Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
“Cap,” I breathed as my way to tell him it was too much.
I was wrong, I knew when his finger swirled my clit, and I went off again.
I was down on my forearms, forehead on the backs of my hands, panting and enjoying still taking him while coming down, when he buried himself and gave my ass a sharp slap that was so nasty-amazing, it made the walls of my sex contract.
He then grunted before he groaned through his finishing strokes, “Fuck, Raye.”
He took his time coming down before pulling out, rolling me to my back, then settling on top.
“For future reference, you can be bossy like that anytime you want,” I told him.
With both hands, Cap smoothed the hair away from my face, and to share he accepted my offer, he kissed me.
I was frantically multi-tasking, eating Cap’s eggs, bacon and toast (he even made scrambled eggs seem gourmet), putting on makeup and sorting through the police notices on the Republic’s website, at the same time thinking we needed to change the alarm from 5:00 to 4:30 (no, 4:00) to accommodate our morning frolics, when Cap took the opportunity afforded him of me filling in my brows to turn my laptop his way.
“I thought you were letting this go,” he said.
“I said I think we’re letting it go.”
He had no reply, so I looked from my brows in the mirror to him. “We found out another woman is missing last night, Cap.”
“Chief of Police of Phoenix used to be uniform in Denver. Jorge Alvarez,” he announced.
“Okay,” I said, not sure why he was telling me this.
“He’s the guy that came in while we were being interviewed about Elsie Faye,” he explained.
“Right.”
“He’s a good man, Raye.”
Oh.
Now I knew why he was telling me this.
I went back to my brows. “I didn’t say he wasn’t.”
“Don’t get pissed at me,” he warned.
Oh shit.
I abandoned my brows and looked at him again.
“Mace and I went in, talked to him, ran those names on your wall by him. Every single one of those women has a history, Raye. Drugs. Solicitation. Petty theft. Stints in juvie. Domestic altercations, with her being the assaulter. Rough upbringings.”
I didn’t like where this was going.
What I knew was, it wasn’t usually the girl with the upper-middle class upbringing, whose parents groomed her to look forward only to that day where she’d wear a beautiful dress and cut a cake then make babies, parents who had the money to pay for her college so she could be somewhere to find the right man to give her that life, who hit the streets.
And he knew this too.
So I didn’t know why he was saying this stuff to me.
“So?” I asked sharply.
“They’re known not to be real stable, and it’s not their profession saying that,” he said the last firmly, because I’d opened my mouth to retort. “I know sex workers and strippers and a lot of women in similar positions who are completely solid. Pay their mortgages or rent, pay their bills, look after their kids, got a good thing going with their men or women. Jorge says some of them burned so many bridges and pissed off so many people, or owed so much to their dealers, it’s highly likely they left town.”
I was still dubious.
And I was so because, to me, this made all of them even better marks to disappear for nefarious reasons.
Cap should know that too.
“Eight of them?” I said to relay these thoughts.
“Phoenix is the tenth largest city in America,” he replied. “And it’s growing exponentially with everyone moving in from California. Not to mention, Tucson, Vegas, San Diego, LA and Albuquerque are less than a day’s car ride away. Easy to find new turf and the things they need. So yeah, honey. Eight of them.”
“Clarice told us to find this Divinity, and not a week went by, and she’s vanished.”
“How deep have you looked into the first ‘who?’”
Shit!
I was so focused on the second one, the only digging we did was into Christina.
And even with her, we didn’t dig too far.
Even so, I told him about that. “On the face of it, Christina Markovic doesn’t get along with her mom. But they’re tight. They’re just their personal brand of messed-up tight.”
“You do what you gotta do, babe. I’m just telling you, this might end up as nothing. I’ve worked enough cases where a wife is certain her husband is cheating on her, and he isn’t. Or an employer thinks an employee is stealing from a company, when they aren’t, that not everything is as it seems. Some things have an explanation.”
“In short, you think, with what happened to Macy, that I’m imagining bogeymen around every corner.”
“I didn’t say that,” he replied gently. “What I will say is, you cannot do this kinda shit unless you understand yourself and your own motivations. If you don’t, they can cloud your reasoning and judgement. So you should consider it.”