He smiled. “Sixty hours, but who is counting? I’m not driving myself home; a patrol guy is taking pity on me. I think the bed is still at the old apartment, but everything else got moved to the new one. At this point I don’t care. I’ll sleep on the floor somewhere.”
“Where’s Marsh?”
“Comatose in his own bed, I expect,” Connor replied, pleased the coffee actually tasted like coffee to his spinning senses. “Let’s not talk about my work-you’ll see it all in the paper anyway. Let’s talk about you and me going out somewhere for dinner.”
Marie smiled. “We’ll see if you can manage breakfast at four in the afternoon first. You really should have just gone home, Connor.”
He looked at her over the coffee cup and let his smile fade. His gaze held hers, and he let the last day show in his eyes, just a bit, never more than a bit, and told her the truth. “I wanted a better image in my mind to drift to sleep on.”
She blinked, gave a very slight nod, and then smiled at him. “Want me to sing you a bedtime song over the phone so you can listen to me too?”
He chuckled but thought he might push her to do exactly that later on. “It’s been a brutal couple days.”
She reached over and touched his hand, for her, quite a shift to be the one reaching out first, and it felt nice as her hand settled firmly on his. “Eat, sleep. Tomorrow the world will still be insanely crazy, but you’ll be back standing upright to face it.”
“Exactly.” He nodded at the waitress’s offer of more coffee. “I left the chief at the office where he planned to shut the door on his office and catnap on the couch, and Marsh at home, threatening the world at large if anyone bothered him in the next eight hours. I figured half an hour for food and twelve hours of comatose time and I might figure out what day of the week it is again.”
He yawned and it cracked his jaw. “Talk to me, Marie, and I don’t care about what. I’m just going to sit here and wilt some more while I eat and enjoy looking at you.”
She dumped a packet of sugar in her coffee, and he would put her on a full blush starting, but she gamely nodded and took up the challenge. “The paintings came in as magnificent as I expected. I think Tracey is going to take the lake painting as a gift for Marsh as she loved it on sight. And I think I might give Daniel that Gibson you knew he would like so I can make room for this really gorgeous study in the color red. It’s cubes and squares and firework bursts, and it reaches out and grabs you from across the gallery.”
Connor listened and smiled and thought about having a future with her one day, the idea growing stronger with every moment together. She was a hole filler in his life, a hole that had needed to be filled for a very long time.
“What?” She paused her chatting to smile at him, the blush growing.
“Our breakfast is here.”
“That was not what you were thinking.”
“I know.” He shifted aside his coffee and ice-water glass to accept the plate, suddenly feeling a smidgen more awake. “Eat.”
“Connor.”
He just smiled at her. “You want to share those strawberries? They look good.”
She’d ordered a cheeseburger and a fruit bowl. She set the bowl between them. “You’re going to tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Not right now I’m not.” He smiled at her, because she amused him and pleased him and he liked looking at her over breakfast foods. “I told the patrol guy to pick me up in forty minutes. Tell the rest of the stuff about the paintings.”
She unfolded her napkin. “Do you like art?”
“I will by the time you tell me all the reasons you love it.” He picked up his coffee and smiled at her. “Going to keep the Denart?”
“It’s already been moved upstairs to the apartment,” she admitted.
“I knew it. What else was in the recent shipment?”
She talked and he ate and he thought about maybe next week… that would be a good time to talk with Marsh about the two of them starting to double-date. Nothing too hard to sort out, just two sisters, two partners, figuring out how to shove the job aside for long enough to do some courting in proper fashion.
Marsh held out the second coffee mug he carried and stepped back to let Connor enter his home Sunday afternoon. “You don’t look that much more awake than when I left you yesterday. You were supposed to sleep, remember?”
“I went to share a mid-afternoon breakfast with Marie first,” Connor admitted. “But the rest of the time I was flat and out of it. Not that I wouldn’t have taken another week of sleep if it were offered.”
Marsh smiled, not entirely surprised at the answer. He walked back to the dining-room table. “Have you seen the newspapers?”
“No.”
“Sykes is doing a magnificent job. He’s got the text of the first note and a really great photo of the blood running down the living-room wall at Nolan’s place.”
“You’re kidding.”
Marsh handed over the paper.
“How the…?” Connor turned a darker shade of red as he got angry, and Marsh watched him push away the reaction and then look up, his gaze hard. “Who’s the leak?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” Marsh replied, impressed with the control his partner was learning. When he had seen the photo, he’d slammed down a mug on his counter so hard he’d split it into three pieces. “To get the photo-that says someone in the chain of evidence in the lab. A negative gets exposed to make two prints instead of one, that kind of thing.”
“Sykes doesn’t have the second message?”
“Not yet. But you’ll figure he’s working everyone who might have stepped into that living room and been there to see it. I figure the building super is already leaking the full details for a wad of cash. From the phone call to 911 to the first cop securing that apartment door-I’d make it five minutes for the super and at least one or two nosy neighbors to have seen more than we would like.”
“So much for burying the information. Reverse tactics and play cold case now? Push the information we have out to the press and see who comes back to nibble at it?”
“Granger can figure that out. It’s going to be Monday before forensics gives up enough to run with. I’m taking the rest of today, such as it is, off.”
“No disagreement here. Someone is pulling phone records, bank records for us?”
“Yes.”
“Monday is early enough then. Granger has us on for the 6 a.m. update again?”
“Seven, he said. I think he wants some sleep too.”
“At least no one else on the list of Henry’s employees turned up dead. I’m hoping the next note is simply a nice simple fax to Daniel’s office.”
Connor set down the paper, having skimmed the article. “I came by to see if you want to maybe do a double date two weeks from Tuesday night, take the sisters out to a concert. I’ve got tickets for the nine o’clock show at the fairgrounds. It’s a big enough crowd we might be able to blend in and enjoy some privacy such as there is in a crowd of five thousand.”
Marsh reached for his wallet. “I’ll pick up half.”
Connor waved it away. “You can buy the dinner. Want me to ask them both?”
“If Marie says yes, Tracey is going to jump on the offer. She’s been dropping hints for the last week about you two.”
“It’s just a date.” But Connor smiled as he said it, and Marsh could read the way the wind blew. “Marie’s a nice lady,” he observed. “Calm and private and contained in her world. It’s a nice world to slip into, I’d be thinking.”
“I’ll learn to appreciate the art.” Connor finished the coffee. “You need a new coffeemaker or at least a new filter and grounds; this is awful.”
Marsh laughed. “Get going, Connor. I’d say you have a lady to see before she makes plans for her evening.”
