Stalking Death Read Free Page A

ass." He stood there, grinning, letting his eyes travel over me in an imitation of rude cop attitude. When other cops do it, it makes my blood boil.
    "I'm late." I jerked the suitcase off the bed.
    "Aren't you going to wear a suit?"
    "Why? It's just a meeting."
    "For when you meet the press."
    "Not meeting the press, honey."
    "Better take a suit. With your track record, you'll get there and all hell will break loose."
    "That's reassuring. If my clients thought like you, I'd never get any business." I narrowed my eyes. "What's this stuff about a suit, anyway? You don't like me in suits."
    "Exactly," he said. "Suits make you look grown-up and dumpy." He was grinning again. Bastard. He had the most backhanded way of giving compliments.
    "So no one will notice me, right?"
    "Right," he agreed. "It's so easy to miss a beautiful woman when she's nearly six feet tall and stacked."
    "Stacked?" I crossed my arms defensively over my chest and glared at him. "What has gotten into you today?"
    He turned toward the window. "Guess I'm having trouble letting you go."
    Our history read more like an adventure novel than a romance. We had good reason to fear separation. Still, duty called and I had answered.
    I was wearing black pants and a green sweater. I walked to the closet, got my black jacket, and put it on. "You see," I said, pirouetting slowly. "Suit."
    "Damn," he said. "Hot damn. You don't look the least bit dumpy." I could have dragged him to bed once more, but we were out of time. And, like Scarlett O'Hara's mammy, my mother had tried to teach me to exhibit ladylike appetites.
    I stopped by the office and picked up the papers Todd Chambers had faxed, reading through them on my way to the car. Someday I'm going to fall and break my neck trying to do two things at once, one of which involves forward momentum.
    Even a cursory reading told me I had to stop him from sending the letter. While it might calm some worried parents, if he already had an upset student on his hands, sending a letter suggesting she'd made it all up would be like throwing gasoline on a fire. It stopped just short of calling her a crazy liar. There had to be a better way. My job was to figure that out between here and his office, then present it to him diplomatically.
    The roadsides were banked with a thick tangle of flowers—goldenrod, chicory, Queen Anne's lace, and masses of pink and purple asters. In the fields, the drying cornstalks were turning gold and pumpkins growing orange. The mountains of Western Maine were a mixture of late summer's fading greens sprinkled with bits of yellow-green and deeper gold and the occasional early maple in brilliant reds and oranges. The wide lakes reflected the blue of the sky, quiet after a summer being churned by propellers. Wedges of birds were gathering for the journey south.
    I wanted to savor this before October's chill and November's bleakness. But the day was already softening into darkness, the shadows deepening as I pressed westward. Todd Chambers' problem had begun to permeate my mind. I felt uneasy about what was waiting for me.
    I switched on the radio to distract me, but the word "news" is just shorthand for "bad news." After a domestic murder, a 12-year-old girl who'd been snatched off the street and assaulted, and two fiery crashes on New Hampshire highways, I turned it off, but I couldn't quite forget that girl. After years working on girl's education issues, I'm proud of young women's growing independence, but the danger also seems to be growing. Too often, when I pass a barely dressed female jogger who's tuned out the world with headphones, my admiration for her athleticism wars with my desire to stop and ask if she's lost her mind.
    I went back to the beauty outside my car and the job inside my head. Schools hired me because I was the competent outsider who could help them handle thorny problems. I didn't doubt my ability to do that. When I got to Chambers' office, I'd help him figure out what to tell his