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He spotted the bombshell, who was playing soccer with the two older kids, and bellowed at her. “Hey! Sveti! Help!”
The girl named Sveti spun around, and sprinted towards him, shrieking at the kids to follow her. He tried to soothe the kid he held, jiggle the baby carriage, and keep Rosa from rolling off the park bench and onto the muddy ground by trapping her on it with his thigh.
“What did you do to her?” Sveti gasped, pounding towards him.
He registered her faint, attractive accent while he fished for a coherent reply. “Ah, nothing. I’m Detective Petrie, of the Portland Police Bureau, and I—”
“Give me that baby!” She snatched the screaming child out of his arms, to his intense relief.
“I was just asking her a few questions about—”
“Eeeuuwww!” commented the boy, as he gathered up scattered photos that Rosa had let drop. “Are these people dead? They look dead!”
The little girl craned to look at the photos fanned out like baseball cards in the kid’s grubby hand, and let out a ear-splitting shriek.
Sveti gasped, and jerked the photos out of the boy’s hand. “You show these to her?” She flapped them in his face, her voice quivering. “These horrible photo? You bastard! You are sick! You are sadist!”
“Ah…but I…but I had to…she said she could—”
“How could you? How dare you?” Her eyes blazed with fury. She an avenging goddess, the kind that would tear off a guy’s balls and use them for earrings. “Get away from her! Go!”
“But, uh, don’t you need help with her? I could call a—”
“You have done enough! Go!” She lunged, batting at him with the photos crumpled in her fist. “And take obscene pictures with you!”
He grabbed the photos, but resisted her shoving hand. “I can’t move,” he explained. “She’ll roll off the bench if I move my leg.”
Sveti dropped to her knees, gently put the toddler on the ground, and tried to push Rosa back up to a sitting position. With no luck at all, that being a whole lot of woman to lift. He hastened to help her.
The older woman’s eyes fluttered open with a pitiful moan. They fastened on him, squinting in dislike. “You? Still?” she said. “Get lost.”
“Yes, do get lost,” Sveti urged. “Hurry. Go!”
He dug for a card. “Let me leave you this. In case you want to—”
Whack,Sveti batted his card away. “You take card, and stick it right up into place you know very well!”
“You mean, up his ass?” the little boy piped up, helpfully.
“Zitto!No bad words!” Rosa Ranieri regained consciousness to hiss the reproof at the little boy, and promptly went slack again.
Petrie felt a bizarre urge to laugh. He backed away, resisting the urge to get one last hungry gawk in at the exotic foreign Fury. He had what he needed. Time to split.
Rosa Ranieri was the type who’d go nuts if she wasn’t in on the action. It took one to know one.
And when she acted, he’d know.
CHAPTER27
Lily fought consciousness as long as she could, but light pressed her eyelids, and pain throbbed redly in her skull with each heartbeat.
She took stock with her other senses before opening her eyes. Still air. Chill. Artificial light. The bitter smell of anti-bacterial cleansing foams. A churning stomach. A desperate need to pee. She cracked her eyes open a slit. Her head pounded like hammer blows. She rolled to her side, tried to sit up. Had to stop halfway through, squeeze her eyes shut, clench her belly against the churning flop of nausea.
She was in a small, windowless room, with metallic furnishings. A naked fluorescent bulb blazed down from the ceiling. She sat on a metal cot covered with a thin black plastic mattress pad. She wore a white cotton hospital gown, open in the back, bare butt hanging out. She shivered. Her jaw locked, twinging painfully with each shudder.
There was a different color of paint over a spot on the wall that had been walled over, where the window had once been. Her clothes lay on a shelf. She poked them. They’d been cleaned. Bloodstains, on the sleeve. Brownish shadows on the nubbly wool. No shoes, though.
She herself seemed to have been cleaned, too. Her hair smelled like disinfectant. Ick. She shuddered, to think of unfriendly hands touching her body while she was out cold.
