Cavanaugh Fortune

by Marie Ferrarella

  “I’ll think about it,” he told her. “That’s the best I can do right now.”

  “Think hard,” Valri recommended.

  They had reached the front door, which was standing wide open.

  Valri paused to put paper booties on over her shoes, the kind that medical personnel favored in the operation room. Alex followed suit and wound up leading the way inside.

  A tall, slender woman who more than faintly resembled his partner looked up in their direction when he and Valri came closer.

  Another cousin, Alex assumed, glancing from the other woman to the one half a step behind him. “One of yours?” he asked, asking the question in a low voice and nodding toward the woman he’d just spotted.

  “Depends on whether or not I feel like acknowledging her,” Valri replied, a half smile playing along the corners of her lips.

  The sound of voices—especially her voice—had the woman turning around. Her face lit up the second she looked at Valri.

  “Ah, my favorite little geek,” the woman said as she crossed to them quickly, a hostess welcoming guests who were late to the table. But her immediate focus was on Valri. “What are you doing away from your computer? If they let you out to get some fresh air, this is definitely not the place to do it.”

  Exercising patience, Valri waited her sister out. Kelly eventually ran out of steam.

  “Thanks for your concern, Kelly. Brody,” she said, turning toward her partner, “this is Kelly Cavanaugh—one of my sisters. Possibly the most annoying one, but the jury’s still out on that.”

  He ignored the introduction beyond the woman’s name. It was best that way. “Nice to meet you,” he said, shaking Kelly’s hand. The woman appeared to be at least half a head taller than his partner, if not more so.

  Because the case had first been called in as a home invasion, Kelly and her partner, Amos, had gotten the case assigned to them. But once the rest of the details came to light, Kelly had called her captain and told the man that the case had turned into one for the homicide squad.

  “Is this your first case?” Kelly asked her sister, fully expecting the latter to say yes.

  She was surprised when Valri answered, “No, we’re already working a homicide case, but there’s a chance that this one just might be connected to it.”

  “Elaborate,” Kelly requested.

  But Valri didn’t want to just lay everything out for her sister—especially when some of the suppositions might turn out to be wrong.

  “When we work out the details, I’ll let you know,” Valri promised.

  She turned toward Brody to get his thoughts on whether or not he felt that this latest development was all part of one and the same case the way she did.

  Brody had left her talking to her sister while he took stock of what had happened. He made his way over to the body that was still lying facedown on the floor. Having put on his rubber gloves before he even entered the house, he bent down over the body, looking for the best way to turn the dead man over.

  Alex believed in putting a face on every case, every threat, that he could. It helped him process what was going on. In this case, since it involved the thwarted theft of high-end, expensive items, he was also curious about the dead man. Had he been the brains behind all this, or just a cog, taking orders? Not that the man’s face could tell him that, but there might be other clues to be gotten from the would-be burglar.

  As carefully as possible, Alex slowly turned the man over onto his back.

  The moment he looked down at the dead man’s face, everything around him faded into the background and vanished.

  Alex recognized him.

  Chapter 12

  When she glanced over her shoulder to see what her partner was doing, Valri saw that he was crouching over the dead man. Instead of lying facedown the way he had been when they’d walked in, the suspected burglar was on his back. The CSI unit had already taken their pictures of the man and the immediate crime scene.

  That meant that Brody had been the one to turn the body over.

  As she watched Brody, it was hard for her to tell which of them was more still, her partner or the dead burglar.

  Mumbling something about catching up with her later, Valri left her sister and crossed over to where her partner was still crouching over the body.

  He didn’t seem to be aware of her presence. Even when she lightly touched his shoulder, it took him almost a minute to react to her.

  That wasn’t like him—at least as far as she knew, Valri amended.

  “Hey, Brody, are you all right?” she asked him, concerned.

  Alex roused himself and rose to his feet. Just because this was Eddie Brauer, a burglar who’d always been at the top of his game besides being a man his father had associated with on a fairly regular basis, didn’t necessarily mean anything. After all, Brauer had pulled independent jobs before.

  “Yeah, sure,” Alex answered. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He sounded way too preoccupied for her taste, Valri thought. Something was definitely up.

  “Well, for one thing, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “No ghost,” he answered a little too emphatically in her opinion. “Just another dead man.” His tone was dismissive. “We need to talk to the homeowners,” Alex said, moving past her.

  “Kelly already took down their statements,” she told him, hurrying to catch up to Brody. “She and her partner were first on the scene, thinking this was just a robbery,” she added, explaining why the Robbery Division had been the first to be called in.

  But Alex was determined to talk to the couple himself. “Maybe the husband remembers something after having his memory jostled,” Alex said. “It wouldn’t hurt to talk to both of them again.”

  “The wife’s a basket case right now,” she warned Brody.

  It was a secondhand evaluation. She was merely repeating what Kelly had told her, but then there was no reason for Kelly to misrepresent anything. Familial harassment aside, she knew that her sister was a damn fine detective. Because of that, Valri took what her older sister said about the case as gospel.

  “Maybe the wife’ll do better talking to a fresh, sympathetic face,” Alex told her.

  “You?” she asked. Sympathetic was the last word she would have used to describe the current expression on Brody’s face.

  “Actually, I was thinking of you,” he told her. “I’ll talk to the husband.”

  Valri nodded, seeing no reason not to go along with what Brody was suggesting.

  But I’m going to talk to you first opportunity I get, she promised herself. She wasn’t convinced that Brody viewed the dead man as just another body. Something was not right there.

  * * *

  “Look at this,” Clark Peters said to Alex as he took the homeowner aside and asked him to repeat his version of the events. Peters was referring to the hand he was holding out. “It’s shaking,” he said angrily, clearly distraught over what had just happened—as well as what could have happened had things gone just a little differently. “That could have been me lying there instead of him. I’m still shaking and I can’t make myself stop.” Not being able to control his own body was obviously really upsetting the homeowner.

  “That’s just your body reacting to what happened,” Alex told the man. Peters was heavyset and appeared to have at least fifty pounds on the dead man in addition to being at least half a foot taller than Brauer. “It’ll settle down in a little while,” he assured Peters.

  “So this is normal?” Peters asked, sounding as if he desperately wanted to be convinced.

  “Perfectly,” Alex assured him. “Now, why don’t you tell me just what happened.”

  Peters obliged, ultimately giving him more than he wanted or needed. “No sooner did we get to our hotel room, than Judy
and I get into this big fight.” He looked over toward his wife, who was talking to the other detective. “The woman always has this lousy timing. She had to wait until I blow twelve thousand dollars on this vacation before she tells me she’s ‘unhappy’ because I don’t tell her little romantic things anymore. So I tell her when I look at her, I can’t think of anything romantic to say.”

  Alex winced. Peters was obviously not a candidate for husband of the year. “Honesty is not always your best option, sir.”

  “Yeah, so I found out,” Peters lamented. “The argument got out of hand, I canceled our stay at the hotel and we caught a flight back. Cost me a bundle,” he declared, none too pleased.

  “How long were you gone from home?” Alex asked, finally getting to something that was pertinent in his opinion.

  “Less than twenty-four hours.” The medical examiner and his assistant had placed the dead man into a black body bag and were now loading him onto a gurney. Peters watched the whole thing, as if to convince himself that it had actually happened. “Am I in trouble?” he asked nervously.

  That had yet to be determined, Alex thought. He’d seen cases go absolutely haywire when unconventional evidence surfaced. Nothing was ever set in stone.

  “Right now, sir, it appears to be an open-and-shut case of self-defense.” He got down to the heart of the case. “Who knew you were going to be away?”

  Peters thought for a moment. “Just a few people. Not that many. It can’t be any one of them. I’d trust them with my life,” he said dramatically.

  “How did you tell them you were going away?” Alex asked.

  Peters looked at him uncertainly. “How?” the homeowner repeated.

  “That’s what I said,” Alex said, waiting.

  “I emailed them,” Peters told him. It was obvious by his tone that he didn’t see what that had to do with anything. “I can give you their names if you want.”

  “That would be helpful,” Alex replied congenially.

  And probably unnecessary, he added silently. It was beginning to sound as if that surreal theory about a fake mobile cell tower collecting data from emails was right on the money. Hackers appeared to be everywhere and they were getting smarter by the minute.

  It was far from a comforting thought.

  This time when Valri approached him, Alex was ready for her and immediately asked, “Did you get anything from the wife?”

  “Not really.” Disappointed, Valri shook her head. “Just that she hadn’t realized that her husband was so brave and I think she used the word heroic.”

  “Guess they won’t be getting that divorce, then,” Alex assumed.

  “What?”

  Brody reiterated what Latimore had initially told them. “The husband said they cut their vacation short because they had this huge fight, and from the sound of it, both of them were ready to call it quits and get a divorce.”

  “Now he’s her hero,” Valri said. “And all it took was killing a burglar.”

  “Yeah,” he commented, more to himself than to her. “That’s all.”

  After telling the couple to stay in town and to call if either of them could think of anything they’d forgotten to mention, Alex instructed them to do a thorough check of the house to see if anything beyond the painting that had been cut from its frame was missing.

  Valri was dying to get to the shelter of his vehicle. The second they did and he got in behind the steering wheel, she asked Brody the question that had occurred to her when she saw him crouching over the dead man’s body.

  Brody knew the man. She was just positive that he did. The trick was going to be to get him to admit it. She decided on the direct approach rather than beating around the bush.

  “You knew him, don’t you?”

  The question seemed to break apart the comfortable, speculative air within the inside of the vehicle.

  Alex stopped pulling away from the curb. His hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel, but he managed to keep his voice at an even level as he flatly denied her assumption.

  “No.”

  He wasn’t fooling her. She’d seen the way Brody had looked at the dead man, seen him stiffen, then force himself to relax. Something didn’t quite add up. She would swear to it.

  “Your body language says otherwise,” she informed him. Now that they were alone in the car and there was no one to overhear them, she could, she hoped, get some answers out of her partner.

  “That’s just your imagination running off with you,” Alex scoffed. Everything about his manner told her that he refused to take her questioning seriously.

  And refused to answer her questions, as well.

  “No, it’s not,” she answered seriously, coming across a great deal more forcefully than he thought she was capable of sounding. “I’m fairly good at reading body language, and yours says that you know the man. How?” she asked him, then realized what he was probably thinking. “This goes no further,” she assured him, waiting. After all, a man couldn’t be held accountable for the people he might know in passing.

  Alex remained silent.

  Thinking.

  Weighing things in his mind. He’d been carrying around the secret of his past—his upbringing—for a long time now. And rather than the load becoming lighter, it seemed to grow only heavier.

  Maybe it was time he shared at least part of what bothered him with someone before he wound up suddenly imploding one day.

  “Yeah, I know him. He’s someone I met in passing a long time ago.” He had a question of his own. “Just how did you get into reading body language?” Up until now, he’d always felt that he was pretty good at camouflaging his thoughts.

  “I’m the youngest of seven,” she told him matter-of-factly. “I did it in order to survive.” She got back to the dead man. “Where did you meet him?”

  He hadn’t expected Cavanaugh to ask for details. He should have known better, he upbraided himself. “What?”

  “The dead man, how did you happen to meet him?” she asked.

  Alex thought of making something up, of lying to make things simpler. But lies, he knew, had a way of tripping a person up, and the whole point of going his own way was to stay clear of deception and to avoid living the same kind of secretive life that his father and his siblings led.

  He had no choice but to clam up—or tell her the truth.

  He went with the truth.

  “I overheard him talking with my father one night a long time ago.”

  “So he’s a friend of your father’s?” she asked, trying to read between the lines and piece things together.

  “An associate of my father’s,” Alex corrected. “My father doesn’t have friends.” It occurred to Alex that he was referring to his father and the situation in the present tense, but it had been years since he’d seen or talked to anyone from his family. For all he knew, they were out of the business.

  But he doubted it.

  “What kind of associate?” she asked.

  “A work associate,” he answered, almost against his will. He was beginning to regret this. Maybe lying would have been easier.

  “What kind of work does your father do?” Valri asked him.

  He was not about to get into it.

  “That’s irrelevant,” he told his partner. Okay, so he lied, but it was just a white lie, he argued silently. Under the circumstances, he figured he could be forgiven. “Listen, when we get back to the precinct, why don’t you see if you can work your magic and match this guy up to a name. See if he’s ever been arrested. Maybe he has a list of priors,” he suggested, trying to distract her from asking him any more questions.

  “You don’t know his name?” Valri asked incredulously.

  “I’ve got a name,” he admitted. “But most likely it’s an alias.” He thought of th
e way Brauer had looked, lying there in a pool of his own blood. “People like that aren’t overly concerned with giving out their real names.” Pausing for a moment, Alex debated whether or not to mention anything else, or just let it ride. But he was beginning to see that his new partner was not the type to be content to merely coast along on the strength of her last name. She was a doer, someone who wanted to prove herself. If he kept quiet about Brauer, he had a feeling that she was going to dig up the details on her own.

  He needed to get out in front of this before it dragged him down.

  “I knew him as Uncle Eddie.” When he was a kid, for simplicity’s sake, his father referred to all of his “associates” as uncles. “Needless to say, he really wasn’t my uncle.”

  This was hard for him, Valri realized. She could tell by his tone, his cadence. Talking about his family even in a cursory manner seemed to take a toll on him.

  She could wait for the truth. It was more important to her to forge a relationship with her partner first. That might not happen if he felt she knew too much too soon. He might even resent her for it.

  She cut bait.

  “Someday, you’re going to have to tell me about what happened,” she told him casually.

  Alex looked at her uncertainly. “What do you mean ‘what happened’?”

  “Between you and your family,” she explained. “It’s obvious that something had to go down in order for you to clam up like that every time there’s the slightest mention of your family.”

  It wasn’t so much that “something” had gone down as it was an entire way of life. His father prided himself on his skills to steal works of art without being caught or even, in some cases, having that theft detected for weeks, sometimes even years.

  “That doesn’t really have anything to do with this case,” he told her.

  “Maybe not,” she allowed. “But it obviously has something to do with you and since it does—and you’re my partner,” she tossed in, “I’d really like to hear about it the second you’re ready to talk.”

  She was letting him off the hook, he realized. For now. Was she being devious? Or simply nice? He wasn’t sure yet.