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“Please, Marcus,” she whimpered.
“Take them off,” he said. “Or I’ll tear them off you.”
Looking humiliated, she shed the top and bottom, and then took off her bra and panties.
“Well, Jillian, I must say, you’ve exceeded my expectations,” Sunday said, shucking his running shorts. “You’re an Aphrodite as Rubens might have painted her, pale and voluptuous. Now lie facedown on the bed and let old Marcus go to work on you. You watch; it’ll relieve the unnecessary tension between us, Jillian. It’ll help us both get a great afternoon snooze.”
CHAPTER
68
TESS AALIYAH AND ALEX CROSS checked out of the hotel shortly after noon and headed to the airport. It was Cross’s idea to set up there, and Aaliyah agreed with the strategy. If they had a break of any kind anywhere in the country, they wanted to be able to move as fast as possible.
They went to a café inside the airport and spent nearly five hours there, drinking coffee, eating, and reviewing every aspect of the case. They identified questions they wanted answered and let their imaginations and investigative instincts paint the space between what they knew and what they didn’t know about Thierry Mulch and Acadia Le Duc.
The more time Detective Aaliyah spent with Cross, the more she respected him. An ordinary man—cop or otherwise—faced with this kind of pressure would have buckled long ago. But Cross just seemed to shrug the weight from one shoulder to the other, bearing the load with a grace she couldn’t imagine. Based on his accomplishments, Cross could easily have been a know-it-all or a pompous ass, yet he was an excellent listener, gave of himself, and didn’t seem to have an egotistical cell in his formidable body.
He also displayed a remarkable ability to compartmentalize. Though he and Aaliyah were talking about things that directly affected the lives of his family, Cross seemed able to divorce himself from what had to be disturbingly emotional aspects of the case and keep working the investigation rationally and logically.
When Aaliyah came back after a bathroom break around a quarter to five, Cross said, “We’ll give it another couple of hours, then find a hotel again.”
“What about the video of the killing you’re supposed to make?”
“Gloria Jones is supposed to call me when she’s ready for me,” Cross said. “On another note, how’s your dad’s hip these days?”
As a general rule, Detective Aaliyah did not discuss her dad without his permission, but Bernie was an admirer of Cross’s work and she didn’t think he’d mind.
“I don’t know if you know, but the entire right side of his pelvis was shattered,” she said. “He gets around okay after four operations, but you can tell it still bothers him.”
“The hip or not being on the job?”
She smiled. “Both.”
“I remember what a machine he was,” Cross said. “Must have made him crazy. To be done with his career, I mean.”
“Oh, it did at first,” Aaliyah said. “I thought he was going to drive my mother insane, and he abused alcohol for a bit, but then Mom got sick, and she became the focus of his life until she passed, last year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What does your dad do with his time now?”
“He fishes a lot, and putters in the yard, and he’s got a lady friend.”
“You okay with that?”
Aaliyah cocked her head, reappraised him, and said, “So it is true you’ve got telepathy and X-ray vision.”
Cross chuckled. “Just a knack for reading body language.”
“Then you should go play poker in Vegas.”
“Does that mean you’re not okay with his lady friend?”
God, he was good, she thought. Gentle, but relentless.
“I’ve met her only once,” Aaliyah replied. “She’s nice. And, I don’t know, I guess I don’t want to see my dad hurting anymore.”
“That’s perfectly understandable,” Cross said. “And it must be tough for you because he’s struggling toward normalcy and you’re not a part of it on a day-to-day basis.”
Aaliyah hadn’t thought of it that way before, but she nodded, realizing that Cross had a vast reserve of emotional intelligence as well as an analytical side.
