Sean glanced up for a moment, assessing the woman in front of him. Seeing the expression in her eyes. There was that pain again, he noted. Definite pain. This wasn’t just a fellow brother in blue she’d looked in on. This was someone important to her.
For now, he let it go at that. He had a crime scene to process. “Give me your card, Charley.” She was quick to oblige him, digging out one of the cards the department had issued to her.
Matt had his own made up for her at the same time. The cards were identical—except for the drawing of a teddy bear on the front. The image represented Barney the Bear, another toy he’d given her. One, he told her, that was supposed to keep her company and protect her whenever she felt afraid.
Barney was propped up on her bed where, even now, he spent his days and nights, a vivid connection to her childhood.
And now he would also serve as a reminder of the brother she’d lost today, she couldn’t help thinking.
Steady, Charley warned herself.
Sean tucked the card into his pocket and went on taking photographs of the crime scene.
“Your friend have any enemies?” Declan asked as they walked out of the house.
She hated leaving Matt there, lifeless on the sofa, no longer regarded as a person, just a statistic. But she knew she had to. There was nothing she could do for him now—except find his killer.
“None,” she answered the detective.
“How about this ex-girlfriend?” he prodded. “Melissa?”
Charley shook her head. As much as she hated the woman, she knew Melissa wasn’t responsible for Matt’s murder. “Melissa didn’t do this.”
Declan looked at her with more than mild interest. “What makes you so sure?”
“To begin with, she’s not bright enough to know how to work a stapler,” Charley said sarcastically, referring to the note that had been stapled to Matt’s chest. “And the note said this was only the beginning. That means whoever did it was holding Matt accountable for something and he—or she—was obviously holding other people accountable, as well.”
“Accountable for what?” Declan asked.
Charley shook her head in complete frustration. “I don’t know.”
For now, he took her at her word. “Fair enough. But there’s also another explanation, you know.”
She looked at him, waiting. She certainly couldn’t think of any. “Which is?”
“Maybe whoever did it wanted to make it sound as if there were going to be other fatalities to throw us off. Maybe Holt was the killer’s only intended victim.”
The theory had merit, she supposed. “It’s a possibility,” Charley allowed, even though she didn’t want to. This gave them far too many possibilities, far too many avenues to investigate.
Well, at least he got her to admit that, Declan thought. Maybe this meant she wasn’t as terminally stubborn as she used to be. “This Melissa, you know her last name?”
“Merryweather,” Charley told him, then repeated, “She didn’t do it.”
Declan nodded, barely paying attention to her. He was busy forming plans in his head.
“So you said. Humor me.” And then he realized that she could still be of some more use. “You wouldn’t by any chance know where we could find her, would you?”
Charley’s expression was totally unreadable. “Other than under the first rock you come to, no.”
“That’s okay, I can look her up once I get back to the office.”
He didn’t ask her if she wanted a ride, because she had her own vehicle as far as he knew and besides, he was really hoping she’d given up the idea of working this with him. As gorgeous as the woman was, he had a feeling that working with her might be a challenge he’d save for another day.
Pulling out of the driveway, he left the other detective standing there, watching him take off.
* * *
Declan didn’t think about her again until he was pulling up in the police department’s rear parking lot. The woman he’d left behind him was now standing by the rear entrance into the building.
Stunned, he slammed the driver’s door behind him as he jumped out of his vehicle. He cut the distance to her in long, quick strides, hardly remembering making them.
“How the hell did you get here ahead of me?” he asked.
That was probably the easiest question she was going to field this week. She gave him a quick, pasted-on smile. “I drive faster than you do. You drive like a senior citizen,” she pointed out. “Let’s go up to talk to your lieutenant,” she said, reminding him of his promise.
“Might as well,” he said, resigned as he punched the number 3 on the keypad on the silver wall. “And I drive carefully,” he corrected, taking offense at her assessment.
“Whatever you say,” she replied.
When they got to the office, Lieutenant Jacobs was nowhere to be found.
“Personal emergency,” one of the other detectives in the department told them when Declan came out of the man’s office. “His wife lost control of her car—it wound up as window dressing in a boutique showroom. The lieutenant looked fit to be tied once he knew for certain his wife hadn’t killed herself. My guess is that he won’t be back today. You need help with something?” the man asked, giving Charley a scrutinizing once-over.
“No,” Declan answered. Turning toward the woman with him, he said, “Looks like I’m on my own here.”
“We’re on our own.” She deliberately emphasized the first word.
“Hey, Cavanaugh, wanna introduce me?” the detective he’d just been talking to asked, rising to his feet as he was taught in a bygone wonderfully polite era.
“No,” Declan replied succinctly as he walked away, headed to his desk. “Okay, let me see if I can find this Melissa Merryweather,” he said more to himself than to Charley.
He just didn’t give up, did he? she thought. Well, it was his time he was wasting. But she intended to try to follow up any shred of a lead the CSI people came up with.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” she told him mildly.
He was getting tired of hearing her say that. “Well, unless and until another tree comes leaping out at me, this is all I’ve—we’ve—” he corrected himself before she could “—got. Unless you’re keeping something from me,” he tagged on.
She was, but it had nothing to do with Matt’s murder and everything to do with her being able to investigate it, so she kept the information to herself as she shook her head. “Not a thing.”
In his opinion, Charley sounded entirely too innocent when she said that and he always held displays of innocence to that degree suspect. But he had nothing to go on other than a gut instinct, one he wasn’t able to pin down or flesh out yet. Until such time, he intended to keep this detective close to him and the best way to do that was to allow her to think he was all for their joining forces.
Getting comfortable at his desk, he gestured to the somewhat scarred desk facing his.
“Spenser was moving out his stuff when I left here this morning. Looks like he’s finished so you can park yourself there for the time being if you like.”
She pulled the chair out and sank down into it. It was going to need some adjustment. This Spenser was a big man, she concluded. “Spenser your partner?”
“Ex-partner.” Declan didn’t look up, his fingers gliding along the keyboard as he continued to search for Melissa Merryweather’s address. “He decided he could make more money in the private sector.”
That wasn’t exactly a newsworthy discovery. “He probably can,” she speculated. The police department wasn’t exactly known for its princely salaries. “You two work together long?”
He had to think for a moment before answering. “A little over a year and a half.”
“Get along?”
Th
at caught his attention. “Average,” he acknowledged, looking at her sharply. “What’s with the twenty questions?” he asked. What was she up to? Even back in the academy, he remembered that Charley had an agenda, a schedule. She went at training doggedly—a preview of how she handled everything else. He doubted that a leopard could change its spots.
“Just catching up,” she said. Moreover, if Declan was answering questions, he couldn’t be asking them.
“That works two ways,” he reminded her. “I get a chance to catch up, too.” He had a few outstanding questions about her he wanted to ask—especially about that mysterious husband of hers who had devolved into a long story for a slow night.
Rather than comment on what he’d just pointed out, Charley indicated the computer he was typing on. “Find anything yet?”
No, and it wasn’t for lack of trying, he thought in frustration.
“Program’s slow,” he said out loud. “The department’s way overdue in investing in new computers to keep us up to speed.” The fact that his department wasn’t alone in this didn’t make it any more palatable for him. Declan had never ascribed to the “misery loves company” way of thinking.
“Could be worse,” Charley offered philosophically.
He frowned at the blank screen with its maddening note at the bottom that told him it was “waiting to connect.”
“How?”
“You could still be banging out end-of-day reports on typewriters and have to make do with just one computer to a floor.”
Now she was just making things up, he thought. “Nobody’s that archaic.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” she countered.
The last police department she’d considered applying to, located in a little town in New Mexico, had a force of exactly three—a sheriff and two deputies—for the entire county, and the only accessible computer was located in the town’s one-story public library. The deputies and the sheriff’s secretary did all their work on electric typewriters.
“You’ll have to tell me about it someday,” he told her in a voice that indicated “someday” wasn’t going to be anytime soon. A second later, he triumphantly announced, “Got her.”
Charley didn’t have to ask who.
Chapter 4
Melissa Merryweather tended bar in a cocktail lounge within one of Aurora’s more upscale hotels. The Aurora Maxwell was located on a major thoroughfare and was approximately a mile away from the city’s commuter airport.
Given the hour, the lounge was close to empty with only a couple of harried travelers seated at tables for one, looking to unwind.
The ambience—semidarkness—was either soothing or depressing, depending on the point of view of the person taking it in. Charley found it depressing. The thought of sitting on a stool at the bar, ruminating over a half-filled glass of alcohol only made it more so.
The less-than-genuine smile on Melissa’s carefully made-up face widened as she looked up when Declan walked into the lounge. It was obvious to Charley that although both of them were approaching the bar at an equal pace, Melissa only saw him.
It was like watching a predator come to life, Charley thought. Even Melissa’s strawberry-blond, corkscrew curls seemed to become bouncier.
“Hi, handsome, what can I get you?” Melissa asked in a husky voice that Charley thought was probably more suitable for someone making an obscene phone call, which she wouldn’t have put past Melissa.
“A few answers,” Declan replied, the width of his smile matching hers.
Except on him, Charley had to admit, the smile looked rather seductive—make that very seductive. It was obvious that Melissa was aware of it.
“How about we start with ‘yes’?” Melissa suggested, leaning in as close as she could to him, given that there was a bar between them. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that she was flirting with him for all she was worth and it was only partially to get him to spend money at the bar.
In her mind, Melissa was probably already going home with him.
This was the woman who had gotten her hooks into her brother, who had taken him for everything she could, then tossed him aside, filleted and aching. For two cents, Charley would have loved to sink her fist into that annoying face.
It was a struggle to hold her tongue and not tell the woman to drop the act and behave like a responsible person. For all she knew, to Melissa, this was her idea of a responsible person. The woman had the IQ of a dirty shoelace.
Declan appeared unmoved by the woman’s blatant flirtation, although he remained friendly. “How about, where were you last night?”
Melissa shrugged dismissively, as if that was of no consequence. “No place special. But I can be anywhere you want me to be tonight.”
Okay, enough was enough. Any more of this and she was going to be nauseous.
“We need you to be more specific than ‘no place special,’” Charley interjected.
The pretty forehead furrowed and a look of annoyance crossed her face as she regarded her. “Why?”
“It’s not your turn to ask questions yet,” Charley informed her curtly.
The furrowed brow became more so as Melissa stared at her. “Don’t I know you from someplace?” she asked, struggling to remember.
“That’s another question,” Charley pointed out, determined not to give Melissa a scrap of information.
Anger etched a line into her features. “Listen, you—”
“That’s ‘Detective’ You,” Charley corrected wryly. “And we still need to know where you were last night—and early this morning,” she added since her brother’s time of death hadn’t been established yet.
“You’re police?” Melissa asked, the last of the friendliness evaporating from her voice.
Declan had taken a backseat for a moment, amused at the exchange between the two women. He had a feeling that Charley had it in her to be a real spitfire if she wanted to be.
But since the woman behind the bar had asked a legitimate question, he decided maybe he should step up before the situation really spun out of control.
“Afraid so,” he told her, taking out his identification for her viewing. “Detectives Cavanaugh and Randolph,” he said, introducing himself to her.
“Terrific,” Melissa muttered. The brightness had definitely left her smile. “Did Matt send you to hassle me?” she demanded.
“Why would he do that?” Declan asked, his voice marginally interested.
“Because I broke up with the loser,” she snapped, rubbing at a spot on the bar that wouldn’t give up its stain. “It’s not my fault he thought it was serious between us.”
“Right. He should have realized that the only serious affair you could have was with money,” Charley murmured under her breath.
She knew better, and ordinarily she would have refrained from saying something like that, but she wasn’t exactly thinking clearly at the moment and her temper had gotten away from her.
“You can’t talk to me like that!” Melissa cried indignantly.
“Actually, she could probably talk a lot worse to you than that, so I wouldn’t push it if I were you,” Declan warned her, completely surprising Charley. Whether he realized it or not, he’d just helped her regain control over her temper.
All Melissa seemed to be aware of was being insulted. “Look, you give Matt a message for me. You tell him I don’t care who he sends over, we’re not getting back together and that’s final.”
Declan inclined his head. “I’m afraid it is.”
The bartender looked somewhat perplexed. For the moment, her confusion paralyzed her. “You mean you think he’ll back off?”
“Sergeant Holt can’t do very much of anything anymore,” Declan informed her. “He’s dead.”
The woman behind the bar appeared stunned, as
if the person she’d just been talking to had lapsed into a language she couldn’t comprehend. “What?” she asked hoarsely, staring at Declan.
“He’s dead,” Charley repeated, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. Her eyes darted to Declan to see if he noticed her momentary shift in tone, but he seemed only focused on Melissa.
Was that because he still thought of the woman as a suspect, or because the vest Melissa was wearing set off her breasts to their best advantage, emphasizing her cleavage?
Charley couldn’t decide.
“This is a joke, right?” Melissa asked, glancing at her and then Declan, waiting for one of them to tell her she was right.
Charley took out her phone and showed her the photo she’d taken of her brother at the crime scene, the cryptic note still pinned to his chest. “This isn’t a joke,” she said.
Melissa stared wide-eyed at the picture on the cell phone, then turned her head away. “Oh, God, he’s dead in that, isn’t he?” she asked, directing the question to Declan. Upset or not, she never lost her focus, which meant playing to the best-looking man in the room.
“Yes, he is,” Declan replied patiently, knowing that if he left it to Charley to answer her, he couldn’t be sure just what would come out.
Anyone paying minimal attention could see that she didn’t like the woman. Was that because she felt Melissa had treated Holt badly—or because she was jealous of the connection, however brief, the two had had?
“How did it happen?” Melissa asked. “Was it the bullet that killed him?” Her eyes strayed back to the photograph and the hole in Matt’s chest.
“Well, it didn’t help,” Charley snapped.
Then, to her surprise, she saw tears shining in the other woman’s eyes. Given what she knew about their relationship, she wouldn’t have thought Melissa capable of any genuine grief or any real emotion whatsoever. There was a chance that she had misjudged the woman—but she tended not to believe that.
“I’m sorry,” Melissa said. “I’ve got to go sit down somewhere.”
Coming around the bar, rather than take a seat the way she’d indicated, Melissa went straight to Declan and leaned heavily against him, her chest heaving with supposedly trapped sobs.
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