The Brutal Heart Read Online Free

Jo.”
    My heart squeezed. “Since we were together?”
    Zack leaned towards me. “Oh God, no. Jo, you’re all I’ve ever wanted and then some. But as you know, the mechanics of sex don’t always work for me. With us, it doesn’t matter, we just fool around till we’re both happy, but it was different for me before. I could be dynamite in the courtroom all day, but if I couldn’t get it up at night, it drove me nuts.
    “So you went to a prostitute,” I said.
    “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Zack said dryly. “Most of the women I could have had sex with were other lawyers. It’s an adversarial relationship, and you don’t want your adversaries to know you’re a dud in the sack. So I kept searching for the magic bullet. Cristal was just the last of many. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.”
    “So was Cristal the magic bullet?” I asked.
    His nod was almost imperceptible. “She was very skilful. Then I met you, and you know the rest of the story. I never saw Cristal again until today.”
    There was a tap at the door, and Mieka opened it and peeked in. “The girls and I are taking off. They wanted to say goodnight, but if we’re interrupting …”
    Zack’s face softened. “Couldn’t ask for a more welcome interruption.”
    Sleepy but still coasting on a sugar high, Madeleine and Lena raced in and crawled up on Zack’s lap.
    “Did you like our present?” Madeleine asked.
    “A man can never have too many flashlights,” Zack said.
    “It’s for flashlight tag,” Madeleine said. “We can play it next time we come over.”
    “Somebody’s going to have to teach me the rules,” Zack said.
    “I will,” Madeleine said. “Lena doesn’t care about rules. But she’s a really good runner.”
    “I’m not much of a runner,” Zack said. “So what can I do?”
    Lena rubbed at a grass stain on her knee of her jeans. “You can be It,” she said thoughtfully.
    Her sister frowned. “Nobody can always be It.”
    “Zack can,” Lena said. Then she aimed a kiss at Zack’s cheek, slid off his knee, and both girls ran to their mother. Zack wheeled his chair after them. “Mieka, I didn’t have a chance to thank you for the toast.”
    Mieka met his gaze. “I didn’t exactly have them rolling in the aisles, but I meant what I said. I’m really glad you’re around, Zack.”
    I closed the door after them and Zack turned to me. “Do you think she’ll still be glad to have me around when she finds about Cristal Avilia?”
    “Is there a reason why she needs to know?”
    There was a crack of thunder and Willie, who’d followed Mieka and the girls to the bedroom, whined. I rubbed his head. “It’s just thunder,” I said. “You’re okay. I’m okay. We’re all okay.” I turned to Zack. “We are okay, aren’t we?”
    “No,” he said. “We’re not.” He splayed his hands on his knees and stared down at them. “Cristal’s dead, Jo.”
    “Oh God. What happened to her?”
    “She was murdered. At some point between the time I left her around two this afternoon and six tonight, when the lawn service went out to fix the underground sprinklers, Cristal fell, jumped, or was pushed over the railing of her balcony. The police are leaning towards the third possibility.”
    “How do they know it wasn’t an accident or suicide?”
    “They don’t know,” Zack said. “Cristal’s condo was on the fourth floor. She could have fallen or jumped, but her body had been pulled towards the side of the building so the other tenants wouldn’t discover it when they came home from work.”
    I felt my nerves twang. “Zack, the police don’t think that you – ”
    His laugh was short and humourless. “There aren’t a lot of advantages to being a paraplegic, but I think even the cops would see that a guy in a wheelchair would have trouble pushing a healthy thirty-four-year-old woman over a balcony railing, then zipping down to the place where she fell so he could pull her body out of