But if she didn’t do it—if she quit the MVPD before swallowing her twelve months of discipline—she’d never get a letter of reference. She’d never work as a detective again.
She tossed back the dregs of her martini.
“Another?”
Her gaze shot to the barkeep. He was maybe thirty, eyes liquid obsidian and densely fringed. Thick, dark, tousled hair. Olive-toned skin, smooth. Lean and muscular in the way of a triathlete. Fuckable, she thought suddenly. And she felt hot. She held his eyes and gently turned the stem of her martini glass in her hand.
“Who’s asking?” she said.
He waited a beat, not breaking eye contact. “Antonio.”
She snorted softly. “Of course. Antonio. Yeah, please, another.”
“Same?”
“Yep—martini, dirty.”
“Rough day?” he said, taking her empty glass from her hand, allowing the backs of his fingers to brush against her skin. The contact shot a crackle of electricity up her arm, and it felt nice. She imagined how he might look naked and cuffed to a bed with a hard-on. How she might sheath his erection with a condom. Open her thighs. Sink down on to him. Rock her pelvis, gentle at first . . . Her heart beat faster. Heat rushed to her groin. That old urge to hit the club serpentined low into her belly and sank claws deep into her throat. A good, mind-numbing, anonymous fuck—that’s what she needed right now. Better than a drink. Better than coke. Better than dope.
“You could say it was rough,” she said.
“Anything I can do?”
Hell yeah. “The drink.”
“Be right back.”
Antonio sauntered in an overtly casual fashion to the far end of the bar, where he began to fix her drink. She watched his gluteal muscles moving beneath the fabric of his tailored black pants. Nothing like an orgasm to take one’s mind off things.
Angie forced herself to break her gaze. She knew her physical reaction for what it was. An addiction. An escape. A way of numbing other feelings. Hitting the Foxy, the adult entertainment club on the highway out of town, had been her coping mechanism for years. A place to blow off steam. All the major crimes cops had ways of doing this. The Foxy had been hers—a hunting ground where she could scope out an anonymous target, proposition him, cuff him to a bed in the adjacent motel, and screw him without exchanging names or numbers. No strings attached. And she’d leave before he could properly enjoy her in return. Power trip, yeah, but so what? She dealt with men who used women every day of her life, so this was her way of taking back control. Angie had grown increasingly addicted to this fix, the latent danger, the taste of physical and emotional strength.
Until Maddocks.
Until the Spencer Addams case.
Antonio placed her fresh drink on a coaster in front of her.
“Thanks,” Angie said, avoiding his eyes this time, instead averting her attention to the ice hockey game playing on the large-screen television above the bar. She took a hard swig of her martini and focused on the warm burn of alcohol blossoming through her chest, and she breathed in deep.
The hockey game finished, and the channel segued to the 8:00 p.m. news. An image of a small, dirty, pale-lilac sneaker suddenly filled the screen. Angie stilled her glass midair. The text at the bottom of the screen said, ANOTHER DISMEMBERED FOOT WASHES UP IN SALISH SEA.
The camera cut to a young woman with a pretty, round face, blue eyes, short blonde hair blowing in wind. The woman’s nose and cheeks were pinked, and her blue jacket glistened from rain. Behind her the sky hunkered bruised and low above a misty gray ocean. She stood on blackish sand that had been sculpted smooth from the outgoing tide, and she held a leash with a little white dog attached to the end. The blonde woman pointed to a knoll of rocks near the waterline where a pile of seaweed lay in a tangle. As she turned, Angie saw that the woman was pregnant.
Slowly, she lowered her drink to the counter.
I saw that today. I saw them filming while I was in the ferry lineup speaking to Vedder.
Two middle-aged men climbed onto the vacant stools beside Angie. She barely registered them.
“Man, check that out,” said one male to the other. “Weird shit, those floating feet. What’s that now, seventeen in the last ten years?”
“But that’s just a kid’s sneaker,” said the other man. “A little girl’s shoe. Those other floating feet were all adult size.” The male leaned across the bar and called to Antonio. “Yo, could you turn that TV news up a sec?”
Antonio bumped up the sound. Angie stared, transfixed by the little high-top runner that once again filled the screen. A yellow-white mass nestled inside the shoe. Something dark and unarticulated began to unfurl at the core of her body. Anxiety rose inside her.
The camera cut back to the beach, this time to a reporter. Dark tendrils of hair blew across the woman’s face as she spoke into her mike. “A decade-old mystery was reignited on Monday when the remains of another detached human foot, still in a shoe, washed up on the causeway beach at the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal, making it the eighteenth dismembered foot to be found along beaches in British Columbia and Washington State since 2007. The shoes containing the macabre contents have been washing up like pieces of ocean detritus, and they’ve been found among bits of foam, candy wrappers, shells, rocks, or clumps of seaweed. Betsy Champlain was on the beach with her children New Year’s Day when she made the grisly discovery.”
The reporter turned to the pregnant blonde woman. “Ms. Champlain, can you tell us how you found the dismembered foot?”
“My two children and I were in the ferry lineup, heading back home to the island. It was really busy, several sailing waits. Our dog, Chloe, needed a bathroom break, so we brought her down to the beach, where she broke away from my son. We found Chloe over there by those rocks with something in her mouth.”
“The shoe?”
Emotion twisted the blonde woman’s face. She shied away from the scrutiny of the camera by looking down at the sand. “It seemed so small,” she said softly. “So alone, just lying there on the beach. Just a child’s shoe—the same size as my daughter’s. That little girl is—was—probably the same age as my child.”
“How old is your daughter, Ms. Champlain?”
“She’s three.”
Angie swallowed. The man seated closest to her cursed softly. “Just a kid,” he said again. “How does a kid lose a foot? What in the hell happened to the rest of her?”