Influenced by Eva Robinson (best free ebook reader TXT) 📗

but it would have felt like some kind of betrayal of both truth and his partner to say Ciara wasn’t pretty.

And moreover, he realized he wasn’t too fussed if Irina was jealous.

“You are urging me out of your house.” She pouted. “You don’t trust me here without you?”

Losing patience, he gestured at his door. “It’s a cop thing. Nothing personal, of course.”

She stormed down the stairs in front of him, chomping on her pancake.

When she pulled open the door, Ciara frowned at her, eyebrows knitting together. “Oh, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”

Michael’s smile faded. Ciara was quickly starting to impress him with her lack of tact. He hovered in the doorway, as if hoping the two of them might just disappear without him.

“He didn’t mention me?” asked Irina.

Ciara shook her head. “Not a word.”

“Well, don’t let him make love to you, because he has trust issues. He is heartbreaker. And he prefers old people for some reason. He is a good lover, but if you sleep with him, he will leave you for old person at dive bars.”

“She grew up on a yacht,” Michael blurted, though he had no idea why. This situation had surpassed his awkwardness tolerance by a long shot, breaking his brain, and he no longer knew his arse from his elbow. Then he added, “Irina, this is Ciara. Are you parked nearby, Ciara?”

“Two blocks away. There was no parking—”

“We’ll take my car,” he cut in. “We’re late.”

Fifteen

Michael took a sip of hot tea, burning his mouth. Then he narrowed his eyes, trying to line up the mirror on his car with the mirror on the car to his right.

He could only hope Ciara wouldn’t notice how much of an effort it was for him to parallel park. It seemed to him Americans were handed licenses straight out of the womb, and learned to parallel park along with toilet training.

And as for him? He’d only learned to drive right before he joined the police force at the age of twenty-six—a fact he’d never shared with any of his colleagues, because he intuited that they would think it unmanly.

Ciara had turned on the radio to a news channel, then flipped to a hip-hop station. Then back to the news. And it was now nearly impossible for him to concentrate, but he didn’t want to let on.

“I’d like to start by asking him more about his wife’s mental state. Maybe she really was psychotic,” said Ciara, “and had a breakdown in the past week. But here’s the thing: her husband was paying nearly obsessive attention to everything Rowan Harris did online. He liked every single one of her photos, going back years. Almost like he had a crush.”

Please stop talking. Michael was slowly rolling the car back, trying to tune out her words so he could keep the two cars parallel. Now a turn of the wheel—

“It’s just that if Arabella took poison intentionally, wouldn’t she have said something in the hospital that made it obvious? She had six hours before she slipped into the coma, and she had no idea what was wrong with her. She made no mention of ending her own life. She seemed as confused by the illness as everyone else.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” muttered Michael, but the utterance cost him his concentration again, and now the rear of his car was too close to the other. This was all wrong.

“I was looking up poisoning in chemistry labs,” Ciara went on. “It’s more common than you’d think. Students who are jealous of each other, like you suggested. Romances that went wrong. Competitive academics, or just people with mental issues. But no one I’ve spoken to so far knows of anyone who had an academic rivalry with Arabella.”

“Right.”

“If it is thallium, like the doctor thought, a chemistry lab like the one where Adam works is just about the only place you could access it. Adam has it within his reach every day.”

At last, Michael got his car into just the right position—the mirror lined up at sixty percent of the other car’s length—and started turning backward into the spot. From Michael’s perspective, it was deeply unfortunate that Ciara had chosen to have this flood of ideas right at this moment. When he could concentrate, he did a reasonably good job.

He rolled the car into place, then put it in park, feeling quite pleased with himself. He blew out a breath. “If it came from Adam’s lab, there’ll be records of its use. We’d find a discrepancy.”

“Right.” Ciara held his eye contact for an unnervingly long time. “You’re from London, aren’t you? I suppose they have a lot of public transportation. I can do the parking next time, if you want.”

“I think I did a perfectly good job, frankly.”

There it was again. That eye contact that lasted just a little too long, like she was reading his secrets. “I mean, we’re three feet from the curb.”

“Irina isn’t my girlfriend,” he blurted. What was it about Ciara that made him want to tell her things? It was those pale green eyes that bored into him. They gave him the sense that she’d be able to read his secrets if she looked at him long enough, so he might as well come out with them.

“I figured. With the ‘heartbreaker’ thing.”

“She… well, we went on a few dates, and… she lies a lot, and I think she’s faking being Russian. So that was just a… a thing.”

She shrugged. “We all have our things.”

And now he was intrigued again.

Ciara got out of the car first, and he sat in the driver’s seat for a moment longer. While Ciara stood in the sun outside, Michael quickly tapped the car door sixteen times. Then his chest tightened. Had he counted correctly, or had he missed one? Because fifteen was an absolute disaster.

The habit was a ritualized superstition, and superstition was completely irrational. He had no idea why the number had to be sixteen. But even if it made no sense,