“One of the CSIs. The head of the day shift’s chief assistant,” he said, deliberately not referring to him as his father. He and his siblings had all earned their present positions, and the less attention paid to the fact that their father was the head of the crime lab, the better for everyone all around. “She found five other open, suspicious ‘suicide’ cases that had far too many similarities to this case to just shrug off and pass over.”
“And you looked these cases over and agreed?” Bailey pressed.
“I haven’t had a chance yet,” Logan told him truthfully. “But I was just about to do that.” As he talked, Logan turned on his computer. It took the machine several seconds to respond and come to life.
“All right, you do that.” Bailey sounded exasperated as he issued the order. Rising to his feet, he nodded at the desk he’d just vacated. “When’s Sullivan supposed to be coming back?”
The wedding had taken place only last weekend. The lieutenant had been invited but hadn’t attended. Unlike Brian Cavanaugh, he didn’t believe in socializing with his men.
“Not for another week and a half,” Logan answered.
The news was not well received. Bailey’s frown intensified.
“Well, I can’t give you anyone else from the squad. Half of them are out sick and the other half are up to their ears in unsolved cases. This month’s stats are going straight to hell.”
“The chief assistant offered to work with me on this one—if it’s okay with you, Lieutenant,” Logan added.
As a rule, he preferred to ask forgiveness rather than permission, but seeing as how this was right out in front of him and the lieutenant was bemoaning the lack of bodies to do the work, Logan decided that this might be the better approach.
Bailey sighed. It was a known fact that the man wasn’t much on accepting outside help. He preferred the “glory,” as he referred to it, to remain within the department. But in this case, he had no choice. They needed to close some of the cases. After a moment, he nodded.
“Desperate times require desperate measures, I guess. All right. Use whatever resources are offered,” he said, and Logan had the distinct impression that the man was blatantly hinting that he could turn to the chief of D’s if it proved necessary.
“Oh, and one more thing—I don’t want this going out to the media until I give the okay. The last damn thing we need right now is for the public to start panicking and seeing a serial killer behind every building.” Bailey’s penetrating gaze met Logan’s. “Understood?”
Translation, the lieutenant doesn’t want to look as if he’s not doing his job.
Logan had always thought that bringing the public in was a good thing. For every thousand crazies who called in with dead-end tips, they’d get one really good, valid one that enabled them to nab their perpetrators a lot quicker.
But this was the lieutenant’s call. “Understood,” Logan answered.
“Good.”
The conversation over, the lieutenant marched back into his office, looking like the very personification of a disgruntled man who had far too much on his plate.
Logan waited until Bailey was out of earshot, then he picked up his telephone receiver and called the extension in Destiny’s office. Detail oriented, he’d taken note of the number when he’d walked into her office.
The phone rang a total of four times. He was just about to hang up, thinking that she must have stepped away from her area, when he heard the phone pick up.
“Crime lab.”
The voice sounded preoccupied, as if he’d interrupted her. “Destiny?”
There was a slight hesitation, as if she was surprised that anyone would recognize her voice. “Yes?”
“This is Cavanaugh. Logan,” he added since there were so many of them. “Good news—”
“I know who you are,” she cut in. “I recognized your voice.” What she hadn’t liked was that not only did she recognize his voice, but her pulse had jumped when she heard it. Maybe she was just sleep deprived and not just reacting to his resonant and sexy voice. “What good news?” she asked, trying not to let herself anticipate anything and not quite succeeding. “Did you find who did this to Paula?”
“Not that good,” he qualified.
“Then what is it?” she asked impatiently.
“My lieutenant just said that in light of the fact that my partner’s on his honeymoon and half the detectives up here are out with the flu, he officially okayed the two of us working together for the time being.”
She had learned to take most everything with a grain of salt and a great deal of caution. “Does your lieutenant know who I—”
“No, he doesn’t, and I purposely didn’t mention you by name, only by your title.”
“By my title?” she questioned. She didn’t think he was even aware of that.
“Yeah, you know, chief assistant to the crime lab’s head of the day shift.” That was quite a mouthful to get right. “Right now, that seemed to be good enough for the lieutenant. He said because we’re so shorthanded up here, you and I should work together on this case—at least until Sully gets back.”
“Sully?” she echoed. Who or what was a “Sully”?
“Yeah.” And then he gave her his partner’s full name. “Detective Eric Sullivan. He’s on his honeymoon at the moment and isn’t due to be back for another week and a half.”
She’d take whatever she could get. “That gives us a little leeway,” she commented.
“Yeah,” he agreed. Who was she kidding? The woman wasn’t nearly as laid-back about this as she was trying to portray. “Oh, and one more thing—”
There was always just “one more thing,” she thought. She could feel her shoulders stiffening as she braced herself. “And that is?”
“The lieutenant wants this kept from the media for as long as possible. He said he doesn’t want single women to be afraid to go out in the evening.”
“The serial killer doesn’t kill his victims in the street,” she pointed out, adding grimly, “He apparently kills his victims after he gets tired of them and dumps them.”
“I kept that little detail from him,” Logan told her. “I’ve come to the conclusion that the less I share with the lieutenant, the more leeway I have to work on a case.”
“As in bringing me in and not telling him my last name,” she surmised.
He didn’t think that she was going to have any particular problem with that. “It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” she told him with feeling. It was just that by not telling his lieutenant her name, she felt as if they were actually lying to the man. And that could come back and bite them. “Don’t think that I’m not grateful—” she began.
He cut her off right there. “We’ll get to that later,” he promised her with a definite grin in his voice, instinctively knowing that was going to distract her and get under her skin. He had a feeling that messing with her and getting her annoyed with him would focus the woman on solving the case and not on her personal loss.
“Okay, so how do you want to do this?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Work together,” she underscored. She felt a warmth creeping up her cheeks when she realized that he might have thought she was making a reference to something personal. More than likely he was probably more accustomed to that sort of thing than to working with a woman professionally. “Do you want me to come upstairs to you, or do you want to come down to me?”
He disliked having to rely on another computer, preferring to work on his own. Logan glanced toward Sully’s desk. That was as good a place as any. Actually, now that he looked around, there were a good many empty desks in the immediate area. This flu thing really was taking its toll.
“A lot of detectives are out sick,” he told her again. “So there’s plenty of space up here.” The crime lab had always struck him as rather claustrophobic, not to mention subterranean. “Might do you good to work aboveground for a change.”
“I’m not exactly a gopher,” she told him, picking up on his inference. “I go out in daylight on occasion.” She didn’t attempt to hide the note of sarcasm in her voice.
“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of a vampire, not a gopher.” When she made no response, he added, “You know, a creature of the night, that sort of thing.”
“I know what a vampire is,” she told him shortly.
Was this his attempt at humor? Or was he flirting in some strange, abstract way? Either way, he needed to stop it. This was a serious case they were working on. There was no time to waste on distractions. Her sister and a lot of other women were dead. They had to find the killer before he found another victim.
She blew out a breath, told herself to calm down and focus, then said, “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Looking forward to it,” he told her.
In response he heard a loud “click” in his ear. She’d hung up. Logan smiled to himself. Mission accomplished. He’d gotten her annoyed, he congratulated himself, and right now, “annoyed” was a lot better than “sad,” which was what he’d picked up on in her voice earlier. And while the woman had every right to be sad, the emotion tended to paralyze a person. Annoyance, or its first cousin “anger,” on the other hand, tended to light a fire under a person, which at the moment would serve them both a lot better than her being sad.
* * *
“Any particular place you want me?” Destiny asked ten minutes later. She’d come up carrying a large cardboard box filled with files, notebooks and miscellaneous information.
The expression on his face when Cavanaugh looked up told her that she’d made a tactical mistake with her wording. Again. What was it about this man that kept her tangling her words? She was seriously going to have to watch that. “To sit?” she added with emphasis, then repeated the question more fully. “Where do you want me to sit?”
“You can take Sully’s desk. I don’t know when the others are liable to come back, and there’s no point in you having to play musical desks every morning, looking to see which is still unoccupied.”
She deposited the cardboard box right in the middle of the desk and began to take out the files. Several looked thicker than he thought they should be, given that they’d only started their investigation.
Finished, she placed what appeared to be a jump drive on top of the files. The neat way they were stacked was in complete contrast to the rest of the desk, which overflowed with papers and folders. In truth, it looked as if the other detective had just stepped away from his desk to make a quick run to the vending machine, not a trip to Hawaii for the better part of two weeks.
Sitting down in the chair, Destiny found herself momentarily flustered when she discovered that her feet wouldn’t reach the floor.
“Is your partner a giant?” she asked. Who would want their chair to be this high?
“Close,” Logan allowed. He thought for a second, then said, “He’s six-six.” He watched as Destiny felt around along the bottom perimeter of the chair, looking for the height adjuster. “It’s on the right,” he told her. “The thing that adjusts your chair’s height,” he prompted.
“Oh. Thanks.”
Finding the adjuster, she pressed hard and suddenly found herself dropping down, seat and all, like a stone. The action jarred her, and it took a couple of moments for Destiny to start to feel all her individual parts back in working order.
“Don’t mention it.” His grin grew wider still. And more inviting. He had to be some lady-killer when he got going, she couldn’t help thinking. That smile of his could definitely melt a rock at close range. “Anything I can do to help.”
She merely nodded in response, not trusting herself to speak.
“Oh, and speaking of help...” he interjected, his voice deliberately trailing away.
“Yes?” she asked guardedly.
“As soon as you’re settled in, I want to ask you a few questions,” he told her.
What was it about this man that had her reacting so defensively? And heating so quickly? “What kind of questions?” she asked.
“About your sister’s social life.”
Oh. He was talking about the case. That was all right, then. She relaxed a little—but not all that much. “I’ve already put together a file addressing that.” She took it from the pile and placed it on his desk.
“Of course you did,” Logan said more to himself than to her.
This woman didn’t need his help to be detached, he thought. She needed his help in staying in contact with her human side. And while he was at it, he needed to get her to relax a little. He could feel her tension.
“I’m not much on reading,” he finally told her after a beat. For now, he ignored the file she’d pushed toward him, preferring the personal touch. “Why don’t you just tell me what you wrote, and I’ll listen?”
“You’re not much on reading,” she repeated in disbelief.
If he noticed her reaction, he gave no indication. Instead, he merely shook his head in response. “Not really.”
She stared at him. “You’re serious?”
“Why?” he asked her innocently, doing an excellent job of hiding his amusement. It was his way of trying to get her to loosen up. In his experience, this was the only way to work a case without letting it get to you. Because if you allowed cases to get to you, it was only a matter of time before they became your undoing, and then you weren’t good to anyone, least of all yourself. “Don’t I look like I’m serious?”
What he looked like was a guy who didn’t have a care in the world—except where his next romantic interlude was coming from.
She wondered if she could appeal to Sean and ask him if anyone else could work on the investigation with her. But then she remembered that technically, she wasn’t really supposed to be working on this at all and the investigation belonged to this laid-back detective who seemed more interested in wordplay than in solving six homicides.
She pressed her lips together. Logan Cavanaugh had to be better than she thought he was. Otherwise, last name or not, he would be out on his butt. According to what she knew about Brian Cavanaugh, he was a good man who was always there for his men and he didn’t suffer idiots. So this all just had to be an act on Logan’s part.
Why?
With a sigh, Destiny resigned herself to the fact that it was either work with Logan or return to the bleachers and watch the investigation into her sister’s death unfold from the sidelines.
There was absolutely no way she was about to do that. So, for better or worse, she was stuck with the man.
“My mistake,” she murmured. “You look serious.” And with that, she launched into a summary of what she had entered into the file he wasn’t opening.
Chapter 7
There was one thing wrong with the summation that Destiny had given him regarding her sister’s social life. For the most part, it involved the past. The present was covered only in generalities. There was no mention of actual names. Was that because there were too many—or because she didn’t know any?
“Do you know the names of any of your sister’s current friends?” he asked, cutting in when she paused for a breath.
Destiny flushed. “I used to.”
God but she hated admitting that.
Once upon a time she and Paula had been closer than two shadows on the wall. But then things began to change. Maybe Paula had seen her as too much of a mother figure and not enough as a sister-confidante. That had come about because she’d been the one left in charge, despite the fact that she wasn’t really that much older than Paula. It happened out of necessity. Because their father had just walked out on them one day, their mother was forced to take any work she could to pay the bills and hold body and soul together. Most of the time, that took two jobs. Their mother was hardly ever home, which put the burden of responsibility on Destiny’s shoulders. Paula grew to resent having to listen to her sister. Rebellion followed.
All in all, though, Paula ha
d turned out all right. She’d gone to college, gotten a degree and went on to make a good career for herself.
And they were finally getting closer again—until this had happened.
“Our careers took us in different directions,” she told him. “We moved around in different circles. But we were getting in touch more often again,” she said with emphasis.
That wasn’t the part he was interested in. “What kind of circles did your sister move around in?” he asked.
Her sister was a fundraiser, working for a charitable foundation. That put her in touch with a broad spectrum of people. Interesting people, Destiny imagined.
“Mainly they had to do with her job.”
“Remind me what that was again,” he said.
She’d mentioned it in passing in her summary and for a couple of minutes there, he’d been so busy just watching Destiny speak that he had lost the thread of what she was saying. That was probably when she’d mentioned her sister’s job title.
“She was a fundraiser for the Children’s Hospital of Aurora,” Destiny told him again. Was he trying to trip her up? Bait her? Or what? “And she was very good at it. Even in these rough times, she knew just how to coax major corporations and wealthy CEOs into making sizable donations to the hospital.”
She knew that because other people had told her. Paula had never been one to sing her own praises, and she didn’t talk all that much about work whenever they did get together. Considering all that grief they’d gone through in the middle years, Paula had turned out well and she was proud of her.
Damn it, this shouldn’t have happened to you, Paula.
Keeping an angry wave of tears at bay, she said, “The hospital is breaking ground on an oncology wing, thanks to her efforts.”
Logan saw the way she was struggling to keep herself under control. To keep the grief at arm’s length. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. But he knew that saying so would be the last thing that she would want to hear. Instead, he said the only thing he knew would be welcome.
“Your sister sounds like she was a really good person.”
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