“A friend?” she persisted. “Or…”

“My father.”

“Oh. Oh dear, I’m so sorry.”

He could see that she was startled, that it was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her. He didn’t know if it was that or the genuine compassion in her eyes that made him explain, in a drawl that tried hard to be casual. “Yeah, he was a naval aviator-a commander at the time of his death, promoted posthumously to captain, which I guess made a difference to someone-my mother, maybe. He was stationed on a carrier in the South China Sea. Flew one too many missions, I guess you could say. And…” he could feel his face cramp with his attempt at a smile as he touched the name he’d located for her, and the MIA cross that followed it “…I guess you could say we were one of the lucky ones. We got a body to bury- It’s over there-” he made a gesture with his hand “-in Arlington.”

He could feel her eyes on him, hear even the tiny throat-clearing sound she made before she said, “That must have been very hard for you.” And then, again so gently he didn’t even notice that she was chip-chipping away at his carefully constructed barricades, “How old were you when it happened?”

And again he was mildly surprised when he heard himself answer. “I was sixteen.”

“A difficult.age.”

He shrugged. “I guess. It was for me, anyway.”

They were strolling along the paved walkway now, close together but nowhere near touching. In spite of that, he was aware of everything about her, the clothes she wore-same slacks and blazer as yesterday, but a different turtleneck, teal blue this time-every movement she made, no matter how slight. Aware that once again she’d turned her head to look at him. He wondered what she saw when she gazed at him like that, so thoughtful and silent. Wondered why it made him so uneasy. And why he allowed it.

“I was pretty difficult at all ages, if you want to know the truth,” he said, taking a breath. “My dad was gone a lot, and I didn’t get along with my mom. Hell, nobody did-including my dad, which was probably why he was gone a lot.” He glanced sideways at Jane to see if she’d smiled at his poor attempt at humor, and was inordinately pleased to see the laugh lines deepening at the corners of her mouth and eyes. He found himself relaxing, at ease with her in a way he couldn’t remember being with anyone in many, many years.

“Anyway, I was already mad at my dad for going to ‘Nam-he’d volunteered for the duty, he didn’t have to go. And I was mad at my mother, blaming her for making him so miserable he’d rather be in that hellhole than home with his family. After he was shot down, well…I was one pretty angry, messed-up kid. Truth is, I don’t know what might have happened if it hadn’t been for-” He stopped, quivering with shock at what he’d almost said.

She glanced at him and, instead of pursuing it, asked, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“A brother.” He said it on an exhalation, relaxing again, with a chuckle that was more fond than ironic. “Jack. He’s navy, too, a real chip off the old block-lives somewhere in Texas, at the moment. Has a wife and three…no, four kids.” His mouth twisted in a way that was familiar to him; afraid of what his companion might read in that expression, he looked over at her and turned it into a grin. “As you’ve probably gathered, we don’t see a lot of each other.”

For a moment, those thoughtful, compassionate eyes seemed to bore right into his, though he knew they were safely hidden behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. But she didn’t say anything, and he shrugged and went on, “Jack was pretty much the only one who could get along with Mother, so of course he always took her side. He was at the academy when Dad died. Naturally he came right home-we were living here in Washington then. And needless to say, that didn’t help my attitude any. Like I said, I don’t know what I would have done…” he took a deep breath and this time let himself finish it “…if it hadn’t been for…a friend of mine.”

“A friend?” The prompt was so soft it seemed almost to come from inside his own mind.

He nodded. She’s good, he thought; really good. She could dig the life story out of a stone. “Their house backed up to ours. She was…I guess you could say she was my best friend.”

My best friend. How odd it was to hear the words, not like anything that might have come from him, but like the vibrations of chords played by some unseen musician and left hanging in the cool, winy air. He paused for a moment to listen, thinking that if he only listened hard enough…

“It’s good that you had someone,” Jane said gently. So much pain, she thought, watching his averted profile, the strange, almost expectant tilt of his head. So much grief…but not all, I think, for his father.

She said nothing more, but settled onto a vacant bench with a little sigh and pulled her tote bag into her lap, leaving it to him whether to tell her about the friend whose name he couldn’t bring himself to utter.

But he swore suddenly and threw her a hard, fierce look, the one men use to mask extreme emotions. “Ah, hell, what am I telling you all this stuff for?” Only he didn’t say “stuff,” and he didn’t apologize for the word he did use.

Jane just smiled; she used the word herself, on occasion. She said comfortably, “I expect because I’m a good listener.”

Watching him take cigarettes from a pocket inside his jacket with jerky, impatient motions, tap one out and light it, she found herself noticing the way his throat moved, the way his lips shaped themselves around the filter, the hard, brown look of his hands. Only when he’d tucked the pack away again and was blowing a thin stream of smoke into the morning’s brilliance did she realize that her mouth had gone dry.

She swallowed with an effort and asked, “Was this one of your appointments?”

“What?”

“Last night, you said-”

“Oh. Yeah, sort of.” The smile flicked briefly at one corner of his mouth but never made it as far as his eyes. He made a restless gesture with the hand that held the cigarette, then sat rather abruptly on the bench beside her, tucking his briefcase carefully between his feet. Also taking care, she noticed, to hold the cigarette between his knees so the smoke wouldn’t drift her way.

Her heart gave a skip when he did that. It’s the little things, she thought. That’s what makes it so hard to explain when somebody asks, “Why? What is it about him?”

“I should be asking about you,” he said after a moment, turning toward her so that once again she couldn’t see anything of his eyes except the dark lenses of his sunglasses. “How are you this morning?” She shrugged and tried a smile, which he didn’t return. “Sleep okay?”

She shook her head, but of course she couldn’t tell him why she hadn’t been able to steep. And as she tried to efface it by adding, “I never do, really, in hotels,” she looked away, reluctant to have him see the doubt that must be in her eyes.

I wish, I really do wish I could trust him, she thought. This morning, seeing him there at The Wall like that, it was hard to remember why she couldn’t. Surely the grief had been genuine.

But, she reminded herself, villains have fathers, too.

“No more dizziness?”

“What?” She jerked her head around to look at him again, heart thumping. His arm lay across the back of the bench behind her shoulders; it was the feathery touch of his fingers. on her neck that had startled her so. “Oh-no.” Her swallow made a stickery sound. She laughed and made a dismissive gesture toward her own throat. “No, I’m perfectly fine. It didn’t even leave a mark, whatever he did. I’d have thought being almost strangled would have more of an effect, you know?”

“You weren’t strangled.” His hand dropped casually, almost negligently, to her nape; his thumb traced up and down the side of her throat.

“No?” Jane whispered. His hand was heavy and warm; she had to resist an urge to lean her head back against it. What is he doing? What does this mean?

He shook his head. Without the influence of his eyes, his smile had an almost unbearable sweetness. “It wasn’t your air supply that was cut off.”

She tried desperately to look intelligent. “It wasn’t?”

Another head shake. “See, if you press right here…” He did so, gently, and instantly she felt that awful, remembered pressure. “What you do is, you cut off the blood supply to the brain.”

Jane gasped and pulled away from him, heart thumping. “But that’s…” She could hardly get the words out; she felt cold. But of course, she thought, being a policeman, he’d know about things like that. “So I could have…he really could have killed me.”

“Could have. But didn’t.”

He took his arm away from the back of the bench, leaving her feeling unsettled, as though someone had picked her up, shaken her vigorously and then set her down again slightly askew.

Gesturing at the tote bag in her lap, he casually asked, “Had it appraised yet?”

She gave her head a quick, hard shake, more in an effort to set herself to rights than as a response to the question, and shifted the tote bag unnecessarily as she considered how she should reply.

It wasn’t that she feared Tom Hawkins; she didn’t, not anymore. No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t make him out to be a villain. And not only because he’d said he was a policeman, either. Because neither did the fact that he was a policeman mean she trusted him. Cop or villain, she was quite certain he wasn’t being honest with her. She could just feel it. He had some sort of agenda he wasn’t telling her about, which struck her as being particularly unfair of him since she seemed to be involved in whatever was going on, at least indirectly.

For goodness’ sake, she thought in exasperation, if he was some kind of law enforcement officer, why didn’t he just show her his ID and tell her what was going on? Why all this cloak-and-dagger, cat-and-mouse stuff? It was all beginning to seem like some sort of elaborate game, and she was quite frankly fed up with being the only one who didn’t know the rules!