“My father tried to talk me out of applying to the police academy, told me that I had it in me to become anything I wanted to, and that he didn’t want to have to worry every time I walked out of the house wearing dress blues.” A distant affection filtered into her smile as she remembered the way it had all played out. “I would have loved to have put his mind at ease, but this is something I have to be.”
She looked at Brody. Something told her that they weren’t all that different in the way they felt about what they were doing. It wasn’t a job, it was a calling.
“The fact that I’ve got an extensive background in computers gives me something extra to bring to the table. All I ever wanted to do was protect and serve—and occasionally play a video game,” she added with a quick—and extremely sexy in its innocence—wink.
And with that, she managed to get to him. She was still a Cavanaugh, still came with an invisible “hands off” sign because of that, but he could totally understand she wanted to use her abilities in order to do something positive in life.
If nothing else, that was how he had felt when he turned eighteen and had decided to rebel against his father and the “family business.”
They had labeled him a black sheep, lamenting that he was wasting the “gifts” he had. Things he would have never been able to learn in any school.
Things that he had, for the most part, turned his back on.
“It was you,” he finally admitted, answering the question Valri had asked a couple of minutes ago.
“I was the one who drove you to drink?” she asked in disbelief. Even though she had guessed it, hearing him actually confirm her suspicions seemed almost surreal. She couldn’t picture anyone reacting to her in that manner for any reason. “Why?”
His original objections to having to work with her had just disappeared. But another issue hadn’t been cleared up.
“I don’t like being in situations I can’t control, and I had no say in getting you as a partner, temporary or not.” The nature of the job necessitated trusting a partner to have your back. If that was missing from the work relationship, then there was an element of danger to the job that made it that much more difficult.
Valri suddenly saw the whole thing from his point of view. She blew out a long breath.
“Wow.” And then she watched him for a long moment. She had only one course of action open to her that would alleviate his dilemma. “I can ask the chief to give me another partner.”
“You’d do that?” Alex questioned, surprised. He would have thought that she’d do her best to convince him what an asset she would be to him. This was a complete 180 turn on her part.
“Yes,” she replied quietly. “I don’t want to be the one responsible for you becoming an alcoholic.”
He expected her to laugh then. But she didn’t. She was serious, he realized. That put an entirely different spin on the way he viewed her. She wasn’t behaving like a crown princess.
“You don’t have to go to the chief,” he told her.
“I thought that was what you wanted,” she protested, confused.
“I did,” he admitted. “But I don’t anymore.”
“You’re sure?”
He continued looking at the road, stopping just in time for a light that turned red too quickly. “I’m sure,” he told her.
“But I don’t want you uptight and frustrated.”
He couldn’t picture having this conversation with Montgomery. Maybe he was trading upward. “I’ll work it out of my system. It’s my problem, not yours. Besides—” he thought of his background for a moment “—I’ve dealt with far bigger problems than you and managed to keep going.”
“What kind of bigger problems?” Valri asked.
Oh no, he wasn’t about to talk about his family. That was a step too far as far as he was concerned. “Let’s see if we can make some progress with this case, then we’ll talk about that.” He figured that she’d forget about it eventually.
“Okay. Fair enough,” she agreed, then added, “But I’ll hold you to it.”
He laughed shortly. He couldn’t make the mistake of taking anything for granted with this live wire. He was quickly learning that she wasn’t a thing like what he expected. The woman was going to keep him on his toes. Constantly.
“Never occurred to me that you wouldn’t.”
“Brody,” she began.
“What?” Was she going to argue that point? Or was there something else she wanted to drag out and dissect to satisfy some inner question gnawing away at her?
Valri pointed to something on her right. “We’re here.”
Alex blinked and looked around, then glanced at the address she had given him. Talking with Cavanaugh had made the miles melt away.
He cleared his throat, parking beside the curb. They were in a residential area. “I knew that,” he muttered.
Valri merely grinned, but said nothing.
Getting out of the car, she let her partner lead the way to the front door. The detective had a really nice, tight butt, she caught herself thinking as she came up the short path behind him. She assumed he worked out a lot.
Focus on the case, not on something that’s out of reach, she ordered silently just as Brody knocked on the door.
It took a while for the door to finally open. The woman in the doorway had faded red hair and roots that needed work. She smelled of cigarette smoke and anger.
“Detectives Brody and Cavanaugh,” Brody said, identifying both of them. He held his ID up for the woman to see. “We’re looking for Jason Bigelow.”
Mrs. Bigelow regarded them suspiciously for a moment, squinting at the IDs, then pointed them in the right direction.
“Is he in?” Alex asked.
The short, squat woman rolled her eyes. “He’s always in.” It was not a boast but a weary statement of fact.
Almost predictably, Jason Bigelow, the gamer they had come to talk to, lived in a small granny unit that was located behind the main house on his widowed mother’s property.
The small, eight-hundred-square-foot quarters where Jason Bigelow lived had a great deal of potential, potential that had gone begging because every waking moment that Jason didn’t spend working at his part-time job as a Heavenly Pizza delivery boy he spent sitting in front of his big-screen monitor, fighting three-dimensional tattooed soldiers who had been assimilated by aliens and were out to destroy civilization as the world knew it.
The gamer didn’t answer his door at first, even though Alex knocked hard. Impatient, Alex gave up knocking and took out what appeared to be a silver key and something else that resembled a pointed, bent nail file.
When Valri looked at him in question, he told her he was “just making sure Bigelow’s okay. Didn’t you hear someone cry out for help?”
Amazed that a detective would actually use that ploy, Valri caught on instantly. She was rather pleased that her new partner wasn’t a stickler for protocol and understood that there were times when rules had to be bent and people who mattered had to look the other way in order to save lives.
It always boiled down to saving lives, Valri thought.
“I thought I did, but then I thought that maybe it was my imagination.”
“Well,” he theorized with a perfectly straight face, “we couldn’t have both heard your imagination, now, could we?”
“I guess not,” she replied, playing along.
And then she actually heard something once the door was open. A noise that sounded suspiciously like angry cursing. Specifically, very brisk cursing that was being discharged faster than machine-gun fire.
The reason for the volley of expletives was because Jason Bigelow’s avatar had been killed in the fourth assault on the territory he was attempting to defend from an infestation of an army of the undead.
“Well, looks like this one isn’t dead,” Alex commented to her.
“Thank God for that,” Valri said, watching the man they had come to question. She was amazed that Bigelow was so absorbed in winning that he didn’t even seem to know they were in the room with him.
It wasn’t until Alex tapped him on the shoulder that the gamer become aware that he wasn’t alone. Startled, caught halfway between the real world and the world that seemed more real to him than his actual existence, Jason held up his controller as if it was some sort of a talisman he could use as a weapon. Thin, slight and of sub-average height, the gamer had longish, dull brown hair that looked as if he had combed it with an eggbeater sometime in the last week. He looked more like one of the characters in the game he was playing than a real, live person.
Scrambling off the sofa, he turned to face the two strangers in his home. “Who are you and what are you doing in my house? My mom send you?” It wasn’t a question so much as an accusation. “Is this an intervention?” Not waiting for one of them to confirm or deny his supposition, Jason supplied his own answer. “My God, it is an intervention.”
His eyes narrowed as he took another long look around. “But aren’t there supposed to be more people at an intervention? Where are my friends?” Bigelow demanded.
“Apparently getting killed,” Alex told him without any preamble.
Bigelow shrieked, the high-pitched sound ripping through the entire granny unit.
“Killed?” he cried in horror. And then apparently his ghoulish side, the part of Bigelow that had been nurtured by the types of video games he favored, rose to the surface. His eyes almost gleamed as he breathlessly asked, “Who?”
Never taking his eyes off the rather diminutive gamer—if the man claimed to be five-seven he was stretching it—Alex felt around the wall close to the door, looking for a light switch. Locating it, he turned the light on.
The three rather weak overhead lights—there was a fourth one, but the bulb was burnt out—provided less illumination than what was coming from the TV monitor. Combined, they created a somber ambience throughout the room.
“Randy Wills and Hunter Rogers.” Valri filled in the names for the gamer.
Jason completely ignored the first name and seemed to instantly home in on the second, more well-known one. The light was poor, but it appeared to Valri that the man’s face had gotten a little pale. “The King?” he cried. “He’s dead?”
Valri nodded. “I’m afraid he is. Randy seemed to think Rogers was into something that would have gotten him killed. Would you know anything about that, or what it could have possibly been?” When Bigelow looked as if he was about to jump out of his skin, she had her answer. “What was it?” she asked.
Jason looked as if he was one step away from hyperventilating. “I can’t say.”
The one thing Alex prided himself on was his ability to read body language. The gamer’s fairly screamed that he was lying.
Stepping into Jason’s space, he lowered his face to the gamer’s and demanded, “Can’t or won’t?”
Jason looked as if he felt he was trapped. “I can’t tell you anything. If they kill me, who’ll be there for my mother? She needs me.”
Alex exchanged glances with Valri. Ethel Bigelow looked far more capable and down-to-earth than her son did. It wasn’t concern for his mother that had the gamer trying to clam up. It was fear of the consequences he was in for if he spoke up.
“Nobody’s going to kill you, Jason. If you help us out, we’ll put you into protective custody,” Alex told him. “You and your mother.”
Jason obviously wasn’t buying it. “Is that what you did for The King and that other guy you mentioned?” Jason challenged, his voice on the very brink of hysteria. “How’d that work out for them? Huh? Huh?”
“The King was already dead,” Valri told him, answering Jason’s question before Brody could. She had a feeling that the detective was close to taking the man’s head off, and the gamer looked as if he would crumble rather than give them anything useful to work with. “And the other guy, Randy, dragged his feet and waited too long. They got to him before we could do anything. You don’t want that happening to you, do you, Jason?”
“No,” he nearly cried. “No, I don’t. But I don’t know that much, really. I always find out about things thirdhand. Nobody tells me anything—they don’t think I count,” he lamented.
“You count, Jason,” she assured him softly. “Tell us what you do know,” Valri coaxed. She could see by Brody’s face that he thought treating the gamer with kid gloves was a waste of time, but the way she saw it, it was the only angle they could play. Who knew where the next break was coming from?
“I overheard Knik saying that The King was working on perfecting the software for a mobile cell tower.”
“Nik?” Alex questioned.
“Knikelson, this hacker that the King let hang around sometimes,” Bigelow was quick to fill in.
“Why would this Knik want a mobile cell tower?” Alex asked. He noticed that Valri had grown very quiet. Rather than enjoying the momentary break, her silence made him uneasy.
What she said next made him even more so. “To intercept signals in the area and collect the data that’s going back and forth between emails.”
“And they’d want this because...?” Alex asked, hoping against hope that the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach was wrong.
With Bigelow whimpering that he was a dead man, Valri continued with her explanation. “A lot of personal information can be gathered from email. The most common thing, though, would be to find out when a person or a family was going to be away on vacation. That way, the hackers can either charge expensive items on the family’s credit cards and have them delivered to the house while the people are away—or they can go the old tried-and-true route, robbing them of their jewelry and their artwork. They break into the house, no muss, no fuss, no civilians to deal with.”
Valri had unknowingly struck a nerve with the last scenario. Instantly on his guard, Alex couldn’t help wondering if his lucky streak was finally over. He’d gone into homicide thinking that this way, his path was never going to cross the path of any member of his family. They were gifted, conscienceless thieves, but they weren’t murderers, that much he was sure of.
Or at least he had been.
He had this nervous feeling that he might have to revise his assessment of the situation.
Oh God, for all their sakes, he fervently hoped not.
“Do you know if he was doing this for someone?” Valri pressed. “From what I remember of The King, he wasn’t the type to do this kind of dirty work just for himself.”
“He wasn’t,” Bigelow told her, apparently glad that she understood.
“Then was someone paying him to hack into different systems?” she asked.
“He did it just for the challenge,” Bigelow declared, avoiding making eye contact.
“And?” Alex demanded.
“And because he was being paid pretty well.” The gamer couldn’t say the words fast enough.
“Who was paying him?” Alex asked. His tone of voice made it clear he wasn’t about to take any evasive answers.
Frightened, Jason shook his head. “I don’t know. I swear on my daddy’s grave, I never heard his name.”
“Can you make an educated guess, then?” There was no room for any answer other than yes. Alex made that clear.
“Not the name, but—but—but,” Jason stuttered, tripping over his tongue, “I think I caught a glimpse of one of the guys as I was leaving The King’s place.”
“One of the guys,” Valri repeated. This was something new. “So there’s more than one.”
“Couldn’t swear to it, but from the way The King talked, it sounded like there were two, maybe three of them. Three, that’s right, three of them
,” he corrected himself. “He referred to them once as the tribunal. I got the impression he didn’t like them, but he liked the money, and he liked the idea of putting one over on people in authority. It was his way of thumbing his nose at them, so he did it.”
Alex picked up on the tense the gamer used. “Then he did finish the program.”
“Oh, yeah. Said it worked like a dream,” Bigelow recounted proudly, like a disciple speaking about sitting at the master’s knee. “Said he was even thinking of using it a couple of times himself, but he’d have to use their equipment and he didn’t think they’d let him.” Bigelow shrugged—and then stopped. “Maybe that’s even what got him killed,” Bigelow cried as the idea suddenly occurred to him.
“And you said you think you saw one of them,” Alex said, reminding the gamer what he’d said a minute ago.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said, hedging.
“If we put you together with our sketch artist, do you think you could remember enough to work with him?” Alex asked.
“Sure, why not,” the gamer agreed like a man who had no other options before him. And then his face lit up like that of a six-year-old when he asked, “On the way to the precinct, can I work the siren?”
All he wanted to do was get the gamer to the police station as quickly as possible with a minimum of fuss, if that was possible.
“Maybe,” Alex hedged. “We’ll talk.”
It was obvious that Bigelow took that as a yes.
Chapter 9
“All I’m saying is that it really didn’t hurt anything to let him flip the siren on for a few seconds. And if it put Jason in a more cooperative mood, so much the better,” Valri pointed out to her partner. “Right now, that gamer is the closest thing we have to a witness in this case.”
Alex shook his head. They had just left the gamer with the precinct’s sketch artist, Mara McFadden, a woman who worked in two venues. The first was the old standby: pencil and sketch pad. The second was more complex.
Cavanaugh Fortune Page 9