Darker Than Any Shadow - By Tina Whittle Page 0,15
I sure as hell do.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Nope, not really sure at all.”
Trey didn’t comment. I started to leave my ice cream bowl on the nightstand, but then I remembered—Trey’s place, not mine. So I got out of bed and schlepped it to the kitchen, suppressing the grumble.
This is how things work at Trey’s, I reminded myself. I had one drawer in the bathroom and two drawers in the bedroom and exactly thirty-six inches of closet space. Even my toothbrush had its own cup, black ceramic to match his. Anything I left lying around would be put away in whatever Trey deemed the proper place.
When I got back, he was sitting up in bed, waiting for me. He looked as much a part of the room as any of the furniture, as dark and sleek as the leather chair, as refined as the four-hundred-thread-count ivory sheets. Most of the décor was featured in the two-year-old GQ magazine residing in his desk drawer. It had been his blueprint for putting his life back together after the accident—a necessary and certainly clever response to the identity crash that followed his cognitive rearrangement—but sometimes I found the whole thing…unsettling.
And yet when I climbed into bed next to him, those sheets were undeniably luxurious against my skin. And Trey himself was undeniably real, not made up at all.
I leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder. “So no obvious criminals lurking about tonight?”
“No. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any, only that I didn’t see them.”
“No knives?”
“No.”
“Guns?”
“Not on the men. Women have an easier time carrying discreetly, of course.”
He nodded toward the pocketbook I kept my .38 revolver in. It was a stylish cognac-colored leather number designed for concealed carry—roomy as a saddlebag, lockable, with a no-snag harness that wouldn’t trip a hammer accidentally.
“All I saw tonight were teeny-tiny Barbie doll purses like the one I had. Unlikely to conceal a firearm.”
I put my head on his shoulder, and he leaned his head against mine. I was always stunned at the tenderness underneath the angles and planes, the curious yielding softness scaffolded by so many rules and addendums to rules. It had been the most surprising thing about our first time together—after my abrupt U-turn, after that nail-bitingly slow elevator ride to his door—to find such intensity tempered with such gentleness, so inextricable, in one man.
I whispered against his neck. “Trey?”
“Yes?”
“This is all very hard to keep straight.”
“I understand.”
I looked up at him. “Help me make a flow chart?”
“Now?”
I nodded. He blinked once, then twice. Then he rolled over and got a yellow pad and a pen from his bedside table.
Chapter Nine
“Okay, so here’s Lex in the center.” I wrote his name and drew a big circle around it. “And we’ll put Rico here.” I drew a satellite circle and connected then with a line.
“This isn’t a flow chart. It’s a bubble map.”
“Whatever. What do I do next?”
“Next you illustrate the other connections.” Trey wrote his name down, circled it, then drew a line from himself to Rico, and two lines from himself to Lex.
“But you didn’t know Lex.”
“I spoke with him in the parking lot, so that’s one connection. Plus I secured the scene after you told me he was dead.” He tapped the paper. “That’s two.”
“But he was dead! That’s not a connection.”
“Of course it is. And if I’d had motive to kill him, that connection would become significant because it would have allowed me to alter the scene.”
“But you didn’t alter the scene!”
“That doesn’t matter. I was there. It’s a connection.”
I knew he was right. Means, motive, and opportunity—the unholy trinity of murder.
“So I have to track not only the how and the why, but the when and where as well? For everybody who had a connection, even myself?”
“Yes, but you’ll need more than a bubble map.”
He got out of bed and went to his desk in the living room. When he returned, he had several sheets of graph paper. He climbed back into bed, and I watched him sketch out a rectangle divided into squares and other rectangles.
“This is the main seating area,” he said. He counted squares and then drew in another rectangle. “And this is the podium with the mike stand and the speakers. The equipment was behind here.”
He sketched in the DJ station. I pointed. “And here’s the door to the back.”
“No, it’s here.” He darkened a stripe. “Twenty feet from the wall.”