Memory of Murder

elevator arrived and they rode up to the fifth floor in silence.

“Guess it’s this way,” he said, and took her elbow to steer her to the right as they got off the elevator. They walked side by side down the silent hallway, not looking at each other, looking at the numbers on the doors they passed.

“Here we are,” he said, stopping at the first of the two rooms. He fished the plastic room keys out of his pocket, selected one. “You take this one-I’ll be in the next one down.” He unlocked the door, pushed it open, stepped inside. A light had been left burning over the desk. He looked around, out of habit, mostly. Satisfied the place was secure, he handed Lindsey her key. “Looks okay. Well…have a good night-see you in the morning.”

He paused, and she nodded. He turned and headed for the door, knowing he should ask her if she needed anything. If she was going to be okay. He didn’t, probably because he was afraid of what her answer would be. And because he didn’t trust his own response. Coward. The voice inside his head was so strident, for a moment he actually hesitated, wondering if it could have been spoken out loud, not just in his own mind. He glanced back at her, but she was standing exactly as he’d left her, pupils so dilated in the dim light that her eyes looked like black holes in a white mask. He went out and shut the door firmly behind him.

In his own room, he repeated the automatic check, then crossed to the closed curtains and opened them onto the vast darkness outside. He took off his jacket and draped it on the back of the chair in front of the desk, reached for his holster before he remembered he wasn’t wearing it. He emptied his pockets onto the desktop-wallet, car keys, evidence bag with Kincaid’s DNA sample, some small change and the hotel key. He pulled his shirt off and was heading for the bathroom when the knock came.

His heart jolted, but not as hard as it should have, and he realized he’d been waiting for the knock. Expecting it. Hoping for it?

Tossing his shirt onto the bed, he strode to the door, glanced briefly through the peephole, then opened it. “Lindsey?” he said.

She didn’t look the way he’d expected her to-although what that was, he couldn’t have said. She looked…angry, he thought.

“I hurt,” she said. Her steady gaze seemed accusing.

“I know,” he said gently.

“No-you don’t. I don’t think you do. I mean, it really hurts-here, and here, and here. Physically.” She touched her face, her throat, her chest. “It hurts so bad, I wish I could take aspirin or something for it, but I know it wouldn’t help.” She took a breath, a shallow one, as if even that hurt. He stood back and made way for her to come in, but she stayed where she was, glaring at him. “I can’t stop thinking about them.”

“Who?” he asked, although he knew.

“Them-all of them. My mother, my father, those two people in the wedding picture, Holt, Jimmy, my dad. I keep seeing their faces…they’re in my head. And every time I see them, I hurt.”

“Empathy sucks,” he said, nodding.

“I can’t seem to stop it. I just…want…to make it…stop.”

“That’s a dangerous frame of mind to be in.”

She nodded, and a frown made lines between her brows. “I know. I guess that’s why people drink. Or take drugs. Or kill themselves.”

“That’s why my mother did.” He hadn’t known he was going to say that.

Her gaze didn’t waver, and he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. He decided he hoped she hadn’t. “I wouldn’t. But I thought of something else, and it seems to help.”

“What’s that?”

She snatched another breath, as if they were suddenly in critically short supply. “I thought of you. And the pain got a lot better. So, I thought I’d find out if seeing you in person would help even more.”

“And does it?” he asked somberly, a quiver of tender laughter deep within his chest.

“Yes.” Finally, she walked past him and into the room. He closed the door, then turned to find her gazing at him, arms wrapped across her body, eyes fierce and bright. “I keep thinking about how it felt when you held me the other day. I’ve thought about it quite a lot, actually. I thought it felt very, very good.”

“Yes,” Alan said. “I thought so, too.”

“So,” she said on another breath, “maybe you wouldn’t mind too much, holding me right now.” She gave him only a split second, then rushed on. “I know you think it’s a bad idea-I get that. I just want you to know I won’t expect anything-”

“Hush,” he said, and folded her into his arms.

But, after a small, faint gasp, she went on talking. “Except tonight. I just need you to get me through this night. Please help me…”

“Like the song says?” he asked with a husky laugh.

She pulled back to stare at him. “What song?”

“‘Help Me Make It Through The Night…’”

Nestled once more against his chest, her laugh was a tiny whimper of sound. “Oh. I was thinking of, ‘Make The World Go Away.’”

“I guess this probably beats the hell out of a bottle of Scotch,” he said after a moment, when neither of them had moved.

“I’ve never been much of a drinker,” she whispered, turning her face toward his. “Me, neither.”

What the hell, he thought as he took her mouth. It wasn’t the first time he’d known something was a bad idea and gone ahead and done it anyway.

She was glad when he turned the light off. Less glad that he didn’t undress her. Leaving that choice up to her might have derailed the whole thing, if she’d been less determined. Less desperate. But she’d disengaged her thinking mind when she’d left her room and gone to knock on his door, and it was without thinking that she took off her clothes in the kindly darkness and laid them neatly over the room’s only upholstered chair. She turned back toward him, and watched him in the faint light that leaked into the room from outside the uncurtained window, watched him tug the bedcovers back, then hold out his hand to her. She took it, and he drew her to the bed, then got in and held the covers open for her. Once again, leaving the choice up to her. She could come to him…or not.

She felt her heart thumping with appalling force inside her chest. Moving in a dream, not thinking, she sat on the edge of the mattress and lay down beside him. The cool, crisp sheets settled over them both.

She lay in the darkness with the rain pulling a curtain of sound around them, shivering at first, curled tightly against him-this man she barely knew-with her fist nested in his chest hair, the thump-thump of his heart loud in her ear and her hand rising and falling with his slow, even breaths. She closed her eyes, and the images came and played through her mind like an old-time newsreel, the faces, one after the other: A lovely young girl, the bride and her groom…like children playing at a make-believe wedding. A little boy, laughing and fat in his snowsuit, throwing snow at his mother. Her mother and father-her daddy, the one she knew and adored-gazing at her with love and pride. Her mother’s face as she’d seen it last, haunted and terrified…her dad’s face growing sadder and sadder by the day. Holt Kincaid, a grown man asking in a man’s voice a child’s question: Why?

The pain came and this time she didn’t fight it but let it wash over her in waves and waves, and he-this hardened cop, this man she barely knew-stroked her gently, so gently, until gradually the pain subsided and the shivering stopped and her body grew heavy and supple, and unfurled along his side the way a flower opens in the sun.

“I should have known you’d be so gentle,” she whispered. “So kind. You are a kind, gentle man, Detective Cameron.”

He gave a snort of laughter and growled, “That’s just what every homicide cop wants to hear.”

“I’m sorry. It’s true, though.”

“How do you know? You don’t know me that well.”

“Maybe not well, but I know that. I saw it that first day I met you, you know-the way you were with my mother.”

He didn’t reply, and after a moment she added, “I knew that you wouldn’t turn me away, even if you do think you shouldn’t-”

“Hush,” he said for the second time, and raised himself so that he loomed above her, big and solid in the