In Death 24 - Innocent in Death

style, it wasn’t her way, but there were times, she thought, you just went with the moment. She strode right up to him, gripped the front of his coat in her fists and took his mouth with hers. Strong and hot and real.
    He drew her in. He always drew her in. So they stood, drenched in the heat of the kiss while the cold blew around them, and New York’s irritable traffic bitched and complained.
    “There she is,” he murmured.
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    “Yeah, here I am.” She drew back. “You’ve got a great mouth, ace. I happen to know your hands are pretty damn good, too. Get us in.”
    He lifted his brow. “Are you suggesting I break into the school, Lieutenant?”
    “I’m ordering it, if you’re standing as expert consultant, civilian.”
    “I love when you pull rank. Stirs me up.”
    “A wink and a smile stirs you up, pal. Give it a shot.”
    He strolled up to the door, removing a small palm device from his inside coat pocket.
    After keying in a code, he aimed it at the security plate, engaged.
    The locks gave up without a whimper of protest.
    “Showoff.”
    “Well, I did have a minute or so to look over the system last night. And in anticipation of orders, programmed a little bypass.” He opened the door, gestured smoothly. “After you.”
    “Security?”
    “Please.”
    She shrugged, stepped in. “Interior security? Log-in scan?”
    He glanced up at the scanner, keyed another code into his palm unit. “There you go. As you could have done the same with your master, I assume you wanted to test how simple it might be to slide into the place without authorization or detection.”
    “Something like that. Say someone didn’t have your sort of education. How much trouble would it be to do what you just did?”
    “More, certainly, as I was top of my class, so to speak. But it’s not a complicated system.
    Your average going-out-of-business-endlessly sale shop on Fifth would have better.”
    He tapped her side and her sidearm under the coat. “However, the fact that you’re carrying is a bit more problematic. I’ll need a minute to shut down the weapon scan.”
    “Go ahead.” That was just for convenience, she thought. It wasn’t smuggling in a stunner or blaster that concerned her.
     
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    “Scanner wouldn’t detect poison. Why should it?” she mused. “Pressure syringe, same thing. Killer or killers could have walked right in, at any time, with both.”
    “You’re clear.” He stood a moment, scanning the area. “So what are we doing here?”
    “Not sure.”
    “Not, I imagine-unfortunately-to play teacher-keeps-the-naughty-student-after-school.”
    “No,” she agreed. “Empty schools are even creepier than when they’re otherwise.” She slid her hands into her pockets as she walked.
    “The ghosts of students past. Bloody prisons, really.”
    She laughed, gave him a friendly elbow bump. “Yes!”
    “Not that I spent a great deal of time inside places like this. At least not until Summerset took charge of me. He was rather insistent about attendance.”
    “The state-run schools I was stuck in weren’t like this. None of this air of privilege, and the security was a hell of a lot tighter. I hated them.”
    She stopped by an open classroom door. One of the cells-or so it had seemed to her-of the prison. “First few years I just felt scared and stupid, then later it was ‘Okay I get all this.
    When can I get out?’”
    “And once you did, you jumped right into the police academy.”
    “That was different.”
    “Because it was a choice.” He touched her arm, just a brush of understanding. “And a need.”
    “Yeah. And nobody in the academy gave a shit if you recognized a dangling participle or could write a brilliant essay on the sociopolitical ramifications of the Urban Wars. Then there was geometry. That’s sort of the thing, though.”
    “Geometry’s the thing?”
    “Lines and spaces and crap. Area, radius, blah, blah. It gave me a headache. But I’m thinking geometry. The distance, the angles, the shortest route between two points.” She started up the stairs.
    “First vic’s classroom. That’s the-Shit, what’s the middle of the thing.”
    “Which thing?”
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    “The middle of the space.” She lifted her hand, fashioned a space in the air.
    “Well, that would depend, wouldn’t it? If you’re meaning a circle, it might be simply the center. Or, staying with a circle as the space, you may mean the central angle, and that’s the angle whose vertex is at