Читать книгу Cavanaugh Stakeout - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 15

“Hey, Finn,” Detective Joe Harley, Finn’s occasional partner, called out as he stuck his head into the robbery squad room. “There’s a woman out here who’s looking for you. She says she wants to talk.” Harley grinned at him. “Looks like you finally got lucky.”

Finn was already on his feet. Armed with the address that Sean had just given him, he was just about to leave the precinct. He wanted to talk to the twenty-year-old who had just become his prime suspect. Unless this was really important, he didn’t have the time to waste on someone coming in to report something that she only thought was missing but in reality had just been misplaced. It didn’t matter how attractive she was. His focus was on something far more important.

“You talk to her, Harley,” he told the other detective.

But the ten-year veteran he sometimes teamed up with shook his head.

“Believe me—” Harley glanced over his shoulder toward the hallway “—I’d like to, but she said she only wants to speak to the person in charge of the investigation concerning the stolen car found in Merryweather Park…and that would be you.”

Finn immediately snapped to attention. Maybe this woman did have something significant to tell him after all. “All right, Harley, show the lady in,” Finn instructed.

Harley pretended to salute as he sighed and retreated. “Y’know, some guys just have all the luck,” he muttered under his breath.

Finn wasn’t sure just how to take that—until the detective returned less than a minute later. Walking beside Harley was a statuesque blonde with a knockout figure that could, in his opinion, bring strong men to their knees and make them salivate, as impossible fantasies began to dance in their heads.

However, despite her other attributes, it was the woman’s clear-water blue eyes that instantly caught Finn’s attention. He knew it wasn’t possible, but her eyes looked as if they could see right through a man, and like the fictional superheroine with her golden lasso, would allow nothing but the truth to fall from his lips.

Getting a hold of himself, Finn managed to regain the use of his tongue just as she came up to him. He put his hand out as he introduced himself. “I’m Detective Finn Cavan—”

The woman slipped her hand into his and Finn could have sworn that there was a momentary spark of electricity shooting up his arm. He dismissed it as adrenaline, with everything that was going on.

“I know who you are, Detective Cavanaugh,” the woman said, cutting him off as she smiled warmly at him.

“Well, that puts you one up on me,” Finn told her. He didn’t like being caught at a disadvantage. “Detective Harley didn’t tell me your name.”

“Well, that’s easily solved. I’m Nikola Kowalski. Nik, to my friends,” she added, putting her other hand over his as she shook it.

Because she seemed so friendly, something within Finn backed off. He didn’t trust people outside the family who were this outgoing. They usually had some sort of a hidden agenda. Women who looked as exceptionally attractive as this one did were usually the type to use their looks to disarm people.

Finn’s voice grew distant as he asked, “Do you know something about the car that was just recovered, Ms. Kowalski?”

Nik picked up on his cool, reserved voice immediately. He was attempting to maintain distance between them. Too bad. She preferred a warmer, friendlier attitude, but she didn’t need him to be all warm and toasty in order for her to do this.

“If you’re going to go the formal route,” she said, referring to his using her surname. “The w is pronounced like a v,” she informed him. “But ‘Nik’ is a lot easier,” she stressed.

He guessed right. The woman who looked as if she had just stepped off the cover of a swimsuit magazine intended to use her feminine wiles to pump information out of him. But he had no intention of being pumped.

“We’re getting off-topic,” Finn told her. “What do you know about the car that was found?”

That hadn’t become public knowledge yet. The details about his grandfather’s brother being savagely attacked and left for dead were being kept tightly under wraps. If she knew about it, then she had to be involved somehow. He looked at her with heightened interest.

She saw the spark in his eyes and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. He hadn’t acted as if he was interested in her a moment ago. But she did answer his question just to move this along.

“Well, for starters,” she told the steely-eyed detective in front of her, “I am fairly certain that Marilyn Palmer didn’t steal it.”

Considering that he had only been given the woman’s name a few minutes ago, Finn’s suspicion that the blonde talking to him was somehow involved increased tenfold. His eyes narrowed as he scrutinized her.

“How would you even know that we thought that?” he challenged. Not waiting for an answer, he decided to approach this squarely and asked, “Are you mixed up in this in some way?”

“Only as a Good Samaritan,” she told him.

“You’re going to have to elaborate on that, Ms. Ko-val-ski,” he said, deliberately stretching out her name.

Nik winced a little at his belabored pronunciation of her last name. It was right even though, at the same time, it somehow felt wrong. Despite that, she wasn’t insulted. “‘Nik,’ please,” she corrected. She had a temper, but it took a lot to arouse it. She decided to just keep it in check. She had a hunch that she would get further that way. “Maybe I should have told you that I’m an insurance investigator.”

His expression didn’t change, other than to allow some of the impatience he was feeling to seep in. “I still fail to see the connection here,” Finn told her between slightly clenched teeth. “It’s far, far too early for any insurance claim to have been filed.”

She had a habit of jumping ahead and burying the headline. Nik took a breath and started again.

“Marilyn’s mother is a friend of mine. She came to me with her concerns. She’s afraid that her daughter might be in over her head, running around with someone she feels might be taking advantage of her and getting her into some sort of trouble.” Her friend hadn’t given her any names yet, but when she heard through her sources about the carjacking, Nik immediately thought that might be a place to start.

He thought of the way Seamus had looked when he’d been called to the crime scene. He’d been on the ground, unconscious, deathly pale, with the gash in his head bleeding profusely.

“I’d say that it looks like she passed the ‘running’ part and is now smack-dab embedded in a very specific kind of ‘trouble.’ Where is she?” Finn asked.

“I have no idea,” Nik answered honestly. “I’m trying to track her down.”

He didn’t believe her. “You could be charged with obstructing an investigation, not to mention vehicular theft after the fact.”

Rather than having intimidated her, Finn was surprised to hear the woman laugh. He hadn’t said anything remotely funny. When he looked at her, puzzled, she said, “I bet you say that to all the girls, Detective.”

As far as he was concerned, this was not a laughing matter. “Only the ones I arrest,” he responded darkly. “I want you to know that if you’re withholding evidence, you’re on very thin ice—”

She stopped him right there. “The only ‘evidence’ I have is her name, which you already know,” she reminded him. “And I’m in the process of trying to find out the name of this ‘mystery’ bad influence her mother is worried about, if her mother got that part right—and there is still a very real possibility that she didn’t.”

“Ms. Ko-val-ski—” Finn began again, his patience running really short.

“Nik,” she corrected again.

“Why are you here?” he demanded, his voice rising along with his temper.

“Well, the simple answer is I thought we could pool our resources and work together since we’re both looking for Marilyn, albeit for different reasons,” she answered.

“Pool our resources,” Finn repeated in somewhat stunned disbelief.

“Uh-huh.” Because he was looking at her as if he expected her to clarify what she meant by that, she said, “You tell me what you know and I’ll tell you what I know. It seems more efficient that way.”

He was not about to work with an amateur, gorgeous or not. If she had anything he could use in his investigation, he intended to hear her out, but he wasn’t about to give her any information. As far as he was concerned, she was in the same class as the press and he made it a rule to always stay clear of the press.

“All right,” Finn replied, tilting his head. “You first.”

She wanted to tell him that she wanted him to go first, but she had a feeling that he would just dig in his heels. She could tell that he wasn’t the type to be receptive to that kind of a suggestion. She supposed that she needed to get this serious, distant man to trust her. The only way to do that was to be agreeable to his terms.

“From what I’ve been told, Marilyn has always been a good girl,” she began, only to abruptly stop. “You don’t need to roll your eyes like that, Detective. There are still good kids left in the world.”

In his experience, that was the sort of thing people said when the exact opposite was true. But for now, he let it ride.

“Go on,” Finn said, doing his best to put a lid on his skepticism, at least for the moment. Anything to hurry this along, although he was losing his patience at what felt like the speed of light.

“According to her mother,” Nik continued, “Marilyn has been acting strangely lately. My friend—Kim—thinks that her daughter has run off with this guy who she feels is a bad influence on her.”

“You already said that,” he reminded her flatly. “This ‘bad influence,’ does he have a name?”

She didn’t care for his condescending manner, but for now she went along with it. “Everyone has a name, Detective,” Nik responded with a smile.

“Then let me rephrase that,” Finn said evenly. “Does this bad influence have a name that you’re familiar with?”

“Not yet, but I’m trying to locate her friends, who don’t seem to be around, either,” she said.

How convenient, he thought sarcastically. “All right, do you have a description of this so-called bad influence?”

“No,” she told him. She hated being unable to answer his questions. As he indicated he was going to leave the squad room, she quickly said, “But I’m working on it.” Even as she said the words, she knew how lame that sounded.

Finn nodded shortly, dismissing her. “Come back when you have something substantial.”

The truth was he could probably get the description himself if this “bad influence” was in Seamus’s car with her as she drove away. Valri was already reviewing all the traffic-cam videos in the immediate area of the mugging, trying to spot Seamus’s car in all the recorded footage. Added to that, he had several members of his team collecting any and all surveillance videos caught on the cameras that were recording activity in the industrial center at what he approximated was the time of the mugging. However, giving the woman an assignment seemed the best way to get her to leave, he thought.

However, as he began to walk away, she placed herself directly in his path and announced, “Your turn!”

“My turn what?” Finn asked. There was an edge in his voice.

“Well, I told you what I know and you agreed to pool our resources, so now it’s your turn to tell me what you know,” she explained in a cheerful voice, which he found exceedingly irritating.

“You agreed,” he pointed out, his voice as dark as hers was light. He saw a fire enter her eyes that, under different circumstances, he might have even found intriguing.

But these weren’t different circumstances. This was about finding who had done this to his grandfather’s brother, and until he accomplished that, nothing else was going to take center stage for him.

“But,” he said evenly, “in the spirit of ‘sharing,’ I’ll tell you that Seamus Cavanaugh was mugged and left to die in the North Tustin Industrial parking lot while the person who did this to him drove away in Seamus’s vehicle.”

When he said that, the words tasted incredibly bitter in his mouth. The idea of someone doing something like that to an old man, let alone a member of his family, galled him beyond words.

“I already know that,” Nik pointed out. Finn wasn’t about to share anything, she realized.

“Well, then I guess you’re all caught up,” Finn told her. He looked toward the doorway and began walking. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

To his annoyed surprise, she fell into step with him. When he glared at her, she responded, “Where are we going?”

“I’m going down to the crime lab,” he growled. “I don’t know where you’re going.”

“That’s simple,” Nik answered, still keeping her voice light. “I’m going with you.”

Okay, time to put an end to this. He stopped dead in his tracks. Looking down at her, he told her sternly, “Oh, no, you’re not.”

The man was very uptight and extremely territorial, she thought. Nik decided to rephrase her words to sound less objectionable to him. “I thought I’d throw my lot in with you—temporarily, of course.”

This woman was harder to get rid of than a strip of paper covered in superglue, he thought. “There is no ‘of course,’ Ms. Kowalski,” he informed her.

“Ko-val-ski,” Nik corrected, resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going to get him to use her first name. At least not yet.

Finn threw up his hands. “Whatever.” And then he fixed her with a penetrating look. “Let me make this perfectly clear for you. We are not ‘working’ together,” he told her. “I’m a professional and you’re not.”

Undaunted, she pointed out, “We’re both investigators.”

“Only in the broadest definition of the word,” he responded, this time gritting his teeth together. She was taking up precious time with this game of hers, he thought.

“Here,” she said, taking out her business card and holding it out to him. When he didn’t take it, she deliberately took his hand and pressed the card into it. “Believe it or not, I am very good at what I do and you might want to change your mind down the line,” she told him.

As Nik walked away, Finn looked down at the card in his hand. “I really doubt it,” he murmured.

“So, do you have anything for me?” Finn asked Valri as he entered the computer lab.

The petite woman glanced up at him from the monitor she had been reviewing now for hours.

“What I have is a huge headache right between my eyes,” Valri told him, massaging the bridge of her nose in an effort to chase away her headache. It didn’t work. “I think I’m going to be seeing Granddad’s car in my sleep for the next six months. However…” She shrugged as she indicated the monitor.

“So, nothing yet?” Finn asked, frustrated.

Valri’s mouth curved ever so slightly. “That’s what I like about you. You catch on fast.” She sighed, turning back to the monitor. “I’ll give you a call if I do find anything.”

“Sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back,” he murmured. Locating all these surveillance tapes had been the two steps forward. But not finding anything on them felt like a giant step back.

“No time to talk about your dance lessons, Finn. I have a car to find,” Valri told him as she resumed her search.

“Then I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “I’ll check with Ramirez and Collins, the two detectives I have canvassing the area. Maybe they came up with something useful.”

“There’s always hope,” Valri said, already blocking out his presence.

Other than the dog walker who had placed the 911 call that had brought out the paramedics, Finn and the other detectives and patrol officers working on the case weren’t able to find anyone who could add anything to the slim amount of information they already had.

The worst part of working a case, Finn decided, was that helpless feeling that took over when he ran into a wall.

Back at his desk, Finn closed his eyes and tried to think. There had to be something he was overlooking, a way he could get this case moving, he thought in frustration.

He sighed. After spending a day spinning his wheels and going nowhere, he decided that he needed to go somewhere for a few hours to unwind so he could think. For him, as for so many other law-enforcement agents, that meant either attending one of Uncle Andrew’s parties, or going to Malone’s, the local saloon that was so popular with the police department.

Since Andrew was currently involved keeping vigil over his father at the hospital—Seamus was still lapsing in and out of consciousness—that left Malone’s.

It was misting when he drove up to the popular saloon, a rare occurrence in its own right. It hardly ever rained outside of the rainy season. Finn couldn’t help wondering if this misting was some sort of an omen.

As a rule, Finn wasn’t superstitious, but there was a part of him that he admitted was open to things that he didn’t fully understand.

Walking into Malone’s, he looked around. For once the place wasn’t packed to the gills the way it usually was. Instead of taking a booth, Finn decided to make himself comfortable at the counter. He slid onto the barstool that was closest to him.

Because Malone’s was currently only half-full at this point, the patrons there provided just the right level of noise to allow him to completely submerge his thoughts. Finn promised himself that for the next half hour or so, he was not going to think about anything at all.

Looking all the way down the bar, he spotted Devin Wilson, the bartender who was tending bar tonight, and he waved at the stocky man. To Finn’s surprise, Devin made his way over toward him. He was holding a large, frosty mug in his hand.

He placed the mug in front of Finn.

“I didn’t order anything yet,” Finn pointed out. He didn’t always have the same drink and Devin wasn’t in the habit of second-guessing his patrons.

“No, you didn’t,” the retired police officer, who was one of the owners of the bar, agreed. And then he smiled. “But she did,” he told Finn, pointing toward the other end of the bar.

Finn looked to where Devin had indicated and saw the woman who had turned herself into his own personal royal pain raising her own glass toward him in a silent toast.

He frowned.

It was that annoying investigator woman.