Page 41 of Sullied Saints

"Yeah, she'll be watching now. Even more."

Tears prick my eyes. "I'm so scared, Dirk, of her, for you…"

He holds me closer. "It’s okay. We'll be okay."

But I don't know if he believes that, or if I could ever believe that again.

We don’t turn on the TV that night, or the next morning, just stay closed away in the safe dark, wrapped around each other, putting off the moment that we need to face it all again.

Chapter six

Thefirstbitofnews I see about the ordeal, to my surprise, makes me laugh.

It’s not a newspaper, but the glossy front of a gossip magazine. They’ve taken the moment that Dirk took his shirt off before the camera zoomed back in, and the large, bold pink print titlesDetective Yummy, with the white capitalised subheading under that declaringI'll Take One Rescue From Detective Big D**k Please. I snort, opening the magazine to page four where the story seems to mostly be asking who else is mad at Cocooner for marring such fine arms. Leave it to the thirsty ladies to bring humour to a crap situation.

I look up at Dirk. We’re parked out the front of a cordoned-off old office in Crennick, waiting for Dean and Howie’s car to arrive. Snow dots onto the windscreen, melting immediately, the engine running to keep us warm. “Can you believe this?” I ask, showing him the cover.

He glances towards me. "Yeah, ridiculous."

"I know!" I say, flipping back to the ‘story’.

"I'm a detective. I don't do rescues."

I slap him with the magazine.

Laughing, Dirk dismisses it. “Whatever, the attention is off you. They’ll forget about me too soon.”

“Hm,” I hum, not convinced, and a little put out at just howmuchthe women of Tregam seem to be gunning for him. I’ve never been the horribly jealous type, but that doesn’t mean I want to be competing with damn near everybody.

Eyeing me, Dirk reaches over and squeezes my thigh, grinning. “Don’t tell me you're feeling jealous?”

“No!” I respond, too quickly and too high-pitched.

“Trust me, baby. Now that I’ve got your pussy, nothing’s going to distract me from it.”

I click my tongue as though he’s being ridiculous, and meanwhile quietly judge myself just a little for relaxing at his words. “How sweet. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

For a moment, he looks thoughtful. “You should meet my mother.”

My stomach drops like he’s just suggested a picnic in Crennick, at nighttime, naked. “Uh, that’s not really what I was getting at…”

“She’ll like you.”

“Why?” I blurt out. Caleb’s mother sure didn’t. Ever. From the moment she met me, I wasn’t good enough. A very small part of me would like to go to her and grill her about what her too-perfect son became, what he’d been all along. But she probably knew, probably covered for him as a kid when the signs started to show.

Dirk snorts. “I’ll explain later. Here they are.”

As their car pulls up, Dirk steps out, leaving me with that future meeting to feel anxious about for the next weeks, or potentially months, if I can put it off for long enough. I step out of the car, shrugging into my warm jacket. Dean claps Dirk on the shoulder as we all turn for the inside of the building. “Man of the hour! They’ll be making a calendar of you soon, huh?”

“Shut up,” Dirk mumbles, eliciting a laugh from all of us.

The forensics have already been through the building, to little result. The crime scene was overrun with media and onlookers long before we were called, and with the events at the precinct, we’re all too late to the scene to find anything of use.

“What do they say at the morgue?” I ask as we pass through a dark hallway and to a small internal courtyard dusted with snow. All around, the shattered windowpanes are brown with age, and there are only little yellow markers left to describe the scene.

“Looks like another copycat so far,” Howie answers. “Died by strangulation. She was found in that tree,” he nods towards a dead-looking tree, bare twigs reaching towards the white sky.

I sigh out a breath, releasing a mouthful of steam. “Not much to go on.”

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