A Fine Specimen Read Online Free PDF Page A

hostility in his
voice. He didn’t have to—the boredom and indifference were enough.
    He wasn’t fidgeting and
he wasn’t rolling his eyes, or drumming his fingers on the desktop or tapping
his foot. He was perfectly composed. But he hummed with frustrated energy as he
sat there, clearly hating to waste even another minute with her.
    Caitlin could feel the
force field of his impatience from across the desk and it was almost
frightening how powerful it was. It wasn’t even a power ploy like some
executives pull— I am so important I cannot waste even a second more of my
precious time with you . She recognized those subliminal messages from her
research into corporate culture, where half the time the executives had
absolutely nothing on their schedules besides two-hour lunches and were otherwise
busy trying to make themselves look important with pretend work.
    No, this was the real
thing—a powerful man with important work to do, impatiently biding his time,
his spirit already somewhere else.
    Caitlin drew in a deep
breath, unobtrusively—dominant males of any species recognized distressed
breathing patterns instinctively.
    She didn’t want to say
what was coming next, but Ray had insisted. She’d better just get it out and
get it over with.
    The lieutenant was
already rising.
    Caitlin bit her lip and
forced the words past the tightness in her throat. There was no polite way to
say it, so she just blurted it out. “Ray—um, Captain Avery—said to tell you
that you owe him. And that he’s collecting.”
    To her astonishment, he
dropped back heavily into his chair as if he’d been suddenly weighted down with
lead. Or knocked in the head.
    He looked
sucker-punched.
    “I owe Ray,” he repeated
slowly, “and he’s collecting.”
    He hadn’t betrayed his
feelings other than by narrowing his eyes, but he’d had the wind knocked clean
out of him, that was clear. Whatever hold Ray thought he had over Alejandro
Cruz, it was real, at least in the lieutenant’s eyes. She couldn’t imagine
anything else stopping the lieutenant, other than a bullet to the head.
    They stared at each in
silence. Caitlin didn’t dare look away—a sure sign of weakness. She didn’t even
dare so much as blink. Though her chest felt constricted, she tried to breathe
normally.
    She couldn’t read his
face at all. Though years of study in the behavioral sciences had taught her
how to read more or less every human expression in a number of different
cultures, she was stymied here, for the first time.
    Faces are extraordinary
tools of human communication. She’d studied under Professor Hamilton Barstow, an
expert on facial expressions in cultures throughout the world. So she could
decipher even deadpan expressions by slight corrugations of the brow, by the
muscles around the mouth, by the tilt of the head. Neurolinguistics was a big
help too, studying the direction the eyes traveled.
    And if the face didn’t
work, there was always body language, another field of expertise for her.
    However, none of her
training, experience or book learning helped right now. There was simply no way
to decipher what Alejandro Cruz was thinking by any physical means. He’d
learned impassivity at a tougher school than the Department of Social Sciences
at St. Mary’s.
    This was a master.
    Caitlin did the only
thing she could do—she simply sat back and waited.
    There was nothing she
could do or say to sway him in any way. She’d said her piece—repeating Ray
Avery’s words—and now whether Alejandro Cruz acknowledged his mysterious debt
to Avery or not was entirely up to him.
    “Okay.” He slapped the
desk with flat hands and surged out of his seat as she gaped up at him. “Come
with me, Ms. Law Enforcement. We’re going out on a Code Seven.”
    A Code Seven! Wow! Ray was right ! This was going to work
after all! She was going to get some field experience. And a Code Seven at
that!
    Caitlin stood up too.
“All right,” she said, trying to still her