Читать книгу Cavanaugh's Surrender - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 9

Following Sean Cavanaugh through the bedroom and into the bathroom where her sister’s body was, Destiny could feel every single bone in her own body stiffening as the battle began all over again. Her protective instincts warred with the ones she had developed as a crime scene investigator.

The latter dictated adherence to the first cardinal rule of investigation: that nothing was to be touched, nothing was to be moved. It was of the utmost importance that the scene be preserved just as it was when the deceased died. This had to be done to piece together facts leading up to that person’s final moments. And, with that, the identity of the killer, if there was one.

But Destiny’s protective instincts were just as deeply rooted within her, if not more so. She was the older sister, the one who had always looked out for Paula.

Yeah, and how’s that going for you? Destiny silently mocked herself.

Being the older sister hadn’t been easy. Though she had never doubted her sister’s love for her, Paula had fought her all the way, desperately wanting to assert her independence.

“I’m a big girl now, Destiny. You can’t hover over me forever.”

Destiny could feel the corners of her eyes beginning to sting again as she struggled for the umpteenth time to hold back her tears.

Yeah, well, you would have done better if I had hovered, Destiny couldn’t help thinking now. There was no doubt in her mind that Paula would be alive right now if she had hovered.

If.

Her protective instincts had made her want to cover Paula up, to give her sister some small semblance of modesty and dignity by draping something over her—at least a towel. She didn’t want to leave her where everyone coming into the beige-and-blue-tiled bathroom could see her like this, utterly naked and exposed.

As if sensing her turmoil, Sean told her, “I promise I’ll make this as quick as I can, Destiny.”

She was grateful to him for his kindness. Pressing her lips together, Destiny nodded, doing her best to smile her thanks and succeeding only marginally.

“Thank you,” she said hoarsely.

Logan, who had entered behind his father and the victim’s sister, squatted down now, his attention focused on the opened cell phone that apparently had slipped from the dead woman’s hand just as life had ebbed away from her.

The cell phone was in the open position and it was still turned on. As he crouched closer to it, Logan could see that there was a text message on the screen. One last message just before death had found her.

Was it a last-minute regret and a plea for help? Or was this intended to be a virtual version of a suicide note?

Using his handkerchief to keep from getting his fingerprints on the phone or contaminating any prints besides the victim’s on the device, Logan was about to pick it up when he stopped and looked over toward his father. “Did you already take a picture of this?”

“Tagged and photographed,” Sean answered as he continued examining Destiny’s sister.

Logan lifted the phone and looked at the screen. There were only three words in the text message: He left me.

“We need to find out who this number belongs to,” Logan said, thinking out loud as he examined the cell number the message had been sent to.

“Not necessary,” Destiny told him stoically.

Each word she uttered felt as if it scraped along an incredibly dry tongue. Her whole mouth felt like a desert in the midst of a seven-year drought. And she was having trouble getting air into her lungs. Part of her was numb, the other was almost on fire.

“She texted you?” Logan guessed, glancing toward her and reading her body language.

Right now, the woman appeared to be shut down tighter than Fort Knox. Logan absently wondered what it would take to loosen her up, then dismissed the thought since right now, knowing that wasn’t going to help him. Thinking of her as a woman was completely out of line. She was the victim’s sister and his father’s assistant, nothing else.

At least, not right now.

Logan caught himself hoping that there would be a later.

Destiny heard the detective’s voice as if it had originated in an echo chamber. It sounded as if it was coming at her from a great distance.

She blinked, forcing herself to stay focused. If she let her mind wander, she wouldn’t make it out of this room without coming apart. She’d already cried once. That was all she could afford to grieve. She had work to do.

“Yes, it’s my number. I called her back almost immediately after she sent the message, but she didn’t pick up.” She pressed her lips together, taking a breath before continuing. Her voice sounded strained. “I’d been calling her all day without a response, so I got worried.”

“Why?” Logan asked. “Was she unstable? Were you afraid that she was likely to harm herself?”

Destiny stared at him. What was he talking about? He didn’t know Paula. He had no right to his assumptions. She took offense at the implication behind his questions.

“I got worried because I’m her sister,” she retorted angrily. “Because Paula normally keeps in touch. And she doesn’t send short text messages.” The three-word text was out of character for Paula. “She goes on and on, whether it’s a phone call, a text or in person. My sister is—was,” she corrected herself painfully, “not a person of a few words. She never said anything in three words that she could say in forty.”

He thought of pointing out that distraught people, especially people about to commit suicide, didn’t always conform to their normal behavior, but he had a feeling she wasn’t in the mood to be contradicted.

Instead, he focused on another piece of the puzzle. “Who’s this ‘him’ she’s referring to?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

Destiny took a deep breath, angry with herself for not having pushed when Paula had opted to keep the man’s name a secret. If she’d badgered Paula enough, she knew Paula would have finally caved in. Why hadn’t she pushed? Why had she just elected to respect her sister’s boundaries? At the very least, this mystery man of Paula’s could give them insight to her frame of mind the last time he saw her as he left.

If he’d left her, Destiny amended, ruling out nothing.

“You don’t know?” Logan echoed, more than mildly surprised. “Then you two weren’t close?” That was the only conclusion he could draw.

“No, we were,” Destiny insisted. “Very close.” They had been that way once and they had gotten that way again just in the past couple of years.

“Then why don’t you know the name of the guy your sister was seeing?”

Because I’m an idiot.

“Paula was a little superstitious. She said she didn’t want to jinx the relationship by saying anything about it too soon.”

God, that sounded so lame, so childish now that she said it out loud, Destiny thought, on the edge of exasperated despair. Why hadn’t she pushed? Insisted? Maybe if she’d known more of the details, she could have somehow prevented this. Even though she didn’t believe in her heart of hearts that her sister had done this, had committed suicide, a tiny part of her was afraid she had.

“All she’d tell me was that he was someone ‘important.’ And, that for now, he wanted to keep their relationship ‘special’ by keeping it out of the public eye. Apparently, I was part of the public eye,” Destiny said with barely controlled frustration.

Most likely, the guy was married, Logan thought, and when he’d decided to go back to his wife, the victim had killed herself.

“And you don’t think that this is a suicide?” Logan asked again. It was obvious from his tone that he felt that the evidence they’d reviewed so far clearly pointed in that direction.

“No,” Destiny said with feeling. “If this ‘important’ bastard had left her, she wouldn’t have killed herself. Paula was the type to have gone upside his head, to have raised a stink, not taken the breakup docilely, given up all hope and killed herself.” She raised her chin defiantly as she added, “I know my sister. That’s just not like her.”

Did anyone really know anyone else? Logan wondered. Of late, since the big revelation that had jolted his family down to their roots, he’d faced that question more than once.

“That’s what you think,” Logan pointed out. And, as far as he was concerned, there was an entire world of difference between prejudiced perception and actual fact.

“No,” Destiny said flatly. “That’s what I know. My sister believed in revenge,” she was quick to add, seeing the suspicious light coming into the detective’s all-but-magnetic green eyes. “And by that, I mean she would have dolled herself up, found the first good-looking male she could and deliberately shown up somewhere where she knew that ‘Mr. Special’ would most likely be. Then she would have flaunted the fact that she was having an exceptionally good time with someone new and gorgeous. Paula was not the kind to just give up,” she insisted. “She was stubborn that way.”

How long was it going to take to get used to referring to Paula in the past tense? Destiny wondered, her heart aching in her chest.

“I take it stubbornness runs in the family?” Logan surmised, watching her. There was just a hint of an appreciative smile on his lips.

Her blue eyes narrowed into slits. “Damn straight it does.”

“You might be right,” Sean interjected as if there was no other conversation taking place. Having completed his preliminary examination of the dead woman, he straightened up.

“About which part?” Logan asked, just taking it for granted that his father was talking to him and not to the sexy, headstrong woman before him.

Instead of answering his son immediately, Sean focused his attention on the person in the room who needed him the most.

“Was your sister right-handed?” he asked Destiny.

She shook her head. “No, Paula was left-handed. Why?” Had he found something to substantiate her gut feeling that her sister hadn’t taken her own life? Without realizing it, Destiny began to pray.

“Just trying to get my facts straight,” Sean said thoughtfully, never one to give away anything too soon. Pausing a moment longer, he then said, “I don’t believe she killed herself.”

Yes!

The relief that flooded through her limbs just about took Destiny’s breath away. At least she wasn’t going to have to fight everyone tooth and nail about this. If the head of the crime lab backed her up, the battle over that at least was over. Now the major one began: finding Paula’s killer.

“Thank you,” she said to Sean. The words came out on a nearly breathless sigh.

While he knew that his father wouldn’t just say something like that to put his assistant at ease, Logan still wanted proof.

“What makes you say that?” he asked his father.

“When a person slashes their wrists, depending on whether they’re right-handed or left-handed, the cut is deeper on the opposite wrist since they’re using their good hand.”

If the person followed regular procedure, Logan thought. Maybe this one hadn’t. “She might have slashed her right wrist first,” Logan suggested. “That would have made her right hand weaker when she was delivering the final cut.”

“True,” Sean allowed.

Concerned, Destiny immediately asked, “Then you’re changing your mind?”

Again, rather than answering directly, Sean turned toward his son, opting for a demonstration. “If you were to slash your wrists, how would you go about it?” he asked.

Logan firmly believed that there wasn’t anything in the world that would cause him to give up all hope and just apathetically end his life.

“I wouldn’t,” Logan said flatly.

“Good to know,” his father murmured. “But if you did, if you put yourself in the place of someone who’d lost all hope and given up wanting to live,” Sean proposed, “how would you slash your wrists?”

Logan honestly didn’t know what his father was getting at. “The usual way,” he answered with a careless shrug.

“Show me,” Sean urged. Taking a pen out of his breast pocket, he handed it to Logan. “Pretend this is a knife. Show me how you’d go about ‘slashing’ your wrists if you were committing suicide.”

With another, somewhat more pronounced shrug, Logan took the pen from his father and then, holding it in his right hand, traced a slightly slanted line from left to right across his left wrist. And then, changing hands, he took the pen into his left hand and reversed the process, “slashing” his right wrist from right to left with the imaginary knife. Both times the lines he created were slightly slanted, going from higher to lower.

“Okay, consider them slashed,” Logan said, handing the pen back to his father. His curiosity had been piqued. “Now what?”

“Now you’d bleed out,” Sean said matter-of-factly. “All right, keeping your methodical procedure in mind, I want you to take a look at Paula’s wrists,” he told both his son and his assistant. “What do you see?”

Each wrist had a long, deep cut going across it. “Slashes,” Logan answered.

Destiny narrowed her eyes, distancing herself from the actual person in the bathtub and focusing only on the victim’s wrists. She looked intently at the cuts that had caused her sister to die.

After scrutinizing the two cuts, she felt no more enlightened than she had been at the outset.

Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t—”

“Look carefully,” Sean repeated, cutting her off.

“I did,” she protested.

And then she saw it, saw what Sean was trying to point out without actually physically doing it. Her eyes widened and she looked at him.

“The slashes are both going in the same direction!” But there was more than just that, she realized. “And they’re both upside down.”

Instead of slanting slightly at the top and then dipping down as it reached the opposite side, each cut seemed to go from the bottom to the top, left to right, on both wrists.

“This is too awkward,” Destiny concluded, her excitement growing. And then she repeated what she had been maintaining all along. “Paula couldn’t have done this to herself. Someone else had to have done it to her.”

He could see his father trying to spare his assistant and make her feel better, but there were other matters to consider, Logan thought.

“There’s no sign of a struggle,” he pointed out, then continued, “There’s no huge amount of water along the perimeter of the old-fashioned tub, leaving the actual tub low, as if there’d been a wild, last-minute struggle. There are no outstanding bruises visible on the victim’s body, and her long, salon-applied nails all seem to be intact. They wouldn’t have been if she was fighting for her life.”

“There wouldn’t be any struggle if the victim was drugged,” Sean told his son, his voice as mild as if he were discussing the garden section of the Sunday paper. Turning, Sean pointed to the wine goblet he had already photographed and that now stood, bagged, on the bathroom floor exactly where he had found it. “A simple analysis can tell us about that.”

Logan still didn’t see that as proof. “A lot of suicides build up their courage with a drink first. Maybe the victim wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t experience a last-minute surge of regret that might cause her to stop what she was doing.” He looked at his father. “Despondence can do that to you.”

“Maybe to you,” Destiny fired back. “But not to Paula. She did not kill herself. I’d stake my badge on it,” she insisted.

“Besides,” Sean interjected, “there are the cuts to her wrists. Our killer obviously slipped up there.” Returning the items he’d taken out previously, as well as packing up the samples he’d taken into his case, Sean glanced at Destiny. “Are you absolutely sure your sister never mentioned this man’s name? Dropped a hint, used initials? Something like that?”

To each suggestion, Destiny could only shake her head no. Each time she did so, she felt her frustration growing larger and larger.

“No.”

The truth of it was that despite her initial concerns, she’d been really hopeful that Paula was finally looking to settle into a lasting relationship. And due to that, she hadn’t wanted to cause any waves by hounding her sister for details.

“And you didn’t press her?” Logan asked incredulously. What kind of a woman didn’t ask for details? he couldn’t help wondering. Was it because she was too wrapped up in her own love life? Was there some guy she was going to go running home to, to cry on his shoulder?

From out of nowhere, Logan felt just the slightest prick of jealousy. He shrugged it off, thinking he was just frustrated because he’d had to break his date with Stacy.

Destiny could only shrug impotently. “I figured she’d tell me when she was ready.”

He couldn’t help staring at her. Was she for real? If this had been one of his sisters, the other two would have been all over her until she finally broke. The life expectancy of a secret in the household where he’d grown up had been about a day and a half—if the one with the secret was in a coma.

“Wow, a woman with no curiosity,” he marveled, only half in jest. “I thought that was like, you know, an urban myth or something. Kind of like a unicorn,” he tagged on.

If nothing else, the man was mixing his metaphors. He was also being colossally annoying.

“Unicorns don’t wander around urban areas,” she pointed out, irritated at the detective’s flippant manner and not bothering to hide the fact, even if he was Sean’s son. Maybe he was adopted, she thought. Her eyes narrowed as she pinned him with a glare. “Are you going to take this seriously or not?” she asked.

“I’m officially ruling this a murder,” Sean announced, interrupting what appeared to be an argument in the making—he knew for a fact that Logan didn’t like being challenged. “Don’t worry. He’ll take it seriously now,” he assured his assistant with a note of finality in his voice.

She was overreacting. Her sister’s murder—just finding Paula this way—was making her lose her perspective. If she continued down this road, then she really would wind up being thrown off the case.

And soon.

At the very least, she wasn’t any good to anyone if she unraveled this way.

Destiny took in a deep, shaky breath, getting herself back under control. Her spine snapped into place, ramrod straight.

“Sorry,” she said to Sean.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” Sean told her warmly. Placing a fatherly arm around her shoulders, he gently escorted Destiny from the room.

The sound of fresh activity was heard coming from the living room. The M.E.’s team had just arrived, pushing a gurney between them.

Nodding at the duo, Sean said, “The victim’s in the bathtub. She’s had a preliminary workup and is ready to go.”

“It’s a suicide, right?” one of the men asked, looking at the sheet attached to his clipboard. The latter was lying on top of the gurney.

“No, it’s a homicide,” Logan corrected, answering for his father.

He wasn’t oblivious to the relieved smile that Destiny shot him. Though it lasted only half a second, he’d been right. Her smile did have the makings to light up a room.

Hearing what Logan said, one of the two men sighed and shook his head. “It’s going to be another long night,” he anticipated, addressing his words to no one in particular.

“C’mon, don’t just stand there and make it any longer,” the other man prodded.

Pushing the gurney before them, they entered the next room.

Once they were gone, Sean turned to Destiny. “I should be the one who’s saying he’s sorry,” he said to her, continuing what he was saying before the two assistants from the M.E.’s office had entered the apartment. “And I am. I am deeply sorry for your loss,” he emphasized. “And we will find the person responsible for this, Destiny,” he said. “I give you my word.”

Destiny blinked back her tears. It felt as if she’d been fighting them all along. Her supervisor wasn’t making things any easier for her.

“I believe you,” she murmured, her voice hardly above a whisper. Any louder and she knew she would risk breaking down entirely.

Again.

To the best of Logan’s knowledge, it was the first time he’d ever heard his father make a promise that he wasn’t a hundred percent certain ahead of time that he could back up.

This assistant had to mean a lot to him, he concluded, then couldn’t help wondering why.