* * *
Rather than call down to the tech department, Declan thought a face-to-face request was best. With that in mind, he went down to the basement where both the crime lab and its offshoot, the much smaller computer lab, were located.
The door to the computer tech area was opened when he arrived, but he knocked on the doorjamb anyway before looking in.
Brenda Cavanaugh, the department’s resident computer wizard as well as Dax’s wife and the daughter-in-law of the chief of detectives, had her back to the door.
When he’d first glimpsed the woman at one of Andrew’s get-togethers he’d thought she was a teenager. The slim blonde with the laughing blue eyes certainly didn’t look like a woman who could make a computer sit up and beg as well as do tricks and roll over, he’d thought once he found out her name and put it together with the accolades he’d heard about the wizard in the department’s tech lab.
She was busily working, her slender fingers all but invisible as they flew across the keyboard at speeds her husband said defied measurement.
“What can I do for you—Declan, isn’t it?” she asked, never looking up from her work.
“They warned me you had eyes in the back of your head,” he said with a laugh, coming forward. “But I didn’t believe them. Maybe I should have.”
Brenda was quick to squash the rumor in the making and fill him in. “No, just a good reflection coming off my monitor and an excellent memory for faces, which, given the ever-increasing size of our family, is an excellent asset to have.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, this time sparing him a glance. Her fingers never stopped moving.
On his way down, he’d worded this several different ways in his head. In the end, he decided that keeping it simple was best. “I need you to do a little digging into someone’s background.”
“In my spare time, right?” Brenda asked with a pleasant laugh.
“Actually,” he told the vibrant blonde, “I’d like it as soon as possible.”
“Is this part of the case you caught? The one with the shooter going after our own?” she asked. “News travels very fast here,” she said before Declan could ask her how she knew. “And your dad’s office is right next to this one,” she said.
“In a manner of speaking,” he said, answering her initial question about the query being part of the case.
“What’s the person’s name you’re looking into?” she asked, pausing to pull over a pad so she could jot the name down.
“Charley—Charlotte Randolph,” he amended, thinking her file most likely had her legal name on it.
Brenda stopped writing and turned from the computer to look at him. “Isn’t she the one the chief authorized to work on this case with you?” she asked.
Already she knew more than he’d initially told her in his communications with her. “Yeah.”
Brenda studied him for a moment. “And you can’t just ask her?”
“Not if I want to hear the truth,” he admitted. “I don’t think she’s ready to talk about it yet.”
“Just what is it you want me to look for?” Brenda asked, watching him.
“I want to see if you can find anything about her connection to the first victim, Matthew Holt. When I casually asked if they’d ever dated, she countered with that old throwaway line about being just friends and wanting to keep it that way.”
“But you don’t believe her.” It wasn’t a question.
“No, I don’t.”
She resumed typing. “Why?” she asked.
“Let’s just say it’s a gut feeling. I figured if anyone could find out what I need to know quickly, you could.”
“Okay, I’ll get back to you,” Brenda told him, turning back to her work. “And don’t forget to take your shovel when you leave,” she reminded him in typical-mother fashion.
“My shovel?” he repeated, thoroughly confused. He didn’t have anything remotely resembling a shovel with him.
“Yeah. You did lay it on pretty thick just now,” she pointed out.
“Didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” he told her as he left the lab. “And thanks a lot for looking into this for me.”
Brenda’s voice followed him out into the hall. “Don’t thank me yet.”
He knew she’d deliver. According to everyone, she was the best at this.
He didn’t feel good about going behind Charley’s back to get the information he wanted, but he needed to know if there was something she wasn’t sharing with him about why she was so determined to work the case. Something that might ultimately interfere with solving the case.
Charley didn’t strike him as someone who was motivated by ambition to make a name for herself in order to get ahead. There was something more at work here, something personal and he was already as in the dark about this case as he was willing to be. Any light he could find to shed on the different details, he was going to go all out and shed it.
* * *
When he came back into the office, he saw that Charley had appropriated desks for the three detectives that had been assigned to work with them. Not only that, but apparently she’d also gotten lunch to be delivered in his absence.
She looked up just as he walked in.
“You’re back sooner than I thought,” she told him. “I ordered lunch for you. As I remember, you liked Chinese food back at the academy.”
“How would you know?” he asked, surprised. “You never went out with us anytime we were celebrating.”
“You celebrated every Friday,” she said with a laugh. “I turned up a couple of times. I just didn’t call attention to myself.”
That wouldn’t have been possible, he thought. Her very presence called attention to itself. She’d had—and still had—a killer figure, a smile that lit up a room for a quarter of a mile and the bluest eyes he’d ever seen outside of an enhanced magazine cover.
He sat down at his desk. The aroma from the bag on his desk instantly reminded him that it had been hours since his stomach had had food drop by for a visit.
“Thanks.” He began to open his bag. “How much do I owe you?”
“We’ll settle up later,” she promised. Her eyes were already glued to her monitor.
Chapter 11
Charley couldn’t get away from the feeling that they were all sitting on a ticking time bomb, trying to find the killer of three policemen before he found another target.
For the past thirty-six-plus hours, she, Declan and the three detectives who had been assigned to the task force had been staring at five separate monitors, going through five years’ worth of data. Data that concerned either any would-be police officer who had washed out of the academy for some reason, or any officers who had been terminated or forced to retire due to disabling injuries sustained on or off the job.
Given the length of time they’d been reviewing and the many different scenarios that the suspect might have been involved in, the amount of data they’d been faced with was almost overwhelming.
Shutting her eyes for a second, Charley rubbed the bridge of her nose. Aside from feeling as if she was going cross-eyed, she was holding one potential monster of a headache at bay. She didn’t have time for a headache.
Mercifully, though she felt as if they were on borrowed time, waiting for the second shoe to drop, the killer hadn’t claimed any new victims. Since the first three murders had been in rapid succession, Charley found herself entertaining the very thin hope that maybe the killing spree had ended as abruptly as it had started.
Glancing over toward Declan’s desk, her eyes met his. “No news is good news, right?”
As if they were on an identical wavelength, Declan knew what she was referring to. He was also quick to point out the flaw in her theory. “Not necessarily. It just might mean that the bo
dy hasn’t been found yet.”
Charley sighed. “You are an optimistic son of a gun, aren’t you?” she commented with a shake of her head. The fact that he might be right was something she didn’t want to dwell on. “Is that why you keep watching the phone?” she asked him. “Because you’re expecting a call saying there’s been another murder?”
“I’m not watching the phone,” Declan told her matter-of-factly.
Silently, he upbraided himself. He was going to have to be less obvious. Right now, he was letting his impatience get the better of him, waiting for Brenda to call him. From what he’d heard, the resident computer tech was usually extremely fast when it came to getting back to people.
Of course, it wasn’t as if she had nothing else to do. When he’d gone to see her, the woman’s desk had been swamped with requests and God only knew what all else. On top of that, she was doing him a favor, something that was off the books—which meant that the request he’d made could be easily bumped and sent to the back of the line as many times as was necessary until Brenda could find a few spare minutes to get to the information he wanted unhampered.
Charley shrugged in response to his protest. Maybe she was just punchy and it was her imagination. At any rate, the past thirty-six hours of hunting had turned up a few names that needed checking out.
“I’ve got a few likely candidates to talk to,” she announced. Pushing her chair back, she rose to her feet. “I’m going to go check them out.”
Declan was already rising, as well. “We’ll go together,” he told her.
Her eyes pinned him in place for a brief moment. “Is it that you’re being protective, or you’re afraid that I’m going to screw up?”
He grinned at her. “Which would insult you less?”
Okay, maybe he was just being helpful and she was being paranoid. “Let me think about it,” she answered with a dry laugh.
The other three detectives had been busy compiling their own lists of possible suspects.
“Looks like we all get to hit the field at the same time,” Bobby Yu said, shrugging into his jacket.
“Not all,” Declan corrected. “You and Callaghan check out the people on your lists.” He turned toward the third detective. “Sanchez, I want you to stay here just in case someone calls in with a tip.”
With a shrug, Sanchez put his sports jacket back on the back of his chair. He didn’t look overly happy about staying behind, but he had learned to roll with the punches no matter what direction they came from.
“Whatever you say, Cavanaugh.”
Declan glanced in Charley’s direction. “Maybe you should take notes,” he suggested with a straight face.
“In your dreams,” she teased.
Just as they were about to leave the office, the phone rang. Sanchez picked up the receiver. After exchanging a couple of words with whomever was calling, the detective held up the receiver and called out to Declan, “Hey, Cavanaugh, it’s for you.”
The room became deadly quiet as Declan took possession of the phone. Within a couple of seconds, it became evident from his body language that the call was not about another body being found.
The call was the one he’d been waiting for. It was Brenda on the other end of the line.
“Sorry it took so long to get back to you,” she apologized. “I had an emergency on my hands.” Unable to go into details, she left it at that.
“That’s okay,” Declan said, brushing off her apology. He kept his voice low. “I figured that you were busy. Do you have anything?” he asked, aware that she could just be calling to say she was going to need more time.
“That thing you wanted me to check out for you?” Brenda began.
“Yeah?” Declan prodded.
“You were right,” she said. “There is a connection.”
He covertly slanted a glance toward Charley, making sure she wasn’t looking his way. “I knew it.”
“No, I don’t think you did,” he heard Brenda contradicting.
That made no sense to him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that Holt and your partner were brother and sister,” Brenda told him.
“Explain,” he requested, unable to put his question into more detail than that. Charley was looking at him curiously and he didn’t want to alert her any further until he had all the information he wanted. When he did, he was going to choose the time to confront her with what he knew. He wanted this to be done on his terms, not hers.
“Same mother, different fathers,” Brenda replied.
“Oh. That explains it.”
“There’s more,” Brenda continued.
Something in the tech’s voice told him the “more” was significant. “Go ahead.”
“Seems their mother was pretty much a flake,” Brenda said. “She took off when Charley was fifteen and Holt was eighteen. He was legally an adult, but she was underage. That meant she had to go into the system since there were no aunts or uncles or a grandparent to take her in.
“Holt stepped up and got himself declared her guardian to keep her out of the system. Then, when she turned eighteen, he got his letter of acceptance from the academy and was all set to go in. The night before that happened, his sister was in a car accident. The doctor told him that she was going to need a lot of care if she was ever going to walk again.
“He put his life on hold and dedicated himself to getting her back on her feet. She was his first priority and he worked with her around the clock, whenever he wasn’t at any of the part-time jobs he took to pay her bills.
“Once she was back on her feet, he reapplied to the academy and got in. My guess is that she feels she owes everything to him. With him dead, she has no other family. Her mother never surfaced. I think there’s a pretty good chance that she’s dead.”
Listening, Declan nodded to himself. That went a long way in explaining everything, he thought, slanting a look toward Charley. It also told him why she’d want her connection to Holt kept quiet. If her relationship with the dead officer came to light, she would be taken off the case since she was far too close.
He knew letting his superior—in this case the chief of Ds—know about this was the right thing to do, but he also knew how he’d feel if it was one of his brothers who’d been murdered. No authority, however loudly voiced, would have deterred him from carrying on with the investigation. At least this way, he could keep tabs on her.
Turning his back toward Charley, Declan lowered his voice as he made one last request of the chief of Ds daughter-in-law. “Brenda, can we keep this just between us?”
“Keep what just between us?” he heard Brenda ask brightly.
Declan laughed. For now, unless and until he decided to share this information with someone, the secret was safe. “Thanks.”
“Any time you want me to forget something else, feel free to let me know,” Brenda said just before she terminated the call.
“Another body?” Charley asked the second he hung up the phone. She held her breath as she waited for him to answer.
“No,” he told her. “I was just following up another lead.”
When he didn’t say anything further, she heard herself prodding, “And?”
Declan shrugged dismissively. “It didn’t go anywhere. But we are,” he said, stepping up his pace as he headed toward the door.
Decidedly shorter than Declan, Charley had to practically skip in order to keep up. She did so without making any comment.
* * *
One by one, the list of likely candidates turned out to be less likely as Charley and Declan managed to track them down.
Of the five on the list, two had left the state soon after they failed to make the grade, choosing to make fresh starts elsewhere. A third, who had made the grade but then seemed to have trouble with authority a
nd was let go, had moved on to a different career. He became a firefighter to satisfy his desire to live daily with a sense of danger, uncertainty and impending doom dogging his every move.
A fourth, Joel Henderson, had chosen a different career path altogether. When they interviewed him, Charley easily heard the bitterness in the man’s voice. It seemed to be evident in every word and it immediately sent up red flags for her and, she saw to her satisfaction, for Declan, as well.
“So you hold a grudge against the department?” Declan asked conversationally.
“Wouldn’t you if they made you feel as if you were a useless piece of garbage?” Henderson asked. The question all but throbbed with hostility.
“Not everyone is suited for that line of work,” Charley pointed out as gently as possible, doing her best to bank down her own reaction to the man. She wanted to seem sympathetic to him in order to draw him out, and possibly trip him up.
Something about Henderson inspired its own hostile reaction from her. She glanced at Declan to see if he felt the same way, but his expression was completely unreadable.
Which, she supposed, made him better at this than she was. But she was working on it.
“Yeah, easy for you to say,” Henderson groused. “You made it. Of course, you might meet with a bullet tomorrow,” he mused, “so maybe I’ve got the better job after all.” He laughed drily. “Nobody thinks about taking potshots at park maintenance workers.”
Henderson had caught Declan’s attention when the man had speculated about Charley meeting with a bullet. “Is that supposed to be a threat?” Declan demanded, his mild demeanor vanishing completely.
Henderson looked at him nervously, his belligerent attitude backing off. “No, dude, that’s just an observation. Look, I’ve got to get back to work, so if there’s nothing else, I’ll be seeing you.”
“Was that just a throwaway line or a promise?” Charley asked Declan after the park trash collector had put a little distance between them.
Declan’s shoulders rose and fell in a vague shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he admitted, then asked her, “Do you like him for it?”
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