Private Affair(98)
Max had only been with her and Masters at the end of the ordeal, which left her free to tell the detective any version of the facts she wanted.
Hoping he would find her in the living room, he pushed himself up, pulled on a T-shirt and jeans that were still in his carry bag, and went into the next room. To his relief, Olivia was there with the TV turned low, listening to an account of “the reunion murders.”
“You want to watch?” she asked.
“I’ve had enough of it.”
She clicked the remote and he sat down next to her, slid closer, and waited.
“Shane stopped by and brought me some breakfast.”
“I slept all night?”
“Right. I left some sticky buns for you. And there’s a coffeepot in the room.”
“Good.” He was still speaking in sentences of one syllable as he reached for the tray and picked up a bun, munching on it. Olivia brought him coffee, and he drank some, wondering when the conversation would turn serious.
When he was finished with the bun, he licked his fingers and wiped them on a paper napkin.
“That was good.”
She gave him a little smile. “You’re not too talkative this morning.”
“Neither are you.”
“You’re up for a serious discussion?”
“Yeah.”
He thought she might say something personal, instead she went back to the case.
“When Shane was here, he had some stuff to say about Troy Masters.”
“Such as?”
“He never did really well in any of the businesses he started. There was a cleaning service and a restaurant that both went bust. He put on a show of being successful, but mostly he was living on investments he inherited from his family.”
Max nodded. They hadn’t dug into his background at that level because he had simply been one of several suspects until the past few days.
“Maybe his rampage was triggered by some recent financial failures. Up until the past year, he had been doing pretty well with the investment income. It seems he’d lost a lot of money in the stock market—partly from the market downturn and partly because of some wrong decisions. Probably he couldn’t cope with the failure.”
“That could have contributed,” Max agreed. “But most people who fail in business or investments don’t need to start killing.”
He heard Olivia swallow. “I’d like to forget about Troy Masters, but he’s always going to be part of my past.” She looked at Max, then away. “On the way over to police headquarters, I thought about what I was going to say to Fisher. But I didn’t decide until I was in the interview room.”
He waited for her to continue.
“I told Fisher I was raped in high school by Masters and raped again yesterday.”
His breath caught. “I didn’t know if you were going to say anything about that.”
She gave him a direct look. “And I told Fisher you took away the condom so I wouldn’t have to talk about the rape if I didn’t want to.”
“What did he say?”
“He said nobody else had to know the details. Troy is dead, and nobody’s going to prosecute him.”
She laid her head on Max’s shoulder, and he put his arm around her. “I also decided Fisher had to know that Troy was killing people to hide what he’d done in high school. Not just to me, but to that girl in Baltimore.”
“Yeah.”
“It could have just been about her, but I realized his raping me was part of it.”
“How did Fisher react to all that?”
“I think it helped him understand.”
“Good.”
She swallowed hard. “Something you don’t know. Troy told me that Angela wasn’t really raped at all. That she just said she was so we’d keep quiet together.”
Anger flashed through him. “Nice of him. It might or might not be true.”
“I know. I hope he was lying.”
“Yeah.” He dragged in a breath and exhaled. “Don’t let what he said mess with your head—or interfere with your life.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“Good. Because you have better things to do.” He brought his mouth to hers, moving his lips, showing her the depth of his feelings for her.
When they broke apart, he said in a husky voice, “We both need to get him out of our minds, and I know how we can do it.”
“I think we’re on the same wavelength.”
He stood and took her hand and led her back to the bedroom. He needed to love her, and he ached to make it good for her, to wipe out the awful things that had happened—and to show her how much she meant to him.
His tongue played with the seam of her lips, and she opened for him so that he could explore the line of her teeth, then stroke the sensitive tissue on the inside of her lips.