Hide (Detective Harriet Foster #1)(47)

“What do you mean?” Foster asked.

“I had watched him at Teddy’s. I could see he had eyes for the young redhead at the bar. I approached him to see if I could turn his head. Like it was a game. He admitted later that the girl he’d been watching was his ex. He was determined, he said, to win her back. I was okay with the revenge sex but underwhelmed all the same.”

“He say anything else about his ex?” Lonergan asked.

Cooke looked up at him but wouldn’t answer.

“Anything at all?” Foster asked. “Maybe how he intended to get her back?”

“Nothing about that. He never even mentioned her by name, but I knew he was hung up on her. He kept stroking my hair, touching it, winding it around his fingers. Then it dawned on me it wasn’t my hair he was seeing but hers. He would have taken anyone home that night. I’m blonde, clearly, but he wanted my hair to be red, like hers. He kept saying, ‘You’d be so beautiful with red hair.’ I didn’t expect any real feelings to be involved, I tucked those away a long time ago, but you’d like to think the man you’re sleeping with is seeing you and not someone else.”

Lonergan frowned. “You could always try sleeping with your husband.”

Cooke let Lonergan’s words sit, and then she stared up at him as though he were a dead thing stuck to the bottom of her designer shoes. “I could, but there’d always be three in the bed—me, him, and . . . whoever catches his eye. A secretary. A waitress. His best friend’s wife.” She glanced at Foster. “Is that all you need? Can I go now?”

Foster stood. “Thanks for coming in, Mrs. Cooke. We appreciate your time.”

Cooke rose, pushed her chair in roughly, the legs scraping against the floor. She smiled in a nice-nasty way aimed mostly at Foster’s partner. “Mrs. Cooke. I used to love being called that.” The smile disappeared. “Now the words burn in my throat whenever I utter them.”

Foster watched her leave the room, drawn in by Cooke’s sadness, her emptiness. She got it, the woman’s desolation, but then she pushed the feeling away and locked it out. Joe Rimmer had lied about his one-night stand. It was more like a two-hour stand, which gave him plenty of time to encounter Peggy Birch on that Riverwalk. Maybe he’d called her and they’d agreed to meet. Maybe she’d left Teddy’s and then sat out on the Riverwalk to watch the water by herself, and maybe Rimmer had doubled back and found her there. All plausible.

“We need to bring that weirdo Rimmer back in,” Lonergan said.

She pushed past him, furious, her fists clenched, her body tense. It was enough. He was enough. An oaf, a narrow-minded, boorish clod. At her desk, she slammed her notebook and files down and started yanking open drawers, slamming them shut again, looking for nothing but needing the noise, the slam, to keep from exploding.

Two days, that was all it had been.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Lonergan asked.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said. She found her backup bottle of aspirin in the middle drawer, grabbed it, and slammed the drawer closed, the metal-on-metal contact echoing through the office. Heads turned; conversations stopped. “Do. Not. Talk. To. Me.”

He smirked. “Look, Foster, if you expect me to coddle every cheap—”

She shot him a warning look. “Don’t finish that sentence.” She swallowed two tablets dry, her entire body shaking, the equilibrium she’d managed to maintain the last couple of days slipping. She couldn’t work with this man. She’d thought she could find a way, a work-around, but she couldn’t bear now to look at him with that smug, pretentious demeanor.

They weren’t alone. The office was full of cops who were now watching them. She knew this. She could feel the eyes at her back. She had to think about career and impressions and reputation as well as fight to quiet the volcano simmering inside her. “You disrespected that woman,” she managed, lowering her voice, burning, burning. “You judged her, and you were nasty about it.” Her eyes moved from his face all the way down to his dusty shoes and back again. “Who died and made you arbiter of everyone else’s morals? Her life is her life. How she lives it is none of your concern. We needed the timeline. That’s all. Just that.”

“It’s people like her makin’ the world such a shit show, you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you. Nobody. Ever. You’re a cop, not her judge. What’s wrong with you?” She really needed to know because whatever it was didn’t look like anything she or Griffin or the job or the world, for that matter, would be able to fix. Had he worked this way his entire career? How? she wondered.

“Look, Foster, I’m tryin’ to get a killer off the streets. I got kids, you don’t, which means I, unlike you, got skin in the game. I’m gonna do whatever I have to do, whether it comes out pretty or not is what I’m sayin’. You want all touchy feely, you need to partner with somebody else.” He cocked a thumb toward the team. “Li, for instance, since you two seem to get on so well together.”

Lonergan’s eyes left hers and focused on something over her shoulder that straightened him up. She turned and saw Griffin standing at her door, her hands on her hips. She’d watched their exchange. “Great,” he muttered. “Happy now?”

For a split second she thought of picking up her stuff and leaving. She needed a break, fresh air, peace, only she didn’t have time for any of that. It felt as though she were locked in a tiny box and the box kept getting smaller. She had to fight to breathe evenly. Rimmer was a liar who was obsessed with Peggy, and he had several unaccounted hours to answer for. That was her next step. Slowly, the din in the office resumed as everyone went back to what they’d been doing. The “blowup” was over.