Jilliane Hoffman by Pretty Little Things Page B

stared blankly at him in the mirror, her face blurring from the steam, waiting for the rest of the explanation that he knew she didn’t want to hear.
    He turned to face her. ‘There’s a kid,’ he explained softly. ‘She didn’t come home from school Friday.’
    LuAnn said nothing. She just kept staring straight at him. Through him. Like the lyrics go from a bad song, there once was a time when he could feel himself getting lost in those green eyes. Eyes that just made you want to kiss her when you looked at them long enough. Now they stared at him, cold and empty. Concealor barely hid the dark circles and the stress fractures that feathered out from the corners. They were standing only a couple of feet apart, but there might as well have been a mountain between them in that small bathroom.
    ‘It looks like a runaway.’
    ‘Oh,’ she muttered with a blink and headed past him into the bedroom.
    He shaved while she got dressed in silence. He stepped back into the bedroom just as she was tying her shoes on the bench by the foot of the bed. He finished buttoning his shirt and doing his tie, then slipped his badge around his neck and clipped the gun belt to his side. Out of respect, he waited until she went back into the bathroom and out of sight before he unlocked the gun safe, took out the Glock and slid it into the holster. He knew it got her upset to see it. It always had, even when he’d gone back into uniform after his shoulder had healed. He was probably the only guy on the NYPD back then whose girl wasn’t turned on by the fact that her boyfriend was a cop. It wasn’t that LuAnn hated guns or was a gun-control nut, it was just that she hated to see him with a gun. She said it reminded her what he had to do all day, and why it was he needed a gun to do it.
    He slipped on a sports jacket and walked back into the bathroom. She was standing in front of the mirror just staring at the image before her. As he came up behind her, she started to mechanically brush her wet hair. His hand found her shoulder and rubbed it gently. ‘Don’t work too hard. See you tonight, Belle,’ he said into the mirror, then kissed her softly on the cheek.
    Belle, for Belle of the ball. His sweet Southern Belle. LuAnn just nodded and kept brushing. Her skin felt cold and slightly damp, like the inside of a window pane on a snowy day.
    He walked out of the bathroom, grabbed his car keys and cell off the nightstand, and headed down the hall, past the framed family pictures that covered practically every inch of the honey-colored walls. The last door at the end was slightly ajar, a battered street sign affixed to it warned ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’. Inside the bubble-gum pink room, the morning sun warmed the dozens of teddy bears posed neatly atop a metallic silver comforter. A stack of laundered, folded clothes sat on the desk chair, still waiting to be hung up. He stopped to pull the door closed, his hand lingering on the cold doorknob for just a second. A million thoughts rushed him and he quickly pushed them back out of his head.
    As he rounded the banister and hurried down the stairs, he licked his dry lips. They tasted salty. That’s when he knew for sure she’d been crying.

12
    No media trucks, no mob of flashing patrol cars, no flock of hovering ’copters.
    That was the first thing Bobby noticed as he pulled his Grand Am in front of the tired white ranch. Atop a sagging roof, a faded blue tarp flapped in the breeze, a bike lay propped against a plastic car port. Down the block, a group of kids laughed and joked as they skateboarded into air off home-made ramps. Obviously the failure of some teenager to come home after a weekend of partying was not on anyone’s radar.
    ‘Hey there, Dapper Dan,’ Zo called, tapping on the car’s back window. He walked up to the driver’s side and leaned in, a toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth, his eyes hidden behind Ray-Bans. He wore khakis and a light blue dress shirt,