My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(73)

Rosa smiled. “I’m just answering the questions asked.”

“I understand. But the only thing you can state definitively is that the deceased is, in fact, Sarah Lynne Crosswhite.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what clothes the victim was wearing when she was abducted?”

“No.”

“Do you know what jewelry the victim was wearing when abducted?”

“Again, I can only offer an opinion based upon what I located in the grave.”

“I see you’re wearing earrings today.”

“I am.”

“Have you ever put on a pair of earrings and then, perhaps undecided, brought a second pair?”

Rosa shrugged. “I don’t know that I have.”

“Have you known women who do that sort of thing?”

“I have,” she said.

“It is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, is it not?” Clark smiled. “God knows my wife does.”

The question brought a few snickers. It was a light moment in the darkest testimony so far and those in the gallery responded with nervous laughter. Even Judge Meyers smiled.

“That’s what I tell my husband,” Rosa said.

“And you have no idea whether the deceased had more than one pair of earrings or more than one necklace when she was abducted?”

“I do not.”

Clark smiled for the first time in two days as he returned to his seat.

Dan stood. “No further questions,” he said.

Meyers considered the clock on the wall. “We will end for the day. Mr. O’Leary, who do you intend to call tomorrow morning?”

Dan stood. “Weather permitting,” he said, “Tracy Crosswhite.”





[page]CHAPTER 45





The media for the most part left Tracy alone, perhaps heeding Judge Meyers’s warning that everyone get to where they were staying before nightfall. The inside of her car was cold as an icebox. Tracy started the engine and stepped out to clear the windshield while the defroster blasted hot air from the inside.

Dan called her cell phone. “I’m going to get Rex,” he said. “The weather is supposed to get worse. No one is going to be out tonight. Stay at the house.”

She flexed her fingers against the cold and looked at the cars departing the parking lot and lining the adjacent streets. “Are you sure?” she asked, but she was already contemplating making love to Dan and sleeping soundly beside him.

“I won’t be able to sleep and Sherlock misses you.”

“Only Sherlock?”

“He whimpers. It isn’t pretty.”



Rex greeted her at the door, his tail whipping the air.

“Well, I can see myself quickly becoming second fiddle around here,” Dan said. “But at least they have good taste in women.”

Tracy put down her suitcase and knelt to gently caress the dog’s head beneath the plastic cone. “How are you, boy?”

When she stood, Dan said, “You doing okay?”

She stepped to him and let him wrap his arms around her, holding her. She’d felt the impact of Kelly Rosa’s testimony more than she’d thought she would. Trained to disassociate herself from a victim, over her years as a homicide detective Tracy had investigated horrific crime scenes with a practiced detachment. She’d become desensitized in order to deal with very visual depictions of evil manifested in man’s inhumanity to man. For years, she’d investigated Sarah’s disappearance with the same learned detachment, not allowing herself to consider what despicable things her killer could have done to her. That detachment had had holes poked in it when she’d hiked into the mountains and seen Sarah’s remains in the shallow grave. It had collapsed when she’d seen her baby sister’s skeletal remains on the courtroom television and had to come to grips with hard evidence of the horrors Sarah had endured, and the indecency of her being stuffed in a garbage bag and dumped into a shallow hole like a bag of trash. Now, out of the public eye, away from the intrusion of the cameras into her personal life, Tracy wept, and it felt good to do so while being held by someone who had also known and loved Sarah.

After several minutes, Tracy stepped back and wiped her tears from her cheek. “I must look like a mess.”

“No,” Dan said. “You could never look like a mess.”

“Thanks, Dan.”

“What else can I do for you?”

“Take me away.”

“Where?”

She tilted back her head and met his lips, kissing him. “Make love to me, Dan,” she whispered.



Their clothes were spilled across the bedroom carpet, along with the decorative pillows. Dan lay beneath the sheet catching his breath. They’d kicked off the covers and the down comforter. “Maybe it’s a good thing you stopped being a teacher. You would have broken a lot of high school boys’ hearts.”

She rolled over and kissed him. “And if I was your teacher, I would definitely have given you an A for effort.”

“Only for effort?”

“And the results.”

He put an arm behind his head and looked up at the ceiling, chest still rapidly rising and falling. “My first A, how do you like that? If only I had known back then that all I had to do was sleep with the teacher.”