It’s too bad the good-looking ones are always sociopaths.
“What are you—?”
I poked his chest with my index finger. “I know what you did.”
“You know that I got shit-faced drunk and slept in the stairwell because I lost my keys?”
“Lost your keys?”
Pike looked sheepish. “They were in my pants.”
I glanced down and realized that Pike was wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants instead of the slim pair that went with his suit. Perhaps earlier, I was too busy looking for bulges instead of the poorly stiched seams and unnatural fabrics to notice the change. But I still wasn’t convinced.
“So you lost your pants and your keys.”
Pike nodded then held my gaze, his eyes meltingly delicious and for the briefest of moments I considered what life with a serial killer might be like.
I shook myself from my revelry. “That’s a convenient story.”
The other elevator plinged! and Detective Moyer stepped out with another officer who was carrying two steaming cups of coffee. Moyer nodded to Pike, who raised his own paper coffee cup to the man.
I narrowed my eyes. “You know Detective Moyer?”
Pike’s eyes cut to me as the steam wisped from around his deep brown eyes. “Didn’t I tell you I work for a lot of people? Sometimes even the NYPD.”
“Right.” I felt myself grimace. “Crime scene photographer.”
I glanced back at where Moyer and the pup cop were setting themselves up, then back at Pike.
“Well you’d better stay around. They want to know who saw Emerson last.”
“And why do you think that was me?”
I narrowed my eyes and Pike narrowed his right back at me and stepped a little closer, his nose—his lips—barely inches from mine.
“Are you accusing me of something, Ms. LaShay?”
“Ms. LaShay?” It was Moyer’s deep voice and he was looking over his shoulder at me now, those heavy brows raised expectantly.
I poked Pike in the chest. “We’re not done.”
And though there is no reason in this realm or the other that it should have, the second we touched, a spark shot through me like delicious wildfire. I pulled my finger back as though it burned but it was too late; Pike’s eyes were low and hooded, and the half-inch of smile on his pursed lips let me know that he felt it, too.
Moyer asked me a rather routine, CSI-type series of questions that I answered with the practiced unease of someone who had seen her first dead body. No one needed to know that back home in San Francisco, my every day was spent with the dead. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but San Francisco was the city that never dies.
“Well,” Moyer said, his pale eyes scanning his notebook as his meat hook of a hand started to close it. “I think that’s pretty much all we need.”
I stood up, but Moyer stopped me. “Oh, Ms. LaShay, just one more thing. Did you recognize the scissors that were used to kill Ms. Hawk?”
My whole body stiffened and if my heart still beat, I knew it would be up in my throat, clanging like a fire bell. I swallowed slowly. “They were mine.”
The buzz and hum of the active lobby was suddenly plunged into a deep, uncomfortable silence as though everyone—from the half-conscious security guard to the honking cabbies right outside the door—had heard me.
“Yours?”
I wanted to lie, to shrug it off, but those scissors would be dislodged from Emerson’s chest eventually, and when they were, they would see my name engraved right across the blade.
“Ms. LaShay, I’m going to have to ask that you don’t leave town until we have this all sorted out. You’re free to contact your lawyer.”
“My lawyer?” I felt myself blanch. “Am I—am I suspected of something?”
Moyer didn’t answer me but his expression told me that his answer was nothing that I wanted to hear.
A cold stripe of fear shot down my spine and my whole body rang electric. I may have fangs, I may have walked this earth for centuries, but right now, I was in deep, deep trouble.
I handed the cabbie several crumpled bills and pushed my way into the apartment vestibule, sinking my key into the lock. It had only been a day, but I already couldn’t remember not feeling like my body was covered with the stench of death (and not the good kind), or when I didn’t want to slink out of my clothes, burn them—which is high holy treason with a wardrobe like mine—or slip away to parts unknown. I pulled out my