Vengeance to the Max (9 page)

She arched, gasped, the mere touch of his breath an aphrodisiac. Or maybe it was his burning gaze on her.

“Come when I do,” she begged, the need to do it together suddenly more important than all her fears.

On his knees, he pumped his cock, then he leaned over her, bracing himself on his hand. With every movement, his tip skimmed her opening, not entering but promising so much more.

She worked faster, harder, sliding in all her wetness. Sensation spiraled down to just her fingers on her clit. Her vision blurred. She bit the flesh between his neck and shoulder. She wanted to watch, to absorb his groan and the wet slap of his palm on his cock, but her mind shut down. She arched and ground. Finally she screamed as the delicious frenzy of orgasm shot her out of her body to the ceiling. She came with the hot spill of his cum all over her clitoris, all over her fingers, dripping down to fill her. She came with his name on her lips and his shout in her ear. She came forever.

His voice pulled her back from heaven. “Lick your fingers.”

His essence. His semen. His manhood and his virility. She opened her eyes to the deep blue need in his. He hovered so close, but barely touching. His arm shook with the strain of holding himself up. Then she did what he told her to.

Meeting his gaze, she put her fingers to her lips, spreading his taste all over. Opening her mouth, she slid two wet fingers inside and sucked him in. His taste, hers, mingling on her tongue. She’d tasted him before, she’d taken him in her mouth, she’d swallowed him. This was ... different. This was them together, blending, until their combined tastes became one and she couldn’t tell them apart.

Blue flames leaped in his eyes, then suddenly he swooped down her, taking her mouth in a fierce, demanding kiss. She opened for him, swirling her tongue with his. Her thighs climbed his legs and clasped him to her. Max held him with all her strength.

When he pulled back, she couldn’t force her eyes to open, and her body failed to respond to her mind’s command. She lay limp and exhausted and frighteningly satisfied.

“Sleep,” he whispered.

With his taste on her lips and the scent of lovemaking in her nose, she fell asleep like a child who hadn’t learned to fear the dark.

Witt, ensconced before a glowing monitor in the Lines Library, typed in the names from Cameron’s yearbook. Happy as a clam, the man was at home with a computer, which made Max wonder how much time a cop spent pounding the streets for answers versus pounding the keyboard. His task, though she hadn’t specified Cameron as the organizer, was to search on every single person who signed Cameron’s book. If there was no last name, he would flip through the book and search on anyone with that first name. Should be enough to keep him busy the rest of the day.

He’d let her sleep for a couple of hours. Despite her exhaustion, it had been more than enough. Max slept like the dead, or the deeply fulfilled. They’d shared something. She couldn’t say what, maybe didn’t
want
to say it. Not yet. It was enough to admit to herself that she’d shared something important with him.

Kinky and sick are the products of a warped mind
.

What they’d done together seemed the furthest thing from sick and kinky. She’d keep telling herself that until she truly believed it heart and soul. She
would
believe it.

Atta girl
, Cameron whispered.
Now go do the obituary thing
.

Nothing like a ghost to bring you back to earth.

The hum of clicking keys and flipping pages filled the library. The old building had been refurbished with institutional blue-gray carpeting the color of Witt’s eyes on a bad day and rows of tables equipped with a reading light in the center. None of the lamps had bulbs. Perhaps the city had run out of money. The floor-to-ceiling book stacks, their metal as yet unscratched by careless hands, provided a sound barrier from the clicking computer keys and the soft voices of the three librarians as they answered questions.

Max waited her turn. The library provided no card files, having replaced them with computers and lookup tables. She, therefore, had no idea where the dead newspaper files would be. She’d decided to begin the search with the date of Cameron’s yearbook and move forward. His sister had obviously been alive and well at the time her picture was taken.

“May I help you?”

Startled—she’d been in the midst of an almost palpable memory of Witt between her legs, one which had her panties turning embarrassingly damp—Max lurched forward when the gray-haired lady beckoned her a second time.

“What can I do for you?” Cat’s-eye glasses with sparkles in the rims swung on a beaded chain around the woman’s neck. Her hair, the color of steel wool and appearing equally as coarse, lay in a cap of tight curls on her head. Over her breast, attached to her green dress, perched a name badge. Evelyn. An old-fashioned name. Anywhere between seventy and eighty, her face was a blanket of lines filled in with a layer of makeup. She had a tiny nose, a snub thing she pointed in Max’s direction, this time clearing her throat.

“Uh,” Max managed, “I’m looking for old newspapers.” She gave the woman the year, watched amazed as the lined features tensed and the gaze behind the cat’s eyes turned inward.

“What a year,” she murmured.

In that moment, a spark of familiarity struck Max. Could it be? Could
she
be ... ? But no, that would be too coincidental, and there really wasn’t a trace of Cameron in that countenance. Especially with that nose.

Max shook off the feeling. “Where can I find the old stuff?”

The woman also seemed to do a mental shrug, focusing once again on Max, her face softening. “We’re having everything scanned so we can load it all on the server, but I’m afraid the daunting task hasn’t been completed yet. What you’re looking for is still on microfiche.” She bent her head and looked at Max over the tops of her bifocals. “If you want the Lines Gazette, that is.” As if Max might dare to ask for something else, like the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times.

“Yes, I definitely meant the Lines Gazette.” Max’s heart beat faster. “And you do have it?” She realized now she hadn’t believed they would, not that far back.

The woman beamed behind the lenses, her snub nose lifting. “Certainly. Lines has everything, things a big library would
never
think to carry. Let me show you.”

Moving at the speed of light, she dashed around the end of the counter. Max, despite her longer legs, had a time keeping up. The woman led her to the far end of the library, past Witt at his computer station, past the tables and the stacks, the children’s reading room on one side, the soft-spoken readers’ groups on the other, the periodicals, and finally back to three work stations, each equipped with old-fashioned fiche viewers.

Wooden card files of old created sound-dampening walls around the stations. Max’s escort dropped her voice as she opened a neat drawer packed to capacity with envelopes of microfiche.

“They’re filed by year and day within year, my dear.” The woman lowered her chin once more and looked at Max over the rims of her glasses. “Please don’t get them out of order.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

“It’s five cents a copy if you do a print screen. You can pay up front.” Then her guide scurried back to the help desk, leaving Max amid filing cabinets fragrant with lemon polish.

The task was indeed daunting. She had over twenty-five years to go through.

“Why obituaries?” she asked, her voice a murmur in the quiet library. “Why not marriages and births?”

Being suspiciously quiet today, Cameron didn’t answer.

Then she thought of the three days she had to accomplish the chore and was damn glad Cameron only asked for the obituaries.

She set her purse and coat down on the chair next to the viewer she’d chosen, then turned to the drawers. Running her finger down the card files, she found the year she wanted two up from the bottom. She started with June, before graduation. Luckily, the editor believed in good indexing. She went right to the obituary section. Above, beside, and below barked advertisements for funeral homes and cemetery plots. Well, really, where else would they advertise? Max began reading.

“Alice Goodhew, aged eighty-five, died Friday, May thirtieth in Lines, Michigan. Mrs. Goodhew is survived by her loving sons, George and Elliot, and her four grandchildren, Lisa, Cindy, Peter, and Rusty.” Rusty sounded like a dog’s name. The bit went on to say a memorial service would be held the following Monday at two o’clock in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.

A busy weekend for the Angel of Death, three more announcements rounded out the number for that edition, an eighty-year-old man, a fifty-year-old woman, and a twelve-year-old boy.

Her heart twisted. Twelve years old. It didn’t say how Jimmy Howell had died, only that his grieving parents and two younger sisters survived him. No parent should outlive his or her children. Max yanked out the fiche and slid in another, the little boy’s death leaving a pall over the assignment.

He wasn’t the only child. Somehow, she hadn’t counted on that. She figured on the names being impersonal, until she got to the one she was looking for. How the hell could so many people die in a town as small as Lines, population ten thousand? Though the truth was the obits covered Lines and the four or five surrounding towns, and after wading through six months, it merely
seemed
like a lot.

By late afternoon, Max’s eyes ached from staring at the sometimes indistinguishable fiche type, and she’d managed to get herself sidetracked by stories like the one on Dr. G.W. Crouch, the dentist who’d been caught drilling for cavities that weren’t there, and Gunther Abercrombie, who’d walked down to his basement one evening after work and hung himself while his kids fought over eating brussels sprouts for dinner. It happened as readily in small towns as it did in big cities. Max had been sidetracked, but she’d still learned something important.

Even in a town like Lines, finding Cordelia Starr was like looking for a grave in a cemetery when you didn’t have a name.

“How ya doing?” Witt’s warm hand traced her spine, and she relished a lung full of his enticing aftershave. She wanted to chuck the whole project and beg him to take her back to his room. All that from a touch and a sniff. God, she had it bad. She’d do anything he wanted. She
had
done exactly what he wanted.

Couldn’t let
him
know that. “No success. How about you?”

“Got a few names still living in town. Enough to check out.”

“Are you done?”

“No.” He leaned over to read with her. Secluded in the rarely used fiche section, surrounded by book shelves and fiche viewers and cabinets, he trailed a hand along her side from her hip to her armpit, his fingers settling below her breast, just short of cupping it.

“What are you doing?” Besides driving her crazy.

“Helping you read.” A chuckle laced his voice.

Helping?
She couldn’t concentrate on a word in front of her with his hand resting up there and his hips so close down there. She hated a man that teased. All right, she loved a tease, but she hated having so little control over the heat in her cheeks and the state of her nipples. She wondered if they showed through the layers of turtleneck and sweatshirt, but refused to look.

He read aloud, his breath against her ear. Bastard knew what he was doing to her pulse rate, too.

“Calvin Hastings, sixty-eight, died Christmas Day at his home in Lines. He is survived by his loving daughters—”

“The same guy must write them all. They’re exactly alike.”

Witt went on, his hand slipping around her until his thumb lay between her breasts and his body rested flush against her back. “—survived by his loving daughters, Evelyn Hastings and Madeline Starr, and grandson Cameron.”

They sucked in a breath at the same time.

“Ohmygod,” Max whispered on the exhale.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Witt snapped out, then, fast thinker that he was, added “Why doesn’t it mention the granddaughter, Cordelia?”

“I’m sure Evelyn Hastings can tell us.”

He pulled back. “I’ll look her up, see if she’s alive.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Think she’s dead?”