If anything, she was becoming steadily more distant.
He remembered his young yeoman clerk this morning. Her tender blue eyes had pooled with tears when she relayed the hospital report, repeating how dreadful it was and how sorry she felt for Commander Dixon until he'd finally seized on the information about Ivanovich to clear out of the office for a few hours.
So it certainly wasn't that he wanted Lieutenant Harald to burst into tears, he told himself. But not to say a word? To keep walking like T. J. Dixon's arm was nothing more than a piece of meat to be thrown in the river?
He'd worked with some hard-nosed senior women officers in his five years with the Navy, but he'd found that if he was friendly and properly respectful of their rank, they soon climbed down and opened up, while this one-
Oblivious to his growing resentment.
Sigrid moved through the sunlit morning almost blindly as she thought how devastated the commander would be when she recovered enough to realize that she'd lost her arm by a fluke, a bad coincidence of time and place. She thought of how bothersome her own arm was, yet it was only wounded and would soon heal.
She turned to Lieutenant'tKnight abruptly. "How much of her arm did they amputate?"
"How much does it take, Lieutenant?"
His hostility took her by surprise.
"I guess police officers get like doctors after a while," he said.
"What-?"
"Cold. Detached. Objective" His soft Southern drawl heaped scorn on the words. "Doctors can tell you about watching a baby die like I'd tell you about the Mets losing to St. Louis. They say it's 'cause they can't let themselves feel; that they'd burn out if they grieved over every patient. After a while, they don't have to worry. They've got no feelings left." His bitterness was scalding. "Is that what happened to you,
Lieutenant Sigrid Harald of the new York Police Department?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said icily, without stopping.
"Is that how you quit being a woman with a woman's softness and a woman's tender heart?"
Goaded now, Sigrid turned on him, her gray eyes blazing. "I'm a professional investigator, Lieutenant. It's my job to stay detached and objective. Will grieving replace Dixon 's arm or bring Val Sutton's husband back to life? Will crying keep whoever did this obscene thing from doing it again? I don't think so, Lieutenant. And what's more if I had a sick child, I'd rather have a doctor cold enough to keep fighting against death than one too choked up to work, so you can take your tender little chauvinistic heart and go to hell!"
She jerked away from him, striding across the dilapidated pier, to the very edge, where she stood staring down into the murky water that lapped against the rotting pilings. She wished the water was cleaner, the day warmer, and that she could just dive in and swim toward thes un until all the churning inside her was washed away.
Her arm throbbed viciously and she slipped it back into the sling and pressed it with her free hand to ease the pounding.
Knight had followed her and he sat down on one of the nearby pilings. "I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I spoke out of line."
Sigrid shrugged and continued staring down into the river, grateful for once that her hair was loose and that the wind kept blowing it across her face and hid what she never willingly allowed anyone to see.
On the next pier over, an oriental man walked out almost to the end carrying a large bundle of red material. He was accompanied by a small girl in pigtails, who frolicked about him like a puppy. They were obviously father and daughter and he called warnings as she ran too near the edge, while her laughter bubbled out in lilting joy.
While Sigrid and Knight watched, the man placed his red bundle on the pier and began working on it. Curious gullsw heeled overhead.
Knight. glanced over at Sigrid. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I keep forgetting that all women don't show-"
"All women don't do anything," Sigrid said between clenched teeth. "No more than all men."
"Hey, I'm no chauvinist," he protested. "I like women. Really."
Still unsettled and now annoyed at herself that she'd lost her temper, Sigrid brushed aside his protest. "Forget it. It's not important."
On the next pier, the long mass of red cloth grew a ferocious golden dragon's face and became first a limp red wind sock and then a swelling sinuous dragon with streamers that caught the wind as it clawed its way into the sky. The child clapped her hands gleefully as it dipped and soared against the blueness like a wild untamed beast straining against its leash. At one point, it toyed with disaster and skimmed the surface of the water, then a twitch of the line sent it climbing again.
It was innocent and graceful and without realizing it, Sigrid began to relax.
"I'm not really a chauvinist pig,"Alan Knight said coaxingly. "Thick-headed at times maybe, but not sexist."
"No?" Sigrid gave him a jaundiced look, for he suddenly reminded her of some of her Lattimore cousins when they meant to wheedle her into trying something she didn't particularly want to do. Whenever the charm switched on, she'd learned to tread warily.
Sensing a slight softening in her manner, Knight smiled persuasively and held up three fingers, with his thumb and pinkie touching. "Scout's honor. I truly do like women."
Sigrid brushed her hair back behind her ears and looked down into his deep brown eyes.
"That must make your wife very happy," she said sardonically.
Beneath the brim of his hat, his handsome face became unexpectedly flushed. "Uh-Well, you see, I'm not exactly married."
She shot a telling glance at the gold band on his left hand.
"I've never been married," said Knight.
"Then why-?"
"The ring? I bought it in a pawnshop and started wearing it in college."
"Why?"
"Well, look at me."
Bewildered, she looked him over completely and saw nothing to alter yesterday's original impression. Lieutenant Alan Knight was a remarkably attractive specimen of American malehood.
She said as much.
"Yeah, now, he said without vanity. "Up until my sophomore year in college, I was an Alfred E. Neuman lookalike: my ears stuck out like jug handles, my front teeth made Bugs Bunny's look good, I was as tall as I am right now, but weighed a hundred and ten sopping wet, and I had cowlicks fore and aft-goofiest looking face outside a comic strip."
Sigrid lowered herself to the dock and leaned back against the next piling with her left knee drawn up and her right leg dangling over the edge.
"What happened your sophomore year?"
"I worked on my uncle's tobacco farm, ate my aunt's cooking all summer, and put on twenty-five pounds. It seemed to make everything fit together. Then before
I went back to college, my sisters hauled me down to their beauty shop and they found a way to cut my hair so it didn't look like a haystack in a hurricane. All of a sudden, I looked pretty much like I do now."
"And that was bad?"
"Scared the living bejesus out of me," he replied earnestly. "I told you I like women and I do. I grew up in a household with six sisters, a terrific mom, and more aunts than I can count, but I never had a sweetheart. Girls at school used to tell me all their problems 'cause they knew I'd understand. They never wanted to go out with me, though. As far as they were concerned, I was just good old dumb-looking Alan. They kept telling me I was almost like a brother to them, only no girl wanted to date her brother."