Page 19 of Convincing Alex (Stanislaskis #4)

The clerk peered over his newspaper. There was an unfiltered cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and total disinterest

in his eyes. “Don’t ask for names.”

Alex merely pulled out his badge, flashed it. “Blonde, about eighteen. Good-looking. A beauty mark beside her eyebrow. Working

girl.”

“Don’t ask what they do for a living, neither.” With a shrug, the clerk went back to his paper. “Two-twelve.”

“She in?”

“Haven’t seen her go out.”

With Bess trailing behind, they started up the steps. To entertain herself, she read the various tenants’ suggestions and

statements that were scrawled on the walls.

There was a screaming match in progress behind one of the doors on the first floor. Someone was banging on the wall from a

neighboring room and demanding—in colorful terms—that the two opponents quiet down.

A bag of garbage had spilled on the stairs between the second and first floors. It had gone very ripe.

Alex rapped on the door of 212, waited. He rapped again and called out. “Crystal. Need to talk to you.”

With a glance at Judd, Alex tried the door. The knob turned easily. “In a place like this, you’d think she’d lock it,” Judd

commented.

“And wire it with explosives,” Alex added. He slipped out his gun, and Judd did the same. “Stay in the hall,” he ordered Bess

without looking at her. They went through the door, guns at the ready.

She did exactly what she was told. But that didn’t stop her from seeing. Crystal hadn’t gone out, and she wouldn’t be walking

the streets again. As the door hung open, Bess stared at what was sprawled across the sagging mattress inside. The stench

of blood—and worse—streamed through the open doorway.

Death. Violent death. She had written about it, discussed it, watched gleefully as it was acted out for the cameras.

But she’d never seen it face-to-face. Had never known how completely a human being could be turned into a thing.

From far away, she heard Alex swear, over and over, but she could only stare, frozen, until his body blocked her view. He

had his hands on her shoulders, squeezing. God, she was cold, Bess thought. She’d never been so cold.

“I want you to go downstairs.”

She managed to lift her gaze from his chin to his eyes. The iced fury in them had her shivering. “What?”

He nearly swore again. She was white as a sheet, and her pupils had contracted until they were hardly bigger than the point

of a pin. “Go downstairs, Bess.” He tried to rub the chill out of her arms, knowing he couldn’t. “Are you listening to me?”

he said, his voice quiet, gentle.

“Yes.” She moistened her lips, pressed them together. “I’m sorry, yes.”

“Go down, stay in the lobby. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, until Judd or I come down. Okay?” He gave her a little

shake, and wondered what he would do if she folded on him. “Okay?”

She took one shaky breath, then nodded. “She’s... so young.” With an effort, she swallowed the sickness that kept threatening

to rise in her throat. “I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. I’m all right,” she repeated, then turned away to go downstairs.

“She shouldn’t have seen this,” Judd said. His own stomach was quivering.

“Nobody should see this.” Banking down on every emotion, Alex closed the door at his back.

She stuck it out, refusing to budge when Judd came down to drive her home. After finding an old chair, she settled into a

corner while the business of death went on around her. From her vantage point, she watched them come and go—forensics, the

police photographer, the morgue.

Detached, she studied the people who crowded in, asking questions, making comments, being shuffled out again by blank-faced

cops.

There was grief in her for a girl she hadn’t known, a fury at the waste of a life. But she remained. Not because of the job.

Because of Alex.

He was angry with her. She understood it, and didn’t question it. When they were finished at the scene, she rode in silence

in the back of the car. Back at the station, she took the same chair she’d had that morning.

Hours went by, endlessly long. At one point she slipped out and bought Alex and Judd sandwiches from a deli. After a time,

he went into another room. She followed, still silent, noted a board with pictures tacked to it. Horrible pictures.

She looked away from them, took a chair and listened while Alex and other detectives discussed the latest murder and the ongoing

investigation.

Later, she rode with him back to the pawnshop. Waited patiently while he questioned Boomer again. Waited longer while he and

Judd returned to the motel to reinterview the clerk, the tenants.

Like them, she learned little about Crystal LaRue. Her name had been Kathy Segal, and she’d once lived in Wisconsin. It had

been hard, terribly hard, for Bess to listen when Alex tracked down and notified her parents. Hard, too, to understand from

Alex’s end of the conversation that they didn’t care. For them, their daughter had already been dead.

She’d been nobody’s girl. She’d worked the streets on her own. Two months after she moved into the tiny little room with the

sagging mattress, she had died there. No one had known her. No one had wanted to know her.

No one had cared.

Alex couldn’t talk to Bess. It was impossible for him. Intolerable. He shared this part of his life with no one who mattered

to him. It was true that his sister Rachel saw some of it as a public defender but as far as Alex was concerned that was too

much. Perhaps that was why he kept all the pieces he could away from the rest of his family and loved ones.

He hated remembering the look on Bess’s face as she’d stood in that doorway. There should have been a way to protect her from

that, to shield her from her own stubbornness.

But he hadn’t protected her, he hadn’t shielded her, though that was precisely what he had sworn to do for people he’d never

met from the first day he’d worn a badge. Yet for her, for the woman he was—God, yes, the woman he was in love with—he’d opened

the door himself and let her in.

So he didn’t talk to her, not even when it was time to turn it off and go home. And in the silence, his anger built and swelled

and clawed at his guts. He found the words when he stepped into her apartment and closed the door.

“Did you get enough?”

Bess was in no mood to fight. Her emotions, always close to the surface, had been wrung dry by what she’d seen and heard that

day. She would let him yell, if that was what he needed, but she was tired, she was aching, and her heart went out to him.

“Let me get you a drink,” she said quietly, but he snagged her arm and whirled her back.

“Is it all in your notes?” That cold, terribly controlled fury swiped out at her. “Can you find a way to use it to entertain

those millions of daytime viewers?”

“I’m sorry.” It was all she could think of. “Alexi, I’m so sorry.” She took a deep breath. “I want a brandy. I’ll get us both

one.”

“Fine. A nice, civilized brandy is just what we need.”

She walked away to choose a bottle from an old lacquered cabinet. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” Very carefully,

very deliberately, she poured two snifters. “I’ll apologize for choosing today to do this, if that helps. I’ll apologize for

making it more difficult for you by being there when this happened.” She brought the snifter to him, but he didn’t take it.

“Right now, I’d be willing to say anything you’d like to hear.”

He couldn’t get beyond it, no matter what she said. He couldn’t get beyond knowing he’d opened the door on the kind of horror

she’d never be able to forget. “You had no business being there. You had no business seeing any of that.”

With a sigh, she set both snifters aside. Maybe brandy wouldn’t help after all. “You were there. You saw it.”

His eyes flashed white heat. “It’s my damn job.”

“I know.” She lifted a hand to his cheek, soothing. “I know.”

Compelled, he grabbed her wrist, held tight a moment before he turned away. “I don’t want you touched by it. I don’t want

you touched by it ever again.”

“I can’t promise that.” Because it was her way, she wrapped her arms around his waist, rested her cheek against his back.

He was rigid as steel, unyielding as granite. “Not if you want something between us.”

“It’s because I do want something between us.”

“Alexi.” So many emotions, she thought. Always before it had been easy to sort them out, to drift with them. But this time...

It had been a long, hard day, she reminded herself. There would be time to think later. “If what you want is someone you can

tuck in a comfortable corner, it isn’t me. What you do is part of what you are.” When he turned, she brushed her hands over

his cheeks again, refusing to let him retreat. “You want me to say I was appalled by what I saw in that room? I was. I was

appalled by the cruelty of it, sickened by the terrible, terrible waste.”

That sliced at him, a long, thin blade through the heart. “I shouldn’t have let you go with me. That part of my life isn’t

ever going to be part of yours.”

“Stop.” The sorrow that had paled her face hardened into determination. “Do you think that because I write fantasy I don’t

know anything about the real world? You’re wrong. I know, it just doesn’t overwhelm my life. And I know that what you faced

today you may face tomorrow. Or worse. I know that every time you walk out the door you may not come back.” The quick lick

of fear reminded her to slow down and speak carefully. “What you are makes that a very real possibility. But I won’t let that

overwhelm me, either. Because there’s nothing about you I’d change.”

For a moment, he simply stared at her, a hundred different feelings fighting for control inside him. Then, slowly, he lowered

his brow to hers and shut his eyes. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

“You don’t have to say anything. We don’t have to talk at all.”

He knew what she was offering, even before she tilted her head and touched her lips to his. He wanted it, and her. More than

anything, he wanted to steep himself in her until the rest of the world went away.

He took his hands through her hair, letting his fingers toy with those loose, vivid curls. “We haven’t come up with those

rules.”

Her lips curved, slanted over his. “We’ll figure them out later.”

He murmured his agreement, drawing her closer. “I want you. I need to be with you. I think I’d go crazy if I couldn’t be with

you tonight.”

“I’m here. Right here.”

“Bess.” His mouth moved from hers to skim along those sharp cheekbones. “I’m in love with you.”

She felt her heart stutter. That was the only way she could describe this sensation she’d never experienced before. “Alexi—”

“Don’t.” He closed his mouth over hers again. “Don’t say it. It comes too easy to you. Just come to bed.” He buried his face

against her neck. “For God’s sake, let me take you to bed.”