Chapter 3

Michelle pulled her seatbelt a little tighter, not caring if Nick saw it or not. The man drove like a maniac. She had felt safer being in a car with Sam, even though the man was a pervert and lazy as hell. She felt her stomach tighten as the light in front of them turned yellow and he sped up, going through it just as it turned red.

"Is this your way of trying to back out?" she asked him through gritted teeth.

Nick looked over at her, sitting stiffly in the low slung passenger bucket seat in his Mustang. They had offered him a undercover police vehicle when he took the job, but he preferred to drive his own car, not only because the detective's cars were always breaking down. Mostly just because his car was much cooler.

"You don't like my driving?" he asked innocently, feigning a hurt he didn't feel, turning his attention to her for a few seconds longer than she liked.

"NASCAR wouldn't like your driving," she grumbled. "Watch where you're going!"

He grinned and turned his attention back to the road as she muttered something under her breath about masochism. The way things were going, she would be taking down her hair and kicking back with him in no time.

"Where are we going?" she asked, refusing to look out the windshield again, instead studying him like an insect under a microscope.

"Lunch." He sped up to pass a semi on the right just as the four lane road merged into two lanes. He made it, but got a blast of horn from the trucker. Looking into his rearview mirror, he could just make out the guy swearing at him.

"But we're headed out of town," Michelle looked around, noticing that they were passing the used car lots that lined US 24 north of town. "There aren't any restaurants out this way."

"My favorite is out this way, hope you like Italian."

Italian food and murder. Red sauce and blood. Suddenly she wasn't very hungry. If his driving wasn't going to kill her appetite, she had no doubt that the crime scene photos would.

She looked up in time to see him passing the first of three cars and looked back at her hands again, her body tensed for the blast of a horn, the scream of brakes, the shriek of metal tearing into metal and glass breaking.

He looked over and saw her clenched hands, white knuckled and took pity on her, slowing down once he had passed the last of the cars. He settled into the seat and kicked on the cruise control, letting the car stream along at a steady sixty miles an hour.

"So, Michelle." She was looking at his speedometer as if she couldn't believe that he had actually slowed down enough to not get her killed. "Tell me about yourself."

"I thought we were going to talk about the case."

Wow, there was steel in that smoky voice. She didn't want to talk about herself. To him? or to anyone? Was there a mystery here? It wasn't his mystery to figure out, but he wished that it were.

"If we're going to work together, I should know something about you. Don't you think? I mean, come on, if we're going to be partners we have to be able to trust each other." He liked the way that sounded. Work together, not that he was the boss and she was the deputy in disguise as a detective. And working for him.

"Not really." The two words were filled with a wealth of meaning.

He pulled into the parking lot of the small convenience store that was on the corner of the road he lived on. It was tiny, carrying only the basics in supplies such as milk and bread, but it boasted a pizza oven and made cheap but excellent pizzas. He turned off the engine and turned in his seat to look at her.

She was looking around, taking in the area and the lack of ambiance the ancient building boasted.

"Well, at least tell me one thing?" He waited until she looked at him, impatience evident in the way she moved.

"What do you like on your pizza?"

He pulled into his driveway and got out, balancing a huge manila envelope and two thick file folders on top of the pizza box to head up the front walk toward his single story ranch style home. He expected to have to drag her out of the car. She acted like he was going to attack her or something the first second he got the chance.

But she got out of the car, took the pizza box from him when he got to the door and held it while he unlocked it and turned off the security alarm he had installed when he moved in. She walked in before him, stopping to look around at some of the work he had done. He suddenly found himself seeing it through her eyes.

The front room wasn't much, yet. He was working on the old fireplace, hoping to have it done in time for winter. He had torn a lot of the original substandard brickwork out and was redoing it himself. The mantle was oak which some barbarian had painted over in a putrid shade of green to supposedly match the woodwork around the windows. He had striped it all and stained it into a light honey color. He had replaced the front door and three windows already, two more sitting to the side of the hallway waiting to be installed.

The carpet was the same ugly stained mess that had been there when he bought the place, he was waiting to finish with the spackling, sanding, and painting of the walls before he replaced it with hardwood floors of the same soft honey as the woodwork. It was a big job, enough for a crew to do. But he was doing it himself. He considered it therapy. Something to do for his mind when he woke at three in the morning with a panic attack. It was something to occupy his hands besides the shaking and tremors of fear that he wasn't going to be able to do his job, to be good enough to do what he was supposed to do.

He tried to think of a joke, a line, something to stop this feeling of inadequacy that was fighting its way up his throat from the knot in his stomach. Nothing.

She turned and smiled at him. It was the first genuine smile that he had seen on her face. No artifice. It was beautiful and it hit him right below the diaphragm, making it almost impossible to breath.

"This is going to be something when it's done." She set the pizza down on the old, lumpy couch and stepped over a pile of boards to look out one of the windows he had replaced. His backyard was small, backing up to state land that was wooded and dark. He had done some landscaping this spring, not sure if what he had done was right or not but liking the way it looked when he was finished. "You need a swing out there, right by the arbor."

"It's on back order." Was that his voice? It sounded strange to his ears.

She turned from the window and looked around at the vaulted ceilings, the completed projects and the ones that were half done and the ones that weren't even started.

"You are going to have to tell me who is doing the work. I live in an old apartment that has tons of creaks and groans. I'm dreading this winter already." She smiled at him.

"Well," he smiled back at her, unable not to. "I'll have to see if he can make the time. If we don't catch the killer or killers in these cases, he'll probably have lots of time."

Her eyes widened in amazement and she mouthed the question, you?

He nodded. She looked around again with new eyes and seemed impressed, her expressions stroking his ego in ways that had everything to do with being a man and nothing to do with being a cop. He could have spent the afternoon with her, showing her the work he had done in the yard, the projects that he was setting up for himself for later. He could have enjoyed getting her opinion on the flooring, expensive ceramic tile, he wanted for the entryway and the carpeting for the bedrooms.

But he stopped himself, picked up the pizza and took it into the huge dining room. It was his work room. His office at home. The table was handmade. It had been made inside the room and that was why it was still there. The only way to take it out would be to take it apart. The old owners hadn't wanted the hassle and had sold it to him with the house.

It made the perfect place to spread out work.

He segregated the table into two sections, one for each victim. The files were open, pictures taken out of the manila envelope and placed next to the files. His notes were taken out and put off to the side. He had bought a large cork board and had leaned it against the wall, he now took it and put it up on two chairs, setting his brief case against the bottom so that it wouldn't slip over. On the board he pinned a picture of each girl, the pictures computer generated using the reconstructed skulls of each victim and generic norms for Caucasian females of their supposed age bracket.

What hair had been left on the bodies had been light colored. The first victim's eyes had been found inside her skull. They had been blue. So both victims were shown with light hair and blue eyes. The science wasn't exact, and the photographs had been given out to the press without any hits from the public yet, but they were much better than putting up the crime scene photos of decaying flesh and broken bones to identify each victim.

From the photos, the girls were late teen to early twenties. They were pretty in a way that wasn't obvious or startling. There wasn't anything about either girl that would draw crowds. What they had been had just drawn a killer.

Michelle had taken the pizza and set it up at a corner of the table. She got his attention away from the board by clearing her throat. "Plates?"

He nodded at the door into the kitchen. "Next to the sink. There's beer and pop in the fridge. Grab me a Mountain Dew?" He added almost as an after thought as his attention was snared again by the board, "Please?"

The kitchen was neat. No dirty dishes in the sink, no food left out or drying on the stove. It didn't look like the stereotypical kitchen of a single man. In the dish dryer next to the sink was a single glass and a coffee cup. No coffee maker on the counter, which meant he either drank instant or he put it away when he was done with it.

She cringed as the image of her kitchen came to mind. It was tiny and cramped and she hadn't had much of a chance to move in since she started working. She was still living out of boxes and suitcases, cursing when she couldn't find things that she wanted and vowing that she would take care of it on her next day off. It never happened.

She found the right cupboard and was amazed again by the fact that all of his dishes, while not matching, were of good quality and complementing colors which would look good together on a dinner table. His glassware matched and wasn't the jumble of freebee stuff like what she owned. She grabbed two plates, a couple of paper towels from the dispenser on the wall and opened his fridge to get the drinks.

Even here he was a surprise. No junk food boxes and bags. And it was filled with actual food. Fruits and vegetable were in the see through drawers, lunch meat was wrapped up in plastic and in another drawer. There were some leftovers but they weren't take out. Another piece to add to the puzzle that was Nick Saint.

She grabbed his soda, taking a bottle of water for herself and took her load back to the dining room. Inside she was a quivering mess trying to steel herself to prove that she was tough enough to look at these photos and to discuss traumatic and violent death as if she dealt with it on a daily basis. Outside she was calm and in control. And she would stay that way or die trying, she vowed.

He was still standing where she had left him, staring at the pictures. It stole into her that he cared enough about the victims to lose himself in thought. She had read about his career. It was hard not to. He had been instrumental in putting away a lot of bad guys in the past twelve years, earning himself numerous awards and commendations. He was tough on those he worked with but she knew he was tougher with himself. He took failure very personally.