Blindside

long piece of black hair had come loose from the clip and was curved around her cheek.
    He nodded. “My name’s Savich. Dillon Savich.”
    “Bobby told me you were an FBI agent.”
    Savich wanted to get back to Dane’s report. He wanted to figure out how he was going to catch this nutcase before math teachers in the area became terrified for the foreseeable future. Again, he only nodded.
    “Is it true that Louie Freeh was a technophobe?”
    “What?” Savich jerked around to look at her.
    She just smiled, a dark eyebrow arched up.
    Savich shrugged. “People will say anything about anyone.”
    Standard FBI spew, of course, but it was ingrained in him to turn away insults aimed at the Bureau. And, as a matter of fact, what could he say? Besides, the truth was that Director Freeh had always been fascinated with MAX, Savich’s laptop.

    “He was sure sexy,” she said.
    Savich blinked at that and said, “He has six or seven kids. Maybe more now that he has more time.”
    “Maybe that proves that his wife thinks he’s sexy, too.”
    Savich just smiled and pointedly returned to Dane’s report. He read: Ruth Warnecki says she’s kept three snitches happy since she left the Washington, D.C., Police Department, including bottles of bubbly at Christmas. She gave a bottle of Dom Perignon to the snitch who saved James Marple’s life, only to have him give it back, saying he preferred malt liquor.
    The booze Ruth usually gave to her snitches would probably burn a hole in a normal person’s stomach. They’d been very lucky this time, but what could a snitch know about some head case killing high school math teachers? They weren’t talking low-life drug dealers here. On the other hand, most cases were solved by informants of one sort or another, and that was a fact.
    He tried to imagine again why this person felt his mission was to commit cold-blooded murder of math teachers. Randomly shooting company CEOs—that was a maybe. Judges—sometimes. Politicians—good idea. Lawyers—hands down, a top-notch idea. But math teachers? Even the profilers were amused about how off-the-wall crazy bizarre it was, something that no one could ever remember happening before.
    He was inside his brain once more when she spoke again. He nearly fell off the treadmill at her words. “Is it true that Congress, way back when, was responsible for shutting off any communication between the FBI and the CIA? And that’s why no one shared any information before nine-eleven?”
    “I’ve heard that” was all he said.
    She leaned close and he smelled her perfume, mixed with a light coating of sweat. He didn’t like Valerie Rapper looking at him like she wanted to pull his gym shorts off.

    She asked, “How often do you work out?”
    He had only seven minutes to go on the treadmill. He decided to cut it to thirty seconds. He was warmed up enough, loose, and a little winded. “I try to come three or four times a week,” he said, and pressed the cool-down pad. He knew he was being a jerk. Just because he was anxious about this killer, just because a woman was interested in him, it didn’t mean he should be rude.
    And so he asked, “How often do you come here?”
    She shrugged. “Just like you—three or four times a week.”
    Without thinking, he said, “It shows.” Stupid thing to say, really stupid. Now she was smiling, telling him so clearly how pleased she was that he liked her body.
    He was an idiot. When he got home he’d tell Sherlock how he’d managed to stick his foot all the way down his throat and kick his tonsils.
    He pressed the stop pad and stepped off the treadmill. “See you,” he said, and pointedly walked to the weights on the other side of the room.
    He worked out hard for the next forty-five minutes, pushing himself, but aware that she was always near him, sometimes standing not two feet away, watching him while she worked her triceps with ten-pound weights.
    Sherlock, much smaller, her once skinny little arms now sleek with muscle, had worked up to twelve-pound weights.
    Thirty minutes later he forgot all about the math teacher killer and Valerie Rapper as he opened the front door of his house to hear his son yell “Papa! Here comes an airplane!” and got it right in the chest.
    Two evenings later at the gym, while Sherlock was showering in the women’s locker room after a hard workout, and Savich was stretching his tired muscles in a corner, henearly tripped on a free weight when Valerie Rapper said,