Dangerous to Touch (3 page)

It was kind of like shaking hands with a clown and getting zapped by one of those gag buzzers. The anticipation of the shock left her on pins and needles.

Sidney tossed the card on the coffee table, rested her cheek on a throw pillow and wondered what to do with the rest of the afternoon. She kept the kennel closed on Sunday, and although she went in twice to feed and clean, it was her lightest day. Sometimes the free hours loomed rather than beckoned.

Marley jumped on her back and began a vigorous kneading, cheering her. At the same time, she became aware of a strange sound emanating from the kitchen.

“What’s that?” she asked, lifting her head.

Marley kept digging her soft paws into her back.

Sidney clambered off the couch, sending the cat sprawling. It was the answering machine. She pushed the blinking button with relish.

“Sid? Are you there? The kids are driving me crazy about going to the beach. Call my cell when you get this. Bye.”

Her sister hardly ever brought her daughters over to visit. It was one of the great sorrows of Sidney’s life. Picking up the phone, she dialed Samantha’s number from memory.

“Hello?” her sister answered in a low-pitched voice.

“It’s me.”

“Sidney?” The sultry tone disappeared. “Are you home?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God. We’re parking right now. The girls are wild today.”

Sidney couldn’t hear any background noise to corroborate that statement. Taylor and Dakota were the most sedate children imaginable.

With no further explanation, Samantha hung up.

Sidney raced upstairs to change, giddy at the prospect of spending time with her nieces, the last of her close relatives who didn’t cringe away from her touch. On impulse, she rummaged through her bedroom closet until she found the bikini her sister had given her as a birthday gift last summer.

Tearing off the tags, she shimmied into it, checking her reflection in the mirror to make sure the fabric covered all of the required parts. The bikini showed a lot more skin than the serviceable black Speedo she usually wore, in a way that was far more flattering.

It was a perfect fit, actually. Stylish and sexy, like the clothes Samantha favored. So why had Sidney never worn it before?

When the doorbell rang, she ran downstairs to greet the girls with open arms. They hugged her dutifully, with a lack of enthusiasm that was more a product of their raising than a reflection of their true feelings for her. She hoped.

“Hey, sis,” Samantha said, gracing her with an air kiss and a wooden smile.

Sidney tried to ignore the painful twist in the middle of her chest. Her sister’s rejections weren’t personal, but they hurt all the same.

The girls fawned over Marley for a few moments before returning to their mother. “Can we go to the beach now, Mommy?” Dakota asked, tugging on the edge of Samantha’s gauzy skirt. “Please?”

“You see how they are?” Samantha said, taking off her designer sunglasses. Beneath the lenses, her vivid blue eyes were bloodshot.

“Sometimes I can hardly catch my breath.”

At seven and eight, the girls required a lot of attention, no matter how quiet and well-behaved they were. Samantha relied heavily on the help of a live-in nanny, as her husband, Greg, was almost never home.

She was still recovering from the ordeal of having two babies in rapid succession.

Sidney winked at Taylor, who giggled. “Why don’t you girls grab a drink from the fridge before we go? I have lemonade.”

Dakota blinked up at Samantha. “Can we, Mommy?”

When she waved them away, they both squealed, more excited by the prospect of refined sugar than an outing with their Aunt Sidney.

“I’m off to the loo,” Samantha said, sashaying toward the bathroom, a sleek leather clutch clasped in her expertly manicured, expensively jeweled hand. Sidney didn’t need any special abilities to predict her sister was going in there to pop another pill.

On the beach, Sidney made sandcastles and frolicked in the waves with her nieces for an hour before joining her sister to sunbathe on the sand.

“You’re good with them,” Samantha said with a drowsy smile.

Sidney warmed at the unexpected praise. “They’re angels. You’re incredibly lucky.”

“Where did you get that suit?”

She glanced down at the blue and white bikini. Under the relentless sun, her tan lines were embarrassingly apparent. “You gave it to me.”

“I have excellent taste,” she murmured.

“Yes,” Sidney agreed. Samantha looked marvelous in a tiny black two-piece, her subtle, sculpted curves displayed to perfection.

“I forget you have a great body,” she said. “You’re always covered up.”

Sidney was surprised by her sister’s faintly envious tone. She often felt like a lurching shadow next to Samantha, who was petite and feminine. Fashionably thin, achingly beautiful and gorgeously blond, men stared at her sister wherever she went. And she stared right back.

“So what have you been up to?” Samantha asked, rolling over onto her flat stomach.

She hesitated. “I met someone today.”

Samantha looked over the rims of her sunglasses. “Oh really?”

Pushing aside her misgivings, Sidney told her sister about this morning’s strange events. True to character, Samantha was more interested in the man than the fact that her little sister’s life had been turned upside down. She’d always been boy-crazy.

“A cop, huh? Is he hot?”

“Yes,” Sidney admitted.

“Mmm. What does he look like?”

“Dark. Hard. Well-built.”

“Hard? How delicious.”

“Not like that,” she said, her cheeks heating. “Tough, kind of. You know.”

Samantha smiled wickedly. “Was he in uniform?”

“A suit.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“Probably.”

“And cuffs?”

“I didn’t frisk him, Sam.”

“Oh, well. Did he frisk you?”

“No,” she said, smiling back at her.

“Ah, but you wanted him to. Right?”

When she shrugged, Samantha ran with it. “I always wanted to do a cop,” she mused. “Something about being overpowered. Or maybe it’s just the handcuff thing.”

Sidney didn’t doubt that Lieutenant Cruz would be willing to oblige her sister on that front. Samantha’s bored, sophisticate attitude and golden girl good looks were probably right up his alley. She wasn’t a bimbo, but she played the part well. And she played men, her favorite game, like a pro.

“He considers me a suspect,” she reminded her sister, and herself.

Samantha was silent for a moment. “Greg and I are getting divorced.”

Sidney laid her head back on the towel, annoyed with Samantha for changing the subject and always putting her own problems first. She and Greg had been getting divorced for years. Sidney hoped they would stop torturing the kids and get on with it.

“It’s for real this time, Sid. I think he’s cheating again.”

Sidney shifted uncomfortably, wishing she could make herself scarce.

Samantha straightened. “You already knew? How could you? I haven’t even touched you today.” She looked down the beach, where her daughters were playing in the sand. “Son of a bitch,” she said between clenched teeth, her blue eyes hard as ice. “He brings that slut around my kids? What does he do, bribe them not to tell?”

“I don’t think they understand. So he doesn’t have to.”

“Son of a bitch,” she repeated. “If I wasn’t sleeping with his business partner, I’d take his ass to the cleaners.”

T
he next morning, it wasn’t the sound of a dog barking that rose with Sidney from the depths of her dream to the cold surface of reality. It was a woman’s scream.

She struggled to break free from the cloak of darkness that surrounded her, but her arms were bound behind her back. Thrashing her head from side to side, she fought against the restraints.

A plastic shroud covered her face.

When she opened her mouth to scream, the plastic drew closer, cutting off her airway completely.

She was sinking, drowning, suffocating.

A dark, dank cold invaded her body, seeping beneath the plastic. At first, it was a relief to gain a precious inch of space, a single breath. Then a pungent, earthy smell engulfed her, the scent of decay and sea and wet blood. The cold pressed in, crawling up her spine and around her neck, rushing into her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils…

Sidney clawed the sheet away from her face, gasping for air. Her heart was pounding, her lungs pumping hard and fast, her pulse racing.

Marley was sitting at the foot of the bed, tail twitching, highly annoyed with Sidney for disturbing her slumber.

“Oh God,” she groaned, laying her head back down on the pillow. “This has got to stop.” Her whole life, she’d been fighting against this strangeness inside herself. Now it was fighting back, mutating, stronger than ever. She could wear gloves, shun society and deny touch, but how could she chase away dreams?

The blankets got wrapped around her head while she was sleeping, she rationalized. She’d been tossing and turning all night, bothered by the uncharacteristically high temperatures outside and a deeper, more invasive heat within.

It was no more than she deserved for entertaining lustful fantasies involving Marc Cruz, tangled sheets and handcuffs.

Now she was cold. Chilled to the bone, in fact.

A gentle morning breeze from a balmy onshore flow ruffled the curtains. The oscillating fan in the corner rumbled lazily, barely causing a stir. Shivering, she climbed out of bed to switch it off, rubbing at the gooseflesh on her arms. She closed the window, too, noticing that her nipples were tightly puckered and painfully hard.

Resisting the urge to rub herself there, as well, she hurried into the bathroom and turned the shower faucet all the way to “Hot.”

Marc pulled at the collar of his shirt. It was a sticky day, hazy and warm, almost ninety degrees before 9:00 a.m.

In other parts of the country, where temperature and humidity levels soared, this kind of weather would be a nonissue. For a city whose residents were spoiled by high seventies most of the year, it was damn near intolerable.

Deputy Chief Stokes and a handful of homicide officers were milling around the gravel pull-out on Pacific Coast Highway near Agua Hedionda Lagoon. Literally translated as “stinking water,” the lagoon separated downtown Oceanside from uptown Carlsbad, educated from underprivileged, rich from poor.

Driving along PCH through O’side, one could encounter almost any kind of vice, from prostitution and drugs to adult bookstores and sleazy strip joints. Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, on the northern border of town, supplied plenty of young male clients for the burgeoning sex industry. It could also be responsible, in a roundabout way, for the number of homeless vets on the city streets.

For all its shortcomings, Oceanside was still a nice place to live. The inland hills were speckled with single family homes and quiet communities. The beaches attracted hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, so they were clean and well-maintained. Stretches of flat white sand weren’t the best venue for illicit activities, so most of the dregs of society stuck to the heavy brush near the San Luis Rey River, which offered less interference and more cover.

Carlsbad, on the other hand, didn’t have a seedy area. Or a middle-class area, for that matter. The rivalry between the two cities was pronounced, from high school sports to police divisions. With better funding at their disposal, Carlsbad usually came out on top.

Behind a police line at the edge of the water, a suited representative from Carlsbad PD was arguing with Deputy Chief Stokes over turf. The lagoon belonged to them, so they laid claim to the body floating in its murky depths. Stokes was adamant that whoever tossed the tarp-wrapped package into the lagoon had been standing on the gravel pull-out along the highway, clearly Oceanside’s territory. The Coast Guard was obliged to oversee the handling of any human remains found in coastal waters, so they were also on site, and the lagoon was part of a wilderness preserve, so State Parks was there, too.

They could debate all morning over recovery issues, but the body was under the county medical examiner’s jurisdiction until after the autopsy. Stokes talked the good doctor into working with Oceanside’s homicide unit instead of Carlsbad’s, citing the distinct possibility that the victim was local resident Candace Hegel.

The killer’s first victim, Anika Groene, had been found in water as well.

Finally the M.E. ordered the retrieval, after a consultation with an E.P.A. affiliate about algae levels and possible impact to the endangered water fowl.

Stokes leveled her evil eye on him. “Get in there, Cruz.”

Marc looked down at the opaque surface with trepidation. First dogs, now stinking water. He wasn’t queasy about dead bodies, having seen more than his fair share, but water-logged flesh was particularly gruesome, and Agua Hedionda was dark and stagnant.

No telling what was down there.

Stokes shoved white Tyvek coveralls at his chest, indicating the issue wasn’t open for discussion, and he walked to his car to change. No way was he ruining a perfectly good suit with marsh muck. Grabbing a pair of basketball shorts from the trunk, he stripped right there on the side of the road while Lacy watched.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, feeling surly.

“Nothing interesting,” she said, smothering a laugh.

Lacy had never been on the scene for a floater, he recalled, wondering if she’d lose her breakfast when they unwrapped the soggy package.

He pulled the jumpsuit over his shorts and covered his hands with gloves to protect the scene from being compromised with trace. As he lowered himself into the lagoon, he winced at the temperature. It might be hot as hell outside, but Agua Hedionda was as cold as the Pacific, a chilly sixty-five degrees.

“Make sure it’s what we think it is,” Stokes ordered.

The oblong shape, wrapped up like a mummy in a green plastic tarp, lurked just below the surface. Grimacing, he wrapped his arms around it in a macabre embrace. When he squeezed experimentally, he felt the give of flesh and slender, feminine curves.

“It’s a woman.”

“Well, don’t yank on it,” Stokes said, as if he would. “Reach under there and see if something’s weighing it down.”

Bodies did sink on their own, and came up several days later, depending on the temperature. This one had either been dumped recently, weighed down, or both. Following the rope tied around the body’s midsection, he pulled gently, feeling tension.

He was going to have to duck under to investigate. Holding his breath, he followed the rope to its anchor.

“Cinder block,” he said when he resurfaced, trying not to smell or taste the water. “And half-inch rope. Hemp, maybe.”

“Cut it,” she said, giving him a razor knife.

He did, but the body didn’t rise.

“Fresh,” she said, nodding with satisfaction.

It was awkward, but he managed to heft the body onto the shore without doing too much damage to it, himself, or the crime scene. Even covered in dark plastic, it was plain to see that the corpse was a slight woman, about the size of Candace Hegel.

When the M.E. cut the tarp away from her face, befouled water gushed out.

Because she hadn’t been there long, and the lagoon was cold, the effects of decomposition were minimal. Enough to discolor her complexion, but not so much that her body was bloated or her skin sloughing off, which would have made sight identification difficult.

In life, Candace Hegel had been a pretty woman. In death, with a greenish tinge to her face, particles of brown algae clinging to her skin and tiny surfperch burrowing into the delicate tissues, she was hideous.

Marc’s stomach clenched, and he felt an unmanageable hatred for whoever would defile a woman this way.

Stokes narrowed her shrewd eyes at him, so he quickly blanked his expression. She’d dealt with his overenthusiastic pursuits of justice before, and didn’t consider it sound police work. Officers were not supposed to get emotionally involved.

Detective Lacy, on the other side of Stokes, was doing an admirable job of suppressing her nausea.

“Wrap it all up,” the M.E. said. “I’ll cut the rest of the tarp away on the table.”

“I want that cinder block,” Stokes said as they loaded the body into the van.

“Of course you do,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“Right away, I said.”

It was no easy task. He could only lift the block a few feet at a time, drop it a little closer to shore and come back to surface for air. By the time he passed it off to CSI, he’d inhaled, swallowed and sputtered about a pint of Agua Hedionda.

“You’ll need a hepatitis vaccine,” Stokes said as he climbed out.

Lying on his back on the dusty gravel bank, shuddering with cold and panting from exertion, Marc prayed he wouldn’t be the one to lose his breakfast instead of Lacy.

After a hot shower and a hotter cup of coffee, Sidney was feeling warm and toasty. It was a muggy day, cloudy and warm, the thick marine layer overhead trapping the earth’s heat like a thermal blanket. By the time she reached the kennel she was sweating.

Mondays were always busy, so work kept her body, if not her mind, occupied most of the morning. She had several pickups scheduled for later that afternoon, and any dog that stayed more than three days got a complimentary bath. Time spent in close confinement tended to emphasize the “doggy” smell, and she didn’t like to send home stinky pets.

She’d just finished her last bath when the phone rang. “Pacific Pet Hotel,” she answered crisply.

“Sidney.” It was Bill. “You’ve got to come get this dog.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Trying to rip everyone’s face off.”

“What about the family?”

“They want him boarded until the owner is…found. Candace Hegel lived alone, and the dog isn’t used to men, obviously. None of her friends or relatives have female-only households.”

She glanced up at the clock. Almost lunchtime. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

At Vincent Veterinary Clinic, Sidney parked next to the employee’s entrance and let herself in. Standing on the other side of the door were Bill, Detective Lacy and Lieutenant Cruz.

She froze dead in her tracks.

“Miss Morrow,” Lieutenant Cruz said in greeting, an avaricious gleam in his brown eyes.

Her gaze darted to Bill, who had assumed a defensive posture. “You told,” she accused.

“They have a warrant for your arrest, Sid. I had no other choice.”

Feeling cornered and betrayed, she began to back away.

Lieutenant Cruz reached out and clamped his hand around her wrist. “Do you see bars in your future?”

She struggled against him, but he held tight. A woman’s ravaged face flashed before her, slimy things squirming in the soft tissues. Just like in her dream, a brackish taste filled her mouth and the smell of blood flooded her nostrils, strangling her, drowning her.

Examining her strange expression, he released her arm.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said, rushing to the nearest bathroom. She fell to her knees as the contents of her stomach came up, not swamp water or blood, as she almost expected, but the pulpy remnants of an orange she’d eaten for lunch in her truck on the way over.

With nothing more to purge, she dry heaved quietly, tears burning in her eyes, citric acid stinging her throat. When she was finished, Lieutenant Cruz handed her some wet paper towels.

“Thanks,” she said in a hoarse whisper, wiping her face.

“Do you have a weak stomach, or a guilty conscience?”

“Neither,” she muttered. “I have a sensitive nose, and you smell.”

He turned to Detective Lacy, frowning. “Do I?”

“A little bit,” she admitted.

“I thought maybe you’d had a ‘psychic vision.’” He sneered around the words, showing not only disbelief, but utter contempt.

Sidney flushed the toilet angrily.

“We’re going to need you to come back down to the station,” he said, not offering to help her to her feet.

“What for?”

“To take your statement.”

“Look, I’m not psychic. I don’t have visions. I don’t know anything more than I’ve already told you, and I’m not interested in being jerked around.”

His jaw tightened with displeasure. “Vincent wasn’t bluffing about that arrest warrant, you know. I have it right here,” he said, patting his suit pocket. Today’s was dark blue, with a crisp white shirt underneath. He looked immaculate, but she hadn’t been lying about the odor. A vaguely swampy, fishy scent clung to him. “You can come willingly, or unwillingly, it’s all the same to us.” Letting his eyes sweep down her trembling form, he added, “But I don’t think you’d like the booking process. There’s a lot of…manhandling.”

“I have a business to run,” she said, hearing desperation edge into her voice. “I’m the only employee.”

“You get a lunch break, right? This shouldn’t take much more than an hour.”

Sidney looked to Bill, who offered no support. “Can you come back here afterward?” he whined. “I’m serious about you taking that dog. He’s vicious.”

Given no alternative, she allowed them to escort her back to the station. Sitting in the back seat of Lieutenant Cruz’s Audi, she noticed a grocery bag with a pair of wet blue shorts inside. The unpleasant smell and sensation rushed her once again, and she hit the button to lower the window, needing fresh air.

“You’re not going to throw up again, are you?”

Putting her face to the lukewarm breeze, she shook her head dumbly.