A Fine Specimen (3 page)

“Oh!” She completely
forgot her intimidation as she rushed to his side, kneeling, pulling her book
bag behind her. She’d once burnt herself with boiling water and could still
remember the stinging pain. She had a small hand towel in her bag and as she
pulled it hastily out to sponge away the worst of the mess, her 2008 hardback
edition of
Theories of Policing in Western Societies
—all one thousand,
forty-seven heavy, glossy pages of it—spilled out and landed squarely, heavily
on the lieutenant’s shiny black lace-up shoe.

“
Ow
!” This time
he cried out and instantly his office door opened. Sergeant Martello stuck her
head in and frowned at the sight of the two of them, the lieutenant slapping
his thighs and Caitlin kneeling at his feet, doing…something to him.

“What’s going on here?”
A sharp indrawn breath of outrage. “Lieutenant Cruz, you should be ashamed of
yourself! Why, that poor child—”

“This poor child,” he
said between clenched teeth, “is doing her best to kill me, and she’s doing a
very good job of it. Now if you’ll just leave, Sergeant, we can let Ms. Summers
finish me off in peace.”

Caitlin looked up at the
lieutenant in surprise.

He has a sense of
humor?
Apparently, he did.
Heavy-handed humor, it was true, but it was a minor miracle he had it at
all—she’d been expecting a burst of rage. Instead, though his face was drawn
into long lines of pain, his eyes, those dark, fascinating eyes, had something
in them which in a lesser man might be called a twinkle.

It was probably an
effect of the light.

“I’m really, really
sorry, Lieutenant,” Caitlin said humbly, sitting back on her heels. She wrung
out her little hand towel over the wastepaper basket and watched the brown
sludge drip down. Maybe the coffee would taste better now that it had been
filtered through Lieutenant Alejandro Cruz’s pants and her towel.

“Yes, I can see that you
are.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle as he put a hard hand under her elbow
and lifted her effortlessly to her feet. “Nonetheless, I’d be really grateful
if you would just sit down over there while we finish our conversation and
don’t
move
.”

Caitlin sat down and
folded her hands in her lap, totally unnerved at the thought of what she’d
done. She got very clumsy when she was nervous, so she tightened her hands in
her lap and resolved to remain calm and focused. And to breathe from the
diaphragm the way her yoga instructor had taught her.

“So.” As if
unconsciously echoing her, he put his own clasped hands on the desk in front of
him. Caitlin stared at his hands. Large, long-fingered, powerful, graceful.
Short black hairs on the backs. Nails trimmed, unbuffed. There was a small
white scar on the back of his right hand, like a lightning bolt in the flesh.
Was that a
tattoo
on his wrist? She jerked her head up.

“I beg your pardon,
Lieutenant?” He had said something and she had been lost in contemplation of
his hands.

“I said,” he repeated
patiently, “would you please explain to me exactly what it is that you want?”

To study you
, Caitlin wanted to say, but couldn’t, much as
she’d like to. Lieutenant Cruz was a walking, talking display of dominance.
She’d give her eyeteeth to be able to film him for a year. They’d give her the
Nobel. Certainly she’d make her name in academia. She’d get tenure immediately.
Probably at Harvard.

“I’m a graduate student
at St. Mary’s over in Grant Falls and I’m writing my dissertation on…certain
aspects of law enforcement,” she said finally.

“Dominance displays,”
the lieutenant said dryly.

“Well…yes.” Caitlin
coughed discreetly. Best to simply glide over that aspect. Couldn’t have the lieutenant
thinking she would be studying
him
specifically, though now that she’d
seen him, she couldn’t even imagine studying anyone else. “I’ve done most of
the preliminary research, but Ray—Captain Avery—convinced me that my
dissertation would profit from time spent actually observing firsthand the
workings of a police force.”

“You said you were an
expert but I don’t get it. How on earth can you be an expert on law enforcement
if you aren’t a police officer?” he asked. He sounded genuinely puzzled.

Caitlin tried not to
smile. How many times had academics in the social sciences came across this
prejudice? You could explain to practitioners until you were blue in the face
that professions needed a theoretical underpinning, but it never sank in. And
yet, what academics did was important. They created a framework within which
experience could be fitted. Without that framework, experience was lost, energy
dissipated. “Easy. Most research on the subject is done by academics, not
practitioners. It’s the same in most fields, you know. However, most academics
research secondary sources. That’s why Captain Avery’s classes were so
priceless,” she said earnestly, leaning forward in her eagerness. “They were
incredibly popular. He gave us so many precious insights into the practice of
policing. Just absolutely fascinating.”

Lieutenant Cruz
straightened in his chair. “Captain Avery’s classes?”

“Why yes.” Caitlin
stared at him. “Captain Avery taught a seminar at St. Mary’s, The History of
Law Enforcement, during the spring semester. Didn’t you know?”

Alex froze and stared.
So
that
was where Ray had gone off to? Off to teach nerds at some
school? What was with that? What the fuck was he doing teaching instead of
doing?

And yet, it explained a
lot.

Ray’d been disappearing
for weeks at a time over the past six months, leaving Alex in charge. Ray had
had tons of accumulated leave to use up. Everyone knew he was retiring soon and
no one had asked questions, least of all Alex. Ray had the right to do what he
wanted, when he wanted, but still, Alex missed him something fierce.

He’d always bounced
ideas off Ray, vented his frustrations with him. The day hadn’t been complete
without a cold beer with Ray at The Shamrock, an Irish pub run by a
Singaporean-Irishman named Li O’Shannesy.

Everyone assumed Alex
wanted to take Ray’s place as captain, but Alex didn’t. He’d rather have Ray
remain as captain, and friend, than rise in rank.

“No,” he said slowly. “I
didn’t know.”

Alex focused on the
young woman in front of him. Messy ponytail. Pale, perfect, poreless skin.
Straight little nose with delicately flared nostrils. Full, unpainted lips.
Perfect oval face. Clothes ancient and shapeless. Take away the untidy
externals and she was extraordinarily beautiful—and she looked about sixteen.

This was not good. When
she’d been ineffectually patting his trousers with her small, pale hands to sop
up the sludge known here as coffee, he’d felt the first stirrings of his cock
in, fuck…way,
way
too long. He tried to think back to the last time he’d
had sex and came up blank.

Jesus, maybe the last
time he’d gotten laid had been with that gorgeous barracuda of a real estate
agent he’d hooked up with…what? Around Christmas? Fuck, that long ago?

She’d been smart,
beautiful and scary as hell. For just a moment, as he put his cock in her, he
wondered if he’d ever get it back.

Had he had sex since?
Nope, he decided, after a quick consult with his dick. And after that brief,
unsatisfactory liaison, the hunt for Lopez had heated up and he’d been putting
in sixteen-hour days at the cop shop.

He needed to get laid
again, fast, if a student could turn him on. At work, no less. Alex believed
strongly is keeping work separate from the rest of his life, and that included
sex. Of course, lately, his entire life
was
work, with no time for
anything else. There really wasn’t any rest of his life.

Only that would explain
a semi-hard-on because Caitlin Summers’ hands had come perilously near his
groin. She wasn’t his type at all. He liked women who knew the score. And
though she said she was a graduate student, she looked so impossibly young…

“How old are you?” he
asked abruptly.

Caitlin Summers blinked.
“Twenty-eight. Why?”

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.