LITMIR.BIZ

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sofa art.

      Let your work express your feelings, she used to lecture her students. The gnawing dissatisfaction of the past few months developed new teeth. Maybe her feelings were the problem. Maybe instead of letting herself be stalled by her painting and stumped by Detective You-Don’t-Want-to-Know Denko and just generally frustrated, she should pick up the phone and check on Jamal.

      Faye winced and rubbed her wrist. She’d been holding a brush too long.

      Or maybe she’d simply had it with this particular piece of work.

      She needed…inspiration. She stretched once to get the kinks out, slapped shut her sketchbook and shoved it into her bag. She would take a walk down by the lake and clear her head.

      “You know, for an artist, you don’t seem to spend a lot of time painting,” Aleksy said.

      Below him on the bank, knee deep in the green brush, Faye Harper froze like Bambi’s mother about to get shot. Her head turned slowly.

      And then she spotted him, propped against a tree trunk with his fishing pole and field pack. Her wide brown eyes narrowed in annoyance. “For a detective, you don’t seem to spend a lot of time investigating.”

      Ouch. Bambi’s mom was packing heat.

      Despite his frustration, Aleksy grinned. “I hit a snag.”

      She picked her way over roots and rocks toward him. “Fish not biting?”

      “I didn’t expect them to. No self-respecting striper’s going to feed in the middle of the day.”

      “Then what are you doing out here?”

      “Surveillance,” he said briefly.

      “What are you looking for?”

      He shook his head. “You don’t—”

      “—want to know,” she finished for him. “Thank you. Is it safe for me to sit down next to you?”

      His grin broadened. “Be my guest.”

      Her skirt billowed and collapsed around her. She wore sandals on her narrow feet and a scoop-necked T-shirt that revealed the slight upper slope of her chest. Her face was pink and moist and she smelled like heat and spring flowers.

      Tasty, he thought.

      But not on the menu. He wasn’t on vacation, whatever his lieutenant said. And a cream puff art teacher with baby-fine skin didn’t fit into his plans or his future.

      “Did you want something?” he asked.

      “Yes. No.” She rested her arms on her knees and her neckline gaped, revealing the white line of her bra. Oh, man. He had definitely been sleeping in his car too long, if a glimpse of ladies’ underwear made him hard.

      “I hit a snag, too,” she said.

      “What kind of snag?”

      “You wouldn’t understand.”

      Probably not. He didn’t know squat about painting. But her automatic dismissal rankled.

      “Try me,” he said, surprising them both.

      He didn’t do intimacy. No way was he discussing art with a woman he wasn’t even trying to talk into bed.

      “I’m not—I seem to be putting in a lot of effort without a lot of result,” Faye said.

      Well, hey, okay. “I can relate there.”

      She turned her head and looked at him. “Have you found…whatever it is you’re looking for yet?”

      “Nope.”

      “But you’re going to keep looking,” she guessed.

      “Yep.”

      “Why?”

      Because he owed it to Karen. He owed it to himself.

      “That’s my job,” he said.

      “Shouldn’t you have help? I don’t know, but—a partner or something?”

      His former partner was dead. Murdered. His current partner, Kenny Stivak, thought he ought to let the big boys handle the case. And Aleksy’s boss told him if he didn’t back off, he’d be busted down to directing Sunday traffic in the St. Wenceslaus parking lot.

      “I don’t need help,” he said.

      She sniffed. “That’s what my students say. Usually the ones who are most in danger of quitting. Or failing.”

      “Well, I’m not going to quit and I can’t afford to fail, so you can save the lecture. Teacher.”

      She flushed. She really had the damnedest skin, as fine and delicate as one of the teacups in his mother’s china cabinet. “I haven’t actually decided whether I’ll return to teaching next year.”

      Now there was a surprise. “At Lincoln?”

      She took a deep breath. “At all.”

      Against his will, he felt the drag of interest. It wasn’t just that she was cute and he was bored. Faye Harper had…something, he decided. Smarts, maybe. Or guts.

      Which made her comment about leaving teaching puzzling.

      “How come?” he asked, figuring she’d say something about teacher burnout or the lousy pay or the school board cutting arts funding again.

      “The principal and I didn’t see eye to eye on my handling of a student.”

      “Parents?” Sometimes it helped in juvenile cases to get a kid’s family involved. Although, at Lincoln, where families struggled simply to survive, lots of parents no longer had the energy to care.

      “The mother wouldn’t speak with me. The stepfather was more…forceful in his opinions.”

      “He disagreed with you.”

      Faye stared out over the water. “He broke my wrist.”

      Aleksy was startled into bobbling his line. He made a grab for the pole. She was a tiny thing. No threat to anyone. What kind of man would raise a hand to her? Anger burned his gut. “You press charges?”

      “No. It was an accident,” she explained. “He was trying to make me leave the apartment, and I—fell—down the stairs.”

      “He pushed you, you mean. That’s aggravated assault.”

      “It was an accident. At least…” Her left hand moved unconsciously to cover the wrist on her knee. The gesture made sense now. “The principal advised me it would be better to treat the incident as an accident.”

      “Better for who?”

      “For Jamal. My student.”

      Aleksy was disgusted. “The one who caused the problem in the first place.”

      She shook her head. “No. No, Jamal was never a problem. He was an excellent student.”

      “Then, why—”

      “He was an excellent student,” she repeated. “Talented in math. Brilliant in art. I pulled every string I had to get him accepted as a scholarship student at the Art Institute school.”

      “So, what was the trouble?”

      “Jamal’s parents—his stepfather—wanted him to go to a regular college and get a degree in business.”

      Aleksy shrugged. “Sounds reasonable to me.”

      “Yes. It sounded reasonable to everyone,” Faye said bleakly. “And heaven help Jamal if what was reasonable in this case wasn’t right for him.”

      “So, what did you do?”

      “It doesn’t matter now.”

      It mattered, he thought. To

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