Secret Prey

didn’t,’’ she said. ‘‘Because I didn’t know that I would.’’
    ‘‘Okay . . . I don’t think it would be necessary to mention to the police that we’ve been involved,’’ he said dryly.
    ‘‘Good thought,’’ she said, matching his tone precisely.
    ‘‘All right.’’ He stood up and started toward the door. ‘‘I’ve got to get down to the bank.’’
    ‘‘The bank? God, when you called, I thought maybe . . .’’ She’d gotten up and come around the couch.
    ‘‘What?’’ He knew what.
    ‘‘You know.’’ She slipped the belt of the kimono; she was absolutely bare and pink beneath it. ‘‘I just got out of the shower.’’
    ‘‘I thought George was coming over.’’
    ‘‘Well, not for a couple of hours . . . and you gotta at least tell me what happened.’’
    ‘‘Take off the kimono.’’
    She took it off, tossed it on the couch. He was staring at her, like he always did, with an attention that both disturbed and excited her.
    ‘‘What?’’ She unconsciously touched one arm to her breastbone, covering her right breast as she did it. Bone reached out and pushed her arm down.
    ‘‘Put your hands behind you,’’ he said. ‘‘I want to look at you while I tell you this.’’
    She blushed, the blush reaching almost to her waist. She bit her lower lip, but put her hands behind her back.
    ‘‘We started out like we always do, walking back into the woods. You know how that trail goes back around the lake . . .’’
    As he told the story, he began to stroke her, his voice never faltering or showing emotion, but his hands always moving slowly. After a moment she slowly backed away, and he stepped after her, still talking. When her bottom touched the edge of a couch table, she braced herself against it, closed her eyes.
    ‘‘Are you listening?’’ he asked; his hands stopped momentarily.
    ‘‘Of course,’’ she said. ‘‘A few minutes before six and the shooting started.’’
    ‘‘That’s right,’’ he said. He pushed her back more solidly into the couch table and said, ‘‘Spread your legs a little.’’
    She spread her legs a little.
    ‘‘A little more.’’
    She spread them a little more.
    ‘‘Anyway,’’ he said, gently parting her with his fingertips. ‘‘Any one of us could have killed him. It was just a matter of climbing down from the tree, sneaking back up the path . . .’’
    ‘‘Did you do it?’’ she asked.
    ‘‘What do you think?’’
    ‘‘You could have,’’ she said. And then she said, ‘‘Oh, God.’’
    ‘‘Feel good?’’
    ‘‘Feels good.’’
    ‘‘Look at me . . .’’
    She opened her eyes, but they were hazy, a dreamer’s eyes, looking right through him. ‘‘Don’t stop now,’’ she said.
    ‘‘Look at me . . .’’
    She looked at him, struggled to focus on his dark, cool face. ‘‘Did you kill him?’’
    ‘‘Does the thought turn you on?’’
    ‘‘Oh, God . . .’’
    SUSAN O’DELL’S APARTMENT WAS A STUDY IN BLACK and white, glass and wood, and when she walked in, was utterly silent. She pulled off her jacket, let it fall to the floor, then her shirt and her turtlenecked underwear, and her bra. The striptease continued back through the apartment through her bedroom to the bathroom, where she went straight into the shower. She stood in the hot water for five minutes, letting it pour around her face. When she’d cleaned off the day, she stepped out, got a bath towel from a towel rack, dried herself, dropped the towel on the floor, and walked back to the bedroom. Underpants and gray sweatsuit.
    Dressed again, warm, she walked back to the study, stood on her tiptoes, and took a deck of cards off the top of the single bookshelf.
    Sitting at her desk, she spread the cards, studied them.
    She’d once had an affair, brief but intense, with an artist who’d taught her what he called Tarot for Scientists. A truly strange tarot method: business management through chaos theory, and he really knew about chaos. An odd thing for an artist to know, she’d thought at the time. She’d even become suspicious of him, and had done some checking. But he was a legitimate painter, all right. A gorgeous watercolor nude, which nobody but she knew was O’Dell herself, hung in her bedroom, a souvenir of their relationship.
    After she realized the value of the artist’s tarot method, he’d bought her a computer version so she could install it on her computer at work—the cards themselves