Turn Me Loose - Turn Me Loose Part 13
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Turn Me Loose Part 13

A click, a pause, then another click and Francine saying, "Ma'am? You're connected to Deputy Lawson."

"Hello?" The voice was young, a little sullen, and a lot wary.

"Deputy Sheriff Lawson here, ma'am," he said. "I understand you have some information for us." He hoped so. Guys killing their exes-it wasn't exactly new territory. But that didn't make it any less evil.

Some men didn't believe in good or evil. He wasn't one of them.

"I don't want to get in any trouble," the girl was saying now.

Nobody ever did. "If you know something," he said, "please tell me. A young girl is dead here, and we'd like to catch her killer. If you're calling me, I'm guessing you'd like us to do that, too."

"I don't really know anything," she said, and he waited. Two beats. Three. "But I think I might know who she is."

HOW HARD COULD IT BE?.

I've driven it lots of times, Rochelle had told Stacy. How hard could it be?

Really, really hard.

It started out just fine, with her looking Saturday-morning good in a trim, sleeveless yellow blouse that still didn't show too much, but could maybe get a man thinking that if she unfastened just one more button-or he did-that situation would change. And another skort, a dark-blue one with flowers this time, since she could tell Travis liked looking at her legs.

He showed up right on time, and he didn't exactly look her up and down, but he noticed. Oh, yeah. He did.

He stood on her front porch, said, "Hi," and smiled at her, slow and sure, and she just about melted. He had the most smiling eyes she'd ever seen, he was dressed in shorts and a gray T-shirt that stretched across about an acre of long, lean, hard muscle, and she wanted to take a bite out of him.

"Come on in," she managed to say. "We're almost ready."

He followed her inside and said, "We?"

"Yep," she said. "I forgot to mention, I asked Stacy if she wanted to come along." And then she held her breath.

"This would be some more going slow, then."

"That's would it would be."

He seemed fine with that, too. If it hadn't been for the way he'd kissed her earlier in the week, she'd have thought he didn't even care.

But he had kissed her like that. His mouth had been so deliciously firm against hers. Before he'd bitten her neck, that is. Before he'd pressed her against the table and hauled her up with one hand, letting her know that in another thirty seconds she'd have been sitting up there with her skirt around her waist.

That was why they were riding bikes today. With her sister. Which, after the first hour, she was more than ready to be done with.

Rochelle's bike, which she'd been delighted to use for errands around town after years of living off gravel roads out in the boondocks, was fat-tired and upright, as opposed to Stacy's and Travis's much faster models. Travis, though, seemed ready to accommodate that. In fact, by the time he'd looked back to find her missing and slowed to allow her to catch up for about the twelfth time, she'd had enough. She told him, as brightly as she could manage, "You go ahead and ride with Stacy. I'm fine."

"Not really the idea," he said. "The point isn't how fast we do it. The point is doing it together."

"Thanks for not bringing the testosterone. But please. Go on. I'll meet you at the end. I'm just . . . taking in the scenery."

All right, it was true, it was beautiful. The hills rolling like an inland sea-stubble fields, now, the remnants of harvested wheat and barley-glowing gold in the sunlight. Blue sky, puffy white clouds, the buzz of insects beside the path, and the foothills rising toward the low mountains to the east.

It was home, and it was good. But "foothills" meant "hills," which were one heck of a lot steeper than they seemed in a car, even on a day that wasn't too hot. And "hills" meant hard pedaling, not to mention something you could call . . . pressure. Which she didn't need Travis to notice.

Stacy had been right. Rochelle normally didn't ride more than a few miles at a time, and she was discovering that an exercise bike at the University Fitness Center also wasn't quite the same as this. Her bike saddle, although it had plenty of padding as far as her butt was concerned, was contoured fairly . . . interestingly for the rest of her. Which she'd noticed before, and not in a bad way. Hey, a girl had to get her sexual stimulation somehow.

At first, it had felt good. Before it got to be way too much, like when you were with a guy who'd never grasped the concept of indirect contact. She wriggled and readjusted, trying to find a more comfortable position, and it only made things worse. By the time she finally rolled into the outskirts of the tiny town of Ithaca and spotted the cafe, she was hopping off the bike with two blocks still to go.

Travis, of course, climbed back onto his own bike and came looping back to her. "All right?" he asked.

He was looking worried, like this wasn't working out the way he'd planned. "Fine!" she said chirpily. "Great. It was a beautiful ride."

He looked at her more closely. "Sure? You look a bit stiff. Your seat not comfortable?"

She thought about telling him exactly what wasn't comfortable, but she wasn't supposed to be sharing anatomical details with him, so she said, "I'm fine," and tried another smile. Like a gracious beauty pageant contestant. Or an electroshock victim. One or the other.

All she needed was a break. And maybe an injection of local anesthetic.

The cafe was tiny, with only six wooden tables, its best feature a wide back patio shaded by a huge maple and overlooking a creek overhung with aspens and weeping willows. It was time for shade, a drink, and a sandwich. And not sitting on a bicycle seat.

She took a hasty detour to the ladies' room, doing her best not to wince at the burn from peeing on chafed lady parts, then went out to the washbasin to fix her hair and minimal makeup. At least she didn't have mascara running down her face today. And it was nice to have a man want to do a fun, adventurous activity with her. As opposed to the fun, adventurous activity they usually proposed.

Stacy had come in with her, and now, she propped herself against the wall beside the sink for a chat. Looking reasonably perky, so this had been a good idea.

"Travis is pretty great," she said. "I mean, no bad-boy vibe or anything, so I don't see why I had to come, but kinda hot for an older guy. Good arms."

He had good thighs, too. He had good everything. But no bad-boy vibe? Maybe because he didn't feel the need to share it with absolutely every woman he met. Rochelle'd gotten plenty of bad-boy off him, one way and another. But she didn't share that. "At least he's wearing regular clothes," she agreed, feeling more cheerful. "No padded shorts so tight, you could take an exact measurement of his junk. No bright-yellow spandex shirt covered with pretend-sponsor names, and he didn't spend the whole time pedaling away from us like he was trying to win the Tour de Rural Bike Path. Although I can see why people do those padded shorts now."

Stacy smiled with satisfaction. "Your butt sore?"

Second person to ask her that. "No. And I'm not whining, so don't get your hopes up." She tucked her comb back into her backpack and said, "Ready?"

Travis kept being nice. He bought them lunch and an extremely welcome beer, leaned back in his chair with that relaxed ease that got Rochelle every time, and talked to Stacy as if he wasn't sorry she'd come along.

"So pre-med, huh?" he asked her. "I'm impressed. What kind of doctor?"

"I don't know." Stacy took a swallow of beer. "I haven't decided. I have to get there first. I mean, it's going fine," she added hastily.

"Something giving you trouble?" Travis asked.

She shrugged. "Not too bad. I'm OK."

"Mine was English Composition," Travis said. "First semester of freshman year. It about did me in right there, before I'd even started. They wanted us to analyze the themes in these novels. How do I know? I just know if it's a good story or not. And it was usually 'not.' I barely squeaked out of that. What's yours?"

Stacy's eyes flew to his face as if she were checking whether she could trust him not to laugh at her. Rochelle knew the feeling. She sat quietly and listened, wondering if a tiny window was finally opening up to her sister's heart.

"Statistics," Stacy finally said. "I mean, lots of things are hard. Sometimes I don't think I . . ." She stopped and visibly swallowed. "But this professor . . . he doesn't explain it so I get it. Or I just don't get it." She picked up her sandwich and scrutinized it as if it were fascinating, and Rochelle saw that her hand was shaking. "I don't know. I don't . . . I don't get it."

"Hmm," Travis said. "What exactly? What's tough?"

"Regression analysis, right now," Stacy said reluctantly. "I know I should be able to understand it," she hurried on, her cheeks flushing, "but I keep getting confused. I can do the math. Calculus was fine, and lots of people think that's harder. But this . . . I don't get the idea."

"OK," Travis said. Calm as always, soothing some of Rochelle's own jangles at Stacy's out-of-proportion distress. "Well, fortunately, here you are, and here I am, and Rochelle isn't talking to me, because I made her ride too far, not to mention that she knows she still has to get home. So we might as well bore her to death."

"I didn't say-" Rochelle began.

"Nope," he said. "You didn't. I'm reasonably fluent in body language, though." He pulled a pen out of his pack and grabbed an extra napkin off the table. "Here we go. But we'll do something that'll keep Rochelle at least marginally interested, how's that?"

"You think?" Rochelle took another sip of her own beer. She was already getting light-headed. Alcohol, warmth, and exercise weren't the best combination. Witness her tequila-fueled error of judgment with Travis.

"You're looking at the relationship of one thing to another kind of thing, right?" Travis was explaining to Stacy like a man who'd never taken a woman right off a dance floor and into his bed. "How much you can rely on one factor predicting the other. Let's say . . . how likely it is that a professor of a certain age will be a decent guy. Say your hypothesis is that they get better as they get older. So the horizontal axis is age, and the vertical one is, let's see . . ."

He grinned at Rochelle and drew two crossing lines, labeling the bottom end of the vertical line "Dickhead" and the top end "Works for Rochelle," then crosshatching the horizontal line and labeling it with numbers in increments of five, from thirty to sixty.

"So," he said, "since this is data Rochelle would have, let's let her fill it in."

She grabbed the napkin, put a dot down near the intersection of the two lines, and labeled it "Wes." Thirty and a dickhead. And then tracked all the way over to the "sixty" and wrote in, "Dr. Olsen," nice and high. Right opposite "Works for Rochelle."

"Best over-sixty guy out there," she said. "In the college, that is. And then there's the rest of them." She drew nine or ten more dots. "Each representing a known individual. I won't write names in. I'll let you draw your own conclusions once you know them better."

"Hmm," Travis said. "Now we do the best-fit line." He turned the napkin around so it faced Stacy and handed her the pen. "What would that look like?"

She hesitated, the pen hovering over the graph, then finally drew a horizontal line and looked up at him questioningly.

He smiled at her like he'd won the lottery. "Yep. That's it. You've got a fairly random scatter there, I'd say."

"Right," Stacy said. "Which means not much slope. No correlation between age and . . ."

"Level of dickhead," Travis agreed. "The older ones aren't better?" he asked Rochelle.

"Not so much. Mostly, they're about the same guy they started out being. Nice, or not. Sometimes they get worse. They start thinking they're superior, just because they get to grade people. The line might actually look like this." She made an adjustment to her sister's line. "If I gave it some more thought, got more exact."

"It might slope down a little," Stacy said.

"But not much," Rochelle said.

"Low r value." Travis looked at Stacy. "Meaning what?"

"One doesn't predict the other. Low . . . correlation coefficient? Between age and how good a guy he is." Stacy was looking excited now.

"There are all levels of professors," Rochelle agreed. "At any age."

Travis glanced at her, then started talking to Stacy again, grabbing another napkin, assigning values and doing math, and the technical part got beyond Rochelle. Stacy was nodding, though, taking the pen and doing her own calculations, so the explanation was obviously working.

Finally, Stacy sat back with a sigh and said, "Thanks. I think I've got it. It's so easy . . . when you explain it." She blinked, and Rochelle could swear there were tears trying to make it out.

"No problem," Travis said. "You need anything else, just ask. Anytime. I'm pretty good with statistics. As opposed to teaching game design. I wish my students would say what you just did, but maybe it depends on how quick the student is at picking it up, too. I'll tell myself that." He looked at Rochelle, then. "And sorry. I tried to keep it entertaining, but there's only so fascinating I could make that."

"Nope," she said. "I learned something, too. Besides what 'r squared' means, and maybe even how you get the p value."

"Which you understood." His eyes were so warm, which was completely unfair.

"More or less. The major ideas, at least. As long as this isn't going to be on the test."

"Have I ever told you that you've got a fairly terrific brain yourself?" he asked her.

It was the beer, surely, that had her floating away like she was filled with helium, and she couldn't answer for a moment.

"So what else did you learn?" he asked.

She took the pen from him, and when her hand brushed his, she felt the thrill of that bit of contact all the way to her toes. It even made it past some of the numbness in her nether regions. She swiveled the napkin around to face her and drew a new dot, hanging out alone, high on the graph above the "thirty" mark and right across from "Works for Rochelle." And then she looked at him and labeled it "Travis."

He cleared his throat. "I'm thirty-five, actually. You might want to move the point to the right along the horizontal axis."

She dropped the pen. "OK. That's the last time I compliment an engineer."

GOING SLOW.

The day was turning out better than Travis had feared when he'd first seen Rochelle walking stiff-legged up the bike path toward the cafe and had cursed himself as an idiot.

Dancing, yes. Swimming, fine. Bike riding, no. Lesson learned, but too late now.

They'd finished lunch, and Stacy was coming back from the ladies' room. She'd done just fine riding out here. Like that did him any good at all.

Stacy didn't sit down, though. And she was crying, but trying to hide it.

"I have to . . . I'm going," she said.

Rochelle had risen to her feet. "Sweetie. What's wrong?"

Stacy shook her head violently. "Nothing. Never mind. I have to go."

"It's Shane, right?" Rochelle said. "Come on. Tell me."

Stacy looked at Travis, wild-eyed, and he got up himself and said, "I'll just-"