Читать книгу Cavanaugh Fortune - Marie Ferrarella - Страница 11

Chapter 3

“Brody, what’re you trying to do, lose another partner before she even gets started by burying her alive in Montgomery’s useless garbage?”

The sharply voiced question came from behind Alex. He didn’t have to turn around to know who the gravelly voice belonged to. Only one person in the squad room talked like that. Len Latimore, the lieutenant who had recently taken over the Homicide Division, had a voice that sounded as if he had spent the past twenty-nine days drinking hard liquor that went down anything but smoothly.

“I’m not trying to bury her, Len,” Alex said, although now that he thought of it, that didn’t sound like altogether a bad idea. “She was trying to locate Montgomery’s laptop, which was supposed to be in there somewhere.”

Of medium height and build, and appearing as if he were permanently rumpled, Latimore scowled as he circumvented the off-white avalanche around the newest addition to the division.

“Looks like she found a lot more than that.” If there was anything Latimore hated, it was clutter not of his own making. “Get a large box out of the supply room and clean this stuff up,” he instructed.

“Yes, sir,” Valri responded. She’d just assumed, since she was low woman on the totem pole and, after all, she had been the one to disrupt the precarious stacks in the first place, that the lieutenant was talking to her. “Which way is the supply room?” she asked.

“Not you,” Latimore snapped. “You, I want to see in my office. You—” he turned to face Alex “—can get all of Montgomery’s junk cleared away.”

“Montgomery’s going to want all this when he gets back,” Alex pointed out. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of the mess that his partner made, but he knew how he would have felt if someone had come and moved all of his things while he was in the hospital, especially since he’d been put there by job-related injuries.

“Yeah, well, what he wants and what he gets are two damn different things. This isn’t his squad room, it’s mine, and I don’t want to see this when I come out again,” he warned, pointing to all the papers scattered on the floor around the chief’s cousin. “Do I make myself clear?”

“It’s my fault, sir.” Valri was quick to speak up. “I caused the papers to fall.”

The last thing she wanted was for this to cause any hard feelings between her and Brody. She might still be green, but she knew that wasn’t the way to start a new partnership, temporary or otherwise.

Latimore’s frown deepened. “I’m not talking about whose ‘fault’ it is, Cavanaugh. I’m talking about cleanup.

“In my office, Cavanaugh,” Latimore ordered gruffly. “Now.”

Valri had no choice but to do as she was told. She couldn’t risk getting the lieutenant any angrier than he already seemed to be. Otherwise, she would have remained to help clean up the blizzard of pages before she went into the short, bull of a man’s office.

Valri glanced over her shoulder at her partner. She fervently hoped that the detective wouldn’t hold this against her. He didn’t look overly thrilled to be working with her to begin with. Having to clean up a mess she had caused, accidentally or not, was only going to make matters worse.

She was acutely aware of garnering covert glances as she followed the lieutenant to his office.

Reaching the glass-enclosed lair that looked barely larger than a small walk-in closet, Latimore waited impatiently until she had crossed the threshold. The second she did, he closed the door behind her.

He walked to his desk and sat down, waving at the chair that faced him and expecting her to take the hint. When she didn’t, he ordered, “Sit,” as if he were training a dog. Rumor had it that Latimore was better with dogs than he was with people.

Valri didn’t remember bending her knees and dropping into the chair, but she must have because the next moment, she was sitting and uneasily facing the lieutenant.

All but holding her breath, she waited for the man to speak.

Not one for being delicate or standing on ceremony, Latimore got right down to the question he wanted resolved.

“You got any trouble looking at dead people?”

For a moment, the question caught her completely off guard. Of all the things she had anticipated that Latimore could ask her, this was not one of them.

“I don’t know,” Valri answered honestly after a beat. “I’ve never looked at a dead person.”

Latimore grunted. He didn’t look as if he was satisfied with her answer. “How long have you been on the force?”

“A little more than two years, sir.”

“And in all that time, you never saw a dead homicide victim?” he questioned skeptically.

“No, sir. I’ve dealt with a couple of victims who had been shot, but they were still alive. Mostly,” she enumerated quickly for his benefit, “I’ve dealt with break-ins, home invasions and robberies.”

“How do you think you’ll react to seeing a dead body?” he asked.

She took a breath before answering. “It’s not something I’d look forward to, but it’s part of the job.” And she was here to do her job.

Latimore looked far from satisfied, scowling at her. “Not answering my question, Cavanaugh. If you’re going to fall apart, I need to know up front—like now,” he emphasized, narrowing his eyes as he pinned her with them.

“I’m not going to fall apart because it is part of my job,” she replied in a surprisingly calm manner, given her penchant for bubbliness. “I wouldn’t be much good to Brody or the victim if I fell apart,” she added. Not to mention that she would have felt that she was letting down a whole legion of Cavanaughs, both here and in Shady Canyon.

Latimore rocked back in his chair, which squeaked to signal the new position. His small brown eyes never left her face. “So you’re telling me it’s mind over matter for you, is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

The lieutenant surprised her with a quick, spasmodic smile as he nodded his approval. “Good. Oh, and one more thing.”

So near and yet so far, she thought, all set to escape only to be pulled back. “Yes, sir?”

“That laptop that was found near the body, you really think you can get something off it?” There was genuine interest in his voice rather than any condescending note, tendering the notion that she was going to fail.

She tried to read the man in an effort to know what kind of answer he expected from her. If she said yes right off the bat, he’d undoubtedly think she was bragging and high on herself. So she couched her answer carefully. “I know I’d like to try.”

“Yes or no, Cavanaugh. I don’t have any time for your modesty or your aw-shucks routine. Give it to me straight. Can you do this?”

“Yes—probably,” she tacked on. There were always problems that could crop up and she didn’t want him berating her, or reminding her that she’d misrepresented herself and her abilities.

Latimore surprised her again by laughing in response. “I guess that’ll just have to be good enough for now. Brody tends to like to work alone, so you’re going to have to stay sharp in order to keep up and not get left behind.”

Latimore made it sound as if Brody had never worked with anyone before. “But he had a partner,” she protested.

“Montgomery usually handled the paperwork part of it—or mishandled it,” the lieutenant tacked on, clearly not pleased with Montgomery’s work ethic.

“I gathered that much,” Valri said, unaware that her comment elicited a muffled laugh from the lieutenant that the man managed to hide.

“The one time they went into the field together, Montgomery wound up in the hospital,” Latimore told her. “That made Brody more convinced than ever that he worked better alone. You’re going to change that.” It wasn’t a comment, or a prediction, it was an order.

Was that her actual assignment? she couldn’t help wondering. To get the detective to come around and get back into the swing of working with a partner? She supposed that she could do that.

“I’ll give it a try, sir,” Valri told the lieutenant.

“I don’t want you to ‘try,’ I want you to ‘do,’” he ordered in a no-nonsense voice. “Do I make myself clear, Cavanaugh?”

She squared her shoulders, every inch the consummate professional. “Crystal, sir.”

Latimore nodded, satisfied—for now. “Good talk, Cavanaugh.” He waved her out of the chair and out of the room. “Close the door on your way out.”

He didn’t have to tell her twice. Valri lost no time leaving.

When she got back to what was now her desk, Brody was still picking up the fallen files and haphazardly dumping them into a large rectangular box. The box had held a six-month supply of paper for the printer ten minutes ago. The reams of paper were now stacked in a corner.

Without a word, Valri began picking up Montgomery’s documents and depositing them into the box. Two could make the job go faster.

Alex raised his eyes for a moment. “So?” he asked as he got back to clearing the floor. He didn’t bother organizing the papers. That was a job for Montgomery, not a man who valued his sanity.

Valri took a guess as to what her new partner was asking her. “The lieutenant wanted to officially welcome me into the office.”

Alex stopped dumping pages for a moment and looked at her. The expression on his face told Valri that he didn’t believe her.

What he said next confirmed it. “That man wouldn’t ‘officially welcome’ the Three Wise Men if they came into the office.” He frowned slightly as he got back to picking up papers. He tried not to notice that her close proximity was undermining his ability to concentrate. But then he’d always been an admirer of shapely limbs and a killer smile. It was nothing personal, he silently insisted. “We’re not going to work well together if you lie to me, Cavanaugh.”

She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to level with him. After all, she hadn’t done anything to merit the lieutenant’s strange question to begin with. “He wanted to know if I got sick looking at dead bodies.”

Alex laughed, nodding to himself. “Now that sounds like Latimore. Do you?” he asked her as a sidebar.

“I don’t know.” He glanced at her again, this time raising a skeptical eyebrow. She could see the question in his eyes. “It’s what I told the lieutenant, too. I’ve never seen a dead body before.”

There were times that he wished he could say that. “All the more reason for you to stay here, working on the smashed laptop, while I go and try to find some of the late Hunter Rogers’s friends.” Picking up the last of the papers, he tossed them into the box, which was now close to overflowing. “Speaking of which, do gamers even have friends?” he asked her out of sheer curiosity. To the best of his knowledge—having never had any interest in spending endless hours competing against people he didn’t know—gamers were all a bunch of socially awkward, highly intellectual, obsessed-with-winning geeks.

“In a manner of speaking,” Valri told him, then thought to expand her response. “I guess it all depends on your definition of friends.”

That was easy. “Someone who knows all your secrets and still likes you.”

The words had come to him automatically. It was something his father had once said to him.

By that definition, he himself had no friends, Alex thought. Because he had secrets he felt he couldn’t—and thus didn’t—share with anyone. Secrets that would create chasms between himself and the people he knew.

“If that’s your criteria,” Valri countered, “I guess what it comes down to is you actually define the word likes.”

Alex blew out a breath. He was right. This world was a dog-eat-dog existence. “The gaming world doesn’t sound very warm and friendly,” he quipped.

“Well, that might be because it’s not,” she told him with an amused laugh. “It’s all about competing and winning and coming up with a better game or, barring that, a better strategy.”

“And you’re part of all that?” he asked her.

Alex liked to think that he was a fair judge of people, and she didn’t seem the type to enjoy that sort of bloodless, cutthroat competition. Nor did she seem the kind of person who liked spending time locked away, focused on a screen and annihilating the two-dimensional “enemy.”

“I was,” Valri acknowledged. “A long, long time ago, in another lifetime,” she told him. “My horizons have become broadened since then, but I do like to keep my hand in the game every so often, just for practice,” she admitted without any qualms, then added, “Keeps me on my toes.”

“So would a pair of six-inch stilettos,” he commented. Enough talk. He had to hit the streets and get cracking. “Okay, I’ll have one of the uniforms sign out the smashed laptop from the evidence lockup and you see if you can resurrect the dead while I go back to Rogers’s apartment and see if I can find something that’ll lead me to one of his buddies—if he had any.”

It hit her like a bolt out of the blue. “Randolph Wills,” she called out to her partner’s back as he was about to leave the squad room.

That stopped him in his tracks. Alex turned to look at her. He appeared somewhat skeptical at this sudden revelation. “What?”

“You said you wanted the name of one of Hunter’s ‘buddies.’ Randolph Wills hung around him a lot, trying to absorb his technique as well as his expertise. He’s kind of a leech, but his heart’s in the right place.”

“Most people’s hearts can be found in the same place,” he told her in an abrupt voice. “And you know this about Wills how?”

She made no attempt at building up the suspense. Instead, she told him point-blank, “Word of mouth.” And then she smiled. She was leading him to a sunrise and his eyes were firmly shut. “The gaming community is both larger and smaller than you think.”

Alex looked at her as if she had begun babbling gibberish. “Is that some kind of riddle for the ages?”

His sarcastic tone didn’t faze her. Growing up as the youngest had allowed her to be ready for anything and had given her a hide like a rhino. Her heart, though, was still her own and it was, for the most part, soft.

“Just a piece of information to contemplate,” she told him with a smile. “And I really think that you’re going to want me to go with you.”

They had different definitions of the word want, he thought. And his definition had nothing to do with the job and everything to do with this gut reaction he was experiencing. If ever there was a “tread lightly” situation, this was it.

“And why is that?” Alex asked her.

“Well, for one thing I think I know where you can find Wills,” she told him.

“And for another?” he asked because she clearly was building up to something.

“You’re liable to need a translator,” she told him, using the word liable out of consideration for the ego he had to have. Everyone was born with an ego and she had a feeling that his might be affected if what Wills told him—probably in a matter-of-fact voice—went straight over his head.

Alex was taking her words literally and he scowled. “He’s foreign?”

“No, born right here in Silicon Valley,” she attested, “but he might toss around terminology in his explanation that’ll confuse you.”

He wondered if she realized that she had just insulted him. “I’m not exactly a functioning illiterate.”

“It has nothing to do with literacy, Brody,” she assured him. “Gamers and hackers live in a different world from regular people—normal people if you will,” she tacked on for his benefit. “I’m just saying that he might start tossing around terms that won’t mean anything to you—and why should they? Gaming isn’t your world.”

She saw that her explanation didn’t sit well with him. Most likely because she’d hurt his pride. She gave him a way out.

“Besides,” she reminded him tactfully, “how can you be my mentor if I’m here in the office and you’re out there in the field? How am I supposed to learn from you?”

Alex shrugged dismissively. “That wasn’t my first thought,” he told her.

Not to be put off, Valri suggested gently, “Maybe you can find a way to work it in.”

She might look like a ball of fluff that was an easy pushover, but she was tenacious, he’d give her that. And he didn’t feel like arguing the point. It wasted too much time.

“You want to come along that much, okay, fine. You’re coming along,” he told her, throwing in the towel for now. “Let’s go.”

“Can I drive?” she asked brightly, falling into step with him as he went into the hall.

“No.” The single word was filled with finality, leaving absolutely no room for argument. Or so he believed.

“But I’m the one who knows the way,” Valri pointed out.

He punched the down button on the wall, summoning the elevator car. “You also know how to talk—God knows you know how to talk,” he said with a dramatic sigh. “That means that you can tell me how to get to Wills’s place while I’m driving.”

“It’d be easier if I just drove,” she informed him a tad stubbornly.

That was not his definition of easy. Nothing about this exuberant, temporary detective was easy—and he’d bet his last dime that she knew it.

“That all depends on whose point of view you’re looking at this from—yours, or mine,” he told her. “And since it’s my car, I win. You can still stay back in the office and play twenty-one pickup with the laptop, you know. Nobody’s stopping you.”

“I’ll ride shotgun,” she said, resigning herself to sitting in the passenger seat. She was not about to petulantly remain in the office because she didn’t get her way.

“Nice of you to come around,” Alex told her.

It was the first time since they had been introduced in the chief of Ds’ office that she had seen her new partner smile.

She had an instant reaction to the smile, starting with the very center of her stomach. If she didn’t know better, she would have said that it had done a complete flip, spinning around a full 360 degrees and causing something akin to a tidal wave.

This man could very well be lethal, given the right set of circumstances.

It would be up to her to make sure that those circumstances never came together, at least not where she was concerned. She was here to learn, to advance, not be the target for advances.

Despite her wise words to the contrary, it took a while for her stomach to settle down.