Roses Are Red

"Is this, like, a date?" she asked once we were seated at a table in the cozy, but noisy, Manhattan restaurant.

I smiled. "I would say this might qualify as a date, especially if we don't talk about work too much."

"You have my word on it. Not even if the Mastermind walks in here and sits down at our table."

'I'm sorry about Jim Walsh," I told her. We hadn't gotten a chance to talk about it much.

"I know you are, Alex. Me too. He was a really good guy."

"Did it surprise you? That he killed himself?"

She put her hand on top of mine. ,

"It did totally. Not tonight. Okay?"

For the first time, she opened up and told me a little about herself. She had gone to John Carroll High School in DC and been brought up Catholic. She said that her background was 'strict, strict, and more strict. Lots of discipline." Her mother was a homemaker until she died when Betsey was sixteen. Her father had been a sergeant in the army, then a fireman.

"I used to go out with a girl from John Carroll,” I told her. "Cute little uniform."

"Recently?" she asked. Her brown eyes twinkled. She was fu

I told her that my mother and father had both died before I was ten and that my grandmother raised me. "I work out a lot too," I said.

"You went to Georgetown, then Johns Hopkins, right?" she asked.

I rolled my eyes, but I was laughing. "You prepared for the meeting. Yes, I have a doctorate in psychology from Hopkins. I'm overqualified for my job."

She laughed," I went to Georgetown. I was way behind you, though."

"Four years. Only four short years, Agent Cavalierre. You were a very good lacrosse player there."

She crinkled up her nose and mouth. "Oohhh. Somebody else has been prepping for tonight."

I laughed," No, no. I actually saw you play once."

"You remember?" she asked with mild astonishment.

"I remember you. You glided when you ran. I didn't put it all together at first, but I remember it now."

Betsey asked about my Johns Hopkins training in psych, then my three years in private practice. "But you like being a homicide detective better?" she asked.

"I do. I love the action."

She admitted that she did too.

We talked a little about people who had been important in our lives.

I told her about Maria, my wife who'd been killed. I showed off pictures of Damon and Ja

I noticed that her voice got softer. "I've never been married. I have five younger sisters, all married, with kids. I love their kids. They call me Auntie Cop."

"Can I ask a personal question?"

She nodded. "Fire away. I can take the heat."

"You ever been close to settling down?" I asked. "Auntie Cop?"

"Is the question personal or professional, Doctor?" I already had the sense that she was incredibly guarded. Her humor was probably her best defense.

"The question is just friendly," I told her.

"I know it is. I can tell, Alex. I've had some good friends in the past -men, a couple of boys. Whenever it got too serious, I always got out of harm's way. Oops. There's a slip."

"Just the truth," I smiled," slipping out ever so slowly."

She leaned in close. She kissed my forehead, then she kissed me gently on the lips. The kisses were sweet and totally irresistible.

"I like being with you," she said. "I like talking to you an awful lot. Are we about ready to leave?"

She and I returned to the hotel together. I walked her to her room. We kissed outside the door and I liked it even more than the first time in Hartford. Slow and easy wins the race.

"You're still not ready," she said matter-of-factly.

"You're right… I'm not ready."

"But you're close," she smiled, then entered her hotel room and shut the door. "Don't know what you're missing," she called from inside.

I smiled all the way back to my hotel room. I think I did know what I was missing.

Chapter Ninety-Five

Here we go! "John Sampson said and clapped his hands together.

"Bad boys, bad boys, where you go

At six a.m. on Wednesday morning, Sampson and I climbed out of my old Porsche in the staff parking lot of the Hazelwood Veterans Hospital on North Capitol Street in DC. The large, sprawling hospital was situated a way south of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, just north of the Soldiers' and Airmen's Home.

Home of the Mastermind? I wondered. Could it be? According to Brian Macdougall it could and he had a lot riding on it.

John and I were dressed in sports shirts, baggy khaki trousers, high-topped sneakers. We were going to work for a day or two at the hospital. So far, the FBI hadn't been able to identify the Mastermind among the patients or staff members.

The grounds of Hazelwood were surrounded by high field stone walls covered with ivy. The landscaping was sparse: A few deciduous and evergreen shrubs and trees, artificial berms that were evocative of wartime bunkers.

"That's the main hospital," I said and pointed to a nearby building that was painted pale yellow, and rose six stories above us. There were a half-dozen smaller, bunkerlike buildings on the grounds.

"I've been here before," Sampson said. His eyes narrowed. "Knew a couple of guys from Vietnam who wound up at Hazelwood. They didn't heap high praise on the institution. Place always makes me think of Titicut Follies. You remember that scene where a patient is refusing to eat? So they force a hose up his nose?"

I looked at Sampson and shook my head. "You really don't like Hazelwood."

"Don't like the system of dispensing medical care to veterans. Don't like what happens to men and women who get hurt in foreign wars.

The people who work here are mostly all right, though. They probably don't even use nose hoses anymore." "We might need to," I told him, 'if we find our guy." "We find the Mastermind, sugar, we'll definitely use nose hoses."