Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (16 page)

“I get it,” Bill
said. “So Jaybird was pissed off, and he gave us Hovis’s name just to get back
at him.”

“Yeah—the
backstabbing bastard. Hovis just wanted to eliminate himself as a suspect, so
we could get on with our work. He was actually trying to help.”

She thought for a
moment, then added, “Our deal with Jaybird is off. His tip was bogus. As soon
as I get a chance, I’m going to make sure he’s put out of business.”

Bill suggested, “If
we just tip the local police they’ll clean up the place.”

“I know,” Riley
said. She thought for a moment, then said, “But I also want to give those women
some kind of alternative. I want Chrissy to have a chance to get out of the
business. She hates it but she’s terrified of Jaybird. I’m sure there are
shelters in town that work with prostitutes who want out.”

“If we can get
Jaybird put away, it will be easier for the women. But they’re gonna need a lot
of help.”

Riley knew that most
prostitutes had been victims of violence or neglect before they entered the
trade. They’d had terrible lives and often didn’t regard themselves as worth
saving. Some of them had PTSD problems just as devastating as her own.

“I’m sure there are
organizations in Phoenix that will help,” she replied. “I’m going to get
someone on it.”

Bill’s phone buzzed
when they were getting into the car. He checked it and said, “It’s a text from
Morley. They’ve got a name and address for Gretchen Lovick’s husband. They’ve
called him, and he’s at home, and they’re getting ready to send agents to break
the news to him.”

Riley agonized
silently for a moment. She knew what had to be done next.

“Text Morley that we’ll
go over and talk to him. Get his address, then give me directions and I’ll
drive us there.”

As she drove, Riley
found herself haunted by the memory of Hovis’s silent gaze. She’d encountered a
strange and disturbing variety of people lately. Some of them were simply
exploiters and abusers, like Ishtar Haynes, Calvin Rabbe, and the man who
called himself Jaybird. Others were simply victims, like Justine, Trinda,
Jilly, and Chrissy.

But others were
harder to pigeonhole. There had been Rex the truck driver—a man who liked his
whores but was horrified when they turned out to be children. And now there was
Hovis, a man who meant no harm to anyone, but nevertheless destroyed lives with
the drugs he sold.

It was weird moral
territory, and Riley wasn’t comfortable in it.

But now she had to
put such thoughts out of her mind. T
hey
were going to have to pay a visit to Gretchen Lovick’s husband and tell him the
terrible news. Since the body hadn’t previously been identified, he might not
even know that there had been a murder.
As far as she was
concerned, this sort of thing was the worst part of her job. And this time
would be worse than usual.

How were Riley and
Bill going to begin explaining the whole sickening thing to the murdered woman’s
husband?

Riley couldn’t
imagine how she was going to explain Gretchen Lovick’s unnatural death to her
family. The neighborhood where she had lived was made up of pristine rows of
modern ranch houses with small but immaculate lawns and manicured shrubbery.
Occasional tall, skinny palm trees stuck up along the street like giant feather
dusters.

She said to Bill, “I
thought this was a desert. But look at all the grass. And there are palms of
all kinds all over Phoenix.”

“People are willing
to spend for whatever they think is important,” Bill replied. “Looks like the
folks around here can all afford some extras. I bet there’s a pool in back of
every one of these places.”

Riley pulled up at
the address they’d been given. The house and yard were scrupulously neat and
well cared for.

Why?
Riley wondered.

Why did a woman who
lived here choose such a deviant path? How could she even go to a seedy place
like the Kinetic Custom Gym? How could she tolerate a pimp like Jaybird?

As they walked up to
the front door, she had to wonder if she and Bill were bringing this awful news
to the wrong man. But Cyrus Lovick was expecting them and he opened the door as
soon as she pressed the bell. He was wearing a polo shirt and casual slacks
that could be golfing attire, but he looked somewhat rumpled and anxious.

“Are you from the
FBI?” he asked. “They said someone was coming.”

Riley and Bill
showed their badges and introduced themselves. They stepped into the
air-conditioned interior.

“What has happened?”
Lovick cried.

“I’m sorry to have
to tell you this,” Riley said, “but your wife, Gretchen, has been found dead.”

“We’re sorry for
your loss,” Bill added.

“Oh, God,” Lovick
said. He sat down abruptly in an armchair. For a moment he looked around the
room, as if expecting to see something that wasn’t there. When he spoke again,
his voice sounded numb. “I was afraid that something … she … yesterday when the
kids came home, she wasn’t here. Lexie—my oldest—she called me, worried. I came
home from work right away. After a while I called the police and reported her
missing. Then this afternoon the FBI called. I knew there must be something
awful.”

He looked back and
forth from Riley to Bill, “But how did she …?”

Riley said as gently
as she could put it, “I’m afraid she was murdered. Her body was found this
morning in Lake Gaffney.”

Lovick seemed
stunned. After a few moments he asked, “Gretchen drowned?”

Riley glanced at
Bill and he took over the explanations. Riley watched Lovick’s expressions as
he learned that his wife had been suffocated, and that her body had been
stuffed into a weighted body bag. She thought that the bereaved husband’s
reactions looked real, but that he wasn’t as shocked as she might have expected
him to be.

After a while Lovick
asked, “Do you know who did it? Do you know why?”

Bill explained that
the FBI was at work on those questions. That’s why he and Riley were here. The
man’s expressions grew more and more despondent.

Riley said, “Mr.
Lovick, we have to ask. Can you account for your whereabouts for the rest of
last night?”

Lovick didn’t look
as if he understood why she was asking the question.

“I was here. All
night.”

Bill asked, “Can
anybody confirm your whereabouts?”

“My kids, I guess,”
Lovick said.

To Riley, it
appeared that he didn’t grasp that they were trying to eliminate him as a
suspect. The truth was, they hadn’t done that yet. They’d have to talk to his
children. And even then, there might be some question as to whether he’d
coached them with his alibi.

At the moment,
though, he seemed like nothing other than a grief-stricken husband. And for the
time being, Riley knew that she and Bill had to proceed on the assumption that
he was exactly that.

Riley tried to think
about how to ease him into the rest of what she and Bill needed to tell him.

“Where do you work,
Mr. Lovick?” she asked.

“I’m a computer
systems analyst. I’ve got my own business. I stayed home today.”

He fell silent
again. Then he managed to murmur a question.

“How could this
happen?”

Those four words hit
Riley like a punch in the gut. Things were about to get extremely difficult.

But before either
she or Bill could speak, they heard the chattering of young voices just outside
the front door. The door swung open, and in walked three children—a girl in her
tweens, maybe twelve years old, and two younger brothers. One looked about ten
years old, the other about eight. Judging from the time, Riley knew that they
must be just getting home from school.

The kids’ chatter
stopped as soon as they saw their father sitting with two visitors. A smile
vanished from the girl’s face.

“Did Mom come back?”
she asked.

Lovick couldn’t
bring himself to reply for a moment.

Finally he said, “Lexie,
take your brothers out back. Go play by the pool.”

With a deeply
worried look, the girl herded her brothers away through the house.

Riley studied Lovick’s
face. He had the slender, small-jawed face of a guy who might have been a geek
and a misfit in as a kid, but had since become thoroughly socialized and
successful and doubtless well liked.

Speaking slowly and
gently, Riley asked, “Mr. Lovick, were you aware that your wife was living a
double life?”

Lovick looked puzzled.
“What do you mean?”

Riley glanced at
Bill uneasily.

Bill said, “It
appears that your wife worked as a prostitute during the day. Out of a brothel
called the Kinetic Custom Gym. Were you aware of this at all?”

Riley studied the
change in Lovick’s expression. She saw less shock in his face than she’d
expected. Instead, it looked as if something was starting to make sense to him.

“I knew there
was—something,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was.”

As far as Riley was
concerned, the whole thing was still completely baffling. But a possibility
occurred to her.

She said, “Mr.
Lovick, did your wife happen to suffer from some sort of dissociative disorder?

Lovick looked up at
her and Riley went on, “I mean something like dissociative identity disorder?
Did she ever exhibit multiple personalities?”

“No, not that,”
Lovick said. But he didn’t sound surprised at the question.

Then he said, “She
had … extreme mood swings that scared me sometimes. Like, a couple of years
ago, we took the kids to the Grand Canyon. I was driving us along the South
Rim, and out of the blue she told me to stop. I did, and she jumped out of the
car. She ran straight toward the canyon. I was scared to death, and the kids
were too. It looked like she was going to throw herself off the cliff. But she
stopped right at the edge, like stopping on a dime. She threw her arms open and
looked out over the canyon and laughed.”

“She was bipolar,
wasn’t she?” Riley said.

Lovick nodded. “Meds
helped a little—when she was taking them. But she didn’t like them. And when
she went off them, her behavior got erratic, or worse. When she was depressed,
she couldn’t get out of bed for days at a time. When she was manic, she took
crazy risks, drank too much, drove too fast, that kind of thing. Things had
been worse lately. I didn’t know how bad it really was. Obviously.”

He shook his head.

“I just wanted her
to be happy,” he said. “I always wanted her to be happy. We met when we were in
college, and she had all kinds of talent, could have been a great programmer if
she’d wanted to. But she said she didn’t want to. She said she wanted to be a
stay-at-home mom, at least for now. There’d be time for a brilliant career
later on, she said.”

He stopped talking,
but it wasn’t hard for Riley to fill in the rest of his story. They’d started
having children when they were both way too young. Gretchen found out that
being a housekeeper and a mother wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Her
husband had been building a business while she was stuck at home, bored
literally out of her mind.

And this was how it
had ended. With her murder.

Suddenly, Riley
realized that her face was hot, her palms were sweating, and her hands were
shaking. She knew what these symptoms meant.

She was angry. She
was as angry as hell.

The emotion took her
completely by surprise. Earlier that day, she had interviewed a drug dealer, a
vile man whose only life’s work was to deal in death and despair. Gretchen
herself had surely partaken of his terrible merchandise.

But Riley hadn’t
been mad at Clay Hovis. Instead, she’d almost felt some strange kind of
sympathy for him.

But now she was
angry. She was angry with this man, Cyrus Lovick. Gretchen’s husband.

Why?
she wondered. Did she think he
was guilty?

The answer to that
question tore through her mind like the blade of a knife.

Yes.

But it didn’t make
sense. She knew that she was being crazy. She knew that she was being
irrational. And she had to stick to the task at hand.

“Mr. Lovick,” she
said, “did you really have no idea what was going on? That your wife was living
this other life?”

He looked shocked by
her tone. She, too, felt shocked by her tone.

He said, “It’s like
I told you, I knew there was something.”

“But how could you
not know?” she said, her voice shaking now. “Didn’t you ever just
ask
her?”

He stared at her.

“You have no idea
how much I asked,” he said.

He looked hurt and
angry now. Riley didn’t care. Her temper was rising by the moment. But why? She
felt herself spinning out of control.

She sputtered at
him, “You said you thought she wanted to be a housewife. But there must have
come a time when you saw that it wasn’t working out for her. Surely you knew
she felt empty and lost and bored. Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you
help her?”

She felt Bill’s
strong hand on her shoulder.

Bill said to Lovick,
“I’d like to confer with my partner privately for a moment.”

Lovick nodded,
looking horrified by Riley’s ranting. Bill hastily escorted Riley to the
kitchen and shut the door behind them.

“What the hell do
you think you’re doing in there?” Bill snapped. “You’re treating him like a
suspect.”

“He
is
a
suspect, for all we know,” Riley said.

Bill looked like he
could hardly believe his ears.

“Riley, for
Chrissake,
think
just a minute. Use your brain. Do you really think this
man killed his own wife? And those two other women? One of them three years
ago? Were those just warm-ups or decoys or what? This isn’t some stupid TV cop
show. It doesn’t make sense and you know it.”

Riley didn’t know
whether she knew it or not. She did know that she wasn’t making sense—or at
least she didn’t
seem
to be making sense.

“We’ve got to talk
to the kids,” she insisted. “Check out his alibi.”

“Like hell we will,”
Bill growled.

“It’s procedure.”

Bill seemed to be
struggling to keep from shouting.

“To hell with
procedure. Riley, are you seriously going to break the news to those kids that
their mother was murdered, then grill them about what their daddy was doing
when she was killed? Their whole world’s just been wrecked. Do you want to make
it worse? What’s going on with you?”

“I’m trying to do my
job.”

“No. You’re not. A
couple of days ago you almost beat up a suspect. Are you going to beat up this
guy too?”

Riley could hardly
believe the insinuation.

“This is different,”
she said.

“Yeah,” Bill said. “It’s
worse.”

The words stopped
Riley short. It was starting to dawn on her that Bill was exactly right.

“I’m getting us out
of here,” Bill said.

Riley followed him
back into the living room. Bill managed to address Lovick in a steady, soothing
voice.

“Mr. Lovick, we’re
terribly sorry for your loss. We don’t have any more questions.”

Lovick looked at him
dumbly. Bill handed him a card.

“Here’s the number
for a victim assistance hotline. I don’t think you should wait to call them.”

Riley realized that
Bill had come here prepared with this information. By contrast, she hadn’t been
prepared at all.

They left the house
and walked to the car. Bill stopped Riley as she headed around to the driver
side.