Blood Ties by Nicholas Guild Page A

another chat.” Sam was clenching the steering wheel as if he hated it. “But if that freak thinks I’m going to share any information with him, he really is crazy.”
    Then he looked at her and grinned, almost savagely.
    â€œI think your little hunch might just pan out, Ellie. I think this might be Our Boy.”
    Ellen didn’t answer. In theory she agreed. Tregear was the leading contender. He even fit the psychological profile, another narcissistic game player, a smart son of a bitch who thought the rest of the human race existed solely for his amusement. Another Brad, if you will.
    Except that this guy was even smarter than Brad, and Brad expressed his contempt of women—or, at least, of her—by dumping them without even the courtesy of a good-bye, which was a step or two up from cutting their guts out while they were still alive to enjoy it.
    â€œDidn’t you just love the way he played with us?” Sam shook his head and, as he changed lanes, almost sideswiped a little old lady in a white Buick. “He thinks he’s so smart. He thinks he can come this close to the fire and not get burned, the arrogant prick. Well, his arrogance will be his undoing. I’ll enjoy putting the cuffs on this one.”
    In that moment Ellen decided she wouldn’t tell Sam about the hair samples.

 
    7
    Tregear saw off his visitors, locked the door behind them and went upstairs to the guest bathroom.
    There was a bathroom immediately across the hall from his bedroom, but it didn’t have a shower stall, which he preferred to washing himself while he stood in a bathtub screened by a plastic curtain decorated with blue waves and mermaids. He liked to be able to see out, just in case he should have forgotten to lock the door.
    Thus he always showered in the guest bathroom. Otherwise, he used the one next to his bedroom.
    He wasn’t absolutely sure that Ellen Ridley had had some devious purpose in visiting his bathroom, but he preferred to know these things.
    The inside of the sink was wet and there was a droplet of liquid soap clinging to the nozzle of the dispenser, so she had washed her hands. But the toilet seat was still up. How many women would think to put the toilet seat back up? So the odds were good that she had flushed the toilet without actually using it.
    And thus it followed that she had been up to something.
    The room contained only the toilet, the sink, which she had used, a medicine cabinet, which contained nothing except a bottle of rubbing alcohol and three boxes of bandages, and a shower. Tregear opened the shower door.
    There was nothing obvious, so he got down on his hands and knees for a closer look.
    Sure enough, he found a tiny scratch in the metal rim of the drain. It sparkled under the light, so it was new. Inspector Ridley had been here ahead of him.
    Tregear pried off the drain cap, but there didn’t seem to be anything remarkable about the drain. Then he turned the cap over and had a look at the inside.
    There were two strands of his hair just under the top, but the sides, where he knew from experience that hair would be more likely to collect, were perfectly clean—just as if someone had scoured all the way around with her finger.
    Now, who could that have been?
    He popped the drain cap back into place, closed the shower door and went back downstairs to his kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. When it was ready, he took it with him into the living room and sat down on the leather chair. As he drank the tea, he stared at the left side of the sofa, where Inspector Ridley had been sitting not twenty minutes earlier. He seemed to be trying to conjure her up out of the thin air, and perhaps he was.
    â€œSneaky girl,” he said, without anger, in a voice that was just audible. “Now why did you do that?”
    The obvious answer had of course occurred to him, but he almost dismissed it out of hand as too wildly improbable. What could she possibly