LITMIR.BIZ

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me find my purse, not stealing anything. Thank you so much for your help, Marcus! I’m so relieved you found it. You can go now.”

      Ross pulled his hand away, surrendering to the inevitable, and Marcus straightened his ratty T-shirt like it was two hundred dollars’ worth of cashmere.

      “Dude’s a psycho,” he said to no one in particular but with a fierce glare for Ross. “I tried to tell you, man. You should have listened. Stupid cop-pig.”

      “Marcus,” Julie said. Though the word was calm enough, even Ross recognized the steel behind it.

      Marcus didn’t apologize, but he didn’t offer more insults, either. “I got to fly. See you, Ms. O.”

      “Bye, Marcus.”

      He ambled away, exuding affronted attitude with every step.

      When he was out of earshot, Julie Osterman turned back to him, her mouth set in those tight lines again. He was so busy wondering if she ever unbent enough to genuinely smile that he nearly missed her words.

      “I hope you haven’t just undone in five minutes here what has taken me weeks to build with Marcus.”

      It took him a few more seconds longer than it should have to realize she was wasn’t just annoyed, she was fuming.

      “What did I do?” he asked in genuine bewilderment.

      “Marcus is one of my clients at the Foundation,” she said. “He comes from, well, not an easy situation. The adults in his life have consistently betrayed him. He’s never had anyone to count on. I’ve been trying to help him learn to trust me, to count on me, by demonstrating that I trust him in return.”

      “By throwing your purse out there as bait?”

      “Marcus has a history of petty theft.”

      “Just the kind of kid I would send after my purse, then.”

      She fisted her hands on her hips and the movement made all her curves deliciously visible beneath her gauzy white shirt. “I wanted him to understand that when I look at him, I see beyond the mistakes he’s made in the past to the bright future we’re both trying to create for him.”

      It sounded like a bunch of hooey to him but he decided it might be wise to keep that particular opinion to himself right now, considering she looked like she wanted to skin him, inch by painful inch.

      “Instead,” she went on in that irritated voice, “you have probably just reinforced to a wounded child that all adults are suspicious and cynical, quick to judge and painfully slow to admit when they’re wrong.”

      “Hey, wait a second here. I had no way of knowing you were trying for some mumbo-jumbo psychobabble experiment. All I saw was a punk lifting a purse. I couldn’t just stand there and let him take it.”

      “Admit it,” she snapped. “You jumped to conclusions because he looks a little rough around the edges.”

      Her hair was light brown, shot through with blond highlights that gleamed in the last few minutes of twilight. With those brilliant blue eyes, high cheekbones and eminently kissable mouth, she was just about the prettiest woman he had seen in a long, long time. The kind of woman a man never got tired of looking at.

      Too bad such a nice package had to be covering up one of those save-the-world types who always set his teeth on edge.

      “I was a cop for twelve years, ma’am,” he retorted. “When I see a kid taking a purse that obviously doesn’t belong to him, yeah, I tend to jump to conclusions. That doesn’t mean they’re usually wrong conclusions.”

      “But sometimes they are,” she doggedly insisted.

      “In this case, I made a mistake. See, I’m man enough to admit it. I made a mistake,” he repeated. “It happens to the best of us, even ex-cops. But I’m willing to bet, if you asked anybody else in the whole damn art fair, they would have reached the same conclusion.”

      “You don’t know that.”

      He rolled his eyes. “You’re right. I completely overreacted. The next time I see somebody stealing your purse, I’ll be sure to just watch him walk on by.”

      The angry set of her features eased a little and after a moment, she sighed. “I hope I can convince Marcus you were just being an ex-cop.”

      Despite his own annoyance, he could see she genuinely cared about the boy. He supposed he could see things from her point of view. He had a particular soft spot for anybody who tried to help kids in need, even if they did tend to become zealots about it.

      “I can try talking to the kid if that would help,” he finally offered, though he wasn’t quite sure what compelled him to make the suggestion. Maybe something to do with how her eyes softened when she talked about the punk.

      “I appreciate that, but I don’t think—”

      A woman’s frantic scream suddenly ripped through the evening, cutting off whatever Julie Osterman had intended to say.

      Julie’s heart jumped in her chest as another long scream echoed through the fair. She gasped and instinctively turned toward the source of the sound, somewhere out of their view, away from the public areas and the four long rows of vendor tents.

      Before she could even draw a breath to exclaim over the noise, Ross Fortune was racing in the direction of the sound.

      He was all cop now, she couldn’t help thinking.

      Hard and alert and dangerous.

      She was too startled to do more than watch him rush toward the sound for a few seconds. It always managed to astound her when police officers and firefighters raced toward potentially hazardous situations while people like her stood frozen.

      She knew a little about Ross Fortune from her friend Susan, his cousin. He had been a police officer in San Antonio but had left the force a few years ago to open his own private investigation company.

      He was a trained detective, she reminded herself, and she would probably do wise to just let him, well, detect.

      But as another scream ripped through the night, past the happy laughter of the carnival rides and the throbbing bass coming from the dance, Julie knew she had to follow him, whether she was comfortable with it or not.

      Someone obviously needed help and she couldn’t just stand idly by and do nothing.

      Ross had a head start on her but she managed to nearly catch up as he darted around the corner of a display of pottery she had admired earlier in the evening.

      Probably only ten seconds had elapsed from the instant they heard the first scream, but time seemed to stretch and elongate like the pulled taffy being sold on the midway alongside kettle corn, snow cones and cotton candy.

      She ran after Ross and stumbled onto a strange, surreal scene. It was darker back here, away from the lights and noise of the Spring Fling crowd. But Julie could still tell instantly that the woman with the high-pitched scream was someone she recognized from seeing her around town, a blowsy blonde who usually favored miniscule halter tops and five-inch high heels.

      She was staring at something a dozen yards away, illuminated by a lone vapor light, high on a power pole. A figure was lying motionless on the ground, faceup, and even from here, Julie could see a dark pool of what she assumed was blood around his head.

      A third person stood over the body. It took Julie only a moment to recognize Frannie Fortune Fredericks, a frequent volunteer at the center.

      And Ross’s sister, she remembered with stunned dismay that she saw reflected in his features.

      Frannie was staring at her hands. In the pale moonlight, they shone much darker than the rest of her skin.

      “It’s her. She killed him!” the other woman cried out stridently. “Can’t you see? The bitch killed my Lloyd!”

      Her

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