“When I’m ready, you’ll be the first to know,” he promised.
“Hopefully you’ll feel like sharing sometime before the Second Coming,” she said wryly. She had no choice—if she wanted to build up a rapport—but to accept his promise at face value—and hope that it was true.
“At the very least, at the same time,” he guaranteed, his tone indicating that he was at ease again. “Now, don’t you have something you’re supposed to be taking care of for the chief?” he prodded.
Valri’s mouth dropped open. Damn, she’d totally forgotten about that. She’d become so completely caught up in both the current case and the mystery that was Detective Alex Brody, the fact that she was tasked with sending out invitations to Shamus Cavanaugh’s wedding had totally slipped her mind.
“Oh God,” she groaned, “I’ve got to get on that right away. Can you do the preliminary paperwork on the case so far?”
As the rookie member of the team, paperwork was supposed to be her job, but she couldn’t do both, and if she waded through one before she took on the other, she’d wind up sleeping at her desk again.
“Consider it taken care of,” he told her. “Don’t give it another thought.”
But I will give you another thought, Valri silently promised her partner. The second she finished notifying all these people about the wedding on Saturday. She glanced down at the list of names again.
Was it her imagination, or had the list somehow grown longer on its own?
Most likely, it was her imagination, she willingly granted. But it just seemed as if lately, everywhere she turned, there were Cavanaughs springing up out of the woodwork.
She got down to work.
* * *
By the time Alex walked into his one-bedroom garden-floor apartment, he felt as if his shift had gone a full eighteen hours. It hadn’t, but in actuality, it had been pretty close. The paperwork had taken longer than he had anticipated, and he felt almost completely wiped out.
He also felt wound up.
As far as the latter went, he couldn’t recall ever feeling this unsettled. Exhausted though he was, he had a feeling that getting to sleep tonight was going to be a problem.
Alex didn’t turn on the light immediately when he let himself into his apartment.
Instead, he allowed himself to absorb the darkness, letting it enfold him in its shadowy arms as he did his best to will his body to relax. If he didn’t unwind, at least to some degree, he could practically guarantee that he wasn’t going to be able to sleep—which in turn meant that he would be totally dead on his feet all day tomorrow.
And if that happened, he was obviously not going to be at his best. That was when bad things occurred. This job needed people to be sharp and alert from the beginning of their shift to the end.
Sometimes longer.
Right at this moment, however, in addition to being wound up, he also felt like a tuning fork that had been struck and was vibrating, vacillating between two completely diverse states of mind.
The first involved attraction, deep, serious attraction.
The second revolved around the feeling that he should do everything in his power to avoid any and all entanglements with this woman.
The minute he opened the door, even just a crack, to admit any sort of feelings, however harmless and minor they might seem, he was a dead man.
As dead as Brauer—or whatever his real name was—had been on the floor of the Peterses’ outlandishly oversize, overpriced house.
Ever since he’d “walked away” from the family business, he had tried to keep things as simple in his life as he could.
But it seemed that from the moment he had first caught this case, simplicity and his orderly life had gone straight out the window, apparently plummeting to their deaths.
Not only that, but things were getting more complicated every day.
And it wasn’t just because there was a honey-blonde riding shotgun in his car—although she was part of it, he silently allowed. Maybe even a bigger part than he was willing to admit.
“You trying to save money on electricity by sitting in the dark, Alexander?”
A chill ran down his back. Several years had gone by since he’d heard that voice, but he would have recognized it even if decades had passed.
Finding the light switch on the wall behind him, Alex flipped it to the on position.
The overhead cam lights came on, flooding the immediate area with illumination.
Certainly more than enough light to show him that he’d been right.
Leland Philip Brody was sitting on his sofa in the living room.
“What are you doing here, Dad?”
Chapter 13
The man on the sofa allowed himself a small smile.
At first glance, he seemed more suited to being a preacher than to the vocation he had chosen for himself. The thin, trim athletic build was at odds with the full mane of silver-gray hair. It made pinpointing an age difficult, which was just the way Leland liked it.
He had spent the main portion of his life moving just under the radar. Recognition was a crutch for the insecure, for the people who never truly measured up but desperately wanted to be seen in that light. He preferred to concentrate on his craft, on attaining his target no matter how elusive and impossible it might initially seem.
Leland thought of what he did as an art form and he was an artist. His artistry was a gift that he gladly passed on to his progeny because they, along with his reputation, known to only a very small number of people, were all he would leave behind.
“Can’t a father occasionally drop in on his son?” Leland asked innocently. “By my count, it’s been a while.”
Alex removed his service weapon and placed it where he always did, on the side table near the front door.
“It’s been years,” he corrected, “and I was under the impression that we were going to keep it that way.”
Leland laughed quietly. “Ashamed of the old man, are we?”
Alex took a seat in the overstuffed chair facing the sofa—and his father.
“You’d be a little difficult to explain, but I’m not ashamed of you. I’d just rather that our paths wouldn’t cross. That was the agreement, wasn’t it?” It was the main reason he had worked his way up into Homicide—because he felt confident that he would never have to investigate his father. His father skillfully robbed people, he didn’t kill them.
“Yes, it was. And it still is,” Leland told him. Even after all this time, a hint of his Alabama childhood raised its head in the way he pronounced some of his words.
“And yet, here you are.” Alex looked at his father, waiting for an explanation. This was not just a casual visit driven by nostalgia. That just wasn’t his father’s style.
“Like I said, I thought I’d just drop in on my youngest-born.”
“You never do anything without a reason.”
“Wanting to see how you were doing isn’t enough?” Leland asked, amused.
Alex’s eyes narrowed, his eyebrows forming a single dark line, underscoring his less than thrilled mood. “Not when it comes to you, no.”
The laugh was dry, short. “You were always the brightest of the three. With a little work, you could have accomplished great things.” It was as close to a lament regarding the past as Leland would allow himself.
“I’m doing just fine the way I am, thanks,” Alex informed him curtly. “Now, why are you here? The truth, Dad, as strange a concept as that might be for you to contemplate.”
The corners of Leland’s thin mouth curved just the slightest bit. “I came to tell you in person that no one in the family was involved.”
Alex watched his father for a long moment as he thought over the man’s assurance. Leland Brody was a gifted, sought-after art forger
as well as an art thief without equal. As far as he was concerned, his father had a great many character flaws, but he wasn’t a liar.
“Involved in what?” Alex challenged.
Leland sighed impatiently. “Are we really going to draw this out?” he asked. When his son said nothing, Leland gave in and, for now, played along. He cited a few details. “Today’s burglary. Today’s botched burglary,” he emphasized. “The one that got Brauer killed. I believe you caught the case.”
He wasn’t even going to ask his father how he knew. No matter what, his father always knew everything that was important to know.
Alex’s eyes never left his father’s. “You weren’t in on it.” It wasn’t so much a question as an establishment of facts.
Leland inclined his head. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“But you knew about it,” Alex stated. He supposed if his father or Phil or Jenna had a police band radio, that would explain how he knew about the case.
“Not the details. Brauer and I have been out of touch for a number of years now. He’d gotten a little sloppy, took on jobs that he never would have thought twice about turning down back when we worked together.”
All right, maybe his father didn’t know details, but he had to know something. “What do you know about it?” Alex prodded.
Leland measured out each word as if he was doling out diamonds. “They get their information from email they collected via a signal coming off a mobile, virtual tower a couple of hackers created.”
That his father knew this was astounding, but it wasn’t anything new. “We already know that part.”
“Bright boy,” Leland said mockingly.
Alex ignored the comment. Since his father obviously knew something about the robbery, he intended to get as much out of him as he could.
“Who set up the virtual tower and collected the data? There has to be more than just Brauer in on this.”
“There’s no arguing that,” his father agreed. “Brauer’s specialty was overriding security systems—man was a master—not any of that other stuff,” Leland confirmed.
“So who was he working with or for?” Alex asked. Someone had to have come up with the idea and then the means to gather the information.
Leland spread his hands. “I don’t have any names, but word on the street has it that it was one of those gamers-turned-hacker.”
The description fit the first dead man. Alex shook his head. “Gotta do better than that, Dad. Rogers wouldn’t have offed himself.”
A smug look filtered through Leland’s steel-blue eyes. “I’m not talking about Rogers. The brains of his operation is someone else. That’s who Brauer approached to facilitate the burglaries. Supposedly it was a so-called friend of Rogers’s and they worked together on the ‘project.’” Leland laughed shortly. There was no humor in the sound, just a pervading sense of emptiness. “Friends like that—you know the rest.”
“Yeah, I know the rest,” Alex murmured, his mind racing. A friend of Rogers’s turned executioner. Whom had he overlooked? “Anything else?” he asked his father.
Leland rose to his feet, as did Alex. He never took his eyes off his father. Father or not, Leland Brody wasn’t a man you let your guard down around. His end game was always hidden until the very last second, and Alex didn’t care for surprises.
“No,” Leland said, crossing over to the door. “I’ve said what I came to say. Just didn’t want you to think I reneged on our agreement.” Resting his hand on the doorknob, he paused for a moment to really look at his son. “You doing all right, Alexander?”
It depended on the definition of “all right.” If “all right” wasn’t too demanding, then he was fine. “I can’t complain.”
“No, you were never one to do that,” Leland recalled. “That’s why the others always thought you were your mother’s favorite.” Still at the door, he appeared to be debating saying something further before he left. Alex saw just the slightest shrug of his shoulder before his father said, “Maybe if she had lived, things would have been different.”
“Maybe,” Alex allowed. His mother had always been the peacemaker. She knew she had married an art thief, but she managed to get him to attempt to lead a normal, civilian life. He did it for her until he couldn’t do it any longer. His mother accepted that.
Had she lived, Alex knew that his break from the family would have been that much harder for him, but he would have had to do it in order to survive. After his mother had died, he felt more estranged from the others than ever. Going his own way just seemed like the logical thing for him to do.
His father was lingering too long. “Is there something else?” Alex asked.
Rather than answer one way or another, his father merely said, “Take care of yourself, Alexander.”
“You, too, Dad.”
Leland closed the door behind him, but his presence would take longer to dissipate. As would the emotions that had been stirred by the man’s unexpected visit.
Taking out a small notepad that had seen many better days, Alex made notes to himself about his father’s impromptu appearance.
* * *
“I want to take another run at Jason Bigelow,” Alex said to his partner the following morning. It was the first thing out of his mouth the moment he walked in.
Valri was already in the squad room and at her desk, working on something. From the looks of it, she’d been there awhile. There was no steam rising from her coffee mug, which meant that the liquid in it was cold. Since she brought it to her desk before she sat down, that meant she’d been here for a while.
“Why?” She didn’t think of it as extra work, but she wanted to know his reasoning. If they were going to be working together—and it was beginning to look that way—they had to get in sync with each other, know how the other thought and reacted to things. The information was half gleaned from everyday interaction and half from observing the other party in action.
“Let’s just call it a hunch,” Alex told her evasively.
But she wanted more than that. He didn’t strike her as someone who was careless, tossing everything against the wall to see what stuck.
“A hunch based on what?”
She asked too many questions, he thought irritably. He had no intention of saying his father had paid him a visit last night and gave him information. That would be opening up a very messy can of worms.
“Hunches don’t have to be based on anything,” he told her.
“Yeah, they do,” she contradicted. “Was there something that jumped out at you in your report that hadn’t occurred to you before?”
Okay, he’d go with that, Alex thought. “I just went over the entire interview with Bigelow and he just didn’t seem to be completely forthcoming with us.” He could see that she wasn’t being convinced, so he tried another tactic. “He wasn’t afraid enough.”
Confused, she stared at Alex. “Come again?”
“Think back,” he instructed. “Wills was scared to death of the person who killed Rogers.”
“And with good reason. The guy killed Wills,” she reminded him.
“That’s my point. There’s this history of violence with our mystery hacker. Bigelow claimed he saw the guy, yet he wasn’t worried about that guy coming back to permanently silence him the way he had Rogers. That doesn’t add up for me.”
Valri thought it over for a moment and played devil’s advocate. “It could just be that Bigelow wasn’t smart enough to think it through and realize how much danger he was in.”
She wrinkled her nose when she was working on a problem in her head. It added a degree of adorable to the whole thing, something he knew she’d be appalled about if he so much as mentioned it to her.
What had gotten into him? Alex silently demanded. They were working a murder case. That was supposed to
take precedence over everything.
“Maybe,” he agreed without too much conviction. “But I still want to question him again.”
She saved her work on the laptop and rose. “Okay, let’s do it,” she said gamely. “Let’s go find our ‘nerves of steel’ gamer.”
“You’re really going to be embarrassed when I turn out to be right,” he told her.
“More like really astonished,” she fired back, managing to keep a straight face.
* * *
When they arrived at the guesthouse where Bigelow lived on his mother’s property, no lights were on in the two-room structure.
When no one answered the door after Alex had rung the bell three times, he let himself and Cavanaugh in the old-fashioned way.
He quickly picked the lock.
“That was no challenge at all,” he murmured. “The guy has to get a better lock than that.”
“Maybe he thinks nobody’s going to bother breaking into a gamer’s home,” she said, watching Alex make quick work with the lock. Then her admiration got the better of her. “You have to teach me that, someday,” she said enviously.
“Someday,” he agreed. Acutely aware of his surroundings, he slowly turned the doorknob and let himself and Valri into the house.
Service weapon poised, he held on to it with both hands as he visually swept the area.
Valri was right behind him.
All the gaming equipment was just where it had been when they came here the other day. There was only one thing missing: Bigelow. The gamer who had given them the description of the man who had paid Rogers to come up with a way to hack into a cell phone tower to create a duplicate was nowhere in sight.
From all appearances, the two-room guesthouse was empty.
“He’s not here,” Bigelow’s mother informed them.
Curious to see what was going on, she had followed the two detectives to her son’s living quarters. She stood in the guesthouse doorway now, her short, robust frame filling the area completely.
Cavanaugh Fortune Page 14