Dangerous to Touch

“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.”

Chapter 3

The 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.