Most of the men had been unaware of her presence until then. She saw no reason to hurry. This was not a well- frequented section of town at night; Nauman would be waiting on the sidewalk.
Instead she stepped outside just in time to see a cab pull away from the curb. The rearview window framed a halo of silver hair. Clinically Sigrid noted a small prick of regret that their evening had ended like this. How odd!
9
She entered reluctantly, stopping just inside the door and pretending not to see his gesture toward a chair.
Captain McKinnon was built like a grizzled, over-grown teddy bear: rumpled looking and easygoing until faced with incompetence. Then his staff realized that the muscles on that large frame hadn't softened with paperwork, and that those sleepy brown eyes had noted every lapse up to and including the one they were being chewed out for right then.
In the past year Sigrid had often caught the captain looking at her with a puzzled expression as if he expected something more from her, and it made her uneasy. Could he possibly have worked with her father? They would have been about the same age. Probably not, though; for whenever she met anyone who'd known her parents-blond, laughing Leif and dark, beautiful Anne-that person sooner or later commented on how different the daughter was from her parents.
Sigrid had built up no special myths about her father in her mind, but her mother never talked of his police work, and Sigrid would have liked to know what kind of officer he'd been-how competent, how dedicated, how involved. The old-timers on the force who actually remembered Leif Harald were few, and they seldom connected her name to his. In any event, she was too reserved to approach them and ask for their memories.
For the thousandth time Sigrid wished she'd inherited her father's happy congeniality or her mother's knack of immediate friendliness. She knew how stiff and cold she must still seem to her colleagues, but to be otherwise was impossible. Although she was no longer a tongue-tied child, a considerable shyness continued to numb her in social situations.
Here in the department some of the men still resented her promotion over them; some felt threatened; some ignored her completely. Yet even with the two or three like Detective Tildon, who respected her competence and accepted her presence among them, there was no easy give-and-take of camaraderie and laughter.
None of which bothered Sigrid Harald. Or so she thought.
Nevertheless, Captain McKinnon did make her uneasy, and she couldn't quite analyze the reason why. He was scrupulously fair and treated her the same as his other officers-piled on work and distributed praise and criticism with absolute impartiality. Yet always there was that vague air of expectation. Because she was female?
Efficiently she summarized for her superior the completion of the investigation into that doctor's knifing and outlined the situation at Vanderlyn College.
'Cohen's preliminary findings were on my desk just now. 'Respiratory paralysis and shock as a result of ingestion of potassium dichromate.' That's one of the chemicals from the print workshop, and anybody in the department could have got hold of it without being noticed.'
'No A.P.B. out for that kid, what's his name?' McKinnon asked mildly.
'Harris, sir; Harley Harris. I didn't think it justified yet. I sent a man over to his home, and he reported that the parents seem cooperative. If Harris shows, they'll probably make him get in touch.'
'What about that Hungarian janitor?'
'The same. Physically he could have done it. We think he had access to the closet key, and he was alone with the victim's coffee cup.' She gave a brief description of how Szabo had carried the tray for Sandy Keppler.
'The girl couldn't have exposed that tray to more potential poisoners if she'd sent it around Times Square,' McKinnon said sourly. 'Better have that Szabo in for a thorough questioning just the same.'
'His landlady said he hadn't been home since this morning; I thought I'd try again later.'
Her voice was cool and her gray eyes stony. Leif's eyes? wondered McKinnon. Leif Harald's eyes had been piercingly blue to match a blond Viking's build. His daughter had his slender height, and yes, the shape of the eyes was his; but the color, as well as her dark hair, came from Anne.
McKinnon still remembered how he'd felt a year ago upon her assignment to his department. To open her folder and read Mrs. Leif Harald under the next-of-kin heading had been an unexpected shock. When one of Anne's photo essays had been nominated for a Pulitzer a while back, he'd assumed that Harald was just a professional name by now, that she surely must have remarried. He should have known better.
He looked across his cluttered desk at the reserved young woman who stood just inside his doorway without nervousness, without fidgeting, until he would be done with this interview and dismiss her. If she remembered him even slightly, she'd given no hint of it.
And after all, she'd been very young-a thin solemn-eyed little girl who'd clung to her mother's hand, bewildered by the ceremony; while he McKinnon, had been only another blue uniform with bright brass buttons, one of a dozen honor guards at her father's funeral. Anne had refused to let him be more than that.
They had been such unlikely partners-McKinnon, stolid, deliberate and motivated by logic; Leif Harald, mercurial and intuitive. The combination had worked, though, and had carried over into their off-duty social life until that day in a dark hallway of a third-rate hotel, where a killer had gone to earth behind one of those thin doors. When it was over, the killer was dead, and the dark bearlike man had walked out unmarked; but his partner, the golden Viking, was carried out on a stretcher, the blood already drying and turning black around those bullet holes in his body.
'
McKinnon wrenched himself away from that night and put the years behind him with a sigh. Better to keep it all official, perhaps. Personalities complicated things. If he had to take on a woman officer, Lieutenant Harald seemed one of the best. At least he hadn't been stuck with a sex bomb who could keep his staff room teetering on the edge of an explosion. The loose, tailored pant-suits, the dark hair skinned back into a knot at the nape of her neck, the minimal makeup-hell! There were times like tonight when she looked closer to forty than thirty. No trouble on that score.
And yet it pained him to see Anne's daughter looking so finely drawn.
'Not burning the candle at both ends, are you, Harald?' he asked, attempting a jocular note.
'Sir?'
'A joke. What I mean is, you're not working too hard, are you? We're supposed to be using the pass-along system, remember?'
Sigrid remembered. Difficult not to with the city going deeper into the red every year. There had been severe layoffs among personnel, and cutbacks had been ordered everywhere. In an effort to reduce departmental overtime, officers going off duty were encouraged to pass their cases along to the officer on the next shift. The procedure had indeed cut down on overtime, but no one really liked it. 'Pass along' meant losing your identification with a case, your pride in a job well done when you cracked it wide open. Sigrid sensed that McKinnon didn't like it any more than she did, and others in the bureau complained of feeling like pieceworkers on an assembly line. Overtime dropped, but further compliance was a sometime thing. Unless a situation was really coming unraveled with a need to act quickly, many officers tried to hang onto cases they'd begun until the next shift.
'This department is officially committed to eight-hour shifts, Harald, and it's nearly ten now.'
'I had no intention of filing overtime,' Sigrid said with the first hint of heat she'd allowed into her voice. 'Anyhow, you're still here, sir.'
'The privilege of rank,' he said loftily.
Driving uptown, Sigrid was bemused. Burning the candle at both ends, indeed! As if she spent the nights
