What A Girl Wants
Authors: Liz Maverick
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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What a Girl Wants
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A
New American Library
Book / published by arrangement with the author
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All rights reserved.
Copyright ©
2004
by
Elizabeth Ann Edelstein
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
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The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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ISBN:
978-1-1012-0993-6
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Electronic edition: MARCH, 2004
To my family,
Mum, Daddy, and Bro.
I
n Hayley Jane Smith's defense, it should be noted that it was a record-breaking week during the hottest summer in ten years of San Francisco meteorological history.
And there's Hayley crammed into a tiny cubicle next to a bunch of other young New Economy professionals in one of those South of Market lofts. There's no air-conditioning, and the smell of leftover pizza and Chinese takeout is so pervasive, it's almost unnoticeable.
The point is that after a person's been there five minutes in the heat and the stink, she becomes one with the heat and the stink.
Which is why it really pissed Hayley off when the investigating detective asked how it was possible to
not
smell Fred Leary's day-old decomposing body in the cubicle next to hers.
The tone the detective used suggested that while he could sympathize with her, he would have recognized Fred's predicament much earlier. Hayley didn't think that coming upon Fred on Thursday would have been any better than it was finding him on Friday.
All this is to say that finding Fred dead was an unusual incident in Hayley's relatively uncomplicated world.
â¢Â â¢Â â¢
Hayley pinged Fred with an instant message three times that morning, since that was his preferred mode of communication. When he didn't respond, she called his name over the cubicle wall. Still no answer.
With a huff she got up and went into his cube, only to find him slumped over his desk, obviously exhausted. Poor Fred. He probably hadn't even gone home last night. Hayley pushed the old pizza boxes off the guest chair and, holding one hand to her nose as casually as possible to ward off the surprisingly pungent stench of his cube without offending him, she tapped him on the shoulder. Nothing. No response.
She shook him slightly, and just like in the movies, Fred Leary's body fell backward in his chair and then just slid off the seat to the floor as the chair rolled to the other end of the cube. He posed there awkwardly, his legs straight out in front and the rest of his body doubled over at the waist.
Clearly in some sort of denial, Hayley called his name again and pushed at his shoulder, which caused his upper torso and head to slam backward to the floor with a sickening thud. And there was Fred's corpse, in a state of late-stage rigor mortis, staring up at her.
Hayley couldn't exactly remember the order of events after that. There was possibly some screaming. Most likely it was her screaming.
In any case, all hell broke loose, and twenty minutes later when the police detective caught up with her, she was in the employee
kitchen, spread-eagled against the soda refrigerator with her palms and face pressed against the glass.
To put it another way, she wasn't at her best.
“Miss . . . Hayley Jane Smith?” a male voice asked.
“That's me,” Hayley mumbled. She peeled herself off the glass and turned around.
He was attractive. Alarmingly so. A big guy, but quite well distributed. He obviously worked out, but she could tell he didn't take it too far. He wore a light blue oxford shirt rolled up at the elbows, and carried off his charcoal-gray dress pants verrry nicely.
Hayley swallowed and zoomed in a little further. An appealing little scarred area stood out on his left forearm . . . he had a bit of a tan going, dark brown hair cut short around the neck and sides but not too short on top. And he was sweating, of course, although in his case it didn't seem gross.
By the time Hayley looked up into his honey-colored . . . no, “honey-colored” was too feminine. They were closer to amber. By the time Hayley looked up into his amber-colored eyes, her only coherent thought was how glad she was that she'd opted for a dressier look today. She sported her new black strappy sandals, a delightful, flippy little black three-quarter-length skirt, and a black spaghetti-strap tank. And she'd had her faux-messy cropped haircut highlighted just last Saturday. It made her feel a little more confident.
“I'm Lt. Grant Hutchinson, a police detective with the San Francisco Police Department. I know this is a difficult time, but I need to ask you some questions about Fred Leary,” he said. And then he looked down her body. Literally, his gaze moved straight down from head to toe.
Hayley leaned back against the refrigerator because she knew
she was blushing and she needed something cool against her skin.
He looked away, apparently entranced by the espresso machine on the far counter, and repeated, “Um, Miss Smith?”
Nothing to be nervous about, Hayley. He's shy! How sweet.
She could draw him from his shell, perhaps. “Call me Hayley.”
“Um.” He turned his face toward her again, looked her right in the eyes, and meaningfully lifted one gorgeous, perfect eyebrow.
Much later, Hayley would try to blame everything on this moment, that eyebrow. Or maybe it was the way he lifted his finger slightly and crooked it at her and quickly dropped his hand back down as if startled by his own boldness.
“Grant.” Hayley said his name quietly. In a nice, encouraging sort of way. She didn't want to scare him or anything.
He looked confused. He raised his finger again with a little nod.
And with a kind of swamping horror, Hayley realized that it wasn't a beckoning sort of finger; it was a pointing sort of finger. Pointing downward. Specifically at her. She swallowed hard and looked down.
Her skirt was plastered up her thigh, the condensation from the refrigerator literally gluing the fabric partially above the waist.
How attractive. Not. I think I'm going to kill myself now. Fred and I can share a plot.
“Right. Thanks.” She shoved her skirt down and cleared her throat. Smiling brightly, she added, “I'll just be at my desk when you're ready with your questions.” Then she ran past him out the door.
For the next ten minutes Hayley sat in her cube in semiparalysis, with her head in her hands. Eventually Grant came into the cube, slid the plastic door shut, and leaned against the desktop.
Since the cubes didn't have ceilings and Hayley could still hear everything going on with the medical examiner next door, it seemed like a funny thing to do.
To his credit, Grant made no mention of what had transpired. He reintroduced both himself and the concept of a police interview and went straight to the questions. “Can you describe your relationship to the deceased?”
“Fred was the senior copy editor. I write blurb copy and headlines for the Web site. He wasn't my boss, exactly, but he reviewed my material before it went live.”
He nodded and openly surveyed her cube space. Hayley flushed. Had she known a handsome police detective would be questioning her about the corpse next door, she certainly would have made an effort to clean up. The layers upon layers of paperwork, candy-bar wrappers, and office supplies made the desk resemble an archeological dig.
Well, they say you take pride in what you care about, ha-ha. Heh.
“And you worked with him on a weekly . . . daily basis?”
“Daily.”
“Daily?” The eyebrowâthe one Hayley had previously misinterpretedâshot up. Hayley stared at the eyebrow and sat back in her chair. Dubious, criticizing, evil eyebrow.
Cocky bastard.
Hayley narrowed her eyes in anticipation of his next question.
Grant opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by a bead of sweat that rolled down the side of his chiseled face. Hayley forgot to be annoyed.
She watched, fascinated, as in what seemed like slow motion, he brought his blue oxford-clad upper arm to his face and swiped from one side to the other. It was the equivalent of a Pamela
Anderson
Baywatch
hair flip. Hayley's mouth slowly dropped open as his arm fell away and he actually licked his lower lip. . . .
“Miss Smith?” He leaned down, picked up Hayley's trash can, and peered down into her face. “Do you need to vomit?”
Hardly. She shook her head.
He nodded and put the trash can down. Then he put his hand on her shoulder. Hayley turned her head and stared at his hand as he said, “I know this must be very difficult for you.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls who find corpses.”
He pulled his hand back. “Excuse me?”
Hayley cringed back into her chair. “Oh. That was out loud.” She could have sworn the tiniest hint of a smile flashed across his face for a second. But she'd certainly been wrong before.
“Why don't we continue?” He picked up his notebook and cleared his throat. “So, let's see. It seems that Fred Leary has been deceased for at least a day and you didn't notice until approximately thirty minutes ago.”
Hence the saying, “going for the jugular.” “I don't think you understand. What with e-mail, instant messaging, and all that stuff, it's not like people here talk to each other face-to-face a lot.”
Grant gave her a skeptical look and Hayley rushed to explain. “It's completely normal for entire weeks to go by without seeing certain people in the office. In fact, there are people here I work with I've never actually seen.”
Grant studied her face. It made Hayley feel inexplicably guilty . . . and hot. “Did you think it was strange when you, what's the word, âpinged' him three times and he didn't answer?” he asked.
“Well, after three times, I did think it was strange. No, that's not true. I thought it was inconvenient. I didn't think it was
strange, per se. And it wasn't like it was a rush job or anything, so I didn't go and bug him about it immediately.”
“And you didn't detect anything unusual until you went into his cube.”
“You mean why didn't I smell anything.” He just couldn't let it go, could he?
Something snapped. It just snapped.
Hayley slumped back in her chair, looked up at him, and waved her hands about in the air. “You think it's possible here to smell the difference between Fred's dead body on the right and the sweating engineer on the left?” She gestured with her head to the cube on the other side, then calmly stared at the detective for a beat before bursting into hysterical laughter.
As she laughed out of control for a solid minute, Grant Hutchinson didn't say a word. The look on his face went from incredulous to possibly amusedâalthough it might have been disgust, actuallyâbefore it shut down completely into a blank facade.
Hayley stopped laughing immediately and jumped up from the chair, horrified. And then she burst into tears.
Through her tears, Hayley could see the detective take a deep breath and slowly exhale. He put down his notebook and came over to her, putting his arm loosely around her shoulders. With his other hand he pulled a travel-size Kleenex packet from his pocket and handed it to her.
Hayley dabbed at her eyes. The guy really was quite good-looking. He had a solid frame and good bone structure. He was polite enough to call her “Miss Smith” and Fred “deceased” instead of “dead,” even if he was somewhat rude and condescending the rest of the time. So what if he'd pissed her off at least twice.
And now to top it all, here he was, totally prepared with a brand-new travel Kleenex packet, even.
Good-looking, polite but not so polite that it made you just want to be friends, and prepared.
Good-looking, fuckable, prepared.
Hayley leaned in, tucked her face into the crook of his neck, and sobbed a couple of times.
“That's all right. We'll take it slow,” he said, and gave her shoulder an awkward squeeze. He cleared his throat. “We're almost finished with the questions anyway. In fact, I don't need to take notes. We'll just make it a little conversation. Okay?” He propped her back up and Hayley nodded, sniffling into her tissue.
She knew she was supposed to be thinking about Fred and the questions and what a tragedy it all was, but for some reason as she answered the detective's carefully worded questions, she kept focusing in on the oddest little non-Fred details. It was just that it was so difficult to concentrate, what with the cloying heat and the detective being so comforting and all.
The sweat at his hairline that was making the hair around his temples curl slightly. The mangled button third from the top that must have gotten melted when he'd last ironed his shirt. The scuffs on the toes of his dress shoes from chasing criminals (undoubtedly). And the fact that the guy was just massive compared to her.
She looked down at her own slight frame. And as she mentally calculated the width and breadth of the detective's chest, she started to think about the fact that this guy could suffocate her to death if, for some reason, he were ever to be lying prone on top of her.
And she contemplated this notion as he asked her casual
questions and the sweat trickled down from his left temple, dampening his collar until he arrested it by wiping his forehead with his sleeve.
And the sweat would trickle. And he'd ask her a question. She'd answer the question. And he'd wipe his forehead. And somehow the grieving/comforting process went through some sort of high-speed metamorphosis, and Hayley found herself moving in for the kill.
She lunged at Grant, putting her arms around his neck. His first instinct must have been to grab a weapon, because his hand moved instantly toward what Hayley had to assume was a gun concealed under his pant leg.
