What the hell?
Her pulse was visible, throbbing delicately in her slender neck. While he watched, it slowed, then stopped altogether.
Muttering a curse, he leaned over her prone form to give her two quick breaths. Her lips were soft and cool, completely slack. If this was a trick, he was buying it hook, line and sinker. He checked her pulse, couldn’t find it, panicked and gave her two more breaths.
Gasping, she lurched forward, clutching her chest.
Weak with relief and stunned to the core, he lay stretched out on the ground beside her, placing a hand over his own heart, which was knocking hard against his ribs.
“What happened?” she wheezed.
“You died.”
“Oh my God.”
“He didn’t save you,” Marc asserted. “I did.”
She leaned to one side and wretched pitifully, her shoulders shaking.
Marc put Candace Hegel back in place, folding her arms across her chest with careful reverence and zipping up the body bag. His hands were trembling as he grabbed some paper towels for Sidney and a plastic cup of water.
She accepted his tepid peace offering in silence, dabbing at her damp mouth. “Why did you do that?” she asked after a moment, her huge gray eyes swimming with tears.
He looked away, hating the reflection of himself he imagined there. “Because I’m a bastard, just like you said.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
His gaze jerked back to her face. He’d just forced her to hold hands with a dead woman, and she was apologizing to him? “Don’t worry about it. It’s true across the board.” He watched her take a small sip of water. “So what did you see?”
“Nothing. It was just…black.”
Bleakly he wondered what she’d see in his soul. “I’ll take you home,” he offered.
“I have to get back to work,” she argued.
“You just died, woman! Take the afternoon off.”
She chuckled weakly. “I don’t have anyone to cover for me.”
Marc stared down at her in disbelief, frustrated with the entire situation. He couldn’t decide what he thought about her, and that was a complication he didn’t need. No way she was legit. So what the hell was she?
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant. You’ll find the real killer.”
“Are you a prophet, too?”
“No,” she said with a rueful smile. “I was just trying to be supportive.”
Although he was wary of misplaced kindness, he couldn’t resist smiling back at her. “Don’t you think you can call me Marc now? After all we’ve been through?”
“Okay,” she said, taking his proffered hand. “And I’m Sidney.”
Ignoring the burst of warmth in her eyes, and the matching sensation in the middle of his chest, he helped her to her feet.
At Vincent Veterinary Clinic, Marc attached a GPS tracking device to the chassis of Sidney’s pickup truck while she went inside to get Blue. When she came out, mangy-looking hound in tow, both dog and woman regarded him with mistrust.
“Can you take some time off tomorrow?” he asked, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“Why?”
“I thought we could drive him around. Walk him along the river, maybe. See if he…smells anything.”
She released the tailgate. “Why would you waste your time? You don’t believe me.” When he made no reply, she gave the dog a brisk order in a foreign language. Blue jumped up and went inside the carrier.
“You speak German?”
“No.” Realizing she just had, she said, “I’ve picked up a few commands. A lot of people train their dogs that way, and he’s part shepherd.”
“Really? I thought he was half wolf, half hyena.”
She shot him a dirty look as she shut the kennel door.
“What did you say to him?”
“Get in,” she decided.
She’d said “up,” but he didn’t bother to correct her. “So how about tomorrow?”
“We could go early, before the kennel opens,” she offered with a tense shrug. “It would be cooler.”
“Five-thirty?”
“I guess,” she said in a resigned voice.
“I’ll come by your house,” he tossed over his shoulder as he walked away.
“Don’t you need my address?” she called after him.
He shook his head, because he already had it. By late afternoon, he’d not only located her small, two-story residence, he’d familiarized himself with every square inch of it. The covert-entry search warrant he’d obtained allowed him to rifle through her personal belongings at his leisure. Sidney would be notified of the “sneak and peek” search when she was no longer under investigation.
Unfortunately there was nothing incriminating inside.
Nothing interesting, either. All of her clothes were well-worn, casual and inexpensive, from her pocket T-shirts to her simple cotton bikini briefs.
The place was quaint and spotless, with mismatched furniture, unusual knickknacks and colorful accents. She saved things like birthday cards and photos in a disorganized drawer, as if she meant to go through them later. Flipping through the photos, he saw a great-looking blonde with two dark-haired girls and a middle-aged couple who must have been Sidney’s parents.
There was no indication of a man in her life, but she had a smush-faced little cat, sitting proprietarily atop her wrought-iron bed. The powder-blue chenille bedspread looked as soft as a cloud, the hardwood flooring was polished to a dull shine and the pale yellow paint was warm and unassuming.
It was…cozy.
On impulse, he reached out to place his palm on the pillow where he imagined she put her head. His hand stood out against the white pillowcase, obscenely dark and masculine in the feminine space, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled with awareness.
It was just like his mother’s house, he realized with horror. Nothing new, nothing matching, nothing expensive and a sense of complacent loneliness that tugged at the heartstrings.
He jerked his hand away from the pillow, unsettled by the revelation. Sidney’s cat startled at the sudden movement, flying off the bed and losing her footing on the slippery floor as she rounded the corner. Berating himself for the moment of sentimentality, he went downstairs and attached a listening device to the cordless phone on his way out.
In addition to the search warrant, a judge had signed his request to run video and audio surveillance. If the killer was in contact with Sidney, feeding her specific details about the murders, that made her an accessory after the fact.
If she was telling the truth…
Marc shook his head, because he couldn’t fathom it. Maybe he was a cynic, but at least he wasn’t a sucker. There was one born every day, his father had always said, and he’d been a master at spotting them. He claimed there was nothing more rewarding than pulling off the perfect con. Marc respectfully disagreed. Catching the player at his game was far sweeter.
So why did the thought of arresting Sidney leave a bitter taste in his mouth?
Deputy Chief Stokes had given him the authority to run full surveillance, if not the budget. He’d booked a cheap hotel room less than a block away, but he couldn’t get a visual on her back door from there. They couldn’t afford to have undercover officers parked on the street in front of her house or hanging around the beach behind it.
He grabbed the white hard hat he kept in the trunk of his car for assuming alternative identities and climbed the telephone pole closest to her house, hoping anyone who saw him would think he was a well-dressed phone
