Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(42)
The sound of her front door opening made her jump. Luke’s laughter filled the room. He stood in the doorway. “It’s me,” he said.
She put a hand over her pounding heart. “You scared me.”
“I’m sorry.”
The last sip of red wine had sloshed over the contents of the Blackwell file. She rushed to the counter and got some paper towels to blot it. Luke watched her with a mildly amused look on his face. “You sure were engrossed in that file. Did you forget I was coming over?”
She got the last drops of moisture off the pages, although not the red stain, and stuffed the pages back into the envelope. “No,” she snapped. “I didn’t.”
He stepped closer and hooked an arm around her waist, pulling her in. He smelled of soap and aftershave. “Did you like the flowers?”
She softened as his lips tickled her neck. “You know I did.”
* * *
An hour later they were eating dinner in her bed. Luke had ordered fancy takeout from the restaurant that Solange, Dirk Spencer’s ex-girlfriend, worked at and brought it with him, complete with plastic forks to go with the white foam takeout containers. She watched him devour more lobster ravioli than she could eat in a week.
“Do you know anyone in the forensic division?” Josie asked, catching him between mouthfuls.
“Where?” he asked. “You mean in the state crime lab?”
“Yeah, didn’t you used to be stationed out by Greensburg?”
He nodded, putting his empty container on the nightstand and lying across the foot of the bed, one hand propping his head up while the other stroked her uninjured calf.
“Near there, yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“So, do you know anyone in the lab?”
His fingers stopped moving. She looked up over her takeout container long enough to see a shadow cross his face. “What is it?” she asked.
“I might know someone there.”
She wiggled her foot and inched her toes toward his chest, tickling his rib cage with her big toe. “Might?”
His hand moved further up to her inner thigh. “Well, I’d have to find out if they’re still working there. Not to mention—again—that I shouldn’t be pulling files, or strings, for you.”
She put her takeout container to one side and stretched her body closer to his roving fingers. “I wouldn’t ask unless it was really important.”
His mouth followed his fingers with breathy kisses along the insides of her legs. “Is this about that Blackwell file?”
An involuntary moan escaped her lips. “Yeah. I need the uh, report, uh the… results of the…”
As his mouth reached her center, she lost her ability to speak. He lifted his head for a moment, a wicked grin on his face. “If I promise to ask about it, do you promise not to talk about the case for the rest of the night?”
She palmed his head and pushed his face back down. “Yes,” she breathed. “Oh God, yes.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Luke left for work while Josie was still asleep but he had, at least, left some coffee on for her. Leaning against her kitchen counter, sipping it slowly, she noticed that all of the chairs had been pushed beneath the kitchen table. That the stack of mail she’d been riffling through yesterday had been piled neatly on top of the Blackwell file, which had been placed on her closed laptop. Everything in an orderly pyramid right next to the flowers he had brought her, the water topped up.
She knew she should be happy. Ray had driven her crazy with his perpetual messiness, but this irked her in a different way. This was her house. Her sanctuary. Her mess. Luke didn’t get it. Sometimes he just didn’t get her.
With a sigh, she retrieved a large plastic bin from her garage and pulled out an old photo album to see if she could find the rock formation Ginger had mentioned. By evening, nearly every surface in her spotless kitchen was covered with photos of her and Ray. The earliest one had been taken when they were almost ten years old. They were on his porch. Ray’s mother had caught them laughing and snapped the picture. That was when Ray’s family lived on the other side of the wooded area behind Josie’s trailer park. Before his dad left. They’d spent countless hours together exploring the forest but mostly hiding from their parents and avoiding their homes.
The next flurry of pictures were from high school. The two of them were always pressed against one another, Ray’s arm slung across her shoulders and Josie turned toward him, her face looking up toward his. The memory of those years stung now. Never could Josie have imagined that Ray would hurt her like he did.
Josie found a photo of the two of them the day they’d made settlement on their house. Their faces glowed. They looked like two people deeply and wildly in love. They were meant for one another. She choked back tears as she snapped the album shut. That nagging voice in the back of her head asked for the thousandth time if she had been too harsh on Ray. She went over that awful night again in her memory and then the night she’d caught him with Misty. No, she had done the right thing. She might have forgiven his infidelity eventually, but that night with Dusty he had broken the most sacred kind of trust between them, the kind she could never forgive.
With a sigh, she took a second look through the pile of photos she had made of the two of them near the various rock formations in and around Denton, which had been taken by friends. She found every other formation in the city, it seemed, except the Standing Man. Had she imagined it? Why did Ginger’s description sound so familiar to her? She tried calling Lisette both to check on her and to find out if she remembered the Standing Man, but the call went right to voicemail. She left a brief, cheery message asking her grandmother to call back.