“Try the Costa Rican Chocolate Blend. All their stuff is wonderful, but their Costa Rican Chocolate Blend is the best coffee on the planet.”

Jess, standing at the counter in the little coffee bar beside Teri, said, “I should never drink the best coffee on the planet. Most of the time, I’m in places that only offer the absolute worst coffee on the planet. My taste buds don’t need to get their hopes up.” She scanned the menu and shook her head. “I should get something decaffeinated anyway. I haven’t been sleeping worth shit since I started this job. My plans when I get home today are a long shower, a long nap, and then straight to bed.”

Teri laughed. “God, I understand that. Between coming in early and leaving late, I manage on five hours of sleep most days. Sometimes less.” She was studying Jess’s face. “You know what? You look good even without makeup. Not exotic or glamorous or anything. But... good.”

Jess was a bit startled by the observation. “Well... thanks. I generally don’t wear makeup,” she admitted. “It makes my skin itch. Besides, I’m comfortable with my own face.”

Teri smiled. “It’s nice seeing women with their real faces. We don’t often, you know? We don’t often show our own faces, either. We’re always in disguise — because when you think about it, that’s all makeup is. Us pretending to be something we aren’t.”

“I suppose.” Jess got decaffeinated black something-or-other with a stupid name, plus a giant cookie, Teri got a cup of her favorite, and they took a seat at one of the little tables. “I never thought about it much. I’ll use lip gloss because it keeps my lips from getting dry. Dancing aside, I don’t bother with anything else.”

They drank their coffee for a moment, neither saying anything. And the coffee was, unfortunately, very good. The mere memory of it was going to make the swill at the police station taste even more gruesome, something she would not have thought possible. She took small sips, closed her eyes, and smiled.

“I was right about all their coffee being good, wasn’t I?”

“Beyond a doubt. You come here often?”

“It’s one of my favorite places.”

They looked out the window, and out of the corner of her eye, Jess saw the surveillance van slide into a parking space not too far away. It had circled the block twice before finding an opening, and Jess was worried that Teri was going to say something important while they were out of range.

Jess leaned back in her chair, put her cup on the table, and said, “You sounded down earlier.”

Teri gave a bitter laugh. “I am down. Goldcastle has the customers coming in, so the money is still there, but a lot of our recent traffic has been gawkers. Sightseers. I’ve noticed a lot of our regulars missing, and who can blame them, considering the news? If they come in, they take a chance of looking like suspects. Plus, we’re losing dancers left and right. Things are going on upstairs that I have no control over, and Lenny is... God, I cannot even begin to describe my problems with Lenny.”

Jess sipped her coffee and waited.

“Well, some of Lenny I clearly don’t have to describe.”

Jess took a bite of the cookie, and raised her eyebrows in silent agreement.

And Teri sighed. “I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid he has something to do with the girls who have died. He’s... well, in private, he’s very, very scary.”

Jess said, “In what way?”

Teri looked down at her hands and shook her head. Jess realized the other woman’s hands were shaking. Teri seemed to realize it at the same time and hid them on her lap. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s mere speculation, and speculation is nothing I want to be a party to. Innocent people get hurt that way, and I don’t want to contribute to gossip.” And then she flushed, and said, “Not that I was suggesting that you would gossip if I said anything.”

Jess put a reassuring smile on her face and said, “I wouldn’t,” in her best sincere voice. “And I understand you not wanting to speculate about someone when you don’t know anything is definitely wrong. I think that’s admirable.” She created a carefully timed pause with a sip of coffee, and said, “The world would be a better place if all the people who suspected things took the time to find out the truth, and all the people who knew the truth told it.” She caught a flash of guilt and fear in Teri’s eyes, quickly hidden. Yeah. Teri knew something about Lenny. She was afraid of Lenny, vulnerable to him somehow. Maybe he was blackmailing her, though Jess had a hard time imagining anything a man could use to blackmail an ex-porn star.

If Teri would just tell Jess, Charlie and Jim could get the lovely search warrant to Lenny’s mansion that would give them this case. And Lenny. And maybe, at long last, Ginny.

But Jess needed to find the right approach to Teri, who was careful and now a bit edgy, and who looked like she would spill her guts if tipped the right way, or shut down completely if pushed.

No pressure at all, Jess decided, would be the best approach.

“How are you going to handle the staffing, since people are quitting?” she asked.

Jess could see Teri breathe out, relieved. “Cut our nightly tip-out, bring in new girls — though we aren’t getting applicants like we were.”

“Well, no,” Jess said. “I’m not surprised.”

“Are you going to stay?”

“I’ve thought about leaving. I’d be crazy if I hadn’t, wouldn’t I?” she asked.

Teri’s rueful shrug was her only reply.

“And at this point I could move to a different club, I suppose,” Jess said. “But I have some regulars who tip well now, and Jim has more expensive tests coming up, and I really can’t afford to stop.” She smiled at Teri. “Plus, you’re there. I’m impressed by the way you take care of your dancers.” And then she got her hook. “Lenny’s a problem, though. I’d thought about going to the police about him, but really, I’d bet anything he was the one who left the flowers on my doorstep. And kissing me in the hallway against my will was... Well. But if I go to the police and charge him with those things, nothing is going to happen to him. You know that. And I’m afraid involving the police without having enough on him to get him locked up might just piss him off.”

Teri nodded. “It would, I think.”

“Do you think he’s killing the dancers? Do you think I’m in danger?”

Teri sighed heavily and clenched the cup in her hand, knuckles white. “Oh, God. Jess, I think he might be. And you might be in danger from him. I don’t know. But... no. I can’t talk about it with you.” She looked into Jess’s eyes, and Jess spotted the sheen of unshed tears. “I can’t.” Teri rose. “I have to go.” She tried to give Jess a reassuring smile, but her lips trembled, and after just an instant she turned away. In a strangled voice, she said, “Whatever you do, stay as far away from him as you can.”

And she fled out the door and across the street, almost running in her haste to get away.

Jess stood up, staring after Teri. She could have chased after her, but she didn’t. No pressure.

Instead, she cleaned off their table, wondering all the while exactly what Lenny Northwhite was holding over Teri Thomas’s head.

What the hell was Lenny Northwhite’s connection to Teri Thomas? She had a feeling that she and Hank and Jim and Charlie needed to find out. Fast.

* * *

Hank thought she looked too tired when she stepped out of the elevator. He walked down the dingy hallway to greet her, picked her up and swung her around and kissed her, and felt her sag against him.

He could feel the killer on her, but only from a distance. At one remove. She had touched something the bastard had touched. He breathed a little easier. Not much, but a little.

“You look beat.”

“I am,” she said. “God, I am. I did not think today was ever going to end.”

“Me, either.” He put her down and wrapped an arm around her waist and walked her back to her apartment door, where he’d left bags full of good things waiting. “But I’m cooking. So long as you promise to stay awake at least long enough to eat.”

“Promise. What did you bring?”

“Be surprised.”

She unlocked the door and let them in. “I have to get a shower,” she told him. “Have to. Lysol, Clorox, lye — there has got to be something that will wash that place off me.”

Hank wanted to tell her that not going in there anymore would do the trick. That her being out of the line of fire, away from that place, when she was the killer’s next target — and special target, at that — would do a very fine job of keeping her slime-free. And alive. He didn’t want to forget the importance of her being alive.

“I do have some ideas on that,” he said, and sounded grimmer than he’d intended to. “But go shower, and I’ll get some of this stuff started, and we can talk while it’s cooking.”

She almost lunged into the shower. He could understand it — probably better than most, he thought. She was carrying the residue of the touches of men she didn’t like, wouldn’t want to associate with, and under other circumstances wouldn’t even go near. They were touching her with thoughts in mind that ranged from the merely pornographic to the horrifyingly perverse — and those impulses and wishes and desires clung. If they didn’t, he wouldn’t have anything to offer the cops. Or anything that made him want to drown himself every time he ended up in the middle of a crowd, or riding a public bus.

There were some sick fucks out there, and a lot of them were congregating around Jess. Including the one who wanted to kill her.

Yeah, he could see that he wasn’t going to be able to put this business in perspective anytime soon.

But he could at least be calm talking about it to her.

He heard the shower running, and her moving around.

It was hard to forget that she was naked in there. Hard to look at baking potatoes and good thick steaks and salad greens and bread and think about cooking dinner. Hard to keep his mind away from the hours he’d been watching other men watch her, watching the bastards imagining her being with them. And the whole time, he’d known what she felt like, how she moved, how she responded — and he didn’t want to share her. Not with their hands pushing money at her, not with their eyes looking at her, not with their minds thinking things about her they had no business thinking.

He wanted to protect her. Wanted to keep her safe, and that had nothing to do with her being a cop in a risky job, and everything to do with him being a man in love.

Good God. Not in love. Not that.

He sighed. From his second bag, he pulled out a small bouquet of bright yellow carnations with red tips, which smelled good and looked nice in the vase. And which he could identify by name; he’d never been a flowers kind of guy. He’d learned the basics — orchids, roses, daisies, carnations — and he stuck with them.

He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for from Jess, but when he was making his way through Publix studying slabs of beef wrapped in plastic and stacks of spuds, looking for exactly the right ones, flowers had been a part of the picture in his head. Candles. Wine.

Something small and shiny with a diamond attached.

He closed his eyes, swearing under his breath. That wasn’t what he wanted. This thing had happened between the two of them too fast, and all of a sudden he was thinking of forever? No. No, flat, not-a-chance no.

He didn’t know Jess well enough for forever. He’d barely met her. She was a good woman. She was someone he could love. But he didn’t love her. Not yet.

He stared at that little arrangement of carnations.

He could see the two of them together forever, though. That was the problem. He was thinking about a romantic evening followed by a great time in bed, and at some point talking her into at least coming to stay with him until this mess was done — or at most getting out of it because she was in danger, dammit — but some conniving bastard deep inside of him that had been keeping his mouth shut was pulling strings Hank hadn’t even known he had. The little man in the control tower was directing Hank the Big Dumb Sucker to flowers and good bottles of red wine and priming him to open his mouth either before or after the great sex tonight and say something monumentally stupid.

Like, Marry me.

Hank wrapped the potatoes in aluminum foil, stuck them in the oven, and set the timer. Forty minutes, and then they could finish up on the bottom rack while the steaks broiled and the wine breathed. The salad was the work of three minutes. Maybe five. Hank didn’t want to tear the lettuce until they were ready to eat it.

He heard the shower cut off, and his heart slid into his throat.

The little guy in the tower didn’t seem to have all that bad an idea. He ran it through his head, examining it. Marry me, Jess, and let’s be happy and wonderful together for the rest of our lives. Marry me, Jess, so that I can see your smile every morning when we wake up and every night before we turn out the lights. Marry me, Jess, because you’re the only woman I’ve ever known who looked at me and saw me, not scars, right from the first. And I might be a big dumb sucker, but I’m not so dumb that I think that’s going to happen again.

Marry me, Jess, because I love you.

And there it was. He could tell himself till the sun came up that he didn’t love her.

But he did.

From the bathroom came thumping. Jess was graceful when she walked, and graceful when she danced, but getting dressed in that tiny bathroom, she sounded like two dogs fighting in a cardboard box. He grinned, wishing he could watch.

He was smiling when she walked out the door. She looked clean-scrubbed, fresh, rested. She was everything he had ever wanted in a woman and a lot of things he hadn’t even dared to imagine.

“Hey, darlin’,” he said. “Potatoes are baking. We have a little time.”

“Time is good. Baked potatoes — not microwaved?”

“You know my opinion of the microwave.”

She grinned at him. “That I do.”

He considered going with the wine and the flowers and the getting down on one knee and making a fool of himself, but they were both on empty stomachs, and dinner was cooking, and he had the whole business of her being the next victim to discuss with her. It would be really unfair, he thought, to ask her to come live with him, or marry him, and then break it to her that he wanted her to get out of this investigation. Something inside of him insisted that she would look at this as his attempting to manipulate her. She’d see it as cheating.

He wasn’t a cheater. Never had been. So he’d do this in order.

He said, “I called the surveillance team to figure out when to look for you. Lump says you met with Teri after work? Get anything good?” Lump was Dan Lumpkin, who was heading up the surveillance-van team.

“I’m still processing it.” She pulled up a bar stool on the other side of the counter and watched him. “She’s hiding something big about Lenny — I’m trying to figure out if anything anyone else has said to this point would tell me what.”

Lenny. Lenny. Where the hell did Lenny fit into this?

"How about you?” she asked. “Called in on the new dead girl?”

“She wasn’t part of the series,” he said. He stuck the steaks in the fridge, moved the bags out of the way, and came around the counter to sit on the other bar stool. “She looked about the same, and she’d been killed in the same way. The things done to her after death, also all the same.” He turned at right angles to the counter so that he could look straight at Jess. “But she was a decoy. The killer was trying to make it look like he’d moved on.”

“Moved on?”

“Here’s what Jim and Charlie managed to find out about today’s victim: She was twenty-six years old; her name was Bethany Hertz; and she’d been stripping as a hobby for a mere three weeks. Her full-time job was as a radiologist at a local women’s clinic. Apparently, noticing that they weren’t meeting a lot of men at work, she and three other girls decided to participate in an amateur-night topless contest, and she won some sort of prize. The club where she participated was more than happy to have her back as a twice-a-week regular.”

“So she has no ties to Goldcastle,” Jess said.

“Not a one. No links to anybody in it. She barely has ties to stripping. She had Wayne Alton’s fingerprint on the back of her shoe—”

“Wayne Alton! The creepy computer-game guy?”

“Yeah. Him. As far as they were able to tell, Bethany never met Wayne Alton before her death. And, of course, Alton has never been to the clinic where she works, either.”

“And yet she’s dead, and he killed her.”

“He and the still-missing blond assailant. Jim said they had fibers, semen, and head and body hairs that appear to match every other case.”

“Okay. I can see — to some extent — why she wouldn’t quite look like part of the series. But she’s dead, and the same people killed her in the same way.”

“Not quite. I could feel the difference — I could feel the intent. Which was to put people off their trail. But Jim and Charlie put together a whole list of reasons why she didn’t fit. Her body was dumped in a public parking lot in the middle of the day, and the treatment of the girl before death was completely different.”

Jess leaned forward. Frowning. Intent. “How?”

“She had the same postmortem bath-and-makeup ritual, same post-cleanup rape. But the medical examiner confirmed what I felt. Nothing — absolutely nothing — was done to her before death. He couldn’t confirm the other thing — that this girl never suffered. I can’t explain it, but she missed her murder. So that’s a big difference.”

“I’d say.”

“The fact that she wasn’t raped or tortured premortem actually fits with what I felt about the killer choosing a victim almost at random, just to throw us of his trail, and to divert attention from you.”

“Because if she isn’t from Goldcastle, then it looks like the killer has changed hunting grounds.”

“Right.”

Jess closed her eyes and rubbed her fingertips against her forehead. “But you still think I’m the next real target?”

“You’re the last real target, Jess. You’ve been chosen because your sister Ginny was the first victim. I keep feeling this alpha-and-omega thing, every time I connect with the killer. After you’re dead, he’s planning on picking up shop and moving to some other location. You fit this six-by-six thing he has going, and you’re omega.”

Jess laid her face in her arms on the counter and said nothing.

“Jess?”

“Give me a minute. I know I’ve considered that Ginny might have been early in his series. But that she was the first, and I’m supposed to be the last...” He heard her choke up.

“Breathe, sweetheart. Breathe. I’m here.” He ran his hand over her back, stroking, rubbing her tense muscles.

She flooded him with her pain, her grief, her sense of loss. He caught images of her with a girl who looked just like her, of friendship and love and of the huge gaping hole her sister’s disappearance had left in Jess’s life. And he could feel, too, a swelling fury that raged into him like the back-blast of a wildfire.

Lenny. She wanted to rip Lenny to shreds with her bare hands.

“Breathe. Breathe, Jess.”

Muffled, her voice still sounded like agony personified. “I’ll be all right. This is just a lot, the way this is coming together.”

“I know.” And there’s more, he thought, but he didn’t say that. Not yet.

He moved his bar stool closer to her and wrapped his arms around her and held her. She wasn’t crying. He doubted that she’d let herself cry in a long time. But he could feel her fighting it with everything in her.

“Let go,” he told her. “If you cry, it won’t be the end of the world.”

“I’ll cry when I’ve found her. When I know for sure. Right now...” A pause, and then a strangled sound. “I can still hang on to hope.”

His eyes prickled with tears, and he blinked them back.

“Jess,” he said. “I want to discuss something with you.”

She took a couple more deep breaths, then sat up. Her eyes were red, her nose was red. But she was not crying. “Sure,” she said.

He looked at the timer. Still had another twenty minutes on the potatoes. He could get through this in twenty, he thought.

“You’re in real danger,” he said.

Somehow, she managed to pull a grin out of thin air. “They pay me for that. Really, they do.”

“Not regular-line-of-duty danger, darlin’. This isn’t what they pay you for. You’ve done your part, you’ve put them on the trail, you’ve given them info they couldn’t have gotten any other way. But nobody is paying you to be stalked by some fucking sociopath.”

“That I put up with because this is my case. And if Ginny really is involved, because it’s more my case than anybody else’s.”

He took both her hands in his. “There’s something we’re missing in all of this. The killer keeps moving around us, and we’re not sure how. If he gets around us one more time, you’re lost.” He felt his throat tighten, and the words that had no place in this discussion came out. “If anything happens to you, I’m lost.”

She stared at him. “You’re lost?”

“I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about reasonable precautions.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Fine. Such as...?”

“The most reasonable thing you could do would be to back out of the stripping thing now. Work at HSCU on following leads, on putting together all the pieces that they have.”

“They don’t need me for that. They have people for that. They need me to get into the thick of this, to dance and look pretty and keep my eyes and ears open because they don’t have anyone else to do that for them. Just me.”

He hadn’t expected her to take the suggestion well. He’d hoped, but he hadn’t expected it. And... well, she hadn’t.

“All right. Then come and live with me until this is over. I’ll drive you to the club, I’ll drive you back, I’ll stay with you whenever you’re not dancing, and we’ll keep you safe that way.”

She said, “Hank, this is sweet of you. It is. But look — if the killer realizes he cannot get to me, he’s eventually going to kill some other girl. Fill in his six-by-six thing, pack his bags, and move on to some other city. And then this nightmare is going to start all over again.” She leaned forward and looked up into his eyes. “Right?”

“We’ll stop him,” Hank said, but in fact, he did know that what she said had more than a grain of truth in it.

“As long as he’s coming after me, we all know where to look, right? We all know who we have to watch.”

“It doesn’t matter. Because if I screw up this time, if I read things wrong, if I can’t figure my way through the killer’s twists... then you’re going to be the one to die.” He squeezed her hands. “You have to let us find another way to get this guy.”

And she pulled away from him. “I’m not going to. I’m not going to make myself safe; I’m not going to hide away from everything I can do just so some other woman can die in my place. Some woman who might be somebody’s mother or sister or wife or daughter. I’m not going to do that, Hank, and you shouldn’t even think about asking me.”

He stood up, angry. “There’s a part of you, Jess, that thinks you deserve to die. That your sister’s death is your fault, and that if you can’t kill the killer, at least you can be dead, too.” He clenched his hands into fists, and felt his stomach knot. “You think I haven’t felt that all along? This guilt of yours? This totally unreasonable, totally stupid guilt from all the way back when you were twenty-one? That you’ve been carrying around on your shoulders like it was the world, and you were chained to it?”

She stepped up to him, right into his face. “I don’t care what you see, and I don’t care what you think. I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it.”

“You’re trying to kill yourself.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“You’re so scared to face the truth that you can’t think straight. You want to believe that you have all these noble reasons for hanging on to this case and putting yourself in stupid, unnecessary jeopardy, but when it comes right down to it, you’re in it to play Russian roulette with yourself. Get the killer or die trying — that’s you. And there’s a whole police force out there that can do exactly what you think you have to do alone. You’re not the only good cop in Atlanta, Jess. Not by a long shot.”

“Get out,” she said. “I’m doing my job whether you like it or not. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to take shit about the way I do it. Not from you, not from anyone.” Her face was red, her fists knotted, and she looked like she wanted to kick down a wall. “You have no stake in how I do my job, Hank Kamian. You have no say in the risks I take, or why I take them, or what value I place on my own life. I won’t put a partner in jeopardy. I won’t get stupid. But no more women are going to die if I can do anything about it.”

“Fine,” he said. “People get what they want, Jess. And you want some dark, awful things. You want to be a martyr... well, that’ll make your mother happy, won’t it? You don’t want my help; you want to be stupid. Then be stupid. I’m out of here.”

He stalked to the door, turned back to her, and said, “Don’t forget the potatoes.”

He slammed the door behind him so hard it shook the light fixtures up and down the hallway.