Читать книгу Cavanaugh Hero - Marie Ferrarella - Страница 11

Chapter 3

Sean Cavanaugh was the first crime-scene investigator in through the doorway.

Nodding at his son and the unfamiliar woman with him—was it him, or did it seem like there was always a woman with Declan?—the head of the day investigative unit looked grimly down at the body on the sofa. The dead man appeared to be in his late twenties, early thirties. Strong, well built and undoubtedly with a good future in front of him until a bullet ended all that.

What a waste, Sean thought, setting down the case he always carefully checked and restocked after every crime-scene investigation. It was time to get to work and find answers.

“So the victim’s one of our own,” Sean said sadly, addressing the remark to both of the occupants within the room.

Charley answered first. “Yes, sir, he was. Sergeant Matthew Holt,” she told the head of CSI.

Oh, Matt, Matt, what have you gone and let happen to you? Why’d you let your guard down like that? You always told me to be careful. Why weren’t you?

Charley felt her throat closing, suddenly clogged with tears. She fought them back.

Sean nodded, taking in the information. “And you are?” he asked.

“Detective Charlotte Randolph, sir.” Charley focused strictly on answering the questions put to her. Her voice sounded almost robotlike. “I was the one who called it in.”

Sean unlocked his case and lifted the lid. “Well, Charlotte—”

“Charley,” she corrected him, forcing a faint smile to her lips. “People call me Charley.”

Matt had called her Charley when she was a little girl and the name had stuck, she thought now. Damn it, she couldn’t tear up, she couldn’t, Charley ordered herself, digging her nails into her palms.

Think of something else. Think of anything else.

Sean looked at the woman, quietly studying her. This wasn’t just a casual acquaintance of the victim. His death was affecting her.

“Well, Charley,” Sean amended. “How did you happen to be here?” he asked gently.

“I already asked her that,” Declan interjected.

“Yes, but I didn’t,” his father pointed out calmly. Both his voice and his expression were sympathetic as he continued to regard the young woman.

Behind him, two more members of his investigative team came in, both well entrenched in what their particular duties were at a scene like this. They got to work quickly and quietly, moving as smoothly as the timing belt on a well-oiled engine.

Charley took a breath before reciting her answer. “I heard he hadn’t shown up for work for a couple of days and that he hadn’t even bothered calling in. I knew that wasn’t like him, but I also knew that he was going through a rough patch—”

“What kind of a rough patch?” Sean asked.

“He’d just broken up with a woman he was certain was ‘the one.’” Someone should have strangled Melissa a long time ago, she thought angrily. Before the witch ever came into Matt’s life.

Guided by her tone, Sean made the only logical assumption. “But she wasn’t ‘the one,’ was she?”

“Not unless we were talking about barracudas, sir,” Charley replied, deliberately staring straight ahead, past the CSI chief’s head.

“No need to call me sir,” Sean said. That sort of thing created a formal atmosphere and right now, he was striving for the exact opposite. Nodding his head to indicate Declan, he added, “He never does.”

“I do, too. You just don’t listen,” Declan told his father.

“All too well, Declan,” Sean said, glancing at his son knowingly. “All too well. All right, if you two want to stand over there and wait until I finish processing the crime scene, it shouldn’t be all that long.” He glanced at the opened bottles of vodka and Kahlua on the coffee table. “A little early in the day to be getting into that right now. Was that his drink of choice?” he asked. “A black Russian?”

It hadn’t been, initially. All Matt ever drank—if he drank at all—was a beer, maybe on rare occasions, two. He hadn’t been very big on anything that allowed him to lose the tight rein he had over his control.

“It was a habit he picked up from Melissa,” Charley told him.

Declan scanned the room as if that could somehow answer his questions by the very nature of the vibrations that had been left behind. “Then maybe she was here, too,” he suggested.

“Only one glass,” Charley pointed out. “It was the first thing I checked for.” Once she could bring herself to leave Matt where he lay, she added silently. “Besides, there’s no lipstick on the glass.”

“Big on makeup, was she?” Declan asked, curious. This detective seemed to know a lot about the woman in question. Why?

“It helped to cover up her physical flaws,” she explained.

He laughed at the way she worded her answer. “Not a big fan of the woman in question, I take it.”

Charley saw no reason to deny or cover up how she felt about the woman who had deliberately broken her brother’s heart. What did it matter? Matt was gone and his feelings were the only ones that had ever mattered to her anyway. If she’d held her tongue before about Melissa, it was only to spare him.

In hindsight, maybe if she had said something, he wouldn’t have gotten to this point. Maybe he might have even been alive now because he would have been at work, not home and unprotected.

“I wouldn’t lift a finger to save her if she was drowning in a puddle of rainwater,” Charley told the detective.

“Talk about cold,” Declan couldn’t help commenting.

Actually, it was the exact opposite. Whenever she thought of the strawberry-blonde with the flat brown eyes who had led her brother around as if he were some sort of trained monkey on a leash, her blood pressure went up by at least ten points. Possibly even more.

“She cut out his heart and stomped on it. I have no reason to get all warm and toasty whenever I think of her—which is as infrequently as possible,” she informed Declan, her tone indicating that she didn’t want to discuss the woman anymore.

“Duly noted,” Sean said. For a minute, she’d forgotten the other man was still in the room.

The head of CSI took out the camera he’d paid for with his own money, preferring to use something he was comfortable with rather than the one the department had issued to him.

“Will you two be working the case together?” he asked mildly.

Declan said, “Don’t know yet” at the same time that Charley said, “Yes.”

Sean smiled. “A slight difference of opinion, I see. Apparently the situation is all tangled up, which is nothing new.” He lowered the camera for a moment to look at her. “I’ll keep Declan here posted and he can let you know what progress has been made, if any.”

She didn’t want to be on the receiving end of anything secondhand. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stop by the lab whenever you’re done processing the evidence.”

Sean glanced up for a moment, assessing the woman in front of him. Seeing the expression in her eyes. There was that pain again, he noted. Definite pain. This wasn’t just a fellow brother in blue she’d looked in on. This was someone important to her.

For now, he let it go at that. He had a crime scene to process. “Give me your card, Charley.” She was quick to oblige him, digging out one of the cards the department had issued to her.

Matt had his own made up for her at the same time. The cards were identical—except for the drawing of a teddy bear on the front. The image represented Barney the Bear, another toy he’d given her. One, he told her, that was supposed to keep her company and protect her whenever she felt afraid.

Barney was propped up on her bed where, even now, he spent his days and nights, a vivid connection to her childhood.

And now he would also serve as a reminder of the brother she’d lost today, she couldn’t help thinking.

Steady, Charley warned herself.

Sean tucked the card into his pocket and went on taking photographs of the crime scene.

“Your friend have any enemies?” Declan asked as they walked out of the house.

She hated leaving Matt there, lifeless on the sofa, no longer regarded as a person, just a statistic. But she knew she had to. There was nothing she could do for him now—except find his killer.

“None,” she answered the detective.

“How about this ex-girlfriend?” he prodded. “Melissa?”

Charley shook her head. As much as she hated the woman, she knew Melissa wasn’t responsible for Matt’s murder. “Melissa didn’t do this.”

Declan looked at her with more than mild interest. “What makes you so sure?”

“To begin with, she’s not bright enough to know how to work a stapler,” Charley said sarcastically, referring to the note that had been stapled to Matt’s chest. “And the note said this was only the beginning. That means whoever did it was holding Matt accountable for something and he—or she—was obviously holding other people accountable, as well.”

“Accountable for what?” Declan asked.

Charley shook her head in complete frustration. “I don’t know.”

For now, he took her at her word. “Fair enough. But there’s also another explanation, you know.”

She looked at him, waiting. She certainly couldn’t think of any. “Which is?”

“Maybe whoever did it wanted to make it sound as if there were going to be other fatalities to throw us off. Maybe Holt was the killer’s only intended victim.”

The theory had merit, she supposed. “It’s a possibility,” Charley allowed, even though she didn’t want to. This gave them far too many possibilities, far too many avenues to investigate.

Well, at least he got her to admit that, Declan thought. Maybe this meant she wasn’t as terminally stubborn as she used to be. “This Melissa, you know her last name?”

“Merryweather,” Charley told him, then repeated, “She didn’t do it.”

Declan nodded, barely paying attention to her. He was busy forming plans in his head.

“So you said. Humor me.” And then he realized that she could still be of some more use. “You wouldn’t by any chance know where we could find her, would you?”

Charley’s expression was totally unreadable. “Other than under the first rock you come to, no.”

“That’s okay, I can look her up once I get back to the office.”

He didn’t ask her if she wanted a ride, because she had her own vehicle as far as he knew and besides, he was really hoping she’d given up the idea of working this with him. As gorgeous as the woman was, he had a feeling that working with her might be a challenge he’d save for another day.

Pulling out of the driveway, he left the other detective standing there, watching him take off.

* * *

Declan didn’t think about her again until he was pulling up in the police department’s rear parking lot. The woman he’d left behind him was now standing by the rear entrance into the building.

Stunned, he slammed the driver’s door behind him as he jumped out of his vehicle. He cut the distance to her in long, quick strides, hardly remembering making them.

“How the hell did you get here ahead of me?” he asked.

That was probably the easiest question she was going to field this week. She gave him a quick, pasted-on smile. “I drive faster than you do. You drive like a senior citizen,” she pointed out. “Let’s go up to talk to your lieutenant,” she said, reminding him of his promise.

“Might as well,” he said, resigned as he punched the number 3 on the keypad on the silver wall. “And I drive carefully,” he corrected, taking offense at her assessment.

“Whatever you say,” she replied.

When they got to the office, Lieutenant Jacobs was nowhere to be found.

“Personal emergency,” one of the other detectives in the department told them when Declan came out of the man’s office. “His wife lost control of her car—it wound up as window dressing in a boutique showroom. The lieutenant looked fit to be tied once he knew for certain his wife hadn’t killed herself. My guess is that he won’t be back today. You need help with something?” the man asked, giving Charley a scrutinizing once-over.

“No,” Declan answered. Turning toward the woman with him, he said, “Looks like I’m on my own here.”

“We’re on our own.” She deliberately emphasized the first word.

“Hey, Cavanaugh, wanna introduce me?” the detective he’d just been talking to asked, rising to his feet as he was taught in a bygone wonderfully polite era.

“No,” Declan replied succinctly as he walked away, headed to his desk. “Okay, let me see if I can find this Melissa Merryweather,” he said more to himself than to Charley.

He just didn’t give up, did he? she thought. Well, it was his time he was wasting. But she intended to try to follow up any shred of a lead the CSI people came up with.

“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” she told him mildly.

He was getting tired of hearing her say that. “Well, unless and until another tree comes leaping out at me, this is all I’ve—we’ve—” he corrected himself before she could “—got. Unless you’re keeping something from me,” he tagged on.

She was, but it had nothing to do with Matt’s murder and everything to do with her being able to investigate it, so she kept the information to herself as she shook her head. “Not a thing.”

In his opinion, Charley sounded entirely too innocent when she said that and he always held displays of innocence to that degree suspect. But he had nothing to go on other than a gut instinct, one he wasn’t able to pin down or flesh out yet. Until such time, he intended to keep this detective close to him and the best way to do that was to allow her to think he was all for their joining forces.

Getting comfortable at his desk, he gestured to the somewhat scarred desk facing his.

“Spenser was moving out his stuff when I left here this morning. Looks like he’s finished so you can park yourself there for the time being if you like.”

She pulled the chair out and sank down into it. It was going to need some adjustment. This Spenser was a big man, she concluded. “Spenser your partner?”

“Ex-partner.” Declan didn’t look up, his fingers gliding along the keyboard as he continued to search for Melissa Merryweather’s address. “He decided he could make more money in the private sector.”

That wasn’t exactly a newsworthy discovery. “He probably can,” she speculated. The police department wasn’t exactly known for its princely salaries. “You two work together long?”

He had to think for a moment before answering. “A little over a year and a half.”

“Get along?”

That caught his attention. “Average,” he acknowledged, looking at her sharply. “What’s with the twenty questions?” he asked. What was she up to? Even back in the academy, he remembered that Charley had an agenda, a schedule. She went at training doggedly—a preview of how she handled everything else. He doubted that a leopard could change its spots.

“Just catching up,” she said. Moreover, if Declan was answering questions, he couldn’t be asking them.

“That works two ways,” he reminded her. “I get a chance to catch up, too.” He had a few outstanding questions about her he wanted to ask—especially about that mysterious husband of hers who had devolved into a long story for a slow night.

Rather than comment on what he’d just pointed out, Charley indicated the computer he was typing on. “Find anything yet?”

No, and it wasn’t for lack of trying, he thought in frustration.

“Program’s slow,” he said out loud. “The department’s way overdue in investing in new computers to keep us up to speed.” The fact that his department wasn’t alone in this didn’t make it any more palatable for him. Declan had never ascribed to the “misery loves company” way of thinking.

“Could be worse,” Charley offered philosophically.

He frowned at the blank screen with its maddening note at the bottom that told him it was “waiting to connect.”

“How?”

“You could still be banging out end-of-day reports on typewriters and have to make do with just one computer to a floor.”

Now she was just making things up, he thought. “Nobody’s that archaic.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” she countered.

The last police department she’d considered applying to, located in a little town in New Mexico, had a force of exactly three—a sheriff and two deputies—for the entire county, and the only accessible computer was located in the town’s one-story public library. The deputies and the sheriff’s secretary did all their work on electric typewriters.

“You’ll have to tell me about it someday,” he told her in a voice that indicated “someday” wasn’t going to be anytime soon. A second later, he triumphantly announced, “Got her.”

Charley didn’t have to ask who.