“I was just watching you,” he said, knowing it was both a lie and the truth.
She reached up and touched his face in that special way of hers. Then her knuckles brushed down over his chest, and the next thing he knew, she was pushing him down against the mattress and straddling him. When he would have touched her in return, she whispered a soft but commanding, “No.”
She bent and quickly brushed her lips against his.
Then she teased his chest with her kiss and the silky caress of her hair.
Finally she moved lower, but not until he was so aroused that he couldn’t stand it did she allow him to reach for her, lift her and bring her back down on his erection. He felt as if the world exploded along with him as he entered her.
Later she slept again, and he lay beside her knowing that he had kept the truth from her. That she didn’t know he was crazy. That he had gone to Hastings House and heard the whisper of the woman with whom he’d once been falling in love.
Leslie.
A dead woman.
And Gen didn’t know that he kept seeing her eyes as the life was choked out of her.
She didn’t know that the man she was depending on was slowly losing his mind.
In the morning, he left before she woke up.
He was suddenly anxious, because Lori Star had never contacted him.
At Lori’s apartment, he once again got no response to his knocking. Before he could move on to Susie’s place, her door opened and she came out to speak to him. She was clearly distressed. “I was going to call you today. I don’t know what to do. I don’t think Lori ever came home.”
He frowned. “You haven’t seen her since Sunday?”
“No. And I don’t know what to do. I mean, I’m not her next of kin or anything. And I always heard that a person had to be missing for forty-eight hours before anyone could fill out a missing-persons report, but I don’t even know if she is a missing person. Oh, God, I’m so upset. I just don’t know what to do.”
“It’s all right. But it’s definitely time to fill out a missing-persons report. I’ll go down to the police station with you.”
“Police station?” she said, and cleared her throat. “Um, Mr. Connolly, you should know…I’ve been arrested before.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he assured her.
But she wasn’t going to go down to the station with him, he quickly realized, so he put through a call to Raif.
“That’s Missing Persons,” Raif told him.
“Raif, this is the woman who was on television after that pileup on the FDR, saying she was psychic.”
“Then talk to Traffic,” Raif said.
“Raif, dammit, Sam Latham was in that accident. It might be connected.”
“And it might not!”
Exasperated, Joe held his temper. “So do you have any answers on the Thorne Bigelow murder yet?” he demanded.
“No,” Raif admitted after a moment, then sighed. “All right, I’ll get someone from Missing Persons and come over.”
“We’ve got to get into the apartment,” Joe added.
“Ask her friend if she has a key,” Raif told him. “Maybe she’s supposed to water the plants or something like that.”
Raif turned to Susie. “Do you have a key to the apartment?” he asked.
She shook her head, and Joe went back to his call.
“She’s a missing person, Raif. Can’t we get a warrant on probable cause to find out if she happens to be lying dead inside?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Raif said. “All right, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Eventually Raif showed up with, as promised, an officer from Missing Persons. Susie did her best to answer all the necessary questions, but it was difficult. If Lori had living parents or other family, Susie had never met them. She didn’t even know if Lori Star was her real name.
While the officer worked with Susie, Raif, who had the warrant in his pocket, entered the apartment. Joe followed him in without asking permission.
“There’s nothing out of order,” Raif said. He sighed, turning to Joe. “Look, I know you thought there was something believable about her, but…the woman is a prostitute. Who knows? She wasn’t bad-looking. Maybe she found someone she could, um, ‘work’ for a while. Maybe she’s shacked up in a motel somewhere.”
“She didn’t leave with any of her belongings, not according to what Susie told us,” Joe said. “She went ‘to see a man about a horse.’ It sounds to me like she went out to meet someone, and that it didn’t go very well.”
“Either that,” Raif argued, “or she went to meet someone and it went very well. Didn’t you see Pretty Woman?”
“Raif, are you serious?” Joe demanded.
“No, but…I don’t know what to tell you.”
Frustrated, Joe looked through Lori Star’s apartment, but try as he might, he couldn’t see anything out of order, either. Nor had she left a note of her destination scribbled down on her phone pad.
“Can you trace her phone records, at least?” Joe asked Raif.
“I’ll get someone on it,” Raif promised.