He became so still that she feared she had ruined something precious, and that the memory she would be left with was of him being highly offended and storming from the bed, the suite, her life.

But after a ponderous silence, he said, “Look at me.” She did. He said, “No. Believe me, wanting you in my bed has been no joke, inside or otherwise. Mike, Gif, and I had words. They lectured me like maiden aunts about letting my dick do my thinking. They cited the conflict of interest this—” he said, sawing his hand between them, “—would create. You see the effect of all their wise counsel.”

He turned the hand she held against her chest and linked their fingers. “If I had wanted to use you to taunt Jasper, that’s what I would have done. Taunted. I would have let him think that we had slept together or planned to at our first opportunity.”

He studied their clasped hands. “You probably won’t believe me, but I swear, for all my tomcatting, I’ve never been with a married woman. You’re my first adultery, and I wouldn’t break my personal moral code just to score points against Jasper.”

“But you were unfaithful to your wife.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You told Jasper—”

“I’ve never had a wife to cheat on.”

Her head went back an inch. “What?”

“I’ve never been married.”

She was stunned by the joy that spread through her from knowing that. “No one special enough to make you stop tomcatting?”

“No time or inclination to let anything special develop. Besides, I wouldn’t drag a good woman into my particular hell.”

“Into that dark place you have to go?”

He nodded. “Hazard of the trade.”

“You didn’t drag me into it this afternoon. In fact you shut me out.”

“Because it’s hardly conducive to foreplay, and I was hoping to get lucky.”

She smiled, but didn’t let him flirt her away from the subject. “Mike and I talked.”

“Oh, great. Did he go into his maiden aunt persona?”

“A little. Dr. Easton.”

She recapped her conversation with Mike. When she finished, Drex said, “I started looking for Weston Graham long before I earned my doctorate.”

“When you learned he had killed your mother? How did that come about?”

“Are you sure you want to hear that?”

“Yes. I’d like to know.”

“You accept that Weston Graham and Jasper Ford are one and the same?”

“You’ve convinced me. No, actually, he’s convinced me with his actions over the past two days.”

He reflected for a moment, then said, “Although I’m not certain he launched his career with my mother, I suspect it. Maybe he hadn’t consciously mapped out woman killing as a career path. But after he’d rid himself of her and walked away unscathed, he recognized his talent and saw a future in exploiting it.”

She scooted closer to him and laid her hand on his chest. “I saw her picture in your files. She was lovely.”

“I have no memory of her.”

“How old were you when she went missing?”

“Around ten, I think. But my dad had moved the two of us to Alaska years before that.”

“Tell me about it.”

He took a deep breath, rubbed his legs against hers, readjusted his head on the pillow. “A lot of it I’ve had to piece together because Dad wouldn’t talk about it. Never. But what I gather is that she abandoned us to be with Weston Graham.”

“She abandoned you, too?”

“I don’t know if she did so without a second thought, or if Dad was unbending on keeping me with him. He cut me off from her. Completely.” He told her about the name change. “That’s why I wasn’t afraid to use my name with Jasper. I knew he wouldn’t recognize it.”

“Wasn’t that a rather spiteful thing for your dad to do?”

“No doubt spite was his motivation. He made it impossible for her to find us. But it was fortuitous, because it also prevented Weston from locating us after he’d disposed of her. We might have been two of those loose threads you referred to earlier.

“I knew none of this at the time, understand,” he said. “My first clear recollections are of living in Alaska, and it was always just Dad and me.”

“What you described to me, all the moving around, et cetera?”

“All true.”

“It must’ve been a lonely life for you.”

He admitted as much by giving her a rueful smile. “On the other hand, I didn’t know anything different. Not until I got older and saw that other dads actually talked over mealtimes. They laughed and joshed with their kids. They had male buddies they hung out with to drink beer and watch ball games. They had women they slept with. Our house was devoid of anything feminine. I began to notice the touches that my friends’ houses had that ours didn’t. It was the…the appealing something that a woman emanates.”

He fell silent for a moment, then said, “My mother’s desertion robbed Dad of all that enjoyment, of all joy. She stole his soul. Then Weston stole from her.”

“She had money?”

“What seemed like a lot at the time. It was modest by today’s standards. After her, Weston, with a new identity, set his sights much higher. But when she went missing, and investigators began digging into her life, it was discovered that all her assets, which she’d inherited from her parents, had miraculously disappeared along with her.”

“How did your father learn of it?”

“It made the newspapers. I didn’t know he’d saved them until later. But I remember when the change came over him. He’d never been a hard drinker, but he started drinking heavily at night, every night, long into the night. He became even more taciturn than normal. I didn’t ask him what the matter was, I think out of fear of what he would tell me. But even if I had asked, he wouldn’t have told me. She had been eradicated from my life.”

“But your dad still loved her. He was bereaved.”

“I see that now. I didn’t then. Years later, when I was old enough to read up on her disappearance, I matched the timing of it to that dark period when Dad really shut down.”

“And you were around ten years old? That must have been an awful time for you.”

“In one respect, it was beneficial. That’s when I learned to be sociable. I stayed over at friends’ houses a lot. Their parents must’ve felt sorry for me. They took me in, saw that I was well fed. Anyway, over time, Dad stopped drinking and went back to being more himself. Which was still a level of bereavement. He grieved for my mother, for everything about her, until the day he died.”

“When was that?”

“I was in my first year of college in Missoula. I was summoned home. He’d had a stroke, which didn’t kill him right away.”

“Did you make it home in time to be with him?”

“That’s when he shared the story of my mother. He’d secretly kept all the newspaper write-ups about her disappearance. He told me about Weston Graham, who was sought as the prime suspect but never captured. Her disappearance remains a cold case of the LAPD.”