212

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

6:00 P.M.

Ellie woke up knowing that something had happened. She knew it not in the way you know the multiplication tables, or the identity of the first president, or the capitals of the fifty states, or anything else learned through study or cognition. She knew it in the way you immediately recognize the smile of a long-lost friend, even before you’ve placed the face within your past. She knew it in the way you sense the onset of a cold, even before you have any tangible symptoms. She knew it not just with her mind, but with her stomach and her heart and her blood and her soul.

She woke up knowing at a base, cellular level that something had happened. Rogan had lost Spark’s trail, or had seen something but failed to recognize the significance. Something.

She reached for her cell phone on the nightstand. No new calls registered on the screen. She pulled up the digest of recent calls to make sure. Nothing. But the fact that she hadn’t missed a call did not put to rest the anxiety coursing through her body. Something had happened, and she had slept through it.

The intensity of her agitation was momentarily disrupted by the tickle of a fingertip meandering near her right hip, across the faded appendectomy scar, then up toward her navel.

“You’re awake.” Max brushed her hair back and kissed her just below her earlobe.

“This time it might actually be for good.”

She had called him from the precinct to say she’d been sent home for the day and would be working at night instead. She’d been home only forty minutes when he showed up at her apartment. Now the sun was less bright through the bedroom window blinds, and the cacophony of running engines and car horns below told her that evening commuters were lined up outside the Midtown Tunnel.

Except for a brief traipse to the front door for their delivery tacos, they had spent the last seven hours in her bed, alternating between sleep, naughty stuff, and snippets of 30 Rock online. Based on the tickle of Max’s index finger around her belly button and the warmth of his breath against her neck, he wasn’t asleep and had no intentions of watching another sitcom.

“Is everything all right?”

“I want it to be. I hope it is.”

“El, I know you have this borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder that makes you grind away at a case until all the layers are gone and you can clear the thing from your whiteboard, but even crazy Howard Hughes occasionally let himself sleep. Since the second you left Bandon’s courtroom in handcuffs, all you’ve done is live and breathe this case—nonstop, jumping from one body to the next, searching for one theory that might connect them. That’s got to feel like a nonstop roller coaster, and now that you’ve stepped away from it, you probably feel like it’s still moving without you and you’ll never be able to get back on. But you’ve got to trust someone else to steer the ride for a few hours.”

She nodded quietly. When she turned on her side to face him, he wrapped his arms around her.

Ellie’s last long-term boyfriend, the banker, always expected her to turn off the job once she took off her uniform, but the fact that Max was asking her to take a breather actually meant something to her. One of the traits that had initially drawn her to him was his shared experience in a job that breaks the heart. They spent their days surrounded by the worst kind of human damage. They couldn’t see the cases they’d seen—the pain, the violence, the wholly avoidable infliction of harm by one person upon another—without allowing that world to become some small part of themselves. Immersion in the lives of people who become a part of the criminal justice system infects the psyche. Max shared the virus with her. But now even he was worried that she wasn’t coping.

She allowed herself to be kissed initially and then felt herself responding to the feel of his tongue against hers, his hand on her hip, the tilt of his pelvis beneath the sheets.

Then just as quickly as her mind registered the warmth building deep in her abdomen, she realized her thoughts about the case had escaped from their cage. This time it was Max who pulled back. He could tell she wasn’t there with him. He reached for her cell on the nightstand.

“You want to call Rogan to be sure?”

She panted like a happy puppy, and flipped the phone open. Rogan picked up after one ring.

“So…damn…bored.”

“Nothing?”

“Sparks was in the office all day except for lunch at Michael’s and a couple walk-throughs on new builds. I’m following his town car now, but I reached out to an investigator I know at the DA’s office. According to him, Bandon’s still on the bench, so who knows where Sparks is taking me.”

“I’ll call you in an hour to figure out where to make the switch?”

“No problem.”

Ellie flipped the phone shut and rolled toward Max. She kissed him, softly at first and then more urgently. And then, before she even realized her mind had been wandering again, she suddenly sat up.

She knew whom she needed to call, and it wasn’t Rogan.