had managed to come in so short a time. It seemed like only yesterday that her smile had lit up the cover of Connecticut magazine. Back then, she had been the state’s great non-white hope, youngest woman in state history to make lieutenant on the Major Crime Squad, and the only one who was black. Within a year she’d moved right on up to homicides. Always, she had produced.
And now here she was, Master Sergeant Des Mitry, getting dissed by stranded mesomorphs.
This was the price she’d paid to pursue her dream, and she was willing to pay it. Happy to pay it. But there were moments, like right now, when it was growing dark and she was driving along in the middle of snowy nowhere, swearing she could still smell raccoon piss, that Des missed the action.
Even though that action had nearly torn her apart. Mostly, it was the faces of the murder victims. She could never seem to forget those faces. Especially the babies. The fact that her marriage to Brandon was falling apart certainly hadn’t helped. In order to cope with it all, she had brought home crime scene photos and started making drawings of them. Transferring the horror from her nightmares to the page, line by line, shadow by shadow. Injecting the images with fearsome emotional power. Turning them into one gut-wrenching portrait after another. Thanks to the twist of fate that had barreled her headlong into Mitch Berger, Des’s therapy became her salvation. Her portraits had gained her admittance to the world-renowned Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, where she was presently studying long-pose figure drawing two nights a week, thereby shining a light on every single weakness in her game. Still, a pair of her most recent victim portraits had been included in this month’s prestigious student show, and that was not shabby for a freshman. Des still had much more to learn, and she knew this. Yet she’d found herself getting itchy in class lately. Anxious to move on. She wasn’t sure where. She wasn’t sure why.
She wasn’t sure about Mitch, either. She could not imagine her life without him in it, even though they made no sense at all together. None. But lately her beloved, exceedingly chatty doughboy had grown strangely quiet and remote on her. Something was eating at him. He would not say what. All she had to go on was the lone grenade he’d lobbed at her across the dinner table a few weeks back-a cryptic, highly unsettling question that had instantly filled her with a million doubts. Doubts that Mitch had, thus far, done squat to assuage. Anytime it seemed that he was about to spill his guts he’d swallow hard and out would come… nada. His Great Big Fat Nothing Gulp, she’d taken to calling it. Des was terribly thrown by his behavior, more than she could have thought possible. In fact, Mitch’s strained silences were making her so tense that she was experiencing the recurrence of a dreaded nervous thing that she thought she’d said good-bye to back when she was a gawky, vision-impaired giraffe of a high school girl.
Still, she had to admit that he’d sounded like his bubbly old self on the phone this morning when he called to tell her they’d been invited to dinner at Astrid’s Castle. More excited than she’d heard him in weeks. So maybe it had passed, whatever the hell it was.
Then again, maybe it hadn’t.
She was tied up at the barracks for well over an hour filling out her incident report, requisitioning a new pair of boots from the quartermaster, and responding to one smirky male query after another about that pungent new perfume she seemed to be wearing. It was already six o’clock by the time she started home to her cottage overlooking Uncas Lake. Mitch was expecting to pick her up in twenty minutes. No way. She phoned him on her cell to say she’d have to meet him there. No problem. Mitch was used to her unpredictable work schedule.
Bella Tillis was busy whipping up an apple cake in the big open kitchen when Des got there. A round, fierce little Brooklyn-born widow in her mid-seventies, Bella Tillis was bunking with Des while she looked for a place of her own. Bella had been her next-door neighbor in the New Haven suburb of Woodbridge back when Brandon had ditched Des for Tamika, a U.S. congressman’s daughter with whom he’d started sleeping back when he and Tamika were classmates at Yale Law School. In fact, Brandon had never stopped sleeping with Tamika, not even after he’d married Des. Which had taught Des one very valuable lesson in life: Dont ever trust lawyers. And caused her to make one very solemn vow to herself: I will never get married again for as long as I live. Because no man on this planet was ever going to get the chance to hurt her that bad again. Never. Utterly shattered by Brandon’s betrayal, Des had stopped going to work, stopped leaving the house and stopped eating. Until, that is, Bella came barging in one morning, Tupperware tub of stuffed cabbage in hand, and recruited Des for her feral stray rescue program. They were best friends now. When Des relocated to Dorset, Bella unloaded her own big house and followed her. As far as Des was concerned, she could stay as long as she wanted. Bella was good company and a dynamite housekeeper and it was nice to have her there when Des felt like staying over with Mitch.
“Oy-yoy, Desiree, what is that awful smell?” she demanded when Des came charging through the back door into the laundry room, shivering from the wind.
“It’s raccoon urine,” Des replied as she stood there on the mud rug, unlacing her spare boots. Not an easy proposition when she had five house cats studying her socks with keen, busy-nosed interest.
Bella appeared in the laundry-room doorway, scrunching up her face. “Forgive me, it sounded like you just said-”
“You asked, I answered.”
“Take those socks off at once, tall person. I will not have you tracking that-that smell all over my clean floor.”
“Um, okay, I like to think of it as our clean floor.”
“Off!” she roared, hurling herself in Des’s path. Des towered over her, but Bella was as wide as a nose tackle.
“All right, all right.” She yanked them off and tossed them out the door into the snow. “Feel free to burn them.”
“Oh, I shall. Believe me.”
Barefoot, Des hurried across the kitchen toward her bedroom. When she’d bought the place she’d torn out walls so that her kitchen, dining room and living room all flowed together. Her studio was in the living room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake. “Bella, I am feeling so not glamorous right now. And I am late, late, late. Tell me what to put on.”
“Well, for starters, forget glamorous.” Bella went back to work on a Granny Smith with a paring knife, slicing it rapid-fire into a mixing bowl. “You’re not about glamour.”
Des stopped in her tracks, hands on hips. “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”
“No, that was honesty,” she replied, hurling cinnamon, brown sugar and nutmeg into the bowl with the apple slices. She made cakes just like Des’s granny did. Never measured, never used a recipe. Hell, there was no recipe. “Glamour is a facade, Desiree. Strictly for tsotskes who are trying to hide something. You don’t have to hide a thing. You’re the real goods.”
“Does that mean I should or shouldn’t wear a dress?”
Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “Covering your tuchos with a dress is like putting a veil over the Mona Lisa. I forbid it.”
“Girl, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I don’t either, quite frankly.”
Des whipped off her uniform en route to her bedroom and jumped into the shower, toweling off while she searched frantically through her closet. She was not what anyone would call delicate. Des knew this. She was broad-shouldered, high-rumped and cut with muscle. Nor was she a girlie-girl. She kept her hair short and nubby, and wore no war paint or nail polish. But she did have alluring almond-shaped pale green eyes, and a dimply wraparound smile that could melt titanium from a thousand feet away. And Des knew this, too. She settled on her black cashmere turtleneck, gray flannel slacks and black boots with chunky two-inch heels.
By now it was a quarter to seven. She’d already reloaded her weapon at the barracks. She tossed it and her shield into her shoulder bag. Her cell phone and pager she wore on her belt. On her way out she shoved her gloves into a pocket of the hooded, buttery-soft shearling coat that she’d bought in Florence on her honeymoon. She loved that damned coat so much she’d worn it around their hotel room naked. Brandon hadn’t exactly minded. God, that was ages ago.
“Yum, what am I smelling?” she wondered, pausing in the kitchen to say good-bye.
“I already had the oven going, so I figured I may as well do my brisket, too. When I thawed it this morning I didn’t know you had plans.”
“Sure, we can have it tomorrow. Mitch loves your brisket.”
“Of course he does. This is a man of discerning tastes.”
“If that’s the case, then how do you explain his American chop suey?”
