A Fine Specimen Read online

  Alex let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. The reaction he’d had to her patting his groin would have been inappropriate—illegal, actually—had she been as old as she looked. The last thing he needed was to turn into a dirty old man at the age of thirty-eight. Since when did he get turned on by school kids? Okay, so it had been a long time since he’d gotten his rocks off with anything other than his fist—so sue him, he’d been busy—but being turned on by jailbait would have been over the top.

  However, his reactions were perfectly normal, not to mention legal—though still inappropriate at work—if she was twenty-eight.

  “Never mind,” Alex muttered. “So I guess you took some courses from Ray?”

  “Yes,” she said enthusiastically, head bobbing, wisps of platinum hair flying around her face. “Oh yes. He gave some incredibly interesting lectures. We were all so enthralled. The stories he told… He gave us such fascinating viewpoints from…the field, I guess you’d call it.”

  “I guess I would,” Alex said dryly. He’d always thought of policing as strictly a hands-on business. As practical as it was possible to be, like being a plumber or a vermin exterminator or a proctologist. People broke the law and he and his men tried their best to check them into the Gray Bar Hotel. Nothing theoretical about it.

  She leaned forward earnestly. “Anyway, Captain Avery insisted that I gain information firsthand. He said that even if I couldn’t put it in the footnotes, it was important to know what law enforcement feels like.”

  “Like crap,” Alex muttered, thinking about Ratso’s escape. Thinking that Angelo Lopez was going to spend another day as a free man, free to wreck lives. That sucked, big time.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind,” Alex said. “Listen, Ms. Summers. It’s been very interesting talking to you, and I’m glad to hear that Ray has been using his time profitably teaching you police theory while we’ve been running around foolishly wasting ours chasing crooks, but I’m afraid that there’s no question of you hanging around for a week. Or even ten minutes, for that matter. This is a working police station, not a lab for out-of-work academics.” He placed his hands palm down on his desktop. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Lieutenant Cruz,” she said softly, looking up at him. “I have something else to say to you.” She was gripping her hands tightly together. Her hands were pretty, slender and delicate, with a little ink stain on the middle finger of her right hand. A scholar who actually wrote with a pen? He thought people didn’t know how to write with pens anymore.

  Alex had four snitches, a sergeant and a district attorney waiting for him, so he was sorely tempted to stand, stride to the door and open it in a not-so-subtle invitation for her to leave. He didn’t, but sat impatiently to hear what else she had to say. Ray had sent this girl—woman—so if she had one more thing to say to him, he was honor-bound to listen to her. Then he’d say “no way” as gently as he could and escort the girl—the woman—to the door. Ray would expect him to be polite.

  He resisted looking at his watch, but it didn’t make any difference. He knew how to gauge time. Caitlin Summers had another three minutes with him, tops. Then he was going to tell her to fuck off.

  Politely, of course. She was a civilian.

  And after all, Ray had sent her.

  Caitlin realized that so far the interview had gone more or less precisely as Ray had said it would—except that Ray could never have guessed that she would manage to burn the lieutenant’s thigh and mangle his foot. Ray had insisted that she say what she was going to say next, but her instinct told her that the lieutenant was not going to like it.

  “Okay. Say what you have to say,” he growled. The lieutenant didn’t even bother to put hostility in his voice. He didn’t have to—the boredom and indifference were enough.

  He wasn’t fidgeting and he wasn’t rolling his eyes, or drumming his fingers on the desktop or tapping his foot. He was perfectly composed. But he hummed with frustrated energy as he sat there, clearly hating to waste even another minute with her.

  Caitlin could feel the force field of his impatience from across the desk and it was almost frightening how powerful it was. It wasn’t even a power ploy like some executives pull—I am so important I cannot waste even a second more of my precious time with you. She recognized those subliminal messages from her research into corporate culture, where half the time the executives had absolutely nothing on their schedules besides two-hour lunches and were otherwise busy trying to make themselves look important with pretend work.

  No, this was the real thing—a powerful man with important work to do, impatiently biding his time, his spirit already somewhere else.

  Caitlin drew in a deep breath, unobtrusively—dominant males of any species recognized distressed breathing patterns instinctively.

  She didn’t want to say what was coming next, but Ray had insisted. She’d better just get it out and get it over with.

  The lieutenant was already rising.

  Caitlin bit her lip and forced the words past the tightness in her throat. There was no polite way to say it, so she just blurted it out. “Ray—um, Captain Avery—said to tell you that you owe him. And that he’s collecting.”

  To her astonishment, he dropped back heavily into his chair as if he’d been suddenly weighted down with lead. Or knocked in the head.

  He looked sucker-punched.

  “I owe Ray,” he repeated slowly, “and he’s collecting.”

  He hadn’t betrayed his feelings other than by narrowing his eyes, but he’d had the wind knocked clean out of him, that was clear. Whatever hold Ray thought he had over Alejandro Cruz, it was real, at least in the lieutenant’s eyes. She couldn’t imagine anything else stopping the lieutenant, other than a bullet to the head.

  They stared at each in silence. Caitlin didn’t dare look away—a sure sign of weakness. She didn’t even dare so much as blink. Though her chest felt constricted, she tried to breathe normally.

  She couldn’t read his face at all. Though years of study in the behavioral sciences had taught her how to read more or less every human expression in a number of different cultures, she was stymied here, for the first time.

  Faces are extraordinary tools of human communication. She’d studied under Professor Hamilton Barstow, an expert on facial expressions in cultures throughout the world. So she could decipher even deadpan expressions by slight corrugations of the brow, by the muscles around the mouth, by the tilt of the head. Neurolinguistics was a big help too, studying the direction the eyes traveled.

  And if the face didn’t work, there was always body language, another field of expertise for her.

  However, none of her training, experience or book learning helped right now. There was simply no way to decipher what Alejandro Cruz was thinking by any physical means. He’d learned impassivity at a tougher school than the Department of Social Sciences at St. Mary’s.

  This was a master.

  Caitlin did the only thing she could do—she simply sat back and waited.

  There was nothing she could do or say to sway him in any way. She’d said her piece—repeating Ray Avery’s words—and now whether Alejandro Cruz acknowledged his mysterious debt to Avery or not was entirely up to him.

  “Okay.” He slapped the desk with flat hands and surged out of his seat as she gaped up at him. “Come with me, Ms. Law Enforcement. We’re going out on a Code Seven.”

  A Code Seven! Wow! Ray was right! This was going to work after all! She was going to get some field experience. And a Code Seven at that!

  Caitlin stood up too. “All right,” she said, trying to still her hammering heart. “A Code Seven! Oh my gosh, that’s so exciting! Thank you!” She was hastily gathering her things, including the book that nearly lamed him. A pen fell out of her bag and she stuffed it back in. “What’s a Code Seven? An emergency? No, that’s in hospitals, I remember that from ER and Scrubs. Is a Code Seven a robbery? Arson? A kidnapping?”

 
“No.” The lieutenant strode out of his office and she rushed to catch up with him.

  Caitlin tried to thread her way quickly through the desks and past the officers loitering and laughing in the large squad room. As she hurried past a desk, her book bag caught a pile of CDs. They spilled to the floor with a clatter. “Sorry,” she mumbled as she bent down. The lieutenant had stopped at the door on the far side of the room, waiting while she scrambled to pick them up, red-faced.

  “That’s okay, honey.” Kathy Martello bent to help her. “It’s much too crowded in here. I’m always bumping into things.”

  Caitlin looked around furtively, hoping the lieutenant wasn’t watching her too closely. Those dark eyes were far too observant. Her hands scrabbled to pick the CDs up.

  “Quick,” she whispered to Sergeant Martello behind her hand. God forbid he hear her. Ray had described the lieutenant as having preternaturally acute hearing.

  Actually, his exact words had been, “Alex can hear a fly fart in the next room.”

  Sergeant Martello looked at her kindly, brows raised, as Caitlin asked, “What’s a Code Seven? I’m going out on one with Lieutenant Cruz.”

  Kathy Martello straightened suddenly, eyes wide, hands full of CDs. “You’re going out…on a Code Seven? With the Loot?” she repeated, looking stunned.

  “Yes,” Caitlin hissed, fairly dancing with impatience. God! This was so exciting! “What is it? What’s a Code Seven?”

  “Whoa, I am sooo not going there.” Kathy looked over to the lieutenant, standing with his arms crossed, then looked back at Caitlin. She shook her head with a grin, miming zipping her mouth. “You’ll have to ask the Loot himself what a Code Seven is, honey.”

  Caitlin Summers approached him gingerly after picking up the mess she’d made. Alex watched her as she made her way toward him, weaving gracefully among the desks. The usually noisy squad room grew quiet as she walked by, heads swiveling, phones on shoulders, fingers lifting from keyboards. When she finally reached him, she stopped, clutching her book bag with white knuckles.

  Fuck, but she’d thrown him. Ray said to tell you that you owed him.

  Oh yeah. He owed Ray. And how.

  Well, looked like Ray had finally called in his chips.

  Ray was absolutely right, no question. Alex owed the man, big time. Twenty years ago Alex had been a worthless punk, a piece of shit running with a gang like a rat in a pack, with maybe a year or two left to live, if he was lucky, before he got wasted in a shootout or in a revenge killing by a rival gang.

  For some reason known only to himself and God, Ray Avery had seen something in him. Something Alex himself had taken years to see.

  Certainly neither his alcoholic mother nor his drug-addled father had ever taken the time or the energy to look beyond Alex’s size and strength and toughness to see whether there was anything else there.

  Ray had. Ray had singled him out, roughed him up and generally knocked some sense into him. And then Ray had hounded him until he had joined the Police Academy. Where Alex had surprised himself and his instructors—but not Ray—by being a natural.

  Alex would have given anything he possessed to Ray, anything at all—certainly his life. That was nothing. His life was Ray’s for the asking. But Ray had refused everything he wanted to offer him, even thanks. All he said was that one day he would collect.

  Well, looked as if that day was finally here, in the form of a very, very pretty woman who was going to fuck with his schedule and his head and his dick for the next week. A crucial week, during which he was expecting to have to all but camp out at the station house as they ran Ratso to ground.

  Alex ran a hand down his face, stalling, but there was no question in his mind what he had to do. If Ray wanted a pint of blood and a pound of flesh, Alex would gladly, unquestioningly give it.

  But Jesus, not this. Somehow, this was worse.

  He looked again at the girl—no, dammit, woman—standing in front of him. She was looking at him anxiously out of enormous blue eyes, the same color as her dress. The same color as the sea at dawn. The same color as the spring sky…

  Alex drew in a sharp breath, willing his dick to stay down. It had taken enthusiastic note of how incredibly pretty she was underneath her studenty getup. It didn’t care at all that she wasn’t Alex’s type, all it wanted was to get into her pants…

  Oh fuck. How was he going to get any work done with this…this distraction next to him?

  “Um, Lieutenant Cruz?”

  “Alex.” If she was going to fuck with his head and his week, at least they should be on first-name terms.

  She nodded. “Okay, Lieu— Alex. Um, Alex?”

  Damn but she was pretty. Even her voice was pretty, soft and light. Was that a touch of the South he heard in her voice?

  She was watching him, pale blue eyes unblinking.

  Alex sighed. “Yeah?”

  “Um, what’s a Code Seven?”

  Alex didn’t answer immediately but instead stared out, jaws clenched, over her head at his men, sending out the silent signal—showtime’s over.

  His men snapped to.

  In Alex’s mind, even the women were his men. One look from him and it was like the scene in Sleeping Beauty where the castle comes to life. Inside of a minute, there was the usual hustle-bustle. Even the phones starting ringing again.

  Alex gave one long last look at the squad room. He longed to stay here, with his men. This was where he belonged.

  Today’s fuckup with Ratso made him even more anxious to get moving on a report of Lopez’s finances that had come in from the forensic economists at the FBI. He had a four o’clock meeting with the shrink who’d carried out the compulsory psych evaluation on one of his men who’d shot a scumbag last week. The SWAT guys were begging for new ceramic plates to add to the Kevlar body armor and he was moving heaven and earth to find the money for them. Today was not a day he wanted to be babysitting, not even for pretty girls sent to him by Ray. Not even if the pretty girl in question was waking up his dormant libido.

  “What’s a Code Seven?” he repeated, taking her arm and moving to the stairs. “Lunch.”

  Chapter Three

  They were walking down the big marble staircase Caitlin knew had been built in 1934, at the height of the Depression, as part of the WPA. She knew everything about the building, about its history and the role it had played in Baylorville. She’d been looking forward to working here for the next week.

  Now she had the distinct feeling that if Lieutenant Cruz—Alex—had any say in the matter, she’d never walk back up this staircase ever again.

  The meeting had gone more or less precisely as Ray had said it would. Caitlin had been dead set against telling the lieutenant she was here to collect on a debt. Didn’t make any difference what she thought though, because Ray insisted. Ray was another super-alpha male.

  Caitlin had hated saying what she’d said. It sounded horribly like blackmail, but Ray had insisted and he could be very…forceful. Though Ray was short and stout, with bright blue eyes and a bushy white mane of hair—the physical opposite of the lieutenant…Alex—they both shared the kind of personality it was hard to say no to.

  Ray had simply straightened his shoulders, deepened his voice, sharpened his gaze and had gotten his way.

  That was probably part of the psychological profile of a police officer, she mused. A certain…persuasiveness. It was an interesting point and there was a lot of literature to back it up, starting from Anderson Carter, who had noted that in his groundbreaking study in the ’50s…

  Caitlin emerged blinking into the bright light of a Southern California June afternoon.

  She needed to pay attention here. Alex was very cool and very smooth. She’d just been herded out of the police station without anything to show for it. He very definitely had not said that she could spend time in the station for her research. All he’d committed himself to was lunch.

  Man, he was good. A real player.

  He put a large
hand to her elbow to turn her right and she instinctively followed his lead, behaving humiliatingly like a little lamb in the presence of a wolf. This wasn’t good. She knew better than this. She had to take back the initiative.

  Over lunch, he was probably going to start listing the reasons why she’d be in the way, why she’d impede important police work, why there was no question of her interrupting his officers. He would be extremely persuasive and he had a very dominant personality. There was a real risk here of coming away empty-handed.

  Pulling Ray out of a hat like a rabbit would only work once. The Loot, as Kathy called him, was perfectly capable of somehow twisting things around so that she spent time in the Archives instead of the station house. Then, technically, he’d be off the hook with Ray.

  “You don’t need to feed me, Lieutenant,” Caitlin said. “I don’t want to take you away from your work. All I need is a few moments of your time and your permission to talk with your officers.”

  “I told you to call me Alex.” He wasn’t even listening. “Here, let me carry that.” Before she could even think of protesting, he’d shouldered her heavy book bag.

  Caitlin thought she would have to scramble to keep up with him, but he adjusted the stride of his long legs to hers and she was able to walk at a comfortable pace by his side.

  She tried not to watch him as he walked along beside her, but it was hard to keep her eyes off him. The man moved with a strong, easy grace, an alpha male animal in its prime, head high, shoulders back, gaze direct. His jacket covered the shoulder holster with its weapon, but he didn’t need it. He had the classic dominant male posture. As he walked, he signaled he was master of all he surveyed.

  This was his street, his turf, and here he was the king. Everyone on the street acknowledged him in classic submissive or acceptance behavior. Passersby on the sidewalk dropped their eyes to the ground. A news vendor across the street waved, a woman behind the counter of a bakery shop smiled at him. A taxi cab driver gave a tiny hoot of his horn as he drove by. Alex nodded to everyone.