I was genuinely curious. “What’s different?”
His shoulders rose. “I don’t know.” He sighed, turning to me, and the look in his eyes truly wounded me. “I wish I did.”
I felt the need to confess to everything I’ve ever done that may have hurt him, but he went on. “I tried to reach you when I was gone, and all I got was static.”
“You tried to reach me?” It was a mere whisper, the words sticking in my throat. Tears stung at my eyes. He had reached out. He had tried . . .
Sampson. Focus. I let a little niggle of anger boil up, reminding myself that Alex wasn’t trying to reach me: he was trying to read my mind. And a telephone was readily available and a hell of a lot more reliable than the “loving” mind dip.
I broke his gaze, seeing the tip of his police badge winking on his belt. “No, Alex,” I said, shaking my head. “Pete Sampson is not back in San Francisco.”
Alex started the car and I tried to quash down the guilt that welled up inside me.
I generally have two complexion colors: impossibly pale or lobster red. But as I drove home from the Underworld Detection Agency—and the heinous crime scene on the bluff—I realized there was a new hue to add when I checked myself in the rearview mirror: ashen. It was the complexion equivalent of the way that I felt. Murder, I was sadly getting used to. Ditto with crime scenes. But lying—scratch that—lying to Alex, was a different thing entirely.
I trudged up the stairs and brightened when I stepped into my apartment and ChaCha, in a bout of spastically happy yips, tossed herself at my ankles. I scooped her up and she gave me a comforting nuzzle.
“Wow, Soph,” Sampson said, stepping out of the bathroom. “You don’t look so well. Everything okay?”
I pinched my bottom lip, trying to think of a better greeting than, “I saw the gnarled remains of a pair of college coeds on the Point; what did you do today?”
“I need chocolate” was my kindly response.
In a matter of moments I was stationed at the kitchen table wearing a stack of chocolate marshmallow pinwheels on my index finger. I was eating them like candied apples and dumping the remains of a chilly chardonnay in my Carrie for Prom Queen coffee mug.
“It was awful,” I said to Sampson, shuddering so that a spray of chocolate fell into my cleavage. “The destruction was . . . complete.”
“Did Alex have any leads? Did anyone?”
I frowned, shaking my head. “Nothing. But . . .” I let my word trail off as I bit into my cookie, hoping the chocolate-marshmallow goodness would dull the ache of those sightless eyes.
“But what?”
“Well, I wandered away a little bit—and ended up sliding in the—in the blood.”
Sampson gestured to my turban of gauze. “I was wondering when you were going to mention that.”
“I just hit my head. But before that, I’m almost certain I saw something. A figure or something in the bushes.”
“Something or someone?”
I looked at Sampson and was taken aback by the intensity of his gaze. “I’m not sure. It was hard to tell.”
He nodded and there was something unreadable in his expression. It was almost heartwarming, the way he focused on me, on my wound, on my story.
I gulped my mug of wine. “It may have been after I fell. But I felt it watching me. I felt it—or him—watching the whole crime scene.”
Sampson bristled. “Does Alex know about this?”
I nodded, bit into another cookie ring. “I told him, but I think that he thinks—” I paused, picked at a chunk of chocolate on the table. “I think that he thinks I was seeing things.”
I saw the question in Sampson’s eyes, and I immediately changed the subject. “No leads. They found some hair, but I’m not sure what came of it.”
“Hair?” Sampson’s brows went up. “Victim or perp?”
I grinned. “You sound like a real detective!”
“Well, I did spend the afternoon watching Law & Order.”
“Same detective school I graduated from,” I said, glugging the remains of my wine. I stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to scrape the crime scene from me, now that I’ve been fortified. Oh—” I paused, turning slowly to face Sampson. “There was one thing that was weird though.”
Sampson was gathering up my cookie crumbs with a napkin. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Feng was there.”
Sampson stiffened and I saw the tremble go through his body. He tried to hide it, tried to brush it off, but I noticed the crumbs he had just palmed were sprinkled back on the table. “Feng? The werewolf hunter?”
I nodded.
“Sophie, why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
I looked from Sampson’s pinched expression to my empty wine mug. “I—I only thought it was weird—not important.”
Sampson let out a long sigh and lowered himself to the dining chair. I could see the cogs turning in his head.
“She doesn’t know you’re here, Sampson. She was at the crime scene—miles from here.”