self- sufficient, not boring, smart and makes you feel safe.”
The table went quiet for too long. I was staring into my coffee cup and when I raised my eyes they were both looking at me.
“Where were you on the night of January third?” Diane said with that mischievous look in her eyes.
“It fits you, M-Max. And your friend, O’Shea,” Billy said.
“Who doesn’t trust a cop, off-duty, in a bar?” Diane said. “Especially a blue-collar girl from a blue-collar neighborhood.”
“I’m not a cop anymore, and neither is O’Shea,” I said, going on the defensive.
“The problem with all this dime-store psychoanalysis is that none of us knows what the women were looking for to let themselves fall into this trap. And that’s if they fell at all and aren’t tending bar in Cancún or Freeport or Houston for Christ’s sake,” I said. “And what’s the killer’s motive in all this if they were abducted?”
This time I got up myself and poured the final cup from the coffeemaker.
“They’re lonely, Max,” Diane said, answering the first question. “You don’t use logic to explain what one person sees in another to save them from loneliness.”
She slipped her hand under Billy’s.
“Just like m-most abusers, rapists, it’s not about sex,” Billy said. “The guy is trying to control something and can’t, not even himself.”
“Colin O’Shea doesn’t want control that bad,” I said. “Hell. He never wanted it when he did have it.”
“I agree,” said Billy.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. If he gets arrested, Max. Tell him t-to call m-me.”
“I appreciate it, Billy,” I said, and looked at Diane, who was now squeezing Billy’s hand.
“And let’s all pray for Cancún,” Diane said.
CHAPTER 17
Marci woke Sunday morning thinking: “How did I do this to myself again?”
She could feel it hardening in the back of her head, that uncomfortable guilt and self-admonishment like she’d put off studying for a midterm until the date of the test or once again forgotten to check the oil in her car and knew that her father would back it out to move it from blocking his truck and see the light on and say “Didn’t I tell you? That engine is going to seize up on you, young lady, and that’s it. You’re walking.”
But this was worse. She was in too deep again with a man and shit, she was starting to tell it wasn’t going to work. She was lying in bed, naked under just a sheet and watching the lines of sunlight streak through the blinds and crawl across the wall. It had to be eleven. He’d been gone since seven because he was working that daytime alpha shift or whatever they called it. She pressed a pillow tighter in between her legs and felt the bruise on the outside of her thigh. It was still that high, purple color of an underripe plum and was just getting a thin ring of yellow around its edge. He’d punched her a good one when she grabbed the cell phone out of his hand and kept right on bitching about him checking all her call-back log numbers.
OK, maybe she was overreacting. It was just his nature, wanting to know everything about her and who she was talking to all the time. It’s what cops do, right? Born investigators and always need to know what’s going on, he said. Christ knows she’d been with guys who didn’t want to know a damn thing about her except whether she’d put out on the first half-drunken date. And so what if he called her at work a dozen times a night? He just wanted to hear her voice, he said. He was always asking if she could get out early because he missed her. Shit, when was the last time she had a boyfriend who showed her that much attention?
She rolled over to her nightstand and took a drink from the bottle of spring water. There was an empty tumbler next to it that he’d filled with Maker’s Mark. The man could drink. Her daddy would be pissed off about that, pull that holier-than-thou on her even if he was the one who got her that first bartending job at the VFW in Eagleton. But the police officer part, he’d be proud of that. A law- abiding, respected man who would protect you when I’m gone. And he’d been gone, what, four years now?
She could still see him sometimes in her worst dreams at night, coming through the mudroom door, stumbling, and her father never stumbled. The frigid air from outside