The Bricklayer
Page 31
“I thought you weren’t here on behalf of the Bureau.”
“I could have called you on the phone with the offer.”
“Tell the director I appreciate it. But someone will be taking Kaulcrick’s place.”
“The job’s been offered to me.”
“And that’s supposed to be an incentive for me?”
She laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m turning it down. Way too far away from why I became an agent. Who knows, maybe we’d get to work together again.”
“Kate, I wasn’t really an employee this time, and I got fired in less than a week.”
“That’s right, less than a week, and you cleaned up the whole mess.”
“I didn’t do it by myself. I believe you got some nine-millimeter scars that prove my point,” he said. “I like the work, but there was just too much to put up with. Thank the director for me, but I’m going to pass.”
For the first time since entering the apartment, she looked around. “I see you got the walls painted. Are you working?”
“I’ve got a few jobs going. Enough to keep the lights on.”
She looked over at his sculpting table. “Still finding time for that, too.”
“Someone has to give dilettantes a bad name.”
“Mind if I look?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
She noticed his eyes shift away from hers. She looked closer at the clay figure under the cloth. The bottom was not completely covered and looked like the upper hips of a human figure. Judging its height and the general shape of the covered portion, she could see that the figure had a head, and if it had a head, maybe it had a face. “Sorry,” she said, and went over to the table, lifting the cloth. It was a nude woman’s figure, finely detailed. It did have a face. It was Kate’s, precisely captured, not with imagined perfection, but with a graceful accuracy. For the first time since the injury, she didn’t mind the scar on her cheek. Somehow Vail had made it seem—a word he had once used to describe her—handsome, maybe even aristocratic. She turned back to him abruptly, her eyes starting to well. “I thought you couldn’t do faces.”
His expression became uncharacteristically warm. “I guess they were never that important before.”
“Something tells me that’s as close as I’m ever going to get you to a compromise.” Kate set down her beer and gave him a quick, hard kiss. She then started unbuttoning her dress. “Well, bricklayer, let’s see if you got the rest of it right.”
About the Author
NOAH BOYD is a former FBI agent who spent more than twenty years working on some of the Bureau’s toughest investigations, including the Green River Killer case and the Highland Park Strangler case (which he’s credited with solving). He currently works on cold cases when he’s not writing. He lives in New England.
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Credits
Jacket design by Mary Schuck
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BRICKLAYER. Copyright © 2010 by Noah Boyd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boyd, Noah.
The bricklayer : a novel / Noah Boyd.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-182701-3
1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Extortion—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.O9326B75 2010
813'.6—dc22
2009019613
EPub Edition © December 2009 ISBN: 978-0-06-196343-8
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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