Dakota by Gwen Florio

bed? And what’s the deal with Brevik? He’s got this freak working for him. Do you know anything about that?” Trying to change the subject, and maybe get some sympathy, too. Neither worked.
    “Let’s just say it’s a relief not to have spent the night with someone I apparently can’t trust at all. When you get back, you might want to think about getting your own place. It’s not like it’ll take you any time at all to pack. You never really moved into mine. I should have known.”
    “Charlie—” The phone was dead at her ear. Lola kicked open the back of the truck and let Bub do his business by himself. “Damn.” She lay back in the twisted sleeping bag and tried to remember the last time she’d had anything resembling a relationship, let alone what seemed to be a relatively healthy one. She’d spent years in Afghanistan limiting herself to practical, prescriptive sex, preferably with colleagues getting ready to rotate to another assignment or aid workers winding up their tours of duty. Which, she’d told herself when things started with Charlie, was how things were likely to go with him, too. But she’d been secretly pleased as the weeks accumulated with neither insecurities nor drama, and passion limited to bed, which was where it belonged. She’d thought they were comfortable together. Apparently, she’d been wrong. Bub touched an icy nose to her neck just as the phone rang again.
    “Jesus!” she shouted. Then, “Charlie, I’m sorry. That wasn’t meant for you.”
    “This isn’t Charlie. But you owe that man an apology. And me, too.”
    “Jan.” Lola held the phone away and glared at it, then put it back to her ear. “What do you want?”
    “What do you think I want? I want you to stay the hell away from my story. Charlie just called me and said you were all over it. Jorkki is going to fire your ass.”
    The dog was back on Lola’s chest. Which, she thought was a good thing. The effort required to speak made her words seem slow, measured. “Jan. I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Charlie. And if Jorkki tries to fire me, I’m going to tell him, too. It’s crazy for me to be over here and not ask about Judith. Besides, I think this is about more than Judith.”
    Lola could practically feel Jan’s struggle to control her curiosity.
    “How’s that?” Jan spoke past a yawn whose fakery came through loud and clear.
    “I think it’s about all those girls. Too many of them, you know? All from the same place. All in trouble with the law. Now one of them’s dead. You know what we say—”
    “There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Jan broke in with the oft-repeated lesson.
    “Exactly,” Lola said. “So why don’t you do some poking around back there, and I’ll do some here. Get their photos. Check the school library. The yearbooks should have them.” Lola knew that the minute Jan put faces to the names, found out the barest facts about the girls, they’d be real to her and she’d be hooked. “I’ll feed you whatever I find out here. Think what it would mean to people for you to get to the bottom of whatever happened to those girls.” She gave Jan a moment to salivate over the irresistible possibilities that lay on the silver platter she’d just extended. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a story—my own story—to work on.” This time, she made sure that she was the one who hung up first.
    She spit on her hands and ran her fingers through her hair. It was growing out in ways that reminded her why she’d cropped it so short for so many years. Now she had a good three inches of unruly curls, one more layer of insulation between her and the cold. Silly to even worry about her hair, really, given that it would spend most of the day hidden in a hat. Which she located and pulled onto her head with a jerk, making sure it covered her ears. Weeks earlier, she’d returned from a careless outing with one lobe white and frozen. The thawing-out process was something