his rug, like a disappointing version of Cinderella’s slipper. He stood quickly and walked naked out of his room, peering down the hall toward his front door. His clothes remained, strewn here and there, mapping their desperate path toward his bed, but hers were gone.
He went to his kitchen, glanced around, peeked into his living room, and his bathroom too, and then returned to his bedroom, looking at the places she might have left a note—his dresser, the second nightstand. But there was nothing. She’d left without so much as a goodbye.
CHAPTER THREE
“Yo, Davies.” Reed looked back to see his partner, Ransom Carlyle, shutting the door of his personal car and then jogging toward him, carrying a fast food bag. His white dress shirt stretched precariously over his muscled arms and when he raised his hand for a fist bump, Reed half expected the movement to accompany a loud tearing sound as the fabric split.
He tapped his fist to his partner’s. “You accidentally put on Cici’s shirt this morning?”
Ransom made a tsking sound and brought his arm up, flexing his muscle and further stressing the fabric. “Don’t be a hater. I might not have a pretty face like you, but these guns have the ladies showing up in droves.”
“Yeah? Drive the badge bunnies wild, huh?”
Ransom let out a sniffing sound. “Man, that’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
Reed snorted. Ransom was full of shit. His partner was only interested in one “lady” and that was his wife. Ransom was one of the most happily married men Reed had ever met.
“Did the sergeant give any details about the scene?”
“No,” Reed said, continuing through the station parking lot, Ransom following. He unlocked the driver’s side door of the city-issued vehicle and climbed in. Ransom slid into the passenger seat next to him. “All I know is a staff member was found murdered at Lakeside Hospital on Hamilton Avenue.”
Reed pulled out of the lot, heading toward the crime scene that had been called in just before he arrived at work. He’d called Ransom who’d been five out and told him to meet him in the parking lot. “No shit? The psycho joint?” He unwrapped what looked like a breakfast burrito and took a bite. “Gotta be an inside job, right?”
Reed wiped his cheek and gave his partner a look of disgust. “Can you chew your food before talking and spraying it all over my face?”
“All those violent nuts running around? Someone’s bound to get shanked eventually.” Ransom took another bite of his burrito. “Cici did a rotation in the psych ward when she was in nursing school and told me some stories that would turn your stomach.” He polished off the last of his burrito. Obviously whatever stories he was referencing did nothing to dampen his own appetite. “But the real psychopaths? The scary ones like they keep at Lakeside?” he said around the food in his mouth. “They don’t even need to manufacture weapons out of objects. They’re just as happy using their own bodies—excrement, nails, teeth. They’ll go Hannibal Lecter on you if you give them the slightest chance. Eat your face right off. No remorse.”
Reed made the conscious decision to turn the conversation away from the topic of face eating. “How is Cici?”
“She’s good. She’s mad you canceled on us for dinner last week. I told her you’ve been in a real shitty mood lately though, and she wouldn’t have wanted to spend time with you anyway.”
Reed shot him a look. “I haven’t been in a shitty mood.”
“Maybe not for the average person. But for you? Yeah, shitty. Ever since the day after DiCrescenzo’s bachelor party. What happened that night anyway? You get roofied? Because you’ve been hungover ever since.”
Reed sighed. Hungover. That was one way to put it. And sex with a beautiful stranger wasn’t supposed to do that. It was annoying that he’d thought about her as often as he had over the past two weeks. He was a grown man, and it was irritating as hell that he was hurt that the woman he’d spent one night with obviously didn’t want to see him again.
“You’re doing it again.”
He glanced at Ransom. “Doing what?”
“Glowering. It looks like this.” Ransom hunched forward and the expression he made brought to mind a black, male, and heavily muscled Cruella Deville.
Reed laughed, breaking the tension that had built inside him. He pulled into the parking lot of the hospital, noting several city vehicles, a crime scene van, and numerous patrol cars. “That