with his cup and got a grin in return. There was a bit of Frank in Forest’s demeanor, an easygoing nature where very little ruffled his feathers. The coffee shop thing was pure Frank. It’d been a rule of sorts at the Sound, one he’d forgotten in his rush to get out the door that morning. Support the musicians, support the coffee-shop crew, and he’d blown it.
“Sorry. I knew that. I just was—”