I should have known.”
He frowned. She’d lost him. “Known what?”
“That if anyone would have reported finding it, it had to be someone honorable.”
He didn’t know how well that description fit him. There were times, when he and Santini were chasing down a so-called suspect, someone who took rather than earned and beat anyone who got in his way, that he found himself toying with the notion of taking the law into his own hands. Of going that extra step and making the felon pay for his crimes without dragging the court system and their endless delays into it.
At bottom, he knew that way was anarchy, so he had never acted upon his rare impulses. Still, it was exceedingly tempting to turn thought into reality….
“So,” the woman on the other end of his telephone was saying, “if you’ll just give me your address, I can be over within the hour, depending on where you live, if that’s all right with you.”
No, it wasn’t all right with him. It was so far from all right with him that there was no human way to chart it. Giving out his address was something he rarely did. The department knew where he lived. So did his ex-wife, although with her being in California, he doubted if that made a difference.
But aside from key members of the department, and Eli Levy, the old man who ran the mom-and-pop store he frequented, no one else knew where he lived. He was as private a man as possible in this age of information invasion. And it was going to remain that way.
“Why don’t you come down to the precinct tomorrow?” The suggestion was said in such a way that it clearly wasn’t a suggestion at all but an order. “I’ll have it for you then. Say nine o’clock?”
He heard a slight hesitation on the other end, as if she were torn over something. “I have to be in school at nine.”
“You’re a student?”
“No,” she laughed, ushering in another shiver. “I’m a teacher.”
He listened to his air-conditioning unit struggling. “But this is summer,” he pointed out.
“It’s an all-year school,” she told him. “Is four o’clock all right?”
Never would be better, he thought, but he’d gotten himself into this. The sooner it was over, the better everything would be. He and Santini had some canvassing to do involving the string of restaurant robberies they were investigating, but he could see to it that he was back at the precinct by four. Santini wouldn’t object.
“Four o’clock,” he echoed. “I’m at the fifty-first precinct.”
He began to give her the address but she stopped him. “I know where that is.”
He wondered if that meant she just passed it on a regular basis, or that she had firsthand dealings with one or more of the people there. Again, the thought of a confidence game came to mind. But if that was the case, she was one of the best scam artists he’d ever encountered. “Third floor. Ask for James Munro.”
“Like the president.”
Everyone said that. It took effort for him not to give in to irritation. Instead, he kept his temper in check. “Yeah, like the president. Except we spell the last name differently.”
She surprised him by apologizing. “Sorry, you must hear that all the time.”
There was that little laugh again. The one that sounded like bluebells ringing. The thought caught him up short. Since when did he wax poetic about anything, much less some stranger’s voice on the phone? He was getting punchy. That last outing with Stanley in this heat had done him in.
“It’s just that I’m so very excited.”
She obviously meant that by way of an explanation. Why the words would suddenly nudge things around in his mind, forming close to erotic thoughts about a woman he had never even laid eyes on, he had no idea.
Despite all logic, a feeling vaguely akin to arousal slipped through him.
Annoyed with himself and the caller, he banked his reaction down immediately. Maybe Santini with all his talk of available women and how he should be out there was seeping into his subconscious.
Whatever the cause, he didn’t like it. Didn’t like not having complete control over every part of himself. Especially his mind.
“Tomorrow, then,” he said. He was about to hang up, then a thought occurred to him. He didn’t exactly have a nine-to-five job where he could be found in a given place at a given time. Circumstances did have a way of intervening. Because of that, though it was against his better judgment, he added, “Let me give you my cell number, just in case you get lost.”
“I won’t get lost, James,” she said with the kind of confidence that came from self-awareness rather than bravado. “But I appreciate the offer.”
Everything the woman said appealed to him. It took effort not to allow himself to be drawn in.
James fairly barked out the number at her, then quickly hung up before she could say anything further that would cause him to linger on the phone. He shook his head, not in disbelief but to get his bearings back.
As he banished the residue of the strange sensations that were still milling around him like morning mists on the moors, he became aware that Stanley was eyeing him with what appeared to be satisfaction, if such an emotion could have been attributed to a four-footed animal.
He knew what that was all about. In his opinion, Stanley was smarter than a lot of people he had to deal with.
“Okay,” he sighed, “you win. Steak. Tomorrow.” Stanley came closer and laid his head on James’s lap. He could feel the animal’s warm breath on his thigh. “I’m not going to the store tonight so you can just back off, you hear me? Go stare down something else.”
It turned out to be a Mexican standoff. James did manage to hold firm about his resolution not to go to the grocery store to buy the dog the promised steak tonight. However, unable to endure the animal’s soulful, penetrating look for more than fifteen minutes, he’d wound up taking the chicken breast he’d meant for his own dinner out of the refrigerator and frying it up for the both of them.
The preponderance of the meal, as always, went to Stanley. The dog took it as his due.
It smelled faintly of cleaning products and the sweat of fear, despite the noble efforts of the less than powerful air-conditioning system struggling to make a difference against the oppressive weather outside.
Walking just inside the front door, Constance Beaulieu took a moment to absorb it all. She’d never been inside a police station before. Even when she’d called to report her mother’s cameo stolen, two policemen had been sent to her to take down the information.
Privilege did that, she thought with a hint of a smile playing along her lips. That and the fact that her parents had been friends with New York’s chief of police, the man she’d grown up calling Uncle Bob. The man who she believed, had her mother been so inclined, would have become her stepfather after her own father had passed away.
But her mother had been a one-man woman to her dying breath and Bob Wheeler
