Free Dead in the Rose City: A Dean Drake Mystery by R. Barri Flowers Page B

lustful
indiscretion. I scooped her up in my arms like she was weightless,
and took her to bed.
    The passion was intense with neither of us
holding anything back, yet was strictly physical. I think we both
knew that. But that was enough to disregard all the warning signs
that I was playing with fire. At the moment, the only thing burning
was the heat of our mouths searching one another’s ravenously and
our bodies wrapped tightly around each other in perpetual movement,
as if riding the wave of erotic chemistry to the end of the
earth.
    * * *
    In the afterglow, I poured wine while
Catherine put on what she came in, a snug fitting purple dress and
black low heeled pumps.
    “Maybe you ought to cut your losses and get
what you can out of your marriage,” I suggested strongly, handing
her a glass of white wine. I settled for beer.
    “That would make it too easy for him,”
Catherine countered stubbornly over the rim of her glass. “I don’t
intend to give in without a fight.”
    “If it’s a fight you want,” I warned, “you
could lose.”
    She smiled insightfully. “Never!”
    I almost believed her.
    She was about to hand me money, but I stopped
her. “Wait until we see what I come up with.” I wasn’t making any
promises or looking to somehow make everything right for her and
wrong for the husband.
    “All right.” Catherine put her small hands to
my waist and, looking wistful, said: “Maybe when this is all
over—”
    “Then we go our separate ways,” I stated
flatly, removing her hands. “Understand? No reason to even kid
ourselves into believing there can be a future for us. We both know
it won’t happen.” At least one of us did.
    Catherine seemed thankful that I had put our
relationship in the proper context. Neither of us could afford to
look ahead.
    Today there was still the important fact that
she was a married woman, even if she appeared to be inexorably
headed for divorce court. And I was a single man who had his eyes
squarely on another woman—one who apparently saw me as little more
than a tall, good-looking handy man.
    Not to mention there was a slippery, sneaky
assed Worm still on the loose that I needed to find.
     

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
    I went for my morning jog, enjoying the
solitude of my own company. Working up a sweat was easy when the
temperature was unseasonably warm, the humidity high, and the pace
steady.
    I ended my run at the newsstand. Glancing at
the front page of the Oregonian , I expected to find just
your average murders, crime, and mayhem. What my eyes saw instead
on the lower half in bold print was: Woman Found Shot To Death.
    Instincts made me read on before I could
digest it with coffee and donuts. “The woman has been identified as
Terri Nicole Hawthorne, thirty-two, a native Portlander...” The
accompanying black and white photograph was grainy and not very
recent, but it was almost certainly the same Terri Nicole
ex-girlfriend of Jessie Wylson.
    Breakfast ended up being a trip to the
morgue. Something told me that Terri Hawthorne’s death was not
coincidental by any stretch of the imagination. Even as a homicide
cop, going to the morgue had been a task that didn’t agree with me.
Seeing stiffs who looked like stiffs had an eerie morbidity to it.
But someone had to do it.
    “Do you know the deceased?” the assistant
M.E. asked. He reminded me a lot of Anthony Perkins.
    “I might,” I responded, clinging to the
possibility that it was someone else who had met her maker.
    “Let’s hope not.”
    “That bad?”
    “Worse,” he admitted. “She took one bullet in
the forehead and three in the chest. Someone wanted to make sure
she was good and dead.”
    He pulled the drawer out halfway. The face
was bloated and discolored, with a quarter sized hole in the center
of the forehead. The chest was torn open, as if a sharp knife had
carved her up like a turkey, ripping apart all vital organs.
    “Well, do you know her?” he asked in a
monotone voice.
    I gazed a