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all exhibiting a sad and vacant stare. Janek understood what she meant by "cruel"—there was a sameness about these people, not a physical sameness, since they were men and women, young and old, but something similar in their expressions, repeated in their eyes: meanness, selfishness, vanity, and beyond all that a sense of emptiness and vacancy, even disappointment with their lives.
    He nodded. "Yes, I see. You got them all to pose a certain way. How did you manage that? I imagine some of these people were upset."
    "Some, I guess." She shrugged. "I really wasn't trying to be mean. Just looking for something, a kind of after-effect. I'd tell them to pose, they'd puff themselves up, then I'd catch them with a second click just as they were letting out their air. I wasn't trying to say they were phonies, though that's what a lot of people thought. I was working on the premise that even the most handsome, most beautiful, richest, most successful, most secure, glamorous and confident people are vulnerable. Not that they're vain, but that they're human and that time and age will break them, too."
    She had looked right at him, giving him the feeling she was telling him something important about herself. And as he looked at the portraits again he saw exactly what she meant. Her pictures weren't cruel so much as compassionate. "I guess if you'd taken shots like these of drunks and bums, no one would have accused you of being mean."
    She laughed. "They would have called me pretentious. Mocked me for an unearned social conscience. But because my subjects were rich and famous everyone assumed I was putting them down. I wasn't. All I was saying was that their confidence was a mask, that they lived with the same background fear as the drunk and the bum—that even when life is sweet, it's much, much too short."
    He was startled to hear her say such a thing. She was young to have worked from such a vision. But he could tell from the portraits that the vision was deeply felt, not a borrowed sentiment. He looked at her again. He hadn't expected her to be like this. He had taken her for a model when in fact she was an artist. "I can see why Al liked to come around," he said. "He may have told good stories, but you're pretty special yourself."
    She smiled; she liked his compliment. "We didn't talk like this much, Janek . We really just bulled around. It was fun. That's all it was. An honest friendship. Pleasure in each other's company."
    "How did you meet?" She was loading more food onto his plate.
    "That was a funny thing. I play tennis fairly regularly at a club a mile or so away."
    "That thing on the river under the plastic bubbles?"
    She nodded. "That's the place. I generally bicycle over there. I use my bike a lot around the neighborhood. Anyway, one day I was riding home and I hit a pothole and fell down. I got bruised and twisted my ankle, and Al just happened to be walking by. He came over, helped me up, and checked my leg to see if I was hurt. He was very nice and he ended up walking my bike and supporting me as I limped back here."
    "I bet he offered to carry you up the stairs."
    "He was very sweet. I could tell right away he was a cop. When he got me to the door I thought the least I owed him was a drink. So I asked him in and we just started talking while I soaked my ankle, and that's how it started. And it just went on from there."
    A nice story—it pleased Janek , sounded like the sort of gentle pickup Al would make. A little too slick, maybe, especially the coincidence that Caroline's father had also been a cop, but such things happened and he had no reason to doubt her. He reminded himself he wasn't interrogating a suspect, just checking up on Al and his absences from home.
    "Lucky meeting for both of you. When did all this happen?"
    "Couple of months ago. Late June, I think."
    "Did he ever talk about a case?"
    "That's all he talked about. There were so many. But if you mean did he talk about a particular one, no. He'd