A Fine Specimen (2 page)

She cleared her throat.
“May I speak with you a moment?”

Alex pinched the bridge
of his nose. Hard. It was shaping up to be one of those days. First Ratso Colby
slithering his skinny frame through the toilet window of a skanky dive, taking
with him Cruz’s best hope of nailing Angelo Lopez this year. Then Ray Avery
siccing a geek on him. And not just any geek, no sirree. A geek who was
supposed to spend a week glued to his side, getting in his way while he was
working night and day to put Lopez away. What the fuck was that about? Ray knew
better than that.

And now fucking
babies
wandering in off the street, asking for him.

Be polite now
, Alex reminded himself.
Don’t snap.
The
kid was going to grow up and vote some day and every police circular stressed
good relations with the community.

“Look, miss,” Cruz said
in his best talking-to-baby-civilians voice. “This is not where you want to be.
Trust me on this. Now if you go back down to the ground floor you’ll find a big
desk, and behind that desk is the muster sergeant. He’s the one you want to
talk to.”

“No, I don’t want the
muster sergeant.” The girl widened her stance, picked up her book bag and held
it in front of her like a shield. She took a deep breath. “I need to talk to Lieutenant
Alejandro Cruz.”

“Well, that’s me, all
right.” Alex tried to stretch his mouth into a reassuring smile and felt rarely
used facial muscles balk. “And who the fu— Who are you?”

“Caitlin Summers,” she
said.

“Well, look, Miss
Summers, I don’t know what you want from—” Alex broke off, appalled. His brain
spun. Caitlin Summers.

Jesus.
C. Summers
.

He rose slowly and his
eyes widened in horror. “Dear sweet God, don’t tell me you’re—”

“The fucking pencil-dick
geek,” Caitlin Summers said softly. “Yes, I am.”

Lieutenant Alejandro
Cruz was the most
alpha
alpha male Caitlin had ever seen. Wow, this guy
was definitely the leader of the pack, top gun, the apex of the food chain.

A dominance hierarchy in
a police station was just as necessary as in a wolf pack, and for the same
reason—to maintain order and reduce conflict in a group of aggressive beings.
Otherwise the group—or pack—would disintegrate into prolonged bouts of
dangerous, possibly fatal fighting. So someone had to be the alpha male—and the
lieutenant was definitely it.

On her way toward Lieutenant
Cruz’s lair—
office
—Caitlin had noticed how, the closer she got to it,
the more the easy banter and noise the officers made seemed to gradually fade,
until silence reigned outside his office. Now that she’d seen him, she could
understand why.

Lieutenant Cruz was
authority personified, alpha in every way there was. Totally a textbook case.
His power didn’t rest with a huge physique or with status symbol clothes.
Standing, he was much taller than she was, but then she wasn’t very tall. He
had broad shoulders and was clearly very fit, but there were bigger men around.
The man who’d been talking to Lieutenant Cruz, for example. He was a walking
meat mountain. For all his size, however, that man could be overlooked in a
room. Not Lieutenant Cruz. All eyes would immediately turn to the prime male.

Lieutenant Cruz’s
clothes were nondescript. White shirt, black tie, black trousers, black leather
belt, which again was textbook. He didn’t need Armani or Versace or Hugo Boss clothes
to prevail. He didn’t need to dress for power. He
was
power.

There was power in the
dark eyes, in the chiseled jaw, in the corded neck. Strength, authority and
responsibility were right there, in every feature of his face, in every line of
his body.

He was watching her out
of black eyes, his face without expression. The lines of his face were sharp,
angular.

Not for the first time,
Caitlin wondered at Ray Avery’s advice. More than advice, really—insistence.
Ray had been urging her for weeks to spend time in a station house to round out
the information in her dissertation on Dominance Hierarchies in Law
Enforcement.

You’ll like Alex
, Ray had said.
He’s a nice man.

Caitlin wasn’t entirely
sure
nice
was the right word to describe Alejandro Cruz.
Overwhelming
,
maybe, oh yeah.
Intimidating
, certainly. But
nice
?

Caitlin stepped forward,
feeling with each step as if she were moving into a force field. A power
greater than her own. If she’d been convinced her studies had taught her how to
deal with the male of her species, she had to think again. This was an entirely
different order of magnitude from dealing with a fellow graduate student or an
associate professor or even—God!—the dean.

This was raw,
unadulterated male power, backed up by the weight of the entire U.S.
government—not to mention a gun—and she couldn’t possibly match it in any way.

But she’d promised Ray,
so she walked forward slowly, as if through a sea of molasses. Caitlin stopped
at Lieutenant Cruz’s desk. Solid, uncompromising, enduring, a little
scarred—just like the man behind it. She glanced at the chair in front of the
desk and started to sit just as he said, “Please have a seat.” His voice held
faint tones of irony.

“Thank you.” Caitlin
hated the touch of breathlessness in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. This
was going to be much, much harder than she’d imagined. She sat down, raised her
eyes to his and tried to still her wild heartbeat.

“So.” Lieutenant Cruz
had a deep voice, slightly raspy, as if he didn’t use it much. He probably didn’t
have to. One look from him and underlings would scurry to do his bidding. She
felt like doing a little scurrying herself.

The lieutenant tapped
Ray Avery’s letter with a blunt fingertip. “It seems we have a problem here.”
His face was as cold as his voice.

Caitlin clasped her
hands together. Not to stop them from trembling. Of course not. Just to have
something to do with them. She didn’t dare show shaking hands or allow her
voice to tremble. She didn’t dare allow herself any show of weakness at all.

Studies had shown that
hyenas can smell blood ten miles away. This was a man who could smell weakness
at a thousand paces. He held all the power and she was here asking for a favor.
Conditions didn’t get more lopsided than that. It was true that she had a secret
weapon, maybe. But it might also be a weapon that would blow up in her hands.

Caitlin drew in a deep
breath, wondering if the lieutenant noticed that it hitched slightly. She
opened her mouth to speak, hoping she could keep her voice firm, then turned in
gratitude as someone came in through the door of Lieutenant Cruz’s office
without knocking, bearing two steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee.

A woman in uniform. She
had dark, curly hair and a round, lined face. Caitlin sent up thanks for the
presence of a member of her gender in the room, to counteract the pure male
pheromones Lt. Cruz was emitting by the ton.

“Hi,” the woman said,
slipping a cup in front of her with a friendly smile. “Sergeant Kathy Martello,
hear you’re a friend of Captain Avery’s. Pleased to meet you.” She put down the
second cup in front of the lieutenant hard enough for some of the coffee to
slosh over. “We like the captain a lot, so anyone he sends us is very welcome
here. Isn’t that right, Loot?” She gave the lieutenant A Look and walked out.

“Loot” took a long gulp
of his coffee, though Caitlin could see steam coming off the cup. Maybe one
developed a calloused gullet the farther one rose in law enforcement hierarchy?
Her own cup was steaming too, and smelled awful—of dishrags dipped in
turpentine.

Still, Sergeant Martello
had made the effort, so Caitlin gingerly brought the cup to her mouth, hoping
it hadn’t been recycled. Budget cuts were everywhere. She sipped the hot,
bitter brew and nearly gagged. It was one of the worst cups of coffee she’d
ever tasted. Worse even than the Sociology Department cafeteria coffee. She
remembered Ray commenting on that.

Whoa.

Maybe there could be a
paper in this.

Bad coffee, Good
Policing: A Causal Link.
The
journal of her professional society published several satirical articles a year
and this would make a good one. Maybe she could get a lab to make analyses of
the coffee in, say, all the police stations in the tri-county area, and
correlate the organoleptic data with arrest figures—

Caitlin struggled to
bring her mind back to the moment. Her mind wandered at the best of times,
which often got her into trouble. Now, with Lieutenant Cruz watching her out of
cold, dark, steely eyes was no time to be wool gathering.

“So,” he said again. “I
take it—”

“Hey, boss.” The face
that peeped into the door of the office was arrestingly ugly. Sparse red hair
straggled back from a long, narrow freckled face with broad features. A wide,
gap-toothed mouth smiled at her seraphically. He looked like an aging, goofy
Howdy Doody on Quaaludes.

The man stared at her
for a minute then shouted over his shoulder, “She’s okay!”

“That’s it!” Lieutenant
Cruz slammed both hands down on his desk, got up and circled it. He stood
framed in the doorway, a tall, broad-shouldered figure, and looked out at the
squad room. Caitlin leaned a little to the right so she could see beyond him.
Everyone in the squad room was frozen, as if caught in a game of “red light,
green light”.

“Okay, you jokers,” Lieutenant
Cruz growled. His voice wasn’t loud but it carried. “If one more person comes
through this door, there’s going to be hell to pay. And you know I mean it.”
Caitlin watched the back of his head as he slowly quartered the room. Wherever
he looked, people’s eyes dropped. The only sounds were the rustling of papers
and tapping of computer keyboards as the officers ostentatiously got back to
work. “I trust I’ve made myself clear,” he added icily.

She heard soft coughs
and phones ringing in the distance. The lieutenant lingered in the doorway a
moment longer then closed the door of his office just hard enough to make a
point. Caitlin’s heart jumped at the sound of the sharp
snick
of the
door.

They were alone in the
room.

Lieutenant Cruz made his
way back to his desk, his tread as soft and dangerous as a panther’s. He
settled back smoothly into his chair and looked at her for a long,
nerve-racking moment.

“Okay. Let’s get down to
business here.” His deep voice was vibrant with frustration as he eyed her
across his steepled fingers. “Precisely what is it that you want from me?”

“
I
don’t want—”
Caitlin began, then bit her lip. She’d argued with Ray Avery for three days
running over this but he had finally convinced her that she should visit the
station house, so now it was her decision to be here and she had to take
responsibility for it. She looked into the lieutenant’s eyes and immediately
realized her mistake. They were dark, mesmerizing, hostile. She felt like a
titmouse facing a cobra, paralyzed. What would the titmouse do?

Distract the cobra.

“Do you know, Lieutenant,
I did some research on the history of the police force in Baylorville. This is
a far cry from the very first police station,” she said, looking around his
neat, austere office. His office was utterly different from the cheerful
clutter she’d observed on the other officers’ desks. There was nothing in Lieutenant
Cruz’s office which even remotely hinted at anything personal. Besides his
neat, uncluttered desk and the chair he was sitting on, the room had a computer
workstation next to his desk and bookshelves filled with law textbooks and
California police yearbooks, arranged in chronological order. No photographs,
no bulletin board with notices tacked up, no wanted posters, nothing.

“The first station was
built in 1858 where Willard’s Department Store
is now, at the Horace Street entrance. They called it the lockup. There
were three police officers, only they were called constables then. Part of
their duties was to ensure that every woman who attended a public dance was
wearing a corset. It was written in the contract.”

He blinked. “Oh yeah?”

She had distracted the lieutenant,
she could see that. Maybe even thrown him off his stride. His annoyed look
faded.

“Well, that’s very int—”
He caught himself and scowled again. “Look, Miss…ah, Ms. Summers. To come back
to the matter at hand, I don’t know what Ray told you, but we do
not
run
training courses for students at this station.”

Well, what a stupid
notion.

“No, of course not,” she
said earnestly. “I certainly don’t expect a full-blown
course
. That
would be ridiculous and probably illegal. Good heavens, you have enough to do
and I wouldn’t think of taking staff away from their duties. And anyway, I
don’t need a course because I’m something of an expert on law enforcement
myself.”

He looked absolutely
blank for a moment, his jaw hanging open slightly, before closing his mouth
with a snap. His eyes narrowed until only the pupils showed, gleaming blackly
under the harsh overhead neon like a sword in moonlight. “You’re an expert on
what
?”

“Law enforcement.”
Caitlin watched, fascinated, as the muscles in his jaw worked and the cords in
his neck stood out even more. It looked as if each muscle in his body—and he
had a lot of them—tensed. She was so vividly aware of him that she hardly had a
sense of herself. This was ridiculous. She had to get herself under control and
stop allowing him to distract her so. She needed him to take her seriously, but
he wouldn’t if she simply sat there like a ninny, fascinated by his muscles.

Caitlin bent down to
rummage in her book bag for the copy
of
her paper in
The Law Enforcement Review
. She was proud of that paper. It
was a great paper. It held some original and truly groundbreaking research and
had taken her two and a half years to write. Once the lieutenant read it, he
would see that she knew what she was talking about. “Here,” she said eagerly,
thrusting the copy across his desk.

The lieutenant reached
out with a frown. “What’s this?”

His hand closed over
hers, hard, warm, so incredibly, powerfully male. Caitlin jumped as if an
electric prod had touched her. She jerked her hand away and knocked over his
coffee cup—dumping the steaming contents straight into his lap.

There was a tense silence,
broken only by the steady drip of coffee from the lieutenant’s trousers onto
her paper, which had fluttered to the floor in the terrible slow motion of
disasters.

“
Oh
.
My
.
God
!”
Caitlin breathed. There was a fierce internal battle inside her, as an intense
desire to flee combated an equally intense desire to laugh. She clapped her
hand over her mouth and stared at him, horrified.

He stood up, holding his
sodden trousers away from his skin. Caitlin realized that the boiling coffee
must have burnt him.