"You entertained him here in your apartment?"
"Sure." Doreen picked up the ice pack and reapplied it to her cheek. "He was here a lot. Usually showed up late at night. Always came through the alley door. What can I say? The sex was pretty intense. Very exciting. Until yesterday, that is."
"That's when he attacked you?"
Doreen closed her eyes in pain. "It was the first time he ever came here during the day. He showed up in the middle of the afternoon. I could tell right away that there was something different about him."
"Different?"
"It was obvious that something had happened." Doreen opened her eyes and gingerly adjusted the ice pack. "He was very rezzed, very aggressive. Told me to close up the shop. Then he demanded sex. I got scared. I wondered if he had been drinking, but I didn't smell any booze on him."
"Was he high on drugs? It wouldn't be the first time in the history of the world that a vice cop got involved with the vice he was supposed to be investigating."
"I don't know." Doreen grimaced and then sucked in a painful breath. "I swear it was as if he'd had a personality transplant. He had always been so smooth, so cool. But yesterday he was a sex-crazed thug. When I fought back, he started beating me. He's a lot bigger and stronger, and I'm sure he would have raped me, but for some reason, he suddenly seemed to get nervous. I got the impression he was scared of hanging around here, like something terrible would happen if he didn't leave right away."
"What did he say?"
"Among other things, he told me that if I breathed a word about what had happened to anyone, let alone went to the police, he would come back and slit my throat." Doreen shuddered. "I believed him."
A sex-crazed thug. Elly thought about that.
The medics had said that Stuart Griggs had likely been dead for a couple of hours by the time she found him. If he had been murdered with blue dissonance energy, as Cooper believed, the killer might well have melted amber to accomplish his goal. That meant that shortly afterward he would have been consumed by a very intense case of lust.
A killer in the grip of a serious amber meltdown might attempt rape. But he would be operating within a very narrow window of opportunity. It was only a matter of time before he started to sink into a heavy sleep, and he would not want to do that while he was near his victim.
"Doreen, please think carefully. Exactly when did the bastard come here?"
Doreen's face puckered up in close contemplation. "Somewhere around three. Right after the mail was delivered. Why?"
"Stuart Griggs died of a heart attack yesterday afternoon. I found the body at about four."
"The florist up the street?" Doreen frowned in surprise. "He's dead? I heard the sirens, but I was in such bad shape that I didn't even bother to look out the window."
"Which explains why you weren't in the crowd of onlookers with the rest of us when they brought the body out."
"I don't understand. What does Griggs's death have to do with what happened to me?"
"I'll tell you later. Did you see which way the bastard went when he left here?"
Doreen shook her head. "No. I really thought that he was going to kill me. I was amazed, frankly, when he didn't. If he hadn't gone into that panic mode, I think you'd have found my body today."
He couldn't have gone far after the attack on Doreen, not if he was plunging into a post-amber meltdown burn, Elly thought. He would have needed at least a few hours of deep sleep. Odds were, he had gone to ground somewhere in the Old Quarter.
"You should have called me," Elly said, opening another cupboard to look for the tea.
"I was too scared. All I could think of was that if I told anyone, he would find out somehow and come back to kill me. He's a cop, Elly. He could get away with it."
"He's not going to get away with anything."
Doreen wiped her eyes. "What do you mean?"
There was no canister of tea in the next cupboard either. Elly gave up in frustration. "Oh, the hell with making the tea. Let's go back to my apartment. I'll make some there. I need to call Cooper, anyway, and I'd rather do it on my own phone. Yours might be bugged or something."
"Bugged?"
"You said he was a cop."
"Yes, but why would he bug my phone?"
"How should I know? He's a cop. They do stuff like that."
Elly started to close the cupboard door, but the sight of the bottle on the top shelf stopped her cold. She looked at it, unable to tear her eyes away from the label.
"Doreen?" she said very quietly.
"Yes?"
"Since when did you start drinking Founders Reserve scotch?"
"What? Oh, the scotch." Doreen winced. "I don't drink it. Can't afford it, even if I did like the taste, which I don't. You know me, I'm a cheap wine spritzer kind of gal."
Elly swallowed hard. "So who gave you the Founders Reserve?"
"He brought it here. Said he wanted to have it on hand whenever he came to see me. He was very particular about it. Why?"
"Dear heaven."
Elly slammed the cupboard door and whirled around. "We've got to get out of here. Right now."
"Are you kidding? I can't go outside looking like this. I'm not even dressed."
"Put on an overcoat and a pair of shoes. You've got to hurry, Doreen."
Doreen got slowly to her feet. "You're serious, aren't you?"
"Yes."
Elly grabbed Rose and rushed into the hall. She opened the closet door and yanked a knee-length purple coat off a hanger. When she got back into the kitchen she saw that Doreen was starting to respond.
"Okay, I'm not arguing." Doreen took the coat and followed Elly down the stairs. "Guess I'm still too scared to be logical."
"Faster," Elly said. She led the way across the shadowed shop, fighting back a tide of panic.
She yanked open the front door and paused a few precious seconds to check the street.
Nothing moved that she could see. She glanced at Rose, who appeared unalarmed.
Heartened, she led the way across the street, fishing for her key.
"Why the sudden panic?" Doreen asked, watching anxiously as Elly rezzed the lock on the door of her shop.
"I used to date a man who drank only Founders Reserve scotch," Elly said. "He was very particular about it."
"What was his name?"
"Palmer Frazier."
"But the guy who did this to me was named Jake Monroe."
"That's the name he gave you." Elly shoved open the door, ushered Doreen inside, and whirled around to yank the shades down in the front windows. "No wonder he didn't want you to introduce him to me."
It dawned on her that Doreen had gone absolutely silent behind her and that Rose was growling softly in her ear.
With a sickening sense of dread, she turned around.
A man loomed in the shadow-filled doorway of the back room. He had a pistol in his hand.
"Eldora St. Clair, you are under arrest for the possession and sale of illegal para-psychoactive substances," Grayson DeWitt said.
Chapter 32
"STUART GRIGGS WAS A JORDAN'S JUNGLE FANATIC." Benjamin Bodkin peered at Cooper over the rims of a pair of old-fashioned reading glasses. "Did a bit of small-time business with him over the years, the occasional journal, that sort of thing. But he could never afford the expensive items. Not until fairly recently, that is."
Bodkin's Rare Books was a dimly lit space saturated with the unmistakable aroma of old volumes. The shelves went from floor to ceiling on every wall. They were crammed with books of all sizes, shapes, and descriptions. Under other circumstances, Cooper thought, he could have spent hours here browsing the collection.
Bodkin, himself, went very well with his bookshop. He was comfortably plump and rumpled, with a shrewd, scholarly air.