Death at Dames Hundred

She felt his grip, hot on her upper arm. She pulled back, felt the vice tighten then release like a fever’s sudden cooling and heard his laugh. “Touchy lady.” He laughed again, a throaty sound, phlegm-laced. He stepped back, thrust the hand that had grasped her against his right hip and raised his other and slammed it against the evidence lockers behind her. He loomed there, a thick, human triangle barring her way. Twice her size, yet his movements pulsed with a tight rhythm punctuated by the sound of the metal locker door as he shoved his hand against it. The bulk of him filled her vision and her breath cut beneath her ribs. She tightened her gut around the acid spurt of fear, forced herself not to reach up to rub the touch of him from her arm. He stood there, canny and watching with shrewd, expectant eyes. Jim Gilchrist, six foot four with big shoulders and square hands that radiated square fingers highlighted by glistening golden hairs. The blue-wash eyes alight in the broad face—like the faces in that exhibit of Communist hero art she’d seen last week, gross, impenetrable, peasant Russian. “You’re a good looking woman.” A slant of the head, the half-tipped visage questioning, sly. “Damn good looking! What’d you want to be a trooper for—cover it all up. Let’s have coffee and you can tell me about it.” “No,” she said. “Thank you, but no. I’ve got two reports to write and testimony on the drug case to go over with the lieutenant.” She shot him what she prayed was a crisp, professional smile. Heart pounding in her throat, she edged to move around him. Unrelenting, he stood motionless, blocking her way. “Litowska. Celine Litowska. What are you so starchy about? What d’you think—I’m making a pass at you?” He chuckled, then smoothed his face as if he had a secret switch somewhere that he could press and erase all expression. “Wouldn’t be appropriate. He flashed finger quote marks around the word ‘appropriate’ then crossed his arms in front of him. “You think I don’t know that? Come on. I’ve had the sensitivity training just like everyone else around here. All I want is to be friends, give you a hand now and again, like I would anyone else. We’re bound to be partners eventually.” She swallowed, knew he saw it, jutted her chin at him. “It’s good to know I can count on you if something comes up. But right now—” “Sure,” he said, cutting her off with a sarcastic hiss. “Keep the chill.” He pulled his arms behind him into an at-ease position, rocked forward on the balls of his feet, then back. “You got things to do, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to interfere with your oh-so-important work. On the other hand, friendship can come in handy—even for loners like you.” He grinned again, but his eyes were flat. “I get the message. Nobody cracks your ice.” She shook her head, half raised a hand to protest. But he laughed outright. Then with a malicious wink, he swept her a little bow and signaled with an open-palmed gesture that she could pass. She stepped around him, drove herself past his force field, felt him looking over his shoulder at her, felt his eyes on her buttocks, heard his parting words insinuating in her head. “Yeah, a real loner.” She rounded the corner, focused on the women’s room door, and forced herself to walk, not run toward it. As she pushed the door open, she saw with a rush of relief that the cream-tiled room yawned empty. It was cold, morgue-like compared to the rest of the barracks. She slid her hands down the sides of her khaki uniform pants, pressed her thighs to hold in the fear and pull strength from anger. She felt the hard push of her holster against her inner arm. Why had he moved on her now when things had seemed to be in balance? She’d graduated from the academy six years ago, made trooper and spent two years at the Baltimore barracks and two in the western part of the state. Then she’d been assigned to the Cape Station barracks. Her antennae had picked up Gilchrist as a potential threat from the start, yet he’d stayed in the background, distant, disinterested, held back, she had to believe, because of her father who’d retired from the Cape Station unit six months before she herself had come here. Within weeks of her assignment, he’d been slaughtered in his own car out on Route 113 by a hog carrier driven by an illegal immigrant high on crystal meth. Gilchrist had been one of the honor guard at the full dress funeral. But he’d looked through her as if she was invisible when he and the others escorted the Maryland-flag-covered casket down the long aisle to the front of the church, then afterward, out to the hearse and on to that dark, gaping rectangle sliced in the earth at the grave yard. And like the rest of them, he’d stepped warily around her that first year. In the second year, when she’d proved it wasn’t the pain of her father’s death that drove her, but her own competence; when she’d made sergeant and the rest of them had fitted her in and made her part of the team, he’d stayed in the shadows. And she’d assumed things were okay, that Gilchrist respected her like the rest did and that what she’d told Dad was working out. She’d been able to forget Gilchrist, imagined she’d escaped him. But it had been a stupid, stupid mistake. He’d been there all the time. Watching, waiting. And now, without warning, he was out in the open. Why? Because he wants a relationship with you, and you weren’t smart enough to pick up on it. The edgy voice inside her, the one that all her life had told her things she knew before she could admit she knew them, hissed the scorn-laden words in her head. She held up both hands to push the idea away. But like Gilchrist it refused to retreat. Christ! To be so blind. But it was true. Gilchrist wanted her, and she knew in a flash of insight that it was a twist on what Dad had warned her about, the blindness that can come with being a loner. In the instant, it flooded back, that talk with him after she’d come home to St. Martins, a prodigal from five years defining herself in the wilderness. “I want to be a trooper—do investigative work,” she’d said as he removed his uniform belt, heavy with equipment and weapons. He’d tensed, held the belt across two hands, palm’s up like a priest’s stole, tilted a question with his head. “I know. It seems crazy—me a rebel and home only a couple of weeks. But it’s not.” He’d sat down, watched her. She could hear her mother in the kitchen.