Free Rite of Wrongs by Mica Stone Page A

another. The tone of the entries did change, Gina accepting her lot in life as a late-blooming mother with a joyous grace.
    The last several days of interviews—Miriam’s and Ballard’s—bore that out. Everyone they’d talked to agreed: Gina Gardner had been a model mother. Involved, attentive, interested, available. Which made Miriam wonder if any part of Gina’s life was her own.
    At the sound of Thierry’s key in the front lock, Miriam looked up from her reading. He caught sight of her as he walked through the door, pushing it closed with one palm, then locking it. Her heart didn’t thump. Her breath didn’t catch. Sad, when he was such a beautiful man.
    He dropped his key ring into the bowl on the entry table and set his laptop bag on the floor. His hair, the color of perfectly browned toast, fell over his forehead. He raked it back with one hand. “What’re you still doing awake?”
    She nodded toward the glass and the diary. “Working. Drinking. Trying to decide if I’m going to shower before I go to bed.”
    “I got a whiff of my pits on the drive home. I’m doing that now,” he said, tugging off the white T-shirt he wore with his scrub pants. They hung low on his hips, and she drank him in . . . his abs that were flat, his chest that spoke to the laps he swam at the Y.
    He came closer, lifting her glass and draining it, his T-shirt balled up in his free hand. “Want me to make you another?”
    He sounded beat, and maybe a little bit frustrated, but mostly like he’d just gotten off a forty-eight-hour shift. She shook her head, and instead of asking him about the past two days, she said, “I’m good, thanks.”
    He left her with a nod, setting the glass in the sink as he headed for the shower.
    She wanted to feel bad for him, and she did, but it was the bad she would feel for Melvin, or Nikki, even. A genuine concern, but not what she should feel for someone she’d tried to convince herself she loved enough to trust with her heart as well as her body.
    The body part was so easy, and it took no more than hearing the water come on and picturing Thierry naked to make up her mind. She needed badly to unplug from this case. To let her subconscious work while she slept. To wake up fresh, with a jump on the burnout.
    She returned the diary to its folder, turned off the lamp, and made her way down the hall to Thierry’s bathroom. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open.
    He was clothed only in gray boxer briefs, and she drank him in . . . the hair on his legs, the thickness behind his fly. He looked her over with the light-brown eyes that had given her so much hope when she thought she’d lost everything. Then he stripped and pulled the curtain aside.
    “You getting in?”
    He didn’t have to ask more than once.
    The very idea of having him at her beck and call, her own private feel-good stress relief . . . she nodded, and he stepped into the tub, his naked body big and hard. She undressed and followed, shoving away the guilt. They’d been using each other for years. He knew it, she knew it, yet here they stood, his back to the spray, his mouth at her neck, his chest hair tickling her tits.
    His dick, already hard, pushed between her legs. He lifted her unceremoniously, driving deep. She let her head fall against the wall and gave in to the mindlessness. Steam rose, the hot water stung her skin, and Thierry took her apart until nothing else in the world existed.
    Until the only thing left to do when they were done was close her eyes and sleep.

T HIRTEEN
    Monday, 11:00 a.m.
    The human head weighed eleven pounds.
    He thought he’d read that somewhere. Or maybe he’d heard it said in a movie. Not that it really mattered. More important was the pressure it took to cave in a human skull.
    He’d also heard it said that head wounds bled like crazy. Boy, was that ever right, and the truth worked in his favor. As did the fact that Franklin Weeks was too lazy to be bothered with a proper yard and had