LITMIR.BIZ

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a hard time?”

       “It’s my own fault,” Gwen confided. “I can’t wear contacts and I hate glasses. I tripped in a crime scene and came close to contaminating some evidence.” She grimaced. “It’s a murder case, too, that college freshman they found dead in her apartment last night. The defense will have a field day with that when the perp is caught and brought to trial. And it will be my fault. I just got chewed out for it. I should have, too,” she said quickly, because she didn’t want Rogers to think Marquez was being unfair.

       Rogers’s dark eyes searched hers. “You like your sergeant, don’t you?”

       “I respect him,” Gwen said, and then flushed helplessly.

       Rogers studied her warmly. “He’s a nice man,” she said. “He does have a temper and he does take too many chances. But you’ll get used to his moods.”

       “I’m working on that.” Gwen chuckled.

       “How did you like Atlanta?” Rogers asked conversationally as they headed for the exit.

       “Excuse me?” Gwen said absently.

       “Atlanta P.D. Where you were working.”

       “Oh. Oh!” Gwen had to think quickly. “It was nice. I liked the department. But I wanted a change, and I’ve always wanted to see Texas.”

       “I see.”

       No, she didn’t, Gwen thought, and thank goodness for that. Gwen was keeping secrets that she didn’t dare divulge. She changed the subject as they walked together to the parking lot to their respective vehicles.

       Lunch was a salad with dressing on the side, and half a grilled cheese sandwich. Dessert, and her drink, was a cappuccino. She loved the expensive coffee and could only afford it one day a week, on Fridays. She ate an inexpensive lunch so that she could have her coffee.

       She sipped it with her eyes closed, smiling. It had an aroma that evoked Italy, a little sidewalk café in Rome with the ruins visible in the distance…

       She opened her eyes at once and looked around, as if someone could see the thoughts in her head. She must be very careful not to mention that memory, or other similar ones, in regular conversation. She was a budding junior detective. She had to remember that. It wouldn’t do to let anything slip at this crucial moment.

       That thought led to thoughts of Detective Marquez and what would be a traumatic revelation for him when the time came for disclosure. Meanwhile, her orders were to observe him, keep her head down and try to discover how much he, or his adoptive mother, knew about his true background. She couldn’t say anything. Not yet.

       She finished her coffee, paid for her meal and walked out onto the chilly streets. So funny, she thought, the way the weather ran in cycles. It had been unseasonably cold throughout the South during the spring then came summer and blazing, unrelenting heat with drought and wildfires and cattle dying in droves. Now it was November and still unseasonably warm, but some weather experts said snow might come soon.

       The weather was nuts. There had been epic drought throughout the whole southern tier of America, from Arizona to Florida, and there had been horrible wildfires in the southwestern states. Triple-digit temperatures had gone all summer in south Texas. There had been horrible flooding on the Mississippi River due to the large snowmelt, from last winter’s unusually deep snows up north.

       Now it was November and Gwen was actually sweating long before she reached her car, although it had been chilly this morning. She took off her jacket. At least the car had air-conditioning, and she was turning it on, even if it was technically almost winter. Idly, she wondered how people had lived in this heat before air-conditioning was invented. It couldn’t have been an easy life, especially since most Texans of the early twentieth century had worked on the land. Imagine, having to herd and brand cattle in this sort of heat, much less plow and plant!

       Gwen got into her car and drove by the crime lab to see if Alice had found anything on that digital camera. In fact, she had. There were a lot of photos of people who were probably friends—Gwen could use face recognition software to identify them, hopefully—and there was one odd-looking man standing a little distance behind a couple who was smiling into the camera against the background of the apartment complex where the victim had lived. That was interesting and suspicious. She’d have to check that man out. He didn’t look as if he belonged in such a setting. It was a mid-range apartment complex, and the man was dingy and ill kempt and staring a little too intently. She drove back to her precinct.

       Her mind was still on Marquez, on what she knew, and he didn’t. She hoped he wasn’t going to have too hard a time with his true history, when the truth came out.

       Barbara glared at her son. “Can’t you just peel the tomato, sweetie, without taking out most of it except the core?”

       He grimaced. “Sorry,” he said, wielding the paring knife with more care as he went to work on what looked like a bushel of tomatoes, a gift from an organic gardener with a hothouse, that his mother was canning in her kitchen at home. Canning jars simmered in a huge tub of water, getting ready to be filled with fragrant tomato slices and then processed in the big pressure cooker. He glared at it.

       “I hate those things,” he muttered. “Even the safest ones are dangerous.”

       “Baloney,” she said inelegantly. “Give me those.”

       She took the bowl of tomatoes and dunked them into a pot of boiling water. She left them there for a couple of minutes and fished them out in a colander. She put them in the sink in front of Rick. “There. Now they’ll skin. I keep telling you this is a more efficient way than trying to cut the skins off. But you don’t listen, my dear.”

       “I like skinning them,” he said with a dark-eyed smile in her direction. “It’s an outlet for my frustrations.”

       “Oh?” She didn’t look at him, deliberately. “What sort of frustrations?”

       “There’s this new woman at work,” he said grimly.

       “Gwen.” She nodded.

       He dropped the knife, picked it back up and stared at her.

       “You talk about her all the time.”

       “I do?” It was news to him. He didn’t realize that.

       She nodded as she skinned tomatoes. “She trips over things that she doesn’t see, she messes up crime scenes, she spills coffee, she can’t find her cell phone…” She glanced at him. He was still standing there, with the knife poised over a tomato. “Get busy, there, those tomatoes won’t peel themselves.”

       He groaned.

       “Just think how nice they’ll taste in one of my beef stew recipes,” she coaxed. “Go on, peel.”

       “Why can’t we just get one of those things that sucks the air out of bags and freeze them instead?”

       “What if we have a major power outage that lasts for days and days?” she returned.

       He thought for a minute. “I’ll go buy twenty bags of ice and several of those foam coolers.”

       She laughed. “Yes, but we can’t tell how the power grid is going to cope if we have one of those massive CMEs like the Carrington Event in 1859.”

       He blinked. “Excuse me?”

       “There was a massive coronal mass ejection in 1859 called the Carrington Event,” she explained. “When it hit earth, all the electrics on the planet went crazy. Telegraph lines burned up and telegraph units caught fire.” She glanced at him. “There wasn’t much electricity back in those days—it was in its infancy. But imagine if such a thing happened today, with our dependence on electricity. Everything is connected to the grid these days, banks, communications corporations, pharmacies, government, military and the list goes on and on. Even our water and power are controlled by computers. Just imagine if we had no way to access our computers.”

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