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“My only plans are with you.” Avery stood. “Thanks for doing this with me. No matter what we find, I appreciate your help.”
“I want to make sure we got things right all those years ago. And I need to know if we got them wrong, too.”
Walt stood also. They were face to face.
“Say, six o’clock tomorrow?”
Avery nodded. “See you then.”
She said the words but didn’t move.
“Okay,” Walt said, staying as still as her. “See you tomorrow.”
His words floated off with little meaning. Then, suddenly, they moved to each other. The kissing was frantic at first and then slowed to become more passionate. Avery did a quick run-through in her mind. She’d had a single beer at dinner; he’d had two. Neither was drunk, which was both a positive and negative aspect of what was about to happen. She’d never made a habit out of drunken sex, which made accountability the following morning unavoidable. Without drunkenness, there was nothing to blame their behavior on other than mutual attraction and an open willingness to share intimacy. For most, this was a normal result of sex. For Avery Mason, it was a portal that allowed another person access to her past.
The worrisome thoughts raced through her mind as she kissed Walt Jenkins. But without too much effort, she forced them away and enjoyed the feel of a man’s hands on her hips for the first time in over a year. She pushed him backward as they kissed. They stumbled across the suite, through the bedroom door, and onto the bed. Buttons popped and zippers buzzed.
CHAPTER 41
Manhattan, NY Sunday, July 4, 2021
ON SUNDAY MORNING AVERY TOOK A LONG RUN THROUGH CENTRAL Park. It was peaceful, quiet, and, unlike any other time she had run these trails, nearly empty. Normally crowded with joggers, bikers, and dog walkers, this morning the park belonged only to the few remaining souls left in the city who were up early on the Fourth of July. Avery nodded at the joggers she passed, sensing an unspoken message in the way they smiled and delivered their good mornings that the once-a-year emptiness and tranquility of the country’s most populated city was a secret shared by only a select few, and that Avery was now part of the group.
Thirty minutes earlier she had quietly snuck out of Walt’s hotel room while he slept peacefully among the knotted bed sheets. The aftermath of long-awaited sex had filled her with an urge to sweat and run and wring from her body any second thoughts or doubts that would surely surface. For some sophomoric reason Avery had decided on a clean getaway. She had slipped out of bed with catlike poise, and resisted the urge to use the bathroom before leaving for fear that flushing the toilet would wake him. Why, she asked herself as she jogged, is the idea of sharing coffee and breakfast with Walt Jenkins so uncomfortable? Because those situations always had a way of leading back to her childhood and her upbringing and her parents and her brother, and Avery didn’t have it in her this morning to tiptoe through the land mines of her past and figure out what to divulge and what to avoid. She had already managed to share more about herself with Walt than she had with any other man in recent memory, and wasn’t sure it was a good idea to offer any more.
In a perfect world—or even just a normal one—Avery would have relished the opportunity to sleep late while lying in bed with a man she found fiercely attractive and more than a little endearing. Walt had shared with her a part of his own past that was riddled with betrayal and secrets. Their histories were so very similar that it would have been a perfect opportunity to share her own scars. If Avery’s life bore any semblance of normal, she would have sunk her head deeper into the crook of Walt’s shoulder earlier this morning and draped her arm over his chest. Instead, she tiptoed out of his hotel room, and cringed in the hallway when the latch clicked loudly as she tried to silently close the door.
In the end, she stopped the self-analysis and chalked it up to Avery being Avery. This was her life and she was stuck with it. Besides, whether she was up for the whole morning-after routine or not was immaterial. This particular morning she had no time. While Walt lay in a postcoital coma the previous night, Avery’s mind had drifted back to Victoria Ford. Even during the review of the Cameron Young file and the potential flaws she found, Avery had been unable to stop thinking about Victoria Ford’s manuscripts and their connection to Natalie Ratcliff.
She grabbed her phone just after midnight and, on a whim, sent out a text while Walt softly snored next to her. She hadn’t expected a reply so late on a Saturday night—especially on a holiday weekend. But it had taken only a few seconds for Livia Cutty, New York’s chief medical examiner and the doctor Avery had met with when she first arrived in New York, to text back. Avery had questions about some of the forensics noted in the Cameron Young case and needed to pick Livia’s brain about them. She had other questions, too, about things completely unrelated to the case file she and Walt had paged through, but the forensics would be a good place to start.
She put in three miles, just enough to get a good sweat and burn her lungs, and used the walk back to the Lowell as a cool down. Showered and dressed, Avery grabbed two coffees from Starbucks and hailed a cab for Kips Bay. She saw Livia standing in front of the entrance to the medical examiner’s office when the cab pulled to the curb. Avery paid the fare with cash, climbed out of the cab, and handed Livia a coffee.
“Black, two sugars.”
“Thanks,” Livia said in a questioning tone. “How did you know how I like my coffee?”
“Last time we were together, when you were out in LA, we grabbed coffee with Mack Carter.”
“That was two years ago.”
“I know. I have a weird thing with coffee.”
“Impressive. Thank you.”
“Thank you for taking time on a Sunday morning, especially over a holiday weekend. And sorry to text you like a lunatic in the middle of the night. I was in a weird place.”
“No worries. I was up. I’m on call this weekend, and bored to death. The Fourth is a notoriously slow time at the morgue. No one really dies when the city is so empty, which sounds like a good thing unless your life revolves around people dying. Besides, some of our strangest thoughts and ideas come in the middle of the night. I’m curious to know what’s on your mind.”
Avery was curious, as well. A revelation had come to her, and she needed Dr. Cutty to confirm it.
“Let’s head inside,” Livia said.
Avery followed Livia through the front entrance of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It was Sunday morning and the building was dark, other than the scattered overhead lights that remained permanently aglow. Livia touched her ID card to the sensor in the lobby to unlock the door. Inside, they rode the elevator to the bottom floor where Livia again scanned her card key to gain access to the long corridor that led to her office. She flicked the wall switch when she walked into the windowless office.
“Have a seat,” Livia said. “So what did you find out about Victoria Ford that had you up so late at night?”
Avery sat in one of the chairs in front of the gunmetal desk. She pulled a single page from her purse and handed it to Livia. She had taken it from the Cameron Young file before sneaking out of Walt’s room earlier. It was the crime lab’s analysis of the DNA found at the crime scene.
