“Where is he?” Alex asked.
Shoulders that were better suited to a football guard rose and fell dismissively. “Damned if I know. You think he tells me anything? I’m good enough to cook for him and toss his dirty laundry into the washer, but not good enough to be told any of his plans,” she grumbled. “Then he’s this adult who comes and goes as he pleases.”
Ethel Bigelow glanced from Alex to his partner. “Do yourselves a favor, you two. Don’t have kids. Nothing but regret and trouble from the minute they’re born.”
The woman looked as if she was just getting wound up to talk. He had a feeling they wouldn’t learn anything except how thankless it was to be a mother. It was time to leave.
“We’ll keep that in mind, ma’am. And if you hear from him, give us a call,” Alex requested, handing her one of his cards. “We just need to ask him a few more questions.”
The woman sneered at them, priding herself on not being taken in for a moment. “Is that why you had your guns out? To ask my son questions?”
“No, ma’am, that’s strictly for precaution in case there was someone in the house with your son who had a gun on him. We’ve been taught not to take any unnecessary chances,” Valri told the woman, deliberately assuming a calm, soothing cadence in order to keep the woman from becoming agitated.
Not that she would have blamed her. If she had a child who was missing, life would have come to a grinding halt until that child was safely back in her arms.
Mrs. Bigelow nodded. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Some of the people that my son hangs out with don’t exactly look like they’re marching off to Sunday school, if you get my drift. Can’t tell him anything, though. He knows best,” she said with complete disgust.
“Kids can be ungrateful,” Valri commiserated. “Don’t forget to call if you think of something else,” she reminded the woman.
* * *
“So back to the drawing board?” she asked Alex when they got into his car several minutes later.
“Not entirely,” he told her. “I’m going to have Mara work up a sketch of Bigelow and start circulating that. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone’s seen him.”
“You really think he has something to do with this, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” Alex affirmed as he drove to one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Culver Drive. And then a thought occurred to him. He spared her a quick glance. “Why, you don’t?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet—but I can see why it would be a definite possibility,” she agreed. “On a different note, are you coming?”
That wasn’t a different note, it was a completely different melody, he thought. Preoccupied with the theory his father had handed him, she had caught him off guard with her question.
“Coming to what?” he asked.
“To the wedding,” Valri said patiently. “You got your invitation, I know you did.”
“Oh, right. That.” Alex shook his head. He didn’t have time for that. “I don’t do weddings.”
Now there was a dumb excuse, she couldn’t help thinking.
“No one’s asking you to get married, just to show up and watch the ceremony. Most of the department’s coming,” she added. “You don’t want to be the one no-show.”
“And if it’s going to be that crowded, how would anyone notice?” he asked.
“I would notice,” she told him. “C’mon, Brody,” she coaxed. “It’ll be fun. I promise.”
He let a silver sports car get ahead of him. “You can’t promise that.”
“Oh, yes I can,” she told him, her eyes shining as she said it.
He had to admit it made him very curious. What did she have in mind?
It didn’t matter what her intentions were, he argued with himself. He needed to keep her at arm’s length at all times. He couldn’t allow any so-called feelings to even remotely poke through. He had his career to think of.
“If I have the time, I’ll come,” he told her, thinking that would be enough to put her off. “Now let’s get Bigelow’s description to Mara so she can work up that sketch.”
“How about if we just circulate his picture instead?” Valri suggested.
He slanted a quizzical glance at her. She was talking as if she had a photo to work with. “You have his picture?” he questioned, surprised. “Where did you get it?” he asked. “Facebook?”
“Actually, I have it on my phone.” She pulled up the app where her photographs were stored and scrolled to the collection of photographs she’d taken at the last gamers’ convention. “Here,” she declared, holding up her phone so that Brody could see, “this is a good one to use.”
“When did you get that?” he asked. Had she had that all along? Just how close was she to Bigelow, anyway?
“Last year, at the big gaming convention in Las Vegas,” she told him.
Something wasn’t adding up. “I thought you said that gaming was in your past.”
“Every now and then, I get nostalgic,” she admitted with a careless shrug. “I like to keep my hand in, see if I’ve still got what it takes to make a competent showing. The competition keeps me sharp,” she told him.
“You know, that innocent-little-girl look of yours is pretty damn deceptive—but you can only play that card a limited amount of times.”
She grinned at him. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she told Alex, then added, “Thank you—but that still doesn’t get you off the hook. You’re still coming to the wedding.”
“Why is it so important to you that I show up?” he asked. Why should it matter whether or not he came?
“Because I want you to experience what it’s like to have a family around you, people who care,” she emphasized.
“One little problem with that. They’re your family,” he pointed out. “Not mine.”
“You’re wrong there,” she told him. “It’s yours, too.”
“And just how do you figure that?” he asked. This was going to be good, he anticipated. He was beginning to think that Valri would have made one hell of a grifter.
“Uncle Andrew considers every single member of the police force to be ‘family.’ Family isn’t just about DNA or biology anymore,” she argued. “Family is a mind-set, a way of viewing people you care about, people whom you wish well. People who matter in your day-to-day life.”
Alex sighed. He wasn’t going to have any peace until he went along with her plans to attend the wedding, he knew that. Or at least say that he was going to attend.
“Did you ever consider transferring to the department’s public relations section?” he asked her, both irritated and amused. “You’d be a natural at it.”
“I’d much rather gather converts one at a time,” Valri told him with a wide, guileless grin. “C’mon, let’s get copies of this photograph printed up and into circulation. Meanwhile, I’ve got a few people to call. Maybe someone on the circuit has seen him.”
“The circuit?” he asked, not sure what she was referring to.
“The gaming circuit. A lot of really good gamers make their living going from one competition to another. Some are online, others require the players be seated within sight of one another.”
“Of course they do,” he murmured under his breath. This was a whole way of life he hadn’t known existed. And now that he did, it still didn’t matter to him—beyond closing this case, hopefully sometime before the turn of the next century.
Chapter 14
After two days of intensified searching, they were still nowhere. It was as if Jason Bigelow had just vanished into thin air.
Valri had come up with a list of people who associated with the gamer, either in person or, more likely, online during one of the tournaments.
Everyone she and Alex questioned told them the same thing: The perso
n hadn’t heard from Bigelow since the day after the so-called “King” had been killed.
“Is it me, or is every avenue we try bringing us to another dead end?” Alex asked as he and Valri wearily got back into his car.
“Definitely not you,” Valri assured him, sitting in the passenger seat. She buckled up out of habit without even being aware of it. Blowing out a breath, she shook her head.
“What?” Alex asked. At this point, he was grasping at straws, but there had to be a lead here somewhere. Sometimes, the most offhanded comment triggered things and made them fall into place.
“I was just thinking, so much for Bigelow being concerned about his mother’s welfare,” she said, referring to what the gamer had said the first time they’d questioned him. He’d expressed concern that if something happened to him, there would be no one to look after his mother.
It was Alex’s turn to laugh dismissively. “From what I saw, his mother was the one taking care of him.”
“No argument,” she agreed. “Taking care of Number One is his only concern.” She thought a moment as Alex pulled into the main flow of traffic. “He’s either dead—or he’s the brains behind this whole thing.”
“That’s a hell of a leap,” Alex commented. He kept to himself the fact that he had already begun to lean toward the second possibility. But since that late-night visit from his father, it was beginning to look more and more as if Rogers was the other hacker Brauer had come to with his proposition.
“Maybe not so much,” Valri theorized. “Remember my sister Kelly? The one where the burglar was killed by Clark Peters, the home owner?” she added to help him make the connection. “She told me that the rash of burglaries has stopped.”
He supposed that the crew—if there was a crew—could be lying low for a while. There was also another theory. “Could it have been that small an operation, just Rogers, Brauer and the third hacker?”
She was quickly learning that when it came to criminals, anything was possible.
“Either that, or the rest of the ‘gang’ is lying low for a while,” she said, giving voice to what he’d been thinking. It surprised Alex that he liked that they were in sync this way. “In any case, it’s Friday afternoon and we’ve done all we can for the moment until something else comes up. The weekend’s just about here and I’m not going to think about dead hackers, runaway gamers and art heists right now. We’ve got a wedding to attend tomorrow,” she told him brightly.
He’d really been hoping she wouldn’t bring that up again. He supposed he should have known better. “About that—”
Valri headed him off. “If you’re going to say anything other than you’re coming, I don’t want to hear it,” she told him.
He sighed. “This stubborn streak you keep displaying, is it just unique to you or is it a trait that all the Cavanaughs share?”
Her smile was wide and unnervingly innocent. “Come to the wedding and find out.”
Alex had to laugh. “You really just don’t give up, do you?”
Valri lifted her chin just a little bit as she answered, “Never.”
That was the truest thing she’d said to him so far, Alex thought.
* * *
His plan was to ignore whoever was on the other side of his door the next morning, even though they were knocking loud enough to wake up the dead. Alex knew that his unexpected would-be visitor wasn’t his father because after one failed attempt to gain entry into the apartment via the normal route, Leland Brody would have let himself in with his skeleton key.
Most likely, whoever was banging on his door was either Valri or another member of her family, dispatched to bring him to the wedding whether he wanted to go or not.
“No” was obviously not part of the Cavanaugh vocabulary.
So not answering was the way he was going to go.
Until the door suddenly opened on its own.
The next second, Valri hurried in on what appeared to be five-inch heels.
“I’m a pretty quick study,” she told him in response to the stunned expression on his face. “I watched you break into Bigelow’s house, remember?”
He made some sort of sound, intended to be taken as agreement. Or at any rate, he thought he made an agreeable noise. However, the stunned expression on his face had nothing to do with her mastering the art of breaking and entering and everything to do with the woman in the shimmery, sky-blue dress standing inside his apartment. She looked as if she’d ridden in on the latest sunbeam.
“Valri?” he asked uncertainly.
Alex was aware enough to know that if he used her surname the way he usually did, considering the event that was happening today, it wasn’t going to narrow things down at all. The Cavanaughs were one hell of an oversize family if ever there was one.
“Of course it’s me,” she answered, frowning at him. “Who were you expecting?”
“Not you,” he said, unable to draw his eyes away. “Not like that, at any rate,” he added, close to speechless.
This was his partner? The woman he rode with these past couple of weeks looked like the poster girl for a beach bunny, or at the very least, a cheerleader who spent her entire summers at the beach.
What he was looking at right now was a woman who could melt away his very knees. Her dress was all glitter and dreams and not much else. It was clinging to her curves and ending far above her knees. The brilliant blue color brought out her eyes even more than usual.
So much so that he felt as if someone had punched him in the gut, stealing his very breath away.
Her hair, always pulled back in a ponytail or clipped back and up, out of her way, was free now, flowing just below her shoulders like a blanket of golden sunbeams.
“You’re not even dressed,” she complained.
Instead of answering, or making some sort of an excuse, he continued standing there, his eyes never leaving her.
Finally, Valri felt she had to say something. “You’re staring at me.”
“Uh-huh. Did you always clean up this well?” he asked her.
Valri frowned. “Very funny. Now get in there and get dressed,” she ordered, pointing to the rear of his apartment, where she assumed his bedroom was located.
Alex looked down at his pullover and torn jeans. “I am dressed,” he told her.
“Get dressed better,” she emphasized. “You do own a suitable jacket to wear to a wedding, don’t you?” she asked, then warned, “Think carefully. Because if the answer is no, I can call one of my brothers to drop one off for you.”
“I’ve got a jacket,” he told her, sounding none too happy. The last thing he wanted was to be wearing a loaner jacket provided by one of her brothers. He didn’t want to get sucked into the Cavanaugh vortex if he could possibly help it.
The family had a habit of absorbing people, bringing them into the fold. Alex felt he was much too independent for that.
“And a tie? Dress pants, nice shirt?” she quizzed hopefully.
He made no answer. Instead, he went into the bedroom.
She listened, but didn’t hear the bedroom door closing. If he was putting on other clothes, wouldn’t he have shut the door?
“Are you changing?” she called out.
“Why, you want to come in here and supervise?” he asked.
“I’ll leave you on your honor,” she told him.
She assumed that he was going to need a few minutes to get dressed, so she busied herself by looking around. As she moved through the living room, she was struck by the lack of anything that would have provided a personal touch to the apartment.
There were no photographs, no books to indicate what he favored reading, no sports paraphernalia haphazardly dropped on the floor as he hurried to get ready for work, or make an appointment.
Nothing was out of its place.
There was also nothing to indicate that anyone actually lived here. “Did you just move in here?” she asked, raising her voice so he could hear her.
“No,” Alex answered, walking out of the bedroom. “Why?”
He cleaned up well, Valri couldn’t help thinking. Very well. She’d acknowledged from the first moment she’d met him that he was one good-looking man, but seeing him in a suit just somehow seemed to emphasize that.
Rousing herself, she said, “Because I don’t see anything personal of yours here. No pictures, no books or CDs. Nothing that says ‘Alex Brody lives here.’”
“It doesn’t have to. I’m here. That’s personal enough,” he told her. “So, do I pass your inspection?” he asked mockingly.
Her eyes met his, conveying a great deal more than she was willing to say out loud yet.
“More than pass,” she assured him. “I think maybe I should bring my weapon.”
That came out of left field, Alex thought. He wasn’t sure he understood her meaning. “Why?”
“To keep some of the more enthusiastic women from grabbing you and running off with you tucked under their arm.”
Alex could only laugh. “I had no idea you had this flair for dramatic exaggeration.”
Her smile turned into an appealing grin. “Neither did I, Brody.”
* * *
Possibly because of his unorthodox upbringing, Alex wasn’t a man who was easily impressed or overwhelmed. But he had to admit that the sight of so many police personnel gathered together other than outside of an auditorium briefing momentarily took his breath away.
“Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” Valri asked, leaning in so that only he could hear her.
She’d used the exact same description that had occurred to him in his head, Alex realized. Not only that, but at the same time she’d managed to make his knees a shade weaker because he had simultaneously experienced the arousing feel of her breath along the side of his face and neck as she whispered. And that in turn mingled with the scent of her light, enticing perfume.
If he didn’t know better, he would have said that his head was spinning. But that sort of a reaction was for adolescents—or someone who had been drugged. And he was neither—or at least, not the first.
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