A Deadly Influence (Abby Mullen Thrillers #1)(5)

He returned to the bedroom, where he removed his shirt and his pants, then folded them and placed them on the nightstand. He took off his underwear next. When he met Gabrielle in the morning, he preferred to be naked, just like she often was.

That done, he lay on the bed and grabbed his phone. Then he tapped the Instagram app. She’d posted a new story like he’d known she would. He touched her profile photo gently, his finger brushing her lips, a ritual that never got old.

She’d taken a selfie in bed, only her bare shoulders visible. He didn’t need to see more. He knew she was lying nude, those satin bedsheets she’d bought two months before twisted between her legs.

Good morning, the caption read. She was smiling that sleepy half smile that never failed to stir him.

“Good morning,” he whispered back.

Need shone in her eyes, a lust that mirrored his, and he lowered the phone, her mouth caressing his torso, his stomach, pausing between his legs. He squeezed the phone hard, his body spasming as he reached his relief.

Later he lay in bed and they talked. He scrolled through her posts, reading the captions or her comments. And then he answered her. Pillow talk.

I wish I could stay in bed all day, one post said, with her peeking under the blankets, grinning mischievously.

“Me too.” He smiled at her.

Another post had her standing on the beach, the wind toying with her hair, and the caption was, Do something your future self will thank you for.

“I plan to,” he said. “Today’s the day. And future you will thank me too.”

He scanned other comments on her posts, reading the inane blather her fans wrote, rife with grammar and spelling mistakes. Your so beatiful, one of them wrote, adding an emoji of a heart and another one with a rose. Her fans didn’t realize an emoji meant nothing. If you wanted to send a rose, you sent an actual rose.

Of course, her fans didn’t know she wasn’t posting for them at all. Sure, they put bread on her table. But for more than a year, all her posts had been aimed only at him.

He scrolled a bit more, another glimpse before he started the day, and then suddenly paused, frowning at one of the images. A recent picture of her eight-year-old brother in his bedroom.

Something in the background caught his eye. A new drawing.

“Damn it,” he muttered, getting up. He put on his clothes, feeling irritable. It was a good thing he’d spotted it before it was too late.

He stomped to the adjacent room. A boy’s bed stood in the corner, with Star Wars bedsheets. A small desk and a dark-blue chair. A Harry Potter poster by the window. A nightstand with some plastic toys and a bed lamp. And a corkboard with a few crayon drawings pinned to it.

He tapped the screen of his phone and compared the image there to the room he stood in. There was the bed. Same bedsheets. Same poster. The nightstand was identical as well; it had taken him weeks to find all those toys.

The corkboard was almost the same. The one on the screen had seven drawings pinned to it. This one had six.

He zoomed in on the missing drawing, frustrated by the low resolution of the image. It was a drawing of a family. A mother, a big girl, and a smaller boy. The girl was obviously Gabrielle. He had to smile at the child’s bad attempt at drawing his sister. Her body a rectangular block, her hair a few straight brown lines.

Sitting down at the desk, he took out a box of crayons and a sheet of paper from one of the drawers. Carefully and painstakingly, he copied the drawing. He had to start afresh twice, once when he got the mother’s shirt color wrong and once when one of the boy’s feet was too long. On the third attempt, he managed to get it reasonably similar. If he’d had time, he’d have made several additional sketches, trying to get it just right. But time was short. He had to get things ready. He copied the signature he already knew so well—Nathan.

He checked the image on-screen again. The picture was attached with a blue pin above the drawing of the spaceship. He found a blue pin in the drawer and stuck it in the exact same location.

Taking a few steps back, he compared the image on the screen to the room.

Perfect.

While he had been working, she’d posted a new image on her feed. It was her, dressed up for her photo shoot. She wrote, How do I look?

He commented, writing, Gorgeous as always.

She liked his comment almost immediately and replied, thanks! coupled with a blushing emoji.

He kissed the screen tenderly. “You’re welcome,” he breathed.





CHAPTER 4


Standing in the bathroom of the NYPD’s police academy, Abby stared at herself in the stained mirror as she washed her hands. It was only noon, but she was completely drained. She’d hardly gotten four hours of sleep before the call about the jumper had woken her up. And the night before had been just as difficult because Ben had woken her up, and it had taken her ages to fall back asleep.

He’d had a terrible nightmare about spiders. Which in itself wasn’t unusual—a lot of kids had nightmares about spiders. Abby herself had had a few when she was young. However, Ben’s nightmare was that Jeepers, his pet tarantula, had died.

Sometimes your children’s nightmares were your own shameful fantasies.

Ben’s eighth birthday was coming. Abby ticked the tasks in her mental checklist. The invitations had been sent, and his best friends had already RSVP’d. She still had to figure out the refreshments and cake. There was a kid with a nut allergy in Ben’s class, so her usual go-to recipe for Ben’s birthday, german chocolate, would have to be adjusted. As for the rest . . .