one person to all three.
“I’d like to get a look at what she might be working on now.” Quinn glanced up at the sergeant. “Maybe we should just pull her in and ask her. All we have to do is catch her in a few lies.”
“Not yet. We can’t risk her lawyering up.” Sergeant Mitchell scratched the back of his neck. “Kurt,” he said and pointed a finger at the other detective. “Work on a couple more of those romantic e-mails from hardluvnman and send them to those two women.”
Quinn cringed. Kurt read romance novels and watched chick flicks, and he and the sergeant thought Kurt knew what sort of mushy shit women liked to hear. He’d been married for more than twenty years, so perhaps he did. “No more shit about how hot they look in their photos,” he warned. “Or that ‘looking for a soul mate’ crap.”
The sergeant chuckled. “Set up dates for a few cocktails this time. Get those women loose. When they e-mail back, let me know.” He turned to leave but said over his shoulder, “Oh, and we need to question the people at Westco again.”
“Kurt and I planned to do that this afternoon,” Quinn said as he watched the sergeant disappear.
An hour later, Kurt finished the “romantic” e-mail. “I just finished this,” he said and handed Quinn a copy. “Sergeant Mitchell thinks it looks good. Maybe my best work yet.”
Quinn glanced at what Kurt had written, and he felt his brain squeeze. “Jesus H. Macy.”
Dressed for work in flannel poodle-print pajamas, Lucy grabbed a mug of coffee and headed for the office. Her slippers made scuffing sounds on the tile floor as she walked from her kitchen and moved up the curved stairs. She sat at her L-shaped desk, kicked off her slippers, and propped her feet up on the side cluttered with research books. Late morning sunlight spilled across her red toenails, a stack of magazines, and a pair of Steelhead tickets she’d been given by the Writer’s League. She yawned until tears filled her eyes. After the strong coffee she’d drunk the night before, she’d come home and worked until 3:00 a.m., killing off a character she’d had to invent from past boyfriends. Using Quinn as a template hadn’t worked out. Not after he’d saved klondikemike’s life.
She raised the mug to her lips and leaned over the arm of her chair to turn on her computer. Not that it mattered really, but Quinn had caught her in a lie. She obviously wasn’t a nurse, and she was sure she’d never hear from him again. Which was fine. Yeah, he’d been very nice looking in that dark and intense sort of way that made a girl’s chest get tight and tingly, but it hadn’t been a real date. She would never seriously date any man who didn’t actively pursue her, and more important, she didn’t have the time to date anyone. She was on page two hundred of
While Lucy’s e-mail program downloaded her mail, she plugged Maroon 5 into her CD player. She grabbed the small gold-framed glasses out of the case on her desk and placed them on her face so she could see without putting her nose on the screen. The problem with getting older was that she’d inherited her mother’s nearsightedness.
Her twenty-pound orange tabby, Mr. Snookums, whom she’d also inherited, jumped up onto the desk and scattered papers and magazines.
Mr. Snookums had shown up at Lucy’s door five years earlier, a skinny stray that she’d nursed back to health and for whom she’d paid more than a thousand dollars in vet bills to save from certain death. Snookums repaid her by being temperamental, totally passive-aggressive, and developing a raging eating disorder. But at night, when she went to bed, he curled up beside her and purred his own brand of pure love and affection. A continuous rattling that Lucy found very comforting.
Mr. Snookums rubbed his face against her feet, then sat and curled his tail around to his front paws. He stared at her as if he could mesmerize her into adding Meow Mix to his bowl, but he was on a diet and Lucy could not be persuaded. Instead, she checked out a Betsey Johnson velvet coat at Nordstrom.com and the newest collection of handbags on the Kate Spade website. She didn’t know which was hotter, Betsey’s coat, Kate’s newest leather shopper, or Adam Levine.
As she and Adam sang about being in love and standing in the pouring rain, she opened her inbox. Up popped fifty-six pieces of spam, three e-mails from her friends, and a joke of the day from her mother. While she deleted the spam, two more e-mails appeared in her reader’s mail file. She thought about opening them but didn’t. Ninety- nine out of a hundred e-mails she received from readers were perfectly lovely, but she never knew when she would get that one incendiary e-mail capable of ruining her day. The one that questioned her research, comma placement, and her intelligence. Opening reader mail was as risky as going to her post office box. Sometimes there was great stuff in there, and sometimes there were letters from crazy people wanting money or warning her that she was going straight to hell. Which was one of the reasons Lucy only visited her PO box once a month or so.
Just as she was about to exit her e-mail program, something popped into the account she’d set up for responding to online men. Lucy straightened and lowered her feet to the floor. Mr. Snookums jumped in her lap like a twenty-pound bowling ball, and she reached around him to open the e-mail.
From: hardluvnman@hotmail.com
To: n2u@mail.net
Lucy,
I enjoyed talking to you last night while gazing into your sparkling blue eyes. You are very different from the women I’ve met recently. Smart and intriguing. I have always been a sucker for brains and beauty. Meet me for dinner and let me see if I can turn that spark in your eyes into a flame.
Quinn
Lucy read the e-mail three times and didn’t know whether to gag or…or be pleased. Which was patently ridiculous. Last night hadn’t been a real date, but even if it
What was wrong with him?
Mr. Snookums butted his head into her jaw, and she shoved him out of her lap. The cat hit the floor with a heavy thud, and he let out an angry meow. Lucy was going to turn Quinn down, of course, but before she did, she forwarded the e-mail to her friends to get their reactions.
Typical of Clare, she thought Lucy should give Quinn points for at least trying to sound romantic. “He did get the color of your eyes right.”
Adele wrote, “What kind of guy writes about sparks and flames? Is he trying too hard?”
Maddie made her opinion known with one short sentence. “Don’t engage the freaks.”
Lucy laughed and glanced at her calender. Next Saturday, she had to speak at the Women of Mystery readers and writers group, but other than that she was free. She talked to her friends all the time, but she hadn’t been out with them for a month. “Let’s get together Monday for chimichangas and margaritas,” she suggested to her friends, then pushed Send. Next she brought up Quinn’s e-mail and clicked Reply.
She didn’t have time for a man, especially a hardluvnman who wanted to gaze into her eyes and turn her spark into a flame.
A single votive candle flickered within red jars in the center of each table inside the Red Feather restaurant and lounge. The noise level rose and fell, from the obnoxious laughter of those who’d had a few too many, to the steady murmur of those who hadn’t.
Quinn sat at a table with his back to the wall, the entrance and the door to the kitchen within view. He didn’t expect trouble. Not tonight, but sizing up his surroundings and zeroing in on the most advantageous spot was so ingrained that it was a part of him, like the way he tied his shoes or brushed his teeth or read a person’s demeanor. Within minutes of walking into the lounge, he’d ascertained the lowlives in the place. It didn’t matter that some of them wore expensive suits and drank expensive wine. He’d arrested enough of them to know that criminals crossed all social and economic bounds.
Quinn pushed the sleeves of his thick olive green sweater up his forearms and reached for the drink menu propped next to the candle. The flat transformer was once again taped to the small of Quinn’s back, just above the waistband of his black trousers. Across the street, Anita sat in the van, with her receiving equipment filtering out background noises, while Kurt waited in the kitchen to snag a glass with legible fingerprints. Tomorrow night, they would repeat the same process with Maureen Dempsey.
The door to the Red Feather Lounge opened, and Quinn lifted his attention from the drink menu. Lucy Rothschild stepped inside looking even better than he remembered. It had taken Kurt two e-mails to coax her into meeting Quinn, but here she was, wrapped up in a black trench coat that tied at the waist and covered her to her
