“No. Comstock was amazing. He taught me to get past my expectations and prejudgment to look at things critically, to see what was there and not what I wanted to see. I learned so much from him.”
“Then it was just a dream and nothin’ more.”
Maybe. And then again…
“I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something.” She drew a deep breath, released it, her mind full of GPS locations and phone numbers. “The dream is right in one respect. Iamdistracted—because of us.”
She turned to face him, pressed her cheek to his chest, felt the beating of his heart. “What are we doing—you and I? We both know this can’t go anywhere. We knew that from the beginning. One or both of us would lose our jobs.”
“I dinnae want to think about that, no’ yet.”
He kissed her then made love to her with his lips and tongue and cock, bringing her to a shattering climax once, twice, three times.
How could she give this up? How could she givehimup?
As they lay together in the early morning darkness, she discovered she didn’t want to think about their future, either.
* * *
Elizabeth stood on the sidewalk,her feet freezing, Quinn beside her, rain pelting their umbrellas. “There’s a nail salon. We can assume he didn’t go there.”
“He liked Indian food, so he might have stopped there for a wee bite.”
“There’s a sports bar, an Asian grocery, and a pet food shop. Maybe he went to get supplies for the puppy.”
They had called the breeder this morning and discovered that Jack had, indeed, bought a little Labrador puppy for his daughters. The breeder had been trying to reach him because the little thing was weaned now. Quinn and Elizabeth had arranged to pick up the puppy—a female—later in the week. They would deliver it to Ava and her girls as the surprise Jack had intended her to be.
Elizabeth pointed. “There’s also a post office branch. Maybe he bought stamps.”
“When I still lived here, I bought mine at Tesco—the supermarket. It saved me the time and the trouble of findin’ parking. I only went to the post office when I needed to post a package.”
The ordinariness of it all was infuriating. They’d been all over Glasgow, trying to figure out where he might have gone in those cases in which more than one business occupied the space at a particular GPS location. Apart from identifying the store where he’d bought his new phone, it was a guessing game. Italian for lunch or ice cream? Coffee or a sandwich? Puppy food or curry?
She’d been expecting something sketchy or unusual.
It’s right in front of you, Shields. Why can’t you see it?
She brushed her dream aside. “This was the last known location of the old cell phone. After this, it vanishes off the face of the earth.”
“Do you want to go from shop to shop, show clerks his photo, and ask if anyone remembers seein’ him?”
“Why not?” They had nothing to lose. “You take the post office and pet food store and I’ll—”
“We stay together, aye?”
Ten minutes later, they had no new information.
Quinn looked out at the parked cars. “Maybe he met someone here.”
“Or maybe what we’re looking for was on his work phone.” This was starting to feel pointless. “I thought for sure his phone records would hold answers—threatening messages, repeated calls from some unidentifiable source. But my feet are soaked, and we’ve gotten nowhere.”
Quinn glanced down at her wet shoes. “You need wellies.”
He drove her to a store where a kind clerk helped her pick the right size and sold her a warm, dry pair of socks.
“Now that we’ve gotten that sorted, let’s get some food, aye?”
Talk of curry had left them both craving Indian food, so they stopped at Quinn’s favorite Indian spot for a late lunch, the food and chai tea warming Elizabeth.