He’d been at the computer since he’d gotten home. He was too wound up and turned on to sleep, so he’d used the time to research everything he could glean about the D’Onofrio saga that could be found on the Internet. He was champing at the bit to call his NYPD source and get some inside details on the case, but it was too early.
So he’d ranged further to pass the time. Reading articles she’d published in various literary journals, about Sara Teasdale, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sappho. A paper for her graduate seminar. Then there was poetry she’d written and published herself. Guest blog entries on websites that catered to poets, scholars. Online poetry workshops that she critiqued. Outlandish stuff. And they said computer nerds were arcane and weird? Computer nerds had nothing on poets and scholars. This crap was from fucking outer space.
He glanced at his watch. Almost five a.m. Good enough. His friend and ex–comrade in arms was now a detective in the NYPD. Gant owed Duncan his life, from a number of bloody adventures they’d had back in Afghanistan. If he wasn’t awake by now, it meant he was getting soft.
He dialed the number. It rang twelve times before the guy picked up. “Who the fuck is this?” said Gant sleepily.
“I need some info,” he said.
“Oh, Christ. You. Couldn’t it wait till daylight?”
“It’s dawn,” Duncan said, staring out his picture window at the spectacular New York City skyline, silhouetted against the faint glow of breaking day. “I need the details of an ongoing police investigation, in Hempton. It involves an elderly woman named Lucia D’Onofrio. She died during a burglary in her house, of a heart attack. A few weeks ago.”
“Yeah? Why do you want to know?”
He leaned his hot forehead against the cool window glass, and hesitated. “Because I’m interested,” he hedged.
“Interested? You wake me up at this un-fucking-godly hour just because you’re interested?” Gant paused for a moment. “This is about a woman, right?”
“None of your goddamn business,” Duncan muttered.
“I knew this would happen,” Gant bitched. “You freak. Acting like a fucking monk, for years at a time. It was just a matter of time till you snapped. So it’s happened, huh? You’re obsessed? You’re awake at this hour because you spent the night Googling her life? Poor girl. She has no idea what she’s in for. So what does this chick have to do with the old broad who had the heart attack?”
“She’s the old broad’s daughter. Stop busting my balls and just get me the info,” Duncan growled.
“You’ll have to wait. I won’t call those guys until it’s a decent hour. That’s called common courtesy. Ever heard of it? Go to bed, Dunc. Or better yet, go jack off, and then go to bed. Later.”
His friend hung up, and Duncan let the phone drop and spun the chair back around to read those poems again.
He was unaccountably fascinated. As if some window were opening in his mind, with a view he’d never seen before. He couldn’t understand what the fuck she was talking about, but so what? Who cared? He liked the way the words resonated inside him, like a big, deep bell. He’d never felt like that before. Everything buzzing, humming.
It felt strangely, dangerously good.
Chapter
4
“Stop here,” Nell directed the driver of the car.
The guy screeched to a halt and took the money with a deadpan face. She was spending a fortune on car services, but there was no help for it. At least there were enough people on the streets that she felt safe walking the rest of the way to the Sunset Grill.
She stared at the hair salon as the car accelerated away. She’d been circling this issue all morning, since she’d wound her hair into the usual thick, fuzzy braid and twisted it into a heavy knot. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window, slid her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, and took another good, long look.
She was hiding behind the glasses, the baggy dresses, the dowdy, frizzy hair. She’d hidden behind the cowardly assertion that looking good was all vanity and nonsense. That she was a lofty scholar who was too intellectual and above it all to care.
What total bullshit. After less than ten lust-charged minutes with Duncan Burke in the stairwell, she cared passionately. She needed every weapon at her disposal to deal with him.
The stray thought made her wince. There it was, beauty as a weapon. The association was programmed into her. She’d chosen plainness because she’d wanted to stay off the battlefield.
But the battle had come to her. There was nothing to do but fight.
She marched into the salon, sniffing nervously at shampoo, perfume, and chemicals. A slight, bald Hispanic man with a pearl-drop earring gave her a toothy smile. “What can I do for you?” he inquired.
Nell stared helplessly. “Do you take walk-ins?”
“When I feel like it. What do you have in mind?”
“I, um, don’t know yet,” Nell confessed.
The man rubbed his hands together. “Hmm. You’re in luck. I just had a cancellation. I’m Riccardo, by the way. Let’s take a look.”
Nell soon found herself in a chair, her body swathed in a plastic cape. Riccardo’s expert fingers pulled the pins from her hair, unraveling it and fluffing it up. He made cooing noises of approval. “May I?” he asked, removing Nell’s glasses. The salon became a glittery blur. “Good material here. You really ought to try contacts,” he counseled.
Nell harrumphed. “Can you do something that’s easy to style?”
“Oh, yes. I’m just going to shape this a bit, and thin out all this weight, and layer this…and lighten it, make it more fluffy. See?”
Of course, Nell didn’t, without her glasses, but this was the beauty salon of destiny, so she nodded and consigned herself to Fate.
Some time later, she retrieved her glasses and gasped at the result. Riccardo had layered and shaped her formless, kinky waist-length mop into a shiny halo of black curls that framed and flattered her face and still hung halfway down her back. Nell kept putting an unbelieving hand up, feeling the soft, springy texture of her ringlets, the way it fluffed up on top, perfumed with various salves and waxes and goops massaged into it. The price was staggering, but she passed over her credit card without protest. The only problem was the glasses. With her new do, they looked even more ridiculous than before.
One step at a time, she told herself.
Her hair caused a sensation when she walked into the restaurant. Monica wolf whistled. Norma spun Nell around, looking at her from every angle. “Oh, honey! You look as gorgeous as I knew you would!” she exclaimed. “I just wish your mama could see how pretty you look!”
Nell’s eyes dampened, and she hugged the other woman tightly.
“Enough of the sentimental stuff,” Monica said briskly. “C’mere, Nell. I wanna put some makeup on you.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be prepping for lunch?” Nell asked plaintively, as Monica dragged her to a chair.
“That’s all right, hon. We can open five minutes late,” Norma said indulgently. “How did that job interview go?”
“Oh. The job interview,” Nell hedged, as Monica tilted her face up and outlined her eyes with black pencil. “It was extremely interesting.”
“Oh? How so?” Norma asked, picking the chairs off the tables.
“You will never, in ten million years, guess who it was who interviewed me,” Nell said.
Norma froze. Monica’s eye pencil stopped moving.
“No way, chica,” breathed Monica.