"Cray, David - Little Girl Blue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cray David)

just above the highest branches of the trees to the east, caught her
eye. She blinked defensively for a moment before turning to meet
Griffith's steady gaze. "I've got a bad feeling here, Bert."

"You worry too much, loo. We put her face on the tube, little kid like
this, somebody's gonna come forward. Especially if she was snatched,
then jumped out of somebody's car."

"Ah, just what I was thinking. The more publicity the better. We'll
get her face on the Today Show, and Dateline, maybe do Larry King and
Oprah. That way, if we don't close the case, the entire country will
know it."

Julia turned to find Griffith staring at her, his look frankly
evaluating. He (and everybody else in C Squad) knew that she'd
recently passed the captain's exam, that she was going places he'd
never see, never even visit. "We gonna hold onto this one?" he asked.
"We're not gonna give it up?"

"Bert, as far as I'm concerned, there's only two ways this job can work
out. Either we break it, or it breaks us."

Though Albert Griffith had spent much of his professional life
displaying what he thought of as a great stone face, a face carved from
ebony, he broke into a broad, toothy smile at Julia's remark. "Then I
guess we'll just have to put it away," he said. "Being that our
careers are on the line."

FOUR

IT WAS seven o'clock that evening when Julia finally sat down to a
dinner of lemon chicken, steamed asparagus, and wild rice. The dinner
had been prepared by Julia's thirteen-year-old daughter, Corrine, a
freshman at Stuyvesant High School. Lately, where Julia was concerned,
Corry had become almost motherly, as if her own weekday trek from their
Woodside home in Queens to lower Manhattan left her with enough time to
claim the household chores for herself. Julia found the protective
gesture touching, but knew that her daughter was in a transitional
stage, no longer a child yet not quite an adolescent. Soon the
hormones would begin to flow and Corry would lose interest in cooking
and cleaning and the other hundred-and-one chores that keep a household
up and running. Lord knew, Julia had tired of them long ago.

They would have a talk, Julia decided as she sliced off an asparagus
tip, a negotiation during which they would separate their
responsibilities. In the meantime, the chicken was only a bit
overdone, the sauce only slightly bland. The rice and the asparagus
were perfect.

Robert Reid apparently thought so, too. He was reaching for the