The Bricklayer

AFTER

STEVE VAIL WAS WORKING ON A NEW SCULPTURE, SO HE IGNORED THE knock at his apartment door. It was near dusk and the late-summer light was being extinguished by an impending storm coming off Lake Michigan. The wind had shifted to the northeast again and the temperature was dropping. There was another knock. He thought it unusual because it was not any more insistent in either volume or rhythm. He covered the figure and took a beer from the refrigerator. Before he got to the door, there was a third knock, this one also controlled. He decided it did not belong to a man.
He opened the door and Kate Bannon was standing there in a black dress. She smiled apprehensively. “Hi?”
“Hi.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not here as an employee of the FBI. Purely social.”
He stepped out of the way. “Then you may enter and state your business.”
“It’s not business.” She walked in and said, “Got another one of those?” She pointed at the bottle in his hand.
After retrieving a second beer, he handed it to her. “No glass?” she asked.
“If I don’t like what you have to say, you can take it to go.”
“Get a glass. I’ll be sure to say something you like.”
“I lose more glasses that way.” He went to the cabinet and got her one.
“I assume you know about Tye Delson.”
“I heard about it.”
“Evidently she was smoking, lost her balance, and fell out her office window. I went to the service. It was pretty sad after all she went through.”
“We probably don’t know half of it.”
Kate got that old feeling about Vail, that he knew something no one else did. “By the way, did you hear that we got the five million back?”
“No kidding.”
She smiled. “Yeah, no kidding. Of course Kaulcrick tried to twist it around with the director. You know, his leadership and all.”
“What makes you so sure he wasn’t responsible?”
“Still can’t stand to take any credit. I get it. I won’t bring it up again,” Kate said. “And in return for what you did, I won’t thank you either.”
“Thank you.”
“Very funny. Also, Pendaran has been cleared. Well, cleared of being part of the Pentad.”
“Did you finally get rid of him?”
Kate shook her head. “He’s suing for false arrest. Looks like he’ll be with us until he retires.”
“Sounds about right.”
“And the director has made a couple of requests. The first was of Assistant Director Kaulcrick. He explained to Don how it was time to retire. He’ll be gone after the first of the month. On behalf of the entire FBI, thank you. The second thing was he told me to get an answer from you this time. He really wants you to come work for us. Like he said before, anywhere you want. You can travel around the country picking and choosing cases.”
“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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