Frisk Me(53)

He half expected her to continue to give him crap, but at the end of the day, Ava Sims was a professional and she gestured over to her camera crew as though there had never been a delay.

Ava spent a few minutes explaining the shot she wanted to Mihail and some other guy whose name Luc had already forgotten. Then Ava turned to Luc. “Okay, Moretti, you’re up. Nothing to it. We’ll just walk nice and slow along the river talking. I ask you questions about that day, you answer, taking me through what happened as best you can. ’Kay?”

Luc gave a curt nod.

“What about me?” Lopez asked, surreptitiously checking out a well-endowed brunette who was trying to ascertain what the camera was for.

“Watch for bad guys,” Ava said. Then she followed his line of sight. “Or go get that girl’s number.”

Luc followed Ava over to the start of the shot.

“Take a deep breath,” she said quietly.

“I’m not nervous,” he said irritably, just annoyed.

“Yeah, I got that,” she said, her mouth curving into a smile. “But it’s just me, Luc.”

It was her use of his first name that got him. He would do well to remember that they weren’t friends.

But sometimes it felt like they were.

She touched his arm briefly to indicate that they were about to start, and her fingers seemed to linger.

Sometimes it felt like they were more than friends. Definitely.

“So, Officer Moretti,” she said in her reporter voice.

Shit. Here we go.

“How many times would you say you’d walked along this very riverbank before the fateful events of February twenty-first?”

Fateful events? It wasn’t like there was a second coming.

She looked at him patiently and he realized he had to speak, or else risk looking like a mute on national television.

Fine.

“It’s not my usual beat,” he said as they moved slowly forward, the camera in their faces but more or less ignored. “My precinct is in midtown, but I’d come down to the Battery for another call…false alarm, as it would turn out.”

“What was the other call?” she interrupted.

“Cop business,” he said with a little wink.

It had been another charming indecent exposure call, but the perp was long gone by the time Luc had arrived.

Luc figured the fewer details the better.

The entire country didn’t need to know quite how often New York dealt with naked weirdos.

“So you were just strolling along…”

“Can’t say we on-duty cops do a lot of strolling,” he corrected, although he added a smile to soften it.

She laughed softly, and in an instant he knew why she was so good at her job. Her voice called people in. Her laughter made them want to stay.

“Okay, so you were walking. With purpose,” she said, making a jokingly macho move forward with her hands.

“I was,” he said, playing the game.

They came to a stop, and both of their smiles faltered a little.

“It was here?”

Luc pointed a few feet to the right. “She was there. Wearing a red dress and singing the chorus of some terrible pop song, but she was messing up all the words.”

“And it was cute,” Ava said with a smile.

He smiled back. “It was cute.”

“Tell us what happened next. Because in that YouTube video, all we see is you diving headfirst over the railing and coming up with a little girl soaked, wearing a red dress.”

Almost done, Luc told himself.

“Well she had, like this…doll,” he said. “A little one.”

Ava’s brow furrowed. “A little doll?”

“Like a…Barbie. Or something.”

“The NYPD cop knows what a Barbie is, folks. Do you have daughters, Officer Moretti?”

She knew that he didn’t, obviously, but the audience didn’t, so he played along. “I do not.”

“Nieces?”

“No nieces, although I think my brother Marco might be working on that.”

Marco absolutely was not working on that, but it served the bastard right for moving to Los Angeles.

Ava leaned forward slightly, her mouth in a teasing smile. “Then pray tell, Officer, how do you know what a Barbie is?”

“I’m a man of the world, Miss Sims,” he said mysteriously. “A man of the world. Anyway, the little girl had her Barbie dancing along the railing, and I’m still really only half paying attention, but then I hear her cry of distress, and the doll is gone.”

“She dropped her Barbie into the water.”

“Yes. And she’s full on crying by this point, because, I mean, who doesn’t hate to lose a Barbie, and I look around for her parents, but before I can figure out who she belongs to, she’s managed to get herself on top of the railing.”

Ava walked to the railing and put her hand exactly in the spot the little girl had gone over. “Here?”

Luc nodded.

“And then she went over,” Ava said.

“And then she went over.”

“How soon after her going in did you follow?”

Luc shrugged. “Instantly, I guess. I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember making the choice? Thinking, do I really want to throw myself into the river for a little girl I don’t know?”