A reminder to get the snake story on his desk, pronto. Without turning around, she raised a hand in acknowledgment. Outside, she ran across the parking lot, the dead boy forgotten.
Nine a.m., and already the July heat was proving to be brutal. The kind of extreme heat that made tree branches break and animals pant.
She slid into her car, a second-generation Honda Civic with a rusty baby-blue exterior and tan interior. The engine jumped when she turned the key. A clunker, but it got her where she needed to go. She had no plans to put old Suzy out to pasture.
Despite traffic and hitting a red light, she made a concerted effort not to speed as she drove to East Sacramento. She made a left on San Antonio Way, and as she neared the house of her boyfriend, Connor, she spotted a car she didn’t recognize in the driveway.
She pulled to the curb across from the house and shut off the engine.
A visitor? Had Connor been expecting someone, and that was why he’d rushed her out of the house this morning? Her pulse quickened as she walked toward the entrance. Connor was a bit of a slob. Maybe he’d finally hired someone to clean. A few more scenarios played through her head as she slipped the key into the lock and opened the front door.
Music was playing. It wasn’t blaring, but it was loud enough to cover the sound of her footfalls as she made her way down the hallway to the bedroom. The door was ajar. She nudged it open, and when she stepped inside, she couldn’t take her eyes off Connor’s naked ass as it rose and fell. The girl beneath him had big eyes that grew even bigger when she noticed Sawyer standing there.
“Really?” Sawyer asked.
Connor must have been focused on what he was doing, because the girl had to use both hands to push him off her and then gesture at Sawyer.
Connor peeked over his shoulder. His face was red from exertion, which made sense considering this was the hardest she’d ever seen him work.
For some reason, Sawyer wasn’t surprised. Not that Connor had ever cheated on her . . . that she knew of. It just somehow fit. Connor had no integrity and only his own interests in mind. And what annoyed her at the moment was that she’d ever moved in with him to begin with.
The girl used the sheet to cover herself. Connor slid off the bed. His dick was still hard, springing forth and wobbling a bit like a diving board.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“What am I doing?” Sawyer laughed, then thought about Geezer being out sick and Sean Palmer at Forrest Hill Apartments, waiting for her. She didn’t have time for this. “I need my camera.” She walked to the closet and searched through clothes and shoes. Her camera bag had been pushed to the back corner. She opened it, made sure she had an extra battery and plenty of memory cards before zipping it closed, and headed back the way she’d come.
Connor followed close behind. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“Back to work,” she said. “It’s what people do to pay the bills. You should try it sometime.”
He grabbed her arm. She shrugged it off.
“Come on,” he said. “We need to talk about this.”
“No. We don’t. It’s over.”
“We haven’t had sex in months. What was I supposed to do?”
When she reached the door, she turned toward him. “Don’t sweat it. You’re like every guy I’ve ever known. I’ll grab my things later.”
Walking toward her car, she saw a shadow underneath the frame by the front tire. It was a cat. “Come on,” she said, trying to coax the animal out. “I’m in a hurry.”
She got down on all fours. The poor thing looked half-starved. Its fur was long and matted, and there was no collar. When she opened the car door, the cat darted across the street and disappeared under a thick hedge. She felt bad that she didn’t have time to run after the animal to see if it belonged to anyone in the neighborhood.
In her car and back on the road, Sawyer kept her hands steady on the wheel and tried to tamp down the emotions swooshing through her—a pinch of anger, a dab of disappointment, and a bucketful of reality that she just wasn’t that into Connor.
Unlike her sisters, she wasn’t plagued with OCD, and she wasn’t afraid of conflict. But Sawyer definitely had her demons, and some of them came in the form of heightened distrust. Overall, Sawyer felt as if her self-contained anger kept her in control. But she was clearly at war with the world. Like many people, she suffered from anxiety, much of which stemmed from being touched.
Connor had been one of two men she’d had consensual sex with. When it came to having sex, she had rules. No grabbing hold of her hair, face, or buttocks. No fucking the shit out of her. Connor had known better than to dare press her against the wall or pin her to the bed. She needed to be on top—full control at all times. Otherwise, terror set in and made her feel things she didn’t want to feel—wild, feral. Her heart would beat erratically, and she would struggle for breath. Her jaw would harden, her teeth grinding together, and there was no telling what might happen. Not that she would ever purposely harm anyone. It was just that moment of feeling trapped that would set her off, filling her with a burst of energy, like a caged animal breaking free.
Her therapist wrote her a prescription every time they talked, but Sawyer always crumpled it up and threw it away. Not because of any clean-body and clean-mind bullshit. But because she knew firsthand what pills could do to her. They made her loopy and calm and vulnerable. Screw being calm and vulnerable. She’d stick with tight fists and body tremors.
She turned her thoughts to where she was headed and Sean Palmer, one of the best crime reporters in the country. He was the reason she’d decided to apply for a job at the Sacramento Independent. Years ago, he’d been invited as a special guest to one of her journalism classes at CSUS. When class ended, she’d worked up the courage to tell him how he’d inspired her to seek out a career in journalism, more specifically, crime reporting. Instead of shaking her hand and moving on to the next student in line, he’d looked her in the eyes and fired off point-blank questions, personal questions about her life. He said he’d easily picked her out of nearly fifty students in class, pegged her as troubled and high anxiety—too much foot bouncing, fidgeting, and shifting in her seat. In a matter of minutes, he’d concluded that whatever baggage she was carrying would weigh her down and prevent her from obtaining the sort of sharp-edged focus it would take to become a decent reporter.
She’d returned to her run-down apartment with its rusty appliances and spotty plumbing, disillusioned but not defeated. Taking his words to heart, she’d decided to do something about the baggage he referred to. Starting with finding the cheapest therapist alive and telling her story.
Of all those tragic memories, the night her sisters left was the most troubling, often as eerily vague as it was disturbingly real. Sawyer had been wearing her favorite nightgown, a light-pink cotton shift with a torn hem that fell below her knees. Out of breath and freezing cold, her heart hammering against her chest, she’d stood on the front porch of their old house in River Rock, staring into the night, praying it was all a bad dream and her sisters would return. That’s when a weighty hand had clamped down around her shoulder.
It was Uncle Theo, the person left in charge whenever their parents took off in search of antiques and collectibles for their store downtown.