5.
Alex couldn't sleep.
She had been up for hours, watching the reflections on her ceiling of lights from the street. Honks and shouts bounced restlessly up through her open window. She was exhausted, but the events of the last two days had left her wired and, although she had been doing it steadily for the last month, she once again felt unsettled sleeping alone.
She gave the empty left side of the bed only one quick glance, and her mind began to flicker with memories of Olivia tying her wrists to the bars of the headboard (Alex wouldn't have minded something stronger, but Olivia had refused even to bring handcuffs into the bedroom for the last two years), of Olivia kissing her way down her body, of Olivia making eye contact from between Alex's legs while she licked at her labia, agonizingly slow. Now Alex twitched, and began to throb, and she slipped her hand into her newly wet underpants—maybe this would help her relax.
But a series of sirens came flashing down the street, ambulance after ambulance, car after car, and up from the recesses of Alex's mind rose a question.
What if Olivia did it?
She sat up in a rush.
She had been so busy trying to protect Olivia that this question had been nowhere near the surface. Now the notion crawled all over her skin, over all the places that Olivia had touched and then just as quickly rejected.
There was this man now, Brady Harrison. When Alex had left Olivia, feeling shredded and desperate, she'd looked him up as any diligent prosecutor would do. She had looked back over his case, a slam dunk for Abbie Carmichael at the time—Harrison had been done in by his carelessness, his own stupid mistakes. Sentenced to fifteen years for his crimes (Alex herself would have pushed for more), paroled after nine. He had been out of prison for a week and a half. Alex had even telephoned his parole officer, a taciturn man named Jeremy Patchett, but her lawyerly weaseling had resulted in a frustrating paucity of information: Harrison was living in a halfway house in Inwood, he'd checked in on time every night, still hadn't found a job but really what did he expect. Alex had hung up with Patchett frustrated and frightened. Harrison sounded dumb, hardly enough of a strategist to stage a frame-up with dozens of stakeholders, to procure a vial of Olivia's blood without her knowledge.
You can't be visiting your dirty cop psychotic killer lesbian lover at Bedford Hills.
Alex barely had time to grab the wastebasket beside her desk before she threw up.
If she really loved Olivia, shouldn't she stand by her even when she had killed a man? But if she were really a prosecutor, on the side of the law and seeking justice for victims—even victims as hateful as this Clyde Vandyne seemed to be—shouldn't she be able to resist falling into bed with a murderer? And if Olivia hadn't done it at all, what kind of a person was Alex for even thinking it?
Alex was sure that Olivia hadn't planned this, but if indeed she had acted from posttraumatic stress, why hadn't Trevor even considered self-defense? Maybe he would—Alex had never asked him about his strategy, and she and Olivia hadn't exactly done a lot of talking. But he would find it difficult to argue when Fritz displayed photographs of the Tasered and castrated corpse.
Alex dry-heaved again, and then again. She imagined Olivia holding back her hair and kissing between her shoulder blades, as she had done when seeing Alex through dozens of days of illness over the last two years, and soon she was on the floor, clutching her knees and leaning against the bedside table, so shocked and scared and empty and aching that she didn't even hear the phone ring. She was certain she wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight.