The Profiler's Daughter (Sky Stone Thriller Series) by P.M. Steffen Page B

writer – came around his desk with arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome. Impeccably dressed in his signature gray wool suit – including a vest – Alexei was Old School. With his bushy eyebrows and full, close-clipped gray beard, he looked remarkably like Sigmund Freud.
    “You are back, Zvezdochka . Wonderful!” The pet name meant ‘shining star’. Alexei had defected from the Soviet Union in the late seventies but the thick Russian inflection remained.
    Sky held out the bottle of Stoli and the striped scarf.
    “She bears gifts. A celebration is in order!” Alexei looped the scarf around his neck three times. “I have always wanted one,” he confided with a sheepish shrug.
    He pulled two glass tumblers from a drawer and placed them on his desk with the exaggerated motion of ritual. Opening the bottle of Stoli, he filled each glass nearly to the brim and handed one to Sky.
    Holding his tumbler high, Alexei said, “Let us toast to good things about bad times, to old friends and new enemies, to great tragedies and small pleasures!” He closed his eyes and drained half the glass in a single gulp. “Outstanding.”
    Sky’s delicate sip prompted a laugh. “Champagne girl! You are kind to share toast of vodka with old Russian reprobate. Looking at you makes my eyes happy!”
    He took another healthy swig and added “I have missed our lunches.”
    At one point in her graduate studies, Sky became fascinated with the underlying mechanisms of hypnosis and attended one of Alexei’s workshops. Her first lesson included going into a hypnotic trance under Alexei’s soothing voice. The two became fast friends over lazy lunches, where they argued about everything from the relative merits of radical behaviorism and cognitive psychology to who was the greater writer, Nikolai Gogol or Raymond Carver. On rare occasions, Alexei would share one of his poems and Sky delighted at his work. ‘You are only one who gets me,’ Alexei would say. ‘You have Russian soul!’
    Sky didn’t waste any time. “I’m working a case. A six-year-old girl may be my only witness.”
    “Heartbreak Hill murder?” Alexei stroked his beard. “No matter! I do not want details.”
    Sky held the hypnosis book up. “Any tips on hypnotizing a child that you forgot to put in here?”
    “Ah.” Alexei took the book from her hand. “Written in Moscow. Smuggled out and published in states.” He shrugged. “For that alone I could have died in KGB labor camps.” His voice turned staccato. “You are with your detective again, yes?”
    “Professional relationship. Strictly.” Sky emphasized the word with a hand chop.
    “You cared great deal about your detective at one time. I seem to recall.” Alexei sat with his stout legs crossed at the knee.
    “Things are different,” Sky said. “I’ve changed.”
    “I agree. You are changed. Something in your face.” His eyebrows furrowed into a therapist’s scowl. “And change perhaps not for better, I am thinking.”
    “It’s this murder investigation,” she said.
    “I am acquainted with your work habits, Zvezdochka . Tenacity is well and good, but I see something else in your eyes.”
    “What?”
    “I see pain.”
    An uncomfortable sensation of transparency washed over Sky. She reminded herself that Alexei was a seasoned clinician, why shouldn’t he see what others couldn’t?
    Sky studied a collection of Egyptian antiquities displayed in a glass cabinet on the wall behind Alexei’s head. A dozen mummy-shaped figurines in shades of turquoise, aqua, and terracotta leaned in a single row against black velvet.
    “I can’t make any mistakes with this little girl, Alexei.”
    “You will not make mistake,” Alexei insisted. “Why do I know this? Because I taught you too well.”
    Sky was thinking about the tiny mummies in the display case, the job they were meant to carry out: to act as workers in the afterworld, in place of the deceased. Did Nicolette have helpers in the