The Nicholas Linnear Novels by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online

tenseness dissolving out of her, and wetly, heatedly, she drew him up toward her, her fingers seeking him, her lips wildly on his, wanting him in her now, at this precise moment, more than she wanted anything else, to continue the exquisite heat she felt, to give him pleasure as he had given her.
    Her sex felt like a furnace as she guided him into her. She rammed her belly against him as he buried himself to the hilt; they both groaned with the sensation. She surrounded him with her arms, languorously twisting her upper torso so that her lush breasts rubbed back and forth across his chest. She moaned with the intense stimulation to her hard nipples. She licked at his neck as he used his hands on her, all over, increasing her pleasure, riding high within her, and at the end, when she found the tension almost unbearable, when the sweat and the saliva ran down her arms and between her breasts, pooling in her navel, when his frictioning against her was so intense that it took on a kind of third dimension, she used her inner muscles once, twice, heard him gasp, felt herself balancing on the brink, the thudding of their hearts heavy in her inner ear, whispering to him, “Come, darling, come—ohhh!” gasped out as she felt his probing finger, slick with their mingled juices, at the opening of her anus and lost all control, filled with fire all the way up to her throat.
    Dr. Vincent Ito stirred the hot chrysanthemum tea steaming in the handleless ceramic cup. Disturbed, several dark bits of crushed leaf swirled upward from the bottom, circling the surface. They reminded him of floaters. They were coming, he knew, had been for a month or so. Those bodies, once people who had leaped or, unconscious, had, perhaps, been pushed into the East River or the Hudson during the long winter months. Consigned to the deep, they had been preserved by the chill at the bottom, undisturbed by the sluggish currents until the beginning of the summer when the water heated up. At thirty to thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, bacteria would begin to breed, causing putrefaction and gases that would, eventually, bring the body to the surface, and the floater, months after it had gone in, would be brought to him at the Medical Examiner’s building.
    That certainly did not bother him. Since he was an associate medical examiner, it was merely part of Vincent’s life. An important part, he had admitted to himself long ago. The morgue, in the building’s basement, with its steel-jacketed doors stacked one atop the other marked by their neat, typewritten cards, the scrubbed gray tile floor, the great scale upon which the corpses were weighed, was where he lived most of his days. There was nothing ghoulish about it, passing the brown and white bodies laid out on the shining gurneys, bloodless, the great T-shaped incisions across the chest from shoulder to shoulder and down across the abdomen, the epidermis thick like leather, the faces as peaceful as if they slept the sleep of the innocent. It had no effect on him. The interest and, yes, the excitement of forensic medicine was, for him, the intricate puzzle of death. Not so much what it was but rather what had caused it. He was a detective whose work among the dead had, many times, aided the living.
    Vincent stared out the window as he slowly sipped his tea. Darkness still spread itself before the coming dawn: 4:25. He was always up this early.
    He stared out at the city, the lighted empty streets of Manhattan. Far away he heard the grinding of a garbage truck making its lentitudinous way along Tenth Street. Then closer by, a police car siren cut abruptly in, shattering the quietude. But it too, after a time, was gone, evaporating into the darkness. Nothing remained in the night but his thoughts, twisting upon themselves.
    He felt trapped. My karma must have been very bad in my last life, he told himself. Japan seemed as inaccesible as if it were in another time. It no longer seemed possible for him ever to find