That was where the person made a mistake, Valri thought with a whisper of a smile curving her mouth.
The data might no longer be visible, but it was still there, a phantom shadow shimmering somewhere out in space, waiting to be restored. It was up to her to coax it back by finding just the right combination of keys, the right subprogram.
That required an infinite amount of patience and dexterity.
Lucky for her she had both.
Because as it happened, “a few more minutes” wound up stretching out into an hour and then two. After that, she lost track and gave up the idea of remaining for only “a few more minutes.” At that point, she knew she was there for the duration.
A small battalion of squashed paper cups that had once each contained some pretty bad black coffee from the vending machine had grown into an untidy pyramid in her wastebasket.
The infusion of the coffee had helped a little, keeping her awake far longer than she was accustomed to, but eventually, the rather foul-tasting black ooze had ceased working its minimal magic and she had given in to mental and physical exhaustion. She promised herself a break that shared the same dubious parameters she’d given herself about unlocking the secrets of the laptop: just a few minutes.
By the way her neck and eyelids felt and the manner the rest of her body complained—her position against her desk had been just shy of the one assumed by penitent early Christian martyrs—her “time-out” had been a period far longer than “just a few minutes.”
Forcing herself to sit up as straight as she could, Valri rotated her neck, first in one direction, then in the opposite one. She was trying her best to loosen the muscles up.
By the sharp, quick stabbing pains that were registering, it really wasn’t working.
What she needed was a good massage, but there was no way she was going to be able to fit that into her day’s routine. This would just have to work itself out on its own.
“Does it come off when you do that?”
Thinking herself almost alone on this side of the squad room, the unexpected question coming from directly behind her made her jump. Valri clutched her armrests and turned in her seat.
Brody.
She blinked, clearing away the partial blur that had descended over her eyes, and focused on his face.
Was it her imagination, or did he look somewhat blurry—for lack of a better term? This wasn’t the somewhat cocky, bright-eyed detective she’d made the rounds with yesterday.
What had happened?
“You look as bad as I feel,” she told Brody.
“Thanks,” Alex bit off, wearily dropping into his chair. His head was killing him despite the two ibuprofen he’d popped into his mouth as he walked out the door. Pills that promised to vanquish his headache within twenty minutes, if not sooner.
Obviously his headache operated by different rules and most decidedly on a different timetable.
“You’re in early,” he commented. Then as he brought his container of coffee up to his mouth, his eyes narrowed and he looked at her for the first time. “Or you stayed late, as the case may be.” Taking a deep drink, he assessed the situation, his eyes never shifting away from her. “You never went home, did you? I recognize your clothes,” he told her. “You were wearing the exact same thing yesterday.”
That wasn’t very hard to figure out, she thought, annoyed at what she took to be his superior tone. “Very good, Brody. You get a gold star for being so observant—almost like a detective. You’d better hang on to that little skill. It just might parlay itself into a career for you someday. How are you at reading palms?” she asked innocently, holding up her right hand for him to look at.
“Your lifeline goes on forever,” he observed, impressed.
Surprised to hear his assessment, Valri pulled her hand back and looked down on it. He’d gotten it wrong.
“That’s not my lifeline. That’s a scar that feeds into my lifeline,” she told him. “I got that one when I was a kid.”
“Bending steel with your bare hands at a young age, were you?” Alex asked.
She shook her head, overlooking what someone else might have taken as blatant sarcasm. “Fighting with one of my brothers. I don’t remember which one at the moment.” Since he was asking questions, she had one of her own. “Why do you look like something the cat rejected bringing in?” she asked.
“Long story.” He’d discovered that Southern Comfort liqueur went down way too easy and took its sweet time in numbing his mind.
Valri cocked her head, obviously still waiting for something more. “Is there a woman in it?” she asked, the question coming out of left field as far as he was concerned.
Alex stared at her. Did she know? “What?”
“Were you trying to drown your sorrows last night because of a woman?” Valri asked.
He laughed shortly, thinking it ironic that the cause for his solitary bender would phrase her question just that way.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” he answered. “Now, if we can get out of my private life and back into the reason that we both draw paychecks from the police department—”
“Fine by me,” she said, raising her hands from the laptop’s keyboard as if she was in the process of surrendering.
Nodding at the laptop, he knew that Cavanaugh was waiting for him to ask, so he obliged her. “Did you find anything?”
She could tell by the tone of Brody’s voice that the hungover detective sincerely doubted she had made any headway. Apparently he was just asking the question to humor her.
She really wished she had been more successful than she had been, but at least she had gotten her toe wet. And she wasn’t about to stop until she had a lot more.
“The data is pretty mangled,” she began.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Alex commented dismissively.
He took a long pull from his coffee. Rather than settle for his caffeine hit via what was in the vending machine, or the stuff brewing in the break area, he’d brought his coffee straight from home. There was currently enough caffeine in his cup to raise a herd of dead elephants. He was counting on it to kick-start his brain.
“But I did manage to get a few bits and pieces of his email correspondences,” Valri continued, doing her best not to crow about it—even though she dearly wanted to.
Alex stopped drinking his coffee. “You actually got something?” he questioned in disbelief, scrutinizing her as if she were some rare bug under his microscope.
“Bits and pieces,” she repeated, underscoring the words.
She wouldn’t be telling him this unless it was going somewhere, Alex thought. Could he have been wrong about her? Was she really this good, to bring a laptop essentially back from the dead? Did this beauty also have brains and skills far beyond those of mortal men, he wondered, suppressing a smile. He was doing his best to distract himself from the fact that despite everything, he felt an attraction to this woman. And that kind of thing, in this kind of situation, could only get in the way.
He grew annoyed with him for feeling this way—and with her for creating these feelings in the first place.
“And?” he asked, blocking an impatient note.
“And,” she echoed, picking up his cadence, “I managed to piece together a few of his emails.”
“Which is good because?” he questioned impatiently. Getting information out of her was like pulling teeth, he couldn’t help thinking. Did the woman like having him dangle like this while she drew everything out?
Probably, he decided. Why else would she do it?
“Well, for one thing, it gives us the names of a few more of his associates,” Valri pointed out. “Hopefully, they’re still alive and we can question them before someone decides to shut them up permanently, too. If Randy knew what Rogers was working on that got h
im killed, one of them might know, too.”
“So let me get this straight,” Alex requested, holding up his hand to stop her flow of words until he could properly process everything. He was still trying to get the cobwebs out of his brain. “You’ve got names and addresses to go with these emails that you magically pulled up?”
She frowned at the word magically, but refrained from commenting on it.
“Wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t.” Valri leaned back in her chair and felt her back crack in two places, as if something was finally clicking into place. “Just let me go and splash some water in my face and we’ll hit the road.”
“Or—”
The single word had her stopping in her tracks. When she turned back around to glance at him, she looked less than thrilled.
“Or?” she questioned.
He finally felt as if he was coming to life. His home-brewed black ooze was only partially responsible. Nothing he liked better than to be closing in on a quarry.
“Or you could just give me the list of names you found and I could hit the road while you went on working your magic on that laptop.” He nodded at the scarred device on her desk. “You obviously have more luck this way than being out in the field.”
But Valri wasn’t buying what he was desperately trying to sell her.
“My list, my terms,” Valri informed him. She patted the hip pocket of her jeans, indicating that was where she had placed the list. “I won’t be but a minute,” she promised.
She was gone five.
Striding back into the squad room, Valri held her breath. She half expected to find Brody’s chair empty.
It was.
Incensed, she was about to call out his name, asking the other detectives if any of them had seen which way her so-called partner had gone. But just as she opened her mouth, she saw him, talking to someone she didn’t recognize.
Grabbing her jacket from the back of her chair, she made her way over to the two men. The other man said something to Brody and then left. He was gone before she reached her partner.
She really wanted to ask him what that was all about, but she bit her lower lip instead. She hadn’t reached that level yet, where they could talk to one another, ask casual questions, shoot the breeze and gain a toehold in each other’s life.
If she asked now, she would only be being overly nosy in his estimation. That wasn’t the image she wanted to convey to him. She wanted him to feel that he could count on her, that she had his back no matter what.
That kind of thing took time.
Brody looked somewhat restless, she noticed. But he did seem to be a little more focused in his appearance than he’d been when he first walked in.
“Ready?” he asked her just before she reached him.
Nodding, she answered, “Let’s go.”
“I told Carson to tell Latimore that we were going to check out a lead,” he told her.
“Carson?” she echoed.
“The guy you looked like you wanted to ask me about,” he supplied easily. “He just transferred to Homicide.”
“He have a partner?” she asked, wondering if Brody was shopping around in case his own partner decided not to come back.
“Not yet.”
She bit her lower lip a little harder. It kept her from asking the obvious.
“Can I see the list?” Brody asked her as they went down the hall to the elevator.
Here, at least, she had the advantage, Valri thought. “When we’re in the car.”
“You don’t trust me?” Alex asked the question as if a negative answer would not just surprise him, it would wound him.
Valri had the feeling that he regarded her like an albatross around his neck. That meant he could easily leave her behind if he had the opportunity.
She was honest with him. “I’m working on it,” she answered. “But it takes time to build up trust. You know that.”
He murmured something under his breath that she couldn’t quite make out. Under the circumstances, she thought that maybe it was better that way.
“Girlfriend?” she asked him out of the blue after several silent moments had gone by.
The elevator had arrived and he stepped in. Where the hell had that come from? “Come again?” he asked.
“The woman you were trying to drink out of your system, was she a girlfriend?” Valri asked. “Or a former girlfriend?”
Alex’s eyes swept over her for a moment. Under a different set of circumstances, the woman standing beside him would have aroused his interest. She was quite frankly his type. But she was a Cavanaugh, which meant she was off-limits. Totally.
He laughed. “Hardly,” he told her, then asked, “And why are you so curious?”
Valri shrugged. “Just trying to be sympathetic and also to get to know you a little better.” She had to start somewhere, didn’t she? Valri mused. “After all, we are partners.”
“Temporary partners,” Alex reminded her, emphasizing the word.
“Everything is temporary if you look at it a certain way,” she pointed out. “We’re all only here on this earth temporarily, but it’s what we do with that time that counts.”
Getting off, they walked toward the rear entrance, where the parking lot was located.
Alex rolled his eyes. “I swear, if you break into a chorus of ‘I Believe,’ or some such song, I’m driving off and leaving you here.”
She offered him a wide grin. “I’m the one with the addresses, remember?”
It really annoyed him that her smile had a way of getting to him. Alex said nothing.
Reaching his car, he got in on the driver’s side and slammed his door.
Not trusting Brody to wait for her to get in, Valri flung open the door on her side and all but jumped in quickly.
He started the vehicle while she was buckling up. Gunning the engine, Alex pulled out of the spot with a vengeance, causing her, buckled or not, to lurch forward. Valri braced her hand against the dashboard in front of her, doing her best to remain steady and trying to be in control.
“It was me, wasn’t it?” she asked suddenly as the realization occurred to her.
“It was you what?” Alex asked. Now what was this thorn in his side talking about?
“It was me you were trying to drink off your mind last night, wasn’t it?”
To say her question stunned him would have been an understatement. But he couldn’t let her know she was right. It would send an entirely wrong message to her. She’d think he had feelings for her or something equally as preposterous. If there was one thing he had learned about women it was they could take an inch and turn it into a mile.
“You’re giving yourself way too much credit,” he told her in an offhand manner, hoping that would be the end of it.
“And you’re not giving me enough,” Valri countered knowingly.
He spared her a glance, then looked straight ahead as he drove. They were not having this conversation, he told himself.
Chapter 8
Valri, however, obviously had different ideas. Like a hungry dog that had stumbled across a bone, she just wouldn’t let the topic drop or rest in peace.
She certainly wasn’t picking up on the signal he was trying to convey by remaining silent.
“What is it about me that bothers you?” Valri persisted. “Is it because I’m a rookie or because my last name is Cavanaugh?”
Denial was useless, he thought. The woman was a novice, but she wasn’t stupid. Even if he had been oblivious to her—and he would have to be dead for that to be true, given her physical attributes—he knew that.
So, after a beat, he finally answered her. “Yes.”
“Yes?” Valri echoed. She stared at Alex, waiting for him to elaborate.
Alex m
erely repeated the word again. “Yes.”
And then, in a sudden flash of realization, she got it.
“You’re saying yes to both?” Valri questioned.
“You brought it up, not me,” he reminded her.
He would have rather left the topic alone altogether. But since she was pressing him for an answer, he wasn’t about to lie. His present reaction to her was fueled by both of the things she had mentioned.
“Well, you can’t pick your family—although, honestly, if I could, I have to tell you that I wouldn’t change anything. I’m proud of being a Cavanaugh and proud of the rest of the family. There isn’t a single thing about my family that I’d want to change.”
God, he would, Alex thought. If there was such a thing as a do-over in life, a way to petition the higher-powers-that-be, he would have done everything in his power to be born into a normal family. Definitely not into one whose members studied art history up close and personal in the privacy of some secluded basement where their stolen goods were stored while deals involving a change of hands were negotiated.
“And as for my being a rookie,” Valri continued, addressing what she took to be his second objection to being partnered with her, “as near as I can tell, even God had a first day. My job as a rookie is to learn everything I can from the experienced people around me. People like you,” she emphasized. “I’m not going to get in your way, and I have no intentions of holding you back.”
She took a breath, coming to what she felt was her most important point. “But I can’t learn anything from you if you leave me behind, or take me along but do everything you can to shut me out.”
She sounded earnest enough and he believed that she believed what she was saying. That led him to ask her a question that had been bothering him.
“Why would you want to risk being out in the field?” Alex asked. “You’ve got a gift that not that many people have. Hell, people with the kind of talent you have can write their own ticket in this world. Why would you want to even be a cop?”
“It’s in the blood,” she answered.
And then she smiled at him. It occurred to him that it was the sort of smile that men vied for. The kind of smile that was instantly personal no matter what the surroundings were. The kind of smile that men like him had to be wary of.
Cavanaugh Fortune Page 8