“Oh. Okay.” She laughed. “So you’re not gonna sweep me off my feet, drive me away in a gold-plated Mercedes, and fund my research for the rest of my life?”

“Now that you mention it, no,” Colin said. But if that wasn’t an opening, he’d never heard one. (If that wasn’t an opening, she’d do unto him as the waitress had the night before.) Trying his best for suave, he went on, “If you’ve got a phone number or an e-mail, though

…”

He waited to see if he’d wind up with egg on his face. She pulled a little imitation-leather card case out of a jacket pocket, extracted a card, and started to hand it to him. Then she said, “Hang on.” Second thoughts? She scratched out the phone number on the card and wrote in a different one. “This is my cell. The one that’s printed here is my office back in Berkeley. I won’t be there till fall, and they’re liable to kill all the landlines anyway, to save money. Budgets.” It wasn’t a four-letter word, but she sure made it sound like one.

“Thanks.” He’d rarely been so sincere about what sounded like ordinary politeness. “And let me borrow that pen a sec, would you?” He scratched out not only the phone number but also the e-mail address on his card. “Here. This is my cell, and this e-mail doesn’t go through the official police system.”

“Thank you.” She looked at the card before she stowed it away. “You just said you were a cop, not a lieutenant.”

He shrugged. “All it means is, I wear a suit more often than a uniform. No gold-plated Mercedes. Not even tin-plated.”

“Oh, it means more than that. It means you’ve spent a lot of time working hard,” Kelly said quietly. “Later on, if either one of us decides this wasn’t such a good idea…” She didn’t go on, or need to.

To show she didn’t need to, Colin gave back a quick nod. “No harm, no foul. Sure,” he said. If he figured she wasn’t young enough or skinny enough or whatever the hell, he wouldn’t write or phone. If she thought he looked too weather-beaten to stand or that he really was a lush coming off a bender, she wouldn’t call back or return his e-mail. It would all be very clean and civilized.