“I will.”
“But?”
She smiled at him, and for a minute her face softened. “You’re really good at reading people, but do you ever think that not everyone wants to know you can tell what they’re thinking?”
Perez laughed. The phone rang and he answered it. While he proceeded to carry on a conversation, Jordain and Butler continued talking.
“Point taken,” Jordain said. “But you were thinking about something and it was bothering you, so what was it?”
“What I just can’t stop thinking about is why these women? Is there an order to these poisonings? Why make them do this to themselves? Someone needs to watch, obviously, but why?”
Jordain smiled and pushed the yellow pad across the desk so that Butler could see it. She read down the list of questions he’d scrawled. In similar words, each question she had just asked was among the questions he’d written down.
“Now all you have to do, Officer Butler, is figure out the answers and you can have my job. I’d be proud to work for you.”
She stood up. “Yeah, I bet. My guess is that you have never been proud to work for anyone. You like running the show too much.”
“That’s not true,” he said, but he wasn’t thinking about work. He was thinking about Morgan just then. He wasn’t running the show there. She was setting the pace of the relationship and it was too slow. And just when he’d get ready to speed it up, a case would break, like this one. Now it was going to get confusing again. And they didn’t do well when that happened. There was no way around it, though. Jordain was going to ask her if he could see her that night.
He needed to tell her about Alan Leightman.
If nothing else, she could be in danger.
Fifty-One
My cooking class started at seven and I just made it. The building on Houston Street was lit up and glowing in the snow, which was still falling and had been falling, it now seemed, forever.
Inside the Culinary Institute, I hung up my coat and rushed into the classroom.
Until Dulcie had gotten the role of Mary Lennox, I never would have signed up for this, but since she was at the theater until ten-fifteen five nights a week, I had the time-and God knows I needed the help.
“Tonight we are going to work with some basic sauces,” Sarah Neery, the chef and teacher, said once we were all assembled.
As soon as she started talking about a basic roux, my mind started to wander. The truth was I was as much a disaster in the class as I was at home. After three weeks, I was slowly realizing that I really wasn’t interested in cooking. It was only eating that interested me.
I whisked the melting butter as I poured in the flour. Whisked more. It was turning golden. That was good. Then the golden turned caramel. And then the caramel color darkened even more. I whisked faster. The mess had turned almost black. Great, I was burning it.
“Morgan, you’re not supposed to let the roux go that dark. Why don’t you try again? This time stop when it turns a nice, warm light brown.”
Light brown? Dark brown? How fast did it turn? Why was I doing this?
Noah was waiting for me in his car in front of the school when the class was over.
“I burned the butter,” I told him once I got inside the car. “And not once. I burned the butter twice. No, not the butter- I burned the roux.”
He reached over and brushed snow off my cheeks and then kissed me softly on the lips. “You’re freezing.” He put his arms around me and kissed me again. For a few seconds, I let go of everything and lived inside his arms.
“Not anymore,” I said when we finally broke apart.
“So if you burned the roux you must be hungry. I haven’t eaten yet but I have some shrimp Creole in the refrigerator.”
“Could we go out? Somewhere nearby?”
He gave me a sidelong glance but didn’t ask me to explain why I didn’t want to go to his apartment. I wasn’t sure what I would have said. I only knew I needed to be in a neutral place. I was afraid that Alan Leightman’s name was going to come up. Afraid of how I was going to avoid talking about him if it did. At least in a restaurant, I could get up, go to the ladies’ room-there were distractions I could use.
Five minutes later we were ensconced in a booth in a small, dark restaurant called Lucky Strike. Noah knew it was one of my favorites-a French bistro that served fries almost as good as what you could get in Paris.
We both ordered dirty martinis, which arrived quickly, and Noah held his glass up to mine in a silent toast.
“I need to talk to you,” he said after we’d each taken our first sip. “About Alan Leightman.”
I didn’t say anything and hoped that my face wasn’t showing any reaction. “What?”
“You’re good at this, Morgan, but you don’t have to pretend. I know he’s your patient. It’s not a question. I have to tell you about Leightman. You don’t have to say anything. Just listen. The man may be a killer. We don’t have enough on him yet to arrest him, but we’re working on it, and in the meantime, I’m worried about you.”
I fingered the stem of the glass. “I appreciate that, but I’m fine. I’m not in danger.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
I made a face at him. I’d been sure of my ability to judge people in the past and had not always been right. “I knew you were going to say that,” I said.
“I’m becoming predictable?”
“Only about this one thing.”
“Well, I am worried about you. Do you understand how powerful he is? If you know something that could help us convict Alan Leightman-”
“I can’t have this conversation with you. I can’t even sit here.”
“Yes. You can. You can sit here and listen. You can help me save your life.”
“That’s overly dramatic.”
“No, Morgan. No. It’s not. And if you won’t take this seriously, I’m going to talk to Nina about it.”
I laughed. “Going over my head? Like I’m a bad little girl? She’s the last person who would take your side.”
“No, not like you are a bad little girl, but like you are a stubborn woman who isn’t being as cautious as she should be.”
The tension swirled around our heads. In the time we’d known each other-in the past seven months-we had come to this place before, and we had not navigated it well.
“I know. Professional ethics. I know. Our principles represent a line neither of us can cross. We admire each other for respecting the line until it gets in the way. Every damn time.” He was angry. At me. At us.
I heard a small sigh escape my lips. “I had hoped we wouldn’t get here again.”
“So did I.”
The waiter arrived and we ordered without even having to look at the menu. French fries and mussels in white wine for both of us.
After the waiter left, I took a deep breath. “Dulcie still hasn’t come home…”
His eyes registered immediate worry and his reaction made me feel a wave of emotion that I wasn’t prepared for. “She’s decided I’m the devil incarnate. Mitch thinks this is about more than the audition, that it’s her way of punishing me for the divorce-”
“But you didn’t instigate the divorce-”
“I know, but it’s easier for her to blame me…” I took another swallow of the salty vodka. “Mitch thinks we should try again. He’s convinced that-”
“Try again?” he interrupted. “As in, the two of you try as a couple again?”
I nodded.
He was waiting for me to say something. To tell him how silly an idea it was. I could tell; I knew him that well.
I started to, because I knew it was. Because I knew how I felt about him. But what if Mitch was right? What if we did owe Dulcie one more try?
Noah fished an olive out of his drink with his fingers and ate it. “So since I’m always Mr. Nice Guy, I should understand this and step back and offer you my best wishes.” His voice was tinged with iciness.