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"The
White Rose?" Ted Gruber, the senior advertising rep, sauntered into the
room. "Bet you anything he got rejected by e-Harmony. Maybe we should get
the cops to subpoena them to open up their records."
Curt and
Max exchanged glances. She muttered about a queue full of stories that needed
to be edited and hurried out of the lunchroom. Ted sidled up next to Curt and
went up on his toes to see through the gap into Angela's office. He whistled.
"Who's
the cutie? Looks kind of familiar... Hey, is she victim two? What's her name,
Karen? Kate?"
"Katrina,"
Curt muttered. "That's not her."
His
stomach twisted and he stared at the young woman, standing now and shaking
hands with Angela. Make her hair longer, exchange that brown blazer for a fuzzy
pink sweater, and make her twelve years old… she could be Angelique Napolitano.
But
Angelique was dead. Nearly twenty years now.
Curt
shook his head. He was seeing Angelique everywhere, lately. He had nearly
knocked himself out on the basketball court two weeks ago, when he looked up in
the stands and thought he saw her sitting there, cheering for Tabor Christian's
team in the inter-church basketball tournament. The look-alike was Sheila
McGuire, Officer Frank McGuire's niece. Her parents were Army doctors, both on
duty overseas.
Ted
stomped over to the coffeemaker and tossed a quarter into the donation jar.
Everyone was supposed to put in fifty cents for the coffee. "Some loony
thinks he's in love and plays Cyrano DeBergerac, spouting love poetry from the
bushes. When the girls get scared, he gets nasty." He spilled coffee on
the counter, then scattered as much sugar as he put in his coffee. He picked up
the sponge from the tiny sink, made a half-hearted swipe at the mess, left it
sitting there, and headed out of the lunchroom. "What happened to the good
old days when a guy saw a girl he wanted, clobbered her over the head and
dragged her back to his cave?" He disappeared down the hall to the front
of the long, narrow office space.
"I
bet you got rejected by e-Harmony, too," Curt muttered.
He heard
the doorknob click and pretended to read the six-month-old copy of Writer's Digest. He sauntered to the
doorway of the lunchroom, watching from the corner of his eye as Angela walked
the stranger to the front of the office. The long hallway down the far side of
the office unit went from front to back, giving Curt a clear view of the traffic
at the front door. He watched Angela and the Angelique look-alike shake hands.
Several knots of tension in his gut and shoulders loosened when the young woman
walked out the door.
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