Carla took the picture out of her hands and stared at it with something like awe. "I always wondered why she never wore short sleeves."

"That's not her," Alison protested. "You've forgotten, you've got this mixed up with somebody else." Silently Mich.e.l.le flipped the photo over, pointed to the neat printing that told them this was Sharon Aldrich at the Summer Solstice festival.

It gets better," she said. "Look at the woman she's hugging."

Alison looked. It was hard, for the second woman was quite a bit taller than the first and part of her had been cut out of the picture.

"I give up," she said, flipping the picture over. 'Melanie Donahue' it said on the back. "No."

"Yeah. I had forgotten that I knew the two of them at the same time." She handed Alison another photo, obviously taken right after the first. Now Melanie and Sharon were facing the camera rather than each other, and little Mich.e.l.le was standing between them. They had their arms around each other. On the back of this one it said, 'We worked on the newspaper together.' Alison turned the photo back over and stared. She had been there, too. She had undoubtedly talked to both of the women. h.e.l.l, she might have even taken the picture. Just more of Mich.e.l.le's h.o.a.rds of friends. The newspaper had folded long ago and she had turned her Indian skirt into a pillow that had been KP's bed for years before she had thrown it out. She didn't remember the last time that Mich.e.l.le had even smoked dope. Sharon Aid rich was straight. And Melanie Donahue was dead.

Unexpectedly tears filled her eyes, and she held her head very still, not wanting them to fall, not wanting to explain that she was crying for the young d.y.k.es they had been that summer.

She would have liked to have taken a quick look through the rest of the photos from the camp out. But Mich.e.l.le was stacking them up. Alison caught brief glimpses of herself, trees, a campfire, faces and b.r.e.a.s.t.s that looked familiar. Mich.e.l.le rapped the stack once against her hand before dropping it back into the plastic bag, a signal, Alison knew, that it was time for bed. Well, Mich.e.l.le and Janka had to get up in the morning, while she was hoping to spend it in bed.

"Well," she said, looking at Carla, "time for you to go home." Uh oh, something wrong. Carla's lip was trembling, and she was looking down at her lap. Alison glanced at Janka and Mich.e.l.le, who looked at one another. No help there.

"What's the problem?"

"I don't want to be home alone." Carla barely whispered the words.

"What?"

"I'm afraid to be home alone. No one is there and they might not be home for hours. Starflower is out of town and Ramona had to work a graveyard shift. I'm afraid. What if it is the Crusaders? I'm in the phone book now. They must know where I live." Her voice was shaking. She was changing into a little girl, and it was with difficulty that Alison, thinking of Stacy waiting for her in the room below, kept from asking where the d.i.l.d.o-packing d.y.k.e about town, seducer of older women had gone. But that would have been mean, and, softly heard through her pounding waves of antic.i.p.ation, a little voice pointed out that maybe Carla had a point, maybe home alone wouldn't be the best place for an attempted murder victim, especially when the killer was still on the loose. After all, the best night with Stacy was not worth Carla's life.

"Okay," she said, trying not to sound grudging, "you can stay."

She swiveled to cast an appealing glance at Mich.e.l.le and Janka, but Janka antic.i.p.ated her and said, "Jan and Vickie borrowed our sleeping bags to take to Zion last week, and they haven't returned them." They sat happily hand in hand, smiling at her, secure in the knowledge that there was no place in their small apartment where a guest could possibly sleep without getting a bicycle spoke up her nose. Mich.e.l.le in particular looked pleased. Anything to keep Alison away from the Evil One.

It seemed cold to put someone who had just gotten eighty st.i.tches in her head on the floor, especially when she had a waterbed that would sleep three. She knew because Mich.e.l.le and Janka had come down to cuddle a couple of times when she had been depressed. But maybe if she gave Carla the big pillow and ran over to borrow some blankets from the boys next door...? After all, Carla was young and resilient.

She went downstairs to check the tub; Stacy had finished. Alison opened the door to the bedroom to confer with her, then stopped. The light was still on, but Stacy was sound asleep in the middle of the bed, flat on her back, snoring just a little. Sleeping the sleep of the exhausted, the sleep from which you wake up eight hours later in the same position. What the h.e.l.l. "You can sleep in here," she said to Carla.

Eleven.

Alison woke and looked at the clock. It was two a.m. She had been having an intense erotic dream. It took her a moment to realize that waking seemed to be an extension of the dream. Her thighs and arms were being stroked from behind. In spite of already being wet and wanting she was irritated. That d.a.m.n Carla!

"Death to the twenty-one year olds," she thought crossly. They had too much energy.

But just as she lifted her hand to push the young woman away the back of her neck was brushed in a kiss. A jolt went through her like a shot of electricity. Instinctively she knew this was not Carla. She tried to turn to face Stacy quietly because, after all, Carla was asleep not more than a few feet away, but Stacy held her back to belly. She could not really reach around to touch her so she simply sunk into the pleasure of the long slow strokes, of the way Stacy's hands felt as they caressed her thighs, her arms, her a.s.s, her belly. She stifled a moan, again all too aware of Carla. Stacy was kissing her neck, her shoulders, kissing her hair and ears and Alison was writhing soundlessly against her. Stacy's voice from earlier in the evening sounded in her mind- "...if she likes to be tied up and have a crop used on her...." She imagined light blows falling on her thighs and a.s.s, no longer wondering if it was something she would enjoy.

Now Stacy was whispering in her ear. Things she had hardly had the nerve to imagine before, and just heating them was making her gush. As if she were a third person she saw them from above, spooned together, saw even as she felt Stacy spread her legs so that she could reach between them to stroke her. Saw them together as if bathed in a golden light; saw the way that she stiffened against Stacy's fingers almost immediately, heard the little birdlike cries she was not able to hold back.

She came back to her own body and laid her head back on Stacy's shoulder, content for a long moment. She almost drifted back to sleep, but there had been too many times that they had almost talked, and she had questions that she wanted to ask now. "Let's go into the kitchen," she whispered.

Alison was glad that she had snagged her robe off its hook on the way out of the bedroom, for there was something very different about being naked as she put together a snack, as opposed to lying in bed in the dark. Stacy too disappeared into the bathroom and came back out with her sweats on.

"This is the only time that I wish I still smoked," said Alison. "It's the perfect thing to do after s.e.x. Tea seems so candy-a.s.sed in comparison."

"I used to smoke." Stacy opened the refrigerator hungrily.

"Who didn't? We were all tough young d.y.k.es." Too late Alison remembered that this wasn't true, that Stacy was married when she and Mich.e.l.le were experimenting with tattoos and cigarettes and running around with their shirts off.

"So, are you ever going to let me touch you?" Way to go, Alison, just blurt it right out there. No sense letting this woman think you know anything about tact and then be disappointed later.

Stacy looked up at her and smiled. "Oh, yes," she said, "and touch me, and touch me...."

"Oh, good! I was afraid, I mean I thought...." Images gleaned from sleazy d.y.k.e novels drifted through Alison's mind; big tough butches in leather jackets they never took off, who only came when their s.e.x slaves sucked their d.i.l.d.os. "I didn't know if...."

"Look," said Stacy, "I make my living with do-me queens, I want to get a little good stuff myself on my own time." She shifted her legs as she spoke and Alison imagined herself kneeling on the floor between them; imagined the taste lingering on her lips, on her tongue, as she raised herself to Stacy's mouth for a kiss. The temptation was great, but there were more questions she wanted to ask. She was tired of feeling like the new kid at school.

"I didn't know you could do it that way." Why change the old foot-in-die-mouth style now, when it seemed to be working so charmingly?

"What way?" teased Stacy. "With my hands? In bed? Without waking someone else up?"

"No, but you're into s/m, right? I mean...."

"Oh, that's the great thing about being kinky. It's like a little chocolate sauce for the dessert. You can be as vanilla as you want for as long as you want, and then when you're in the mood for something else..." she lowered her eyelids flirtatiously "...you can play." Alison felt her stomach knot up with excitement, but there was relief also. Oh, .thank goodness she wasn't going to be expected to be a s.e.x G.o.ddess all the time. There were still going to be the good old 'Why-don't-we-do-it-real-low-key-before-we-go-to-sleep?' scenes.

"Mmm, you know those razor cuts that Dominique was doing with Tamara?" She let her voice trail off, but Stacy did not come to her rescue and fill in the sentence for her. She tried again. "I don't want to do that."

"It's not something that I usually do, even for money. To tell the truth, I'm pretty vanilla as dominatrixes-dominatri?-go. I don't like to draw blood or anything like that. Just my own personal thing. Women who stay with me like the drama. I'm good at that." She lowered her eyes again and Alison caught her breath. She flashed back to the leather skirt and studded blouse Stacy had been wearing the night they had first kissed, and imagined her talking dirty, making her beg. Her face felt hot.

"Yep, toys, bondage and drama," said Stacy, biting into a bagel. She spoke as if she were talking about any job, as if she were saying, "Yep, I put the cans in the bottom of the bag and the bread and eggs on top."

"How do you know what women want?" Alison asked curiously.

Stacy chuckled. "Just a minute. Where did I put my bag?"

Tell me what you like said the form she pulled from her date book. Alison read the list of suggestions silently. Halfway through it, she began squirming. She glanced up at Stacy who was spreading cream cheese on the bagel. "I, um, mmm..." She didn't know quite what to say, except that some were making her wet just to read about them. She pointed to one line. "Mmm...."

"Oh, yeah, baby," Stacy said seductively. She reached over to run her hand down Alison's leg but Alison squirmed away. Not yet.

"So you just hand everybody a little business form, huh? Very professional."

"No, I'll talk, too. But a lot of women would prefer to make a few check marks. It's not embarra.s.sing and it makes things feel more spontaneous, less like you wrote a script and brought it in. You know-okay, now you say 'You've been a very naughty girl' and I say, 'Oh, no, no, please' and you say, 'You're going to have to be punished'...I'm actually pretty good at following a basic suggestion or theme."

"I'll bet you are." Part of Alison could not believe that she was having this conversation. Not she, who had always been such a good little d.y.k.e, who had only been able to attend the s/m workshop at the festival by sitting in the back and pretending that she was really one of the softball players who just happened to be taking a break right there; who couldn't even buy a copy of On Our Backs at the women's bookstore unless she bought something else to hide it beneath.

"So, do you update these frequently?" she asked.

"You mean, can you say, I changed my mind, I don't like being spanked, or I saw a toy in the s.e.x shop that I think I would like, or let's try a different scenario, 'cause this one is boring the s.h.i.t out of me? Sure! You have that rule, too, don't you?" Stacy looked at Alison, her face drawn up anxiously, though her eyes were twinkling. "If I don't want you to go down on me tonight, it doesn't mean that I've lost my chance forever, does it?"

"No," said Alison. Suddenly she had lost her desire to discuss the topic anymore. She crossed the room, pulled her robe up around her thighs and sat down on Stacy's lap, straddling her. "But I hope," was the last thing she said, as Stacy began undoing the robe, "that you do want me to tonight."

Alison had no idea what time it was, only that it was much earlier than she had planned on waking. There was someone knocking on the front door and not just the paper boy or a Jehovah's Witness, either. The evenly s.p.a.ced banging was too loud and persistent for that.

Wonderful. She swung her feet over the side of the bed. Carla and Stacy were still dead to the world.

"All right, all right, I'm coming," she called crossly. She stuffed her arms into the sleeves of her robe and then stomped to the door and snapped open the lock. Only after she had jerked it open did she realize that she should have looked first-they all needed to be extra careful-and only a second after that did she realize that her robe was on inside out.

"Oh," she said, an acknowledgement not a greeting. "Dad."

"Oh, yourself," he answered, sweeping past her as if he had been invited.

"Have I got a date with you?" She followed him into the living room, as confused by his presence as she was by the b.u.t.tons on the inside of her robe. She clutched it over her chest. "Did I forget to write it down?"

"No, you don't have a date with me. How could you, when you were supposed to be out of town and I didn't even know you had changed your plans until I heard it through the grapevine?" That one was going to be a sore topic for a while. "But I know trusting you to answer anything on that machine of yours is like whistling into the wind."

Oh. He was not of the era of answering machines, but she hadn't realized that he knew she used hers to screen calls.

Her father caught her look. "Do you think I'm stupid?" he asked in a scathing voice. "Do you think they just keep me around because I cut such a fine figure in a uniform? Guess again. I thought I'd better get over here and talk to you before you got yourself in some real trouble."

She resisted the impulse to regress to fourth grade and whine. "Now, Dad," she began calmly.

"Get dressed, I'll take you out to breakfast and we can talk about this."

"Dad I..." she began, searching her mind frantically for a tactful way to say there were two naked women in her bed, and after she had dumped one, she was planning on spending the morning f.u.c.king the brains out of the other. Maybe lunch?

She was saved from this tactical dilemma, however, by Stacy's timely appearance at the door of the bedroom. Fortunately, she was in a state of semi-dress-a T-shirr of Alison's that she must have picked up off the floor. When her eyes. .h.i.t Frank Kaine in uniform, they flew open wide and she gave Alison a very readable, very reproachful look, accusing her of calling the cops after all, and after everything that had happened the night before, too!

"No," Alison protested, "Stacy, this...."

"Uh." Carla staggered in next, rubbing her face with both hands. She was still stark naked except for the scarf wound around her head. Her eyes were tightly shut. Stacy took her by the arm and tried to steer her back into the bedroom, but she resisted, saying loudly, "I've got to p.i.s.s like a racehorse." Alison winced and felt her father do the same. Stacy opened one of Carla's eyes forcibly with two fingers and pointed her face into the living room. "Oh, s.h.i.t," said Carla, "don't you guys ever give up? I told her every d.a.m.n thing I know about everybody in the whole world. I feel like my G.o.dd.a.m.n brain is empty." She jerked away from Stacy and marched into the bathroom.

"Stacy..." Alison was feeling a bit frantic. Her father's eyes were wide. Great, how was she going to explain to him that she had not been up all night in an orgy? He was probably expecting a couple more naked women to pop out of the bedroom. On the other hand, who had invited him to come over without calling first anyway? Let him think what he wanted. Again she tried the introduction. "Stacy, this is..."

There was a knock on the connecting door and Mich.e.l.le came in carrying a measuring cup. "Hey, Alison," she began, and then stopped and gave a squeal of delight. "Mr. Kaine!"

He opened his arms wide and she ran over for a hug. "Mikey!" Alison looked on sourly. Mich.e.l.le got the hug while she was going to get bawled out. If they started talking football she was going to slap them both.

In the end Alison's father insisted on taking all five of them out to breakfast. There had been no turning him down. During the meal he paid attention to everyone in turn, insisting that Mich.e.l.le and Janka tell about their latest commissioned pieces, that Stacy give a small lecture on quilt making, and that Carla, oblivious to Mich.e.l.le's elbow in the ribs and Alison's discrete signals across the table, be oooed and ahhed over as she described her attack. Although he had seated Alison at his elbow he ignored her, except for a sad look in her direction during Carla's story. He had never called her to task in front of her friends when she was a child, either. Oh, well, she supposed she should be grateful that Carla had remembered, under his charm, to delete the s.e.x scene.

In fact, Alison was beginning to hope that she was going to escape a lecture altogether when Stacy clued into her father's hums and long looks and suggested brightly, "Why don't we all go get a donut and let Alison have a few minutes alone with her dad?" Thanks, traitor.

"Now listen here, my girl," he began immediately after they left. "I don't know what you've been doing, but you've caused a big stir at your station house, and your chiefs not too happy with you. You tell me the detectives aren't doing their job, and what I'm really finding is that they're angry, and rightly so, because you've been trying to do it for them. And puttin' yourself in danger doing it as well!"

"No, Daddy." Christ, there she went right away. She took a deep breath. "I saved that woman's life!" She said in an angry whisper. "Did you see her head? That was her throat he was trying to do that to. Are you going to blame me for that? What should I have done? Held up my hands and said 'Sorry, I'm not a.s.signed here and I don't want to step on anybody's toes?'"

"No, you did the right thing, and you did save her. But what I'm asking is, what were you doing there to begin with? And on a week night, too," he added, as if the next issue they were going to tackle was her study habits.

"I'm a lesbian, I was on-"

"Ah, don't try to feed me that line of c.r.a.p! Maybe you can shock those two jerks, but I don't buy it. You were snooping, is what you were doing. You've always been a snoop, ever since you were a little kid. You never could keep your nose out of anyone else's business. If anybody in the neighborhood got in trouble you were always the first one to know and the first one to tell."

"Yeah, well you always told me that was what was going to make me such a good detective."

"If you ever get recommended for a promotion...which is never going to happen if you keep this up!"

"Anybody can ask questions. I didn't get a word out of anyone by telling them that I was a cop!"

"Right, anybody can ask questions, but only if she's discreet about it, and can give up what she finds in a tactful way. Not if the detectives find out that she's been interviewing all their witnesses before them. Not if they find her directing traffic at the scene of the crime and telling them what to do."

"I didn't do anything wrong!" said Alison in frustration. "If it had been anyone else they would have thanked me. But those men don't like lesbians. Read my lips. They think we are the sc.u.m of the earth, and they are not busting their b.u.t.ts to solve this case. What they resented was that I had everything set up so that they had to follow through. Come on, you called them jerks yourself-you must know there's a problem."

He pursed up his lips and turned his head, caught, but not about to admit a thing.

"They're not even admitting that these attacks are related, are they?" she pressed.

"There's no evidence that they were. There was nothing found at the scene of the crimes that indicates one attacker. They have to go by what evidence they find."

"Look, Dad," she said, "what would you do if you ever found out that I was taking bribes?"

His face blanched, and for a moment she thought he was going to faint. Hastily she a.s.sured him. "No, no, I'm not, it was just an example. It was just to say that you wouldn't be able to deal with it if I were. Because you taught me not to be a bad cop. Dad, if I know that something is happening in a murder and it is not being brought to light because of someone else's incompetence or bigotry, and I don't do something about it, then I'm still being a bad cop. And if I don't do anything, if I say, okay, I'll give it up so I can get a promotion, isn't that promotion a kind of bribe?"

"If you really think that the officers involved aren't doing their best because they're prejudiced, you should go in and talk to Sergeant Obrachta."

"And he's going to listen to what I think, based on interviews while I was in a highly emotional situation that took half my face off, and put them over the word of two men who have been on the force for twenty years?"

"He's a fair man."

"I know that. But let's get real. You were concerned when you heard that I had come out to Jorgenson, because you knew that it amounted to coming out to the whole department, and you were afraid that I would be discriminated against. The official policy, the G.o.dd.a.m.n law is non-discrimination, but you were still afraid that it was going to happen. Now if you can think that, without a minute's hesitation, about people that you can call fair and good, then why the h.e.l.l can't you believe it about a couple of guys that even you call jerks?"

He was silent and she felt that for once she had scored her point.

All the women unloaded noisily from Mr. Kaine's large sedan at Alison's house. Alison gave her father a hug.

"Well, at least," he said, returning it in the style of the old Irish cop who treated all farewells between family members as if one of them were emigrating, "at least if you find out something, tell me or Rob so that we can leak it with some tact. You never were a tactful child."

"A promise." She waved as he drove off.

"I can walk home," Carla announced. It was the first thing Carla had said all morning that Alison was actually glad to hear. If Carla left immediately maybe she would still have time to jump Stacy's bones. She shivered deliciously with antic.i.p.ation, a feeling heightened by a long sensual look that Stacy shot at her.

Alison was so excited, in fact, that she almost had her hand on her front door before she noticed that anything was wrong. Then she acted automatically.

"Get back!" she barked, accompanying the command with a sweeping motion of her right arm that caught Stacy in the chest with a thud. There was some confusion, but Carla who had already been attacked once, dropped not only immediately down, but tumbled off the side of the porch, pulling Janka with her. Stacy and Mich.e.l.le followed a moment later. Alison's gun was already in her hand. Cautiously she flattened herself against the side of the house and then reached sideways to push the front door open-the door that had been locked with a deadbolt when she left for breakfast. A million questions ran through her head: Was it the Crusaders on Carla's tail? Were they armed? Was it related at all, or just your normal Capital Hill rapist or burglar? But these were like background noise, like the chattering of a crowd to which she paid no attention. She was thinking in slow, careful steps. Pushing the door open and drawing no fire, she could hear the intruder now; it sounded as if he were in the kitchen. More than one? She thought she heard voices. Cautiously she entered the room and crossed it, still against the wall. Now, as she approached the kitchen, she realized that she should have sent someone to phone for backup. Procedure had gone out of her head in the heat of anger at having her own home violated. It would be all right. The intruders were either idiots or novices, for they were chattering to one another as if they were making coffee in their own home. In fact, she thought she could hear dishes clanking. She took a deep breath and leapt into the doorway, the gun extended in both hands. "Freeze!" she shouted.