Dream Man

“I have a niece nearby,” she said. “I’ll call her.” And she looked at him as if asking for his permission to call the niece instead of a friend. He patted her and told her that was fine, and sent her off with the patrolman, who had taken his cue from Dane and treated her as gently as he would a lost child.

When Dane turned around, Trammell was still looking as enigmatic as a cat.

“What?” he demanded testily.

Trammell raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking something, though. You’ve got that shit-eating smirk on your face.”

“Why would anyone smirk while they eat shit?” Trammell asked rhetorically.

He loved the man like a brother, but honest to God, sometimes Dane felt like messing up that pretty face. But when Trammell was in one of his moods, nothing could pry information out of him. Dane thought about giving him a couple of beers to loosen his tongue, then decided to leave well enough alone. He’d save the beer for special occasions.

There was nothing left to do but assist Freddie and Worley in tying up the loose ends: make certain the trash had been sacked up, to be gone through later; search the house for personal papers such as a diary, telephone and address books, life insurance policies. In death, Jackie Sheets would lose all of her privacy. They would go through her closets and her cabinets, in search of that one snippet of coincidence and fate that linked her to Nadine Vinick. Whatever the two women had had in common was the key to the killer. If poor Ansel Vinick hadn’t killed himself, he could have helped them pinpoint the crucial link, and maybe found a reason for living in helping to find his wife’s killer. In Dane’s opinion, the bumper sticker “Shit happens” should have the word “frequently” tacked on to the end of it.

Ivan had taken his meager findings back to the lab to begin analyzing them; the medical examiner’s office had Jackie Sheets’s body, though there was little to be added other than the approximate time of death. They could have saved the ME the time and trouble; Dane knew the time of death, because Marlie had called him.

Worry had settled new lines in the lieutenant’s face as he glumly surveyed the outline on the floor where Sheets had lain. “Everyone be in my office at ten tomorrow morning,” he said. “For now, go home and get some sleep.”

Dane glanced at his watch. It was almost one, and he was suddenly aware that he hadn’t had much sleep the night before.

“Are you going back to Marlie’s?” Trammell asked.

He wanted to; God, did he want to. “No, I won’t disturb her,” he said. “She’ll be asleep.”

“You think so?”

He remembered the way she had looked when he’d left, that haunted expression back in her drawn face. He hadn’t even kissed her, he realized. His mind had already been on the murder scene, and he had totally blocked Marlie out. He had just made love to her, had gotten off her warm body to answer the beeper’s summons, and he had walked out without kissing her. “Damn,” he said tiredly.

Trammell said, “See you in the morning,” and got in his car. Grace Roeg would probably still be waiting, Dane thought. She was a cop, too; she would understand that he had had to leave suddenly. But Marlie wasn’t a cop; she was a woman who had been too solitary her entire life, a woman who had borne enough pain for ten lifetimes. She was strong, incredibly so; she hadn’t cracked, but she wore the scars, both physically and mentally. It had taken guts for her to let him make love to her, and what had he done? Their first time, and he had turned it into a slam-bam; he hadn’t even said “thank you.”

If he could have reached it, he’d have kicked his own ass.

She wouldn’t be asleep; she would be sitting on the couch, still and quiet, waiting for his return. He couldn’t protect her by keeping her in the dark, because she knew more than he did. She was an eyewitness, inside the killer, watching through his eyes as he gleefully hacked and slashed.

Dane drove quickly, the streets much emptier now. It began raining, the slow-moving storm finally reaching the city. He felt as if it were a replay of Friday night, when he had hurried through the wet streets to reach Marlie.

As he had expected, there was a light on in the living room when he pulled into the driveway and killed the motor. Before he could get out of the car, she had opened the front door and was standing there, silhouetted against the light, waiting for him.

She was still wearing the thin robe, and he could see the outline of her body through the fabric. He ran through the rain and leaped up the two shallow steps onto the porch. She didn’t say anything, just stepped back to let him in. She didn’t have to ask what they had found, because she knew.

She was tired, her face wan, her eyes dark-circled. In those eyes was a weariness that went far beyond the physical, and the subtle air of distance had settled around her again.

He meant to offer comfort, if she would accept it. He meant to take care of her, give her the healing unconsciousness of sleep. She could relax, knowing that she was secure. He meant to hold her all night long, offering her the primitive animal comfort of his closeness.

That was what he meant to do. But as they silently faced each other, with the rain pattering outside in rhythm to his suddenly racing heart, he forgot about all the noble things he meant to do. He had claimed her only a few hours before, making her his in the physical possession of mating, but they had been interrupted. The act had been completed, but the seal of the flesh hadn’t been. True intimacy wasn’t found in penetration and climax, but in the quiet time afterward, in the small ways that two lives meshed. He had left that undone, and his instincts were too primal and sure for him to ignore it.