LITMIR.BIZ

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together, all these years.”

      “Yes, they have.”

      The waiter came and took their orders. Alice had a shrimp cocktail and a large salad with coffee. Harley gave her a curious look.

      “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.

      She laughed. “I told you in Jacobsville, I love salads,” she confessed. “I mostly eat them at every meal.” She indicated her slender body. “I guess that’s how I keep the weight off.”

      “I can eat as much as I like. I run it all off,” he replied. “Working cattle is not for the faint of heart or the out-of-condition rancher.”

      She grinned. “I believe it.” She smiled at the waiter as he deposited coffee in their china cups and left. “Why did you want to be a cowboy?” she asked him.

      “I loved old Western movies on satellite,” he said simply. “Gary Cooper and John Wayne and Randolph Scott. I dreamed of living on a cattle ranch and having animals around. I don’t even mind washing Bob when she gets dirty, or Puppy Dog.”

      “What’s Puppy Dog’s name?” she asked.

      “Puppy Dog.”

      She gave him an odd look. “Who’s on first, what’s on second, I don’t know’s on third?”

      “I don’t give a damn’s our shortstop?” he finished the old Abbott and Costello comedy routine. He laughed. “No, it’s not like that. His name really is Puppy Dog. We have a guy in town, Tom Walker. He had an outlandish dog named Moose that saved his daughter from a rattlesnake. Moose sired a litter of puppies. Moose is dead now, but Puppy Dog, who was one of his offspring, went to live with Lisa Monroe, before she married my boss. She called him Puppy Dog and figured it was as good a name as any. With a girl dog named Bob, my boss could hardly disagree,” he added on a chuckle.

      “I see.”

      “Do you like animals?”

      “I love them,” she said. “But I can’t have animals in the apartment building where I live. I had cats and dogs and even a parrot when I lived at home.”

      “Do you have family?”

      She shook her head. “My dad was the only one left. He died a few months ago. I have uncles, but we’re not close.”

      “Did you love your parents?”

      She smiled warmly. “Very much. My dad was a banker. We went fishing together on weekends. My mother was a housewife who never wanted to run a corporation or be a professional. She just wanted a houseful of kids, but I was the only child she was able to have. She spoiled me rotten. Dad tried to counterbalance her.” She sipped coffee. “I miss them both. I wish I’d had brothers or sisters.” She looked at him. “Do you have siblings?”

      “I had a sister,” he said quietly.

      “Had?”

      He nodded. He fingered his coffee cup. “She died when she was seven years old.”

      She hesitated. He looked as if this was a really bad memory. “How?”

      He smiled sadly. “My father backed over her on his way down the driveway, in a hurry to get to a meeting.”

      She grimaced. “Poor man.”

      He cocked his head and studied her. “Why do you say that?”

      “We had a little girl in for autopsy, about two years ago,” she began. “Her dad was hysterical. Said the television fell over on her.” She lifted her eyes. “You know, we don’t just take someone’s word for how an accident happens, even if we believe it. We run tests to check out the explanation and make sure it’s feasible. Well, we pushed over a television of the same size as the one in the dad’s apartment. Sure enough, it did catastrophic damage to a dummy.” She shook her head. “Poor man went crazy. I mean, he really lost the will to live. His wife had died. The child was all he had left. He locked himself in the bathroom with a shotgun one night and pulled the trigger with his toe.” She made a harsh sound. “Not the sort of autopsy you want to try to sleep after.”

      He was frowning.

      “Sorry,” she said, wincing. “I tend to talk shop. I know it’s sickening, and here we are in a nice restaurant and all, and I did pour a glass of tea on a guy this week for doing the same thing to me…”

      “I was thinking about the father,” he said, smiling to relieve her tension. “I was sixteen when it happened. I grieved for her, of course, but my life was baseball and girls and video games and hamburgers. I never considered how my father might have felt. He seemed to just get on with his life afterward. So did my mother.”

      “Lots of people may seem to get over their grief. They don’t.”

      He was more thoughtful than ever. “My mother had been a…lawyer,” he said after a slight hesitation that Alice didn’t notice. “She was very correct and proper. After my sister died, she changed. Cocktail parties, the right friends, the best house, the fanciest furniture…she went right off the deep end.”

      “You didn’t connect it?”

      He grimaced. “That was when I ran away from home and went to live with the mechanic and his wife,” he confessed. “It was my senior year of high school. I graduated soon after, went into the Army and served for two years. When I got out, I went home. But I only stayed for a couple of weeks. My parents were total strangers. I didn’t even know them anymore.”

      “That’s sad. Do you have any contact with them?”

      He shook his head. “I just left. They never even looked for me.”

      She slid her hand impulsively over his. His fingers turned and enveloped hers. His light blue eyes searched her darker ones curiously. “I never thought of crime scene investigators as having feelings,” he said. “I thought you had to be pretty cold-blooded to do that sort of thing.”

      She smiled. “I’m the last hope of the doomed,” she said. “The conscience of the murdered. The flickering candle of the soul of the deceased. I do my job so that murderers don’t flourish, so that killers don’t escape justice. I think of my job as a holy grail,” she said solemnly. “I hide my feelings. But I still have them. It hurts to see a life extinguished. Any life. But especially a child’s.”

      His eyes began to twinkle with affection. “Alice, you’re one of a kind.”

      “Oh, I do hope so,” she said after a minute. “Because if there was another one of me, I might lose my job. Not many people would give twenty-four hours a day to the work.” She hesitated and grinned. “Well, not all the time, obviously. Just occasionally, I get taken out by handsome, dashing men.”

      He laughed. “Thanks.”

      “Actually I mean it. I’m not shrewd enough to lie well.”

      The waiter came and poured more coffee and took their orders for dessert. When they were eating it, Alice frowned thoughtfully.

      “It bothers me.”

      “What does?” he asked.

      “The car. Why would a man steal a car from an upstanding, religious woman and then get killed?”

      “He didn’t know he was going to get killed.”

      She forked a piece of cheesecake and looked at it. “What if he had a criminal record? What if he got involved with her and wanted to change, to start over? What if he had something on his conscience and he wanted to spill the beans?” She looked up. “And somebody involved knew it and had to stop him?”

      “That’s a lot of if’s,” he pointed out.

      She nodded. “Yes, it is. We still don’t know who the car was driven by, and the woman’s story that it was stolen is just a little thin.” She put the fork down. “I want to talk to her. But

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