"Reading improves your vocabulary, Officer Maiden. You should try it sometime. Though I suppose you can get by with just looking at the pictures."
"Ooh, I'm cut to the quick on that one," Maiden said.
"If you cut us, do we not bleed?" Belisarius asked.
Maiden shocked the hell out of me by giving the next line: "If you tickle us, do we not laugh?"
Belisarius clapped softly. "Touché, Officer Maiden."
"Big and well read," I said. "I'm impressed."
He pulled a chain out of his pocket with keys on the end of it. "Don't tell the other cops. They'd think I was a sissy."
I looked up at him, all the way up at him. "It's not reading Shakespeare that makes you a sissy, Maiden. It's that damn gun. Only pansies carry that much hardware."
He unlocked the door at the end of the hallway. "Got to carry something big, Ms. Blake. Balances me out when I run."
That made me laugh. He opened the door and ushered us through. He locked the door behind us and went down a long white stretch of hallway with two closed doors on either side. "Wait here. I'll go make sure your boyfriend is ready to see you."
"He's not my boyfriend," I said. It was becoming automatic, like an involuntary reflex.
Maiden smiled and unlocked the door at the far end. He vanished through it. "You and Officer Maiden seem to have hit it off, Ms. Blake."
"Cops dish out a lot of shit. Trick is, don't take it personally, and dish back."
"I'll remember that next time."
I looked up Belisarius. "It might not work for you. You're a lawyer, and you're wealthy."
"And I'm not an attractive woman," he said.
"That, too, though that can work against me with policemen."
Belisarius nodded.
Maiden stepped back through the far door. He was smiling like something had amused the hell out of him. I was betting I wasn't going to think it was funny. "I told Zeeman that for a fucking pervert, he had a cute girlfriend."
"I'll bet that's not what you said," I said.
He nodded. "I asked him why, with a nice piece of ass like you for his girlfriend, he had to go out and rape somebody."
"What'd he say?" I asked, face as blank as I could make it.
"He said you're not his girlfriend."
I nodded. "See, I told you so."
Maiden opened the door wide and motioned us through. "Ring the buzzer when you want out." We stepped through, and he said, "Enjoy," as he locked us in.
They must have gotten a deal on white paint because the entire room was white, even the floor. It was like standing in the middle of a blizzard. Two bunks, one on top the other, the bars on a small window, even the toilet and sink were white. The only color was the bars that formed a three-sided cage. Richard sat on the other side of the bars looking at us.
He was sitting on the lower bunk. His hair fell in thick waves, nearly hiding his face. In the stark whiteness of the overhead lights, the hair looked darker than its normal honey brown, almost chestnut. He was wearing a pale green dress shirt untucked, sleeves rolled back over muscular forearms. His dark brown dress slacks were wrinkled from being slept in. He unfolded his six-foot-one-inch body from the bunk. The dress shirt stretched tightly across his shoulders and upper arms. He'd bulked up a little since last I'd seen him, and he'd been pretty muscular to begin with. Once upon a time, it would have been my great pleasure to have peeled that shirt off and seen what was underneath, to have run my hands over that lovely chest and those strong arms. But that was then, and this was a whole new ball game, one that I really couldn't win.
Richard came to stand at the bars, hands wrapping around them. "What are you doing here, Anita?" His voice wasn't as angry as I feared it would be. He sounded almost ordinary, and some tightness in the center of my body relaxed.
Belisarius stepped away from us. He sat at the table outside the cell and began spreading papers out of his briefcase. He tried to look very busy and give us as much privacy as he could. It was a nice gesture.
"I heard you were in trouble."
"So you came to rescue me?" he made it a question. His solid brown eyes stared at me, searching my face. His hair had fallen into his eyes. He smoothed it back from his face in an achingly familiar gesture.
"I came to help."
"I don't need your help. I didn't do it."
Belisarius interrupted. "You've been charged with rape, Mr. Zeeman."
I turned and looked at Belisarius. "I thought it was attempted rape."
"I've been reading the file while I was waiting. Once I had Mr. Zeeman's permission to act as his lawyer, I got access to the records. The rape kit was negative for semen, but there was evidence of penetration. Penetration is enough to constitute rape."
"I never had intercourse with her," Richard said. "It never got that far."
"But you did date her," I said.
He looked at me. "Yes, I did." There was a little anger in his voice now.
I let it go. I'd probably be grumpy, too, if I were in jail on trumped-up charges. Hell, I'd be grumpy even if I had done it.
"The problem, Mr. Zeeman, is that without semen samples, you can't really prove conclusively that you didn't violate Ms. Schaffer. If this is a frame, it's a good one. You dated the woman more than once. She went out with you and came home beaten up." He paged through one of the files. "There was vaginal bruising, some tearing. If she wasn't raped, it was still very rough."
"Becky said she liked it rough," Richard said quietly.
"When did how rough she liked sex come up in conversation?" I asked.
He met my eyes, no flinching, ready to be angry if I was angry. "When she was trying to get me to go to bed with her."
"What exactly did she say?" Belisarius asked.
Richard shook his head. "I don't remember exactly, but I told her I was afraid I'd hurt her. She said if I liked it rough, she was my girl."
I walked away from him to stand looking at the closed door. I didn't want to be here for this. I turned around, and he was already staring at me, already meeting my gaze. "Is this why you wanted to see both of us at once? So I'd hear all the details?"
He gave a harsh sound, almost laughter, but bitter. A strange look passed over his face. Once I could have read his every thought on his face, in his eyes. Now I didn't know him. Sometimes I thought I'd never known him, that we'd both been fooling ourselves. "If you want details, I can give you details. Not about Betty, but there's Lucy and Carrie and Mira. Especially Lucy and Mira. I can give you details on them."
"I heard you'd been a busy boy," I said. My voice was softer than I wanted it to be, but normal. I wasn't going to cry.
"Who told you to come down here, Anita? Who disobeyed me?" That first prickling roil of energy crept through the room. Sometimes you could forget what Richard really was. He was better at hiding it than any lycanthrope I knew. I glanced at Belisarius. He seemed oblivious. Good, he wasn't sensitive to it. But I was. The power crept over my skin like a warm wind.
"No one disobeyed you, Richard."
"Someone told you." His hands flexed on the bars, rubbing over and over. I knew he could have ripped them out of the floor. He could have knocked a hole through the back wall if he wanted to. The fact that he was still in this cage was only because he didn't want out badly enough to blow his cover. A mild-mannered junior high science teacher could not bend steel bars.
I leaned close to the bars, lowering my voice. His otherworldly energy breathed along my skin. "Do you really want to discuss this now, in front of a stranger?"
Richard leaned in so close his forehead pressed against the bars. "He's my lawyer. Doesn't he need to know?"