Destroying Angel, page 13
“So does that mean he didn’t take that second dose himself?”
“That or he did a really good job of disposing the evidence,” Julia said. She glanced around the department, but everyone else had been making themselves scarce ever since she started asking them to review surveillance. Then she sat up a little taller as an idea struck her. “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow night?”
“Mmm, nothing,” Emery said. “Why?”
“It’s Friday night and a bunch of the county employees go to the Taphouse for drinks every week,” Julia said. “I went last week and it was pretty fun.”
“You’re inviting me to come meet your friends?”
“My coworkers,” Julia said. “I haven’t been in town long enough to cross the friend barrier. But yes, I’d love it if you came.”
“What time?”
Julia gave Emery all the details, and she promised to meet her there.
“I can’t wait,” Emery said, and Julia could hear in her voice how much she meant it.
The next day at quitting time, Julia slid away from her desk with a groan. Her eyes were red and dry from all that screentime, but the task was finished and she had the company of a beautiful woman to look forward to shortly. She practically skipped up the street to the Taphouse with her fellow detectives.
“You have a lot of pep in your step for someone who just watched three hundred hours of surveillance,” Renee commented.
“Not quite three hundred – you, Ariel and Tom watched a couple days’ worth,” Julia said. “But I can’t say I’m not glad that’s over. Not a single non-staff visitor went into that hospital room, but at least now we know.”
“I happen to know there’s another reason she’s excited right now,” Tate chimed in.
Julia raised an eyebrow. How could she know?
“I overheard you saying goodbye to your girlfriend on the phone yesterday when I was coming back from a scene,” she said.
“She’s not…” Julia stopped mid-sentence. She’d had a visceral reaction to the G word, but that was just her baggage speaking. How was she going to introduce Emery to everyone when they got to the bar? They were definitely more than friends.
Maybe they should have had this conversation before she asked Emery to meet everyone. It’d been a spur-of-the-moment idea.
“Not your girlfriend?” Tate pressed.
“Is she cute?” Renee asked. “Cuz if you haven’t locked it down and you’re planning to introduce her to basically every queer cop and forensic investigator in the city, you may want to rethink that.”
Ariel and Lena laughed, and Julia surprised herself by shooting a jealous glare at Renee. “She’s my girlfriend. We haven’t labeled ourselves yet, but…” She narrowly avoided the possessive word choice of she’s mine, saying instead, “Yeah, we’re dating.”
Renee playfully raised her hands in surrender. “Good to know.”
Then she winked.
Lord, Julia wanted to smack that smugness off her face.
The Taphouse was bustling when they arrived. A lot of the tables were already full, and delicious, greasy bar food smells abounded. Dylan and Elise from the medical examiner’s office had claimed their usual high-top table near the back, and as Julia slid onto her stool, she took out her phone to text Emery, letting her know where to find them.
“Drinks?” Dylan asked. She recited Tate and Renee’s drink orders from last week, which was impressive enough, then apologized when she couldn’t remember what Ariel and Julia liked.
“I’m a sweet tea girl,” Ariel said over the sound of the bar, “thank you.”
“I actually just get whatever sounds good,” Julia said. “Tonight… could you get me something light, an IPA on tap?”
“You got it,” Dylan said and headed over to the bar.
“Julia’s gotta stay sharp so she can protect her girlfriend from the rest of us,” Renee teased.
“Oh?” Elise’s eyebrow rose.
She took the liberty of filling her in on Julia’s invited guest, and around the time Dylan was coming back with a round of drinks, Julia noticed Emery coming through the front door. Her heart immediately climbed into her throat, and she got up to meet her halfway.
Emery immediately scooped Julia into her arms and kissed her, then second-guessed it, asking, “Is this okay?”
“This is wonderful,” Julia answered. She could feel her coworkers’ eyes on her from across the bar, and she found herself putting a little extra showiness into the kiss after Renee’s comment about competing over Emery.
Emery held out her hand and Julia took it. “You ready for this?”
“Sure am.”
They made a quick pitstop at the bar so Julia could buy Emery a beer, then they went over to the table. After a round of introductions that did not include the word ‘girlfriend’ but did include several teasing comments about the mysterious, sexy mycologist Julia had been spending so much of her time with, they all settled in to drink their beers and chat.
A couple more people from the ME’s office came – the pathologist, Amelia, and her fire captain partner, Simone, and Reese and Jordan from reception and the morgue, respectively. There was shop talk, and continued speculation over when, exactly, Arlen was going to pop the question to her girlfriend, Maya, now that she had the ring.
Groups broke off and side conversations began, and Julia found herself gravitating toward Emery no matter what else was going on. They ended up in a world of their own at the two bar stools at the end of the table, leaning in and talking close in order to be heard over the music and the chatter.
“The G word may have been used to describe you before you got here,” Julia admitted.
“The G word?” Emery asked. “Gangsta?”
Julia almost spit her beer across the table. “Girlfriend!”
“Oh that,” Emery said, looking both bashful and pleased. “You used that word?”
“One of my coworkers did.” Julia had just enough alcohol in her system to make her unapologetic about staring at Emery. Her dark skin was so smooth and soft, her dimples so irrepressibly cute, her mouth a perfect cupid’s bow. “I wouldn’t mind, though.”
Emery set down her beer bottle. “Really?”
“I mean, if you’re not intimidated by all my baggage…”
Emery folded her hand over Julia’s, warming her and sending tingles up her arm. “Not at all. I know you’re worried about getting involved, but I like you, Julia. I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“I am worried… but I can’t stop thinking about you either,” Julia said, turning her hand over so their palms met and interlacing their fingers.
“Let’s just take it slow,” Emery suggested. “If the G word comes up, I certainly won’t be upset. But if you don’t want a label just yet, I understand that too.”
“You’re wonderful,” Julia said. “And I think you deserve another drink on me.”
She squeezed Emery’s hand, then slipped off the stool and went to the bar for a couple more beers. When she got back, Emery was chatting with Dylan about the areas in which their careers overlapped.
“I’ve never even been asked to test for amatoxin in a decedent before the Hawthorne case,” Dylan was saying as Julia took her spot at the table again. “I did a little with mycology in grad school, though, just in case I ever needed it.”
“It’s pretty rare as a cause of death,” Emery agreed. “Most of my work is academic.”
“And yet you’ve consulted on two cases in the last couple weeks,” Dylan pointed out. “Related, right?”
“We haven’t found the link yet, but they have to be,” Julia said.
“Whatever happened with the guy who was friends with the first victim and lives in the building with the second one?” Lena asked.
“Nick,” Julia said. “I talked to him. He said he’d never seen Kyle Brody around the apartment complex, didn’t recognize his name. I don’t think he was lying.”
“But he could have been,” Reese piped up, switching from a conversation going on at the other end of the table to theirs. “People lie all the time.”
“Are you an investigator?” Emery asked.
“Professional gossip,” Dylan answered for her. “She’s our receptionist.”
“I just wanted to answer phones and make a steady paycheck,” Reese said, “never thought I’d spend my days overhearing stuff about murders and other gory deaths.”
“Turns out she loves it,” Dylan’s fiancée, Elise chimed in with a smirk.
“Even the dead have gossip to share,” Reese said.
“That’s pretty much my whole job,” Julia answered. “Finding the dirt, so to speak.”
“And sometimes digging in the dirt,” Emery added.
The conversation turned to the skeleton-in-the-tree case that Renee had been working. It was turning out to be just as difficult as expected to figure out the identity, although the forensic anthropologist had determined it was a male in his forties who’d died just a few decades ago.
“So you’re looking at a likely homicide, not some ancient indigenous burial site,” Julia said, trying to suppress her jealousy over the case.
“Looks like it, I’ll be working on this for a while unless we have a breakthrough with the ID,” Renee answered.
Emery bought another round of beers for everyone and the alcohol was starting to go pleasantly to Julia’s head when Emery put her arm around her shoulder.
“Is this okay?” she asked softly.
Julia snuggled into her. “It’s perfect.”
And then her phone buzzed in her pocket. Her thigh was pressed against Emery’s leg, so they both felt it, and Julia let out a groan.
“Work?” Emery asked.
“Hope not,” Julia answered, digging the phone out.
There was a text waiting for her from a number that she didn’t recognize. She frowned, figuring it was probably a coworker whose number she hadn’t programmed in yet.
But when she unlocked her phone and read the message, ice flooded her veins.
“Oh shit.”
“What?” Emery asked.
Julia felt sick, all that euphoric warmth from the alcohol suddenly turning on her and making her gorge rise. When she didn’t answer, Emery looked over her shoulder to read the message.
I knew I’d find you eventually… I’ll never give up on us. Come back home, baby – Michigan’s better than Ohio anyway.
27
EMERY
Emery watched as Julia shoved her phone into her pocket, mumbled an excuse to the group about needing to retrieve something from the office, then hustled out of the bar.
She was halfway down the block and walking fast by the time Emery caught up to her on the sidewalk.
“Hey, Julia… wait for me, okay?”
She barely responded, muttering an apology, and she was shaking. It made Emery’s guts feel like they were being squeezed and twisted, and she wanted nothing more than to do the same to the monster who made Julia react like this.
“Stop for just a second, please,” she pleaded, gently taking Julia’s hand.
That seemed to break her out of her panic, at least enough to respond if not enough to stop. “I have to go.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can I come?”
That earned her a sideways glance and a bit of consideration. There was torment in Julia’s eyes, but Emery was relieved when she said yes, even if it was in a distracted, shaky way.
So Emery kept up with her as Julia speed-walked up the sidewalk toward the police parking garage, their hands linked, wondering what the hell to say or do next. She was in uncharted territory here, and terrified of scaring Julia away. She couldn’t let her go through this alone, though… whatever it was.
“It was your ex, right? Who sent the text?” she finally got brave enough to ask.
“Yeah. She figured out my new number. She knows I’m in Ohio.”
“Should we go tell the chief? File a report?”
“Lot of good that’s done in the past,” Julia said as they turned into the parking garage. “I think I need to leave.”
“Okay, we’ll go home,” Emery agreed. “Your place or mine?”
“I need to leave the state. It was foolish of me to think I could have a normal life here.”
Emery’s stomach was suddenly full of rocks and she had to resist the urge to throw her arms around Julia, cling to her with all she had. “What?”
“It’s not safe here, for me or for you if I’m with you,” Julia said, still panicky, then suddenly bubbling over with anger. “God damn it! I don’t want to start over again! I have a good thing here.”
She smacked a concrete pillar as she passed it, then immediately drew her hand back and hissed with pain.
Emery took Julia’s hand, cradling her stinging palm. “I have a good thing now that you’re here too. Please don’t go… if you run, she wins.”
A selfish thing to say, she knew it even before the words left her mouth. But anything she could say right now to convince Julia not to leave her was fair game as far as she was concerned. At least the pain from slapping the pillar seemed to have redirected the anxiety that was making her whole body shake on the way here.
“If I don’t run, it’s only a matter of time til she shows up here,” Julia said. “And she could hurt you.”
Julia let Emery pull her into a hug. “I’m not worried about that – I only care about you. If you don’t want to talk to the chief about this, come back to my place. We’ll strategize and figure out what to do next. I won’t let her get anywhere near you, I promise.”
“You don’t know her,” Julia mumbled against Emery’s shoulder.
“Yeah, well, she doesn’t know me either,” Emery said. “I may be a nerdy scientist, but I can be tough when I have to. If she shows up here, I’ll make her wish she hadn’t.”
That finally got a smile from Julia, even if it was a small one. “Are you gonna beat her up?”
“Can’t say it’s in my nature, but I will if I have to. Can we go back to my place now?”
Julia sighed. After a moment of thought, she said, “Make it mine, just in case I need to leave after all.”
Pain stabbed at Emery’s chest at the idea, but she agreed. “Let’s call a rideshare – we’ve both been drinking.”
“I’m stone-cold sober after that text,” Julia said. But she let Emery get them a car, and they made the short trip to her apartment. It was Emery’s first time being there, and it was clear that Julia didn’t spend much time there either. The apartment was bare, with only a few essentials scattered around the place.
“You really did leave Michigan in a hurry, didn’t you?” Emery asked.
She wrapped Julia in her arms again in the middle of the sparse living room, and she didn’t want to let her go – now or ever. A fierce drive to protect this woman rose up whenever Emery was around her, something she’d never felt before, and which was only intensified by this scumbag ex that kept popping up.
“Basically fled the minute I got a job offer from FCPD,” Julia confirmed. “Left with whatever would fit in the trunk of my car.”
And you’re ready to do it all over again, Emery thought sadly. Probably already would have run if Emery hadn’t talked her out of it.
“I know you’re scared,” Emery said. “I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through, and I know how serious the situation is. All I want is for you to be safe… but please don’t leave.”
Julia looked up at her. Those dark eyes stormy, tortured, glossy with pain… but damn, she was still the hottest woman Emery had ever seen, little wisps of hair coming out of her ordinarily neat ponytail and framing her pretty face. What if this was the last time Emery ever saw her? What if she had gotten freaked out and ran and Emery didn’t even get to say goodbye?
She hooked both hands around the back of Julia’s head and drew her into a desperate kiss.
Julia’s body responded, relaxing into her, giving in to her.
The scent of her flooded Emery’s senses, the feel of her body curving against her own. The slick joy of Julia’s tongue gliding over Emery’s as they deepened the kiss…
I love you, Emery thought.
“I need you,” she said.
“Take me,” Julia breathed.
And Emery did, right there on the living room floor. Within seconds, they were a tornado of hands tearing at each other’s clothes, throwing them aside and clinging to each other like their lives depended on it.
And damn if it didn’t really feel like that was true. Emery had never met a woman like Julia, never even been the object of someone else’s desires for more than a fling, and she’d never felt her heart fill up with another person the way it did for Julia.
It might actually explode if she left.
Buck-naked, Emery dropped to her knees in front of Julia. She lifted one creamy thigh over her shoulder and dove hungrily between her legs. Julia was dripping wet, just as desperate for this as Emery, and she laced her fingers into Emery’s hair, using her head to steady herself.
“Oh God,” she cried into the echoey apartment the moment Emery’s tongue touched her clit. “Oh, fuck yes…”
Her fists closed on Emery’s hair, tugging at her scalp, and the sensation shot straight down between her own legs. That’s right, baby, hold onto me. She lapped and licked and slid her fingers into Julia’s wetness until she could feel her thighs shaking around her. Then Emery brought her down to the carpet.
She was about to go down on her again when Julia used her grasp on Emery’s hair to tug her back up to her mouth. They kissed, Julia slicked her tongue over Emery’s lip, tasting herself, and then she said, “Turn around.”
“Huh?”
“I want to taste you too,” she said, putting her hands on Emery’s hips and nudging her into the position she wanted.
Emery got the idea, her hips braced above Julia’s head as she lowered her mouth back down to her sex. Julia looped her arms around Emery’s thighs, holding her tight as she guided her down to meet her mouth.
