“Valri?” Rae repeated. She was certain that he hadn’t mentioned the name to her before.
Sully nodded without looking up from the cell screen. “My cousin.”
“The medical examiner?” she asked, trying to keep things straight.
He glanced up. “That’s another cousin,” he told her. “This one is a computer wizard, and she can access databases that the average person hasn’t even thought of yet.” He took a picture of the fingerprints that had been lifted from the deceased, sending them along with the text message he’d just written.
Finished, Sully began to head toward the last exam room.
Rae was right behind him. “Now what are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to take a couple of close-ups of those stab wounds in Warren’s chest and send them to Kristin to see if she notices anything unusual about them,” Sully explained.
“Kristin.” She was having trouble keeping the names straight. “And that would be the medical examiner?”
He was preoccupied and muttered, “Yes.”
Rae wanted to ask more questions. But she waited as Sully moved the sheet back and took several photographs of the entry wounds on the dead man’s chest.
Warren looked progressively worse each time she looked at him, Rae thought. She could feel her stomach threatening to turn over and send up her last meal.
In addition to keeping her food down, she was having trouble keeping her guilt from overwhelming her.
She kept quiet until she thought Sully was finished. “Anyone else you want to send a photo array off to?” she asked.
She was being sarcastic, but he answered her seriously.
“My uncle Sean,” he said as the thought occurred to him. “I’ll ask the doc about processing Warren’s DNA in the morning and I can send that to Uncle Sean,” he said, thinking out loud.
“Why would you want to collect Warren’s DNA?” she asked. “We already have his name.”
“Just a hunch,” he answered vaguely.
Rae looked at him more closely, second-guessing what was going through his head. “You don’t think John Warren’s his real name, do you?”
“It probably is,” he said, “but given what you said about not knowing anything about his background, you can’t really rule out anything at this point.” He carefully replaced the sheet over the man’s body. “If he’d been born and raised here, that would be another story.”
“Yes, it would be,” she said, her mind straying. She couldn’t think about Warren right now. Not until she could find out who killed him and why. Instead, she forced herself to focus on the immediate situation and the man she was sharing space with. “Just how many people on the police force are you related to, Cavanaugh?”
“At times, too many to keep straight,” he readily confessed.
She looked at him. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”
“At times it can get pretty overwhelming,” he admitted.
He missed them now, Sully thought, and that was a good feeling. It was comforting to know that there was always someone who had his back, no matter what happened.
“Overwhelmed by relatives,” Rae said, trying to relate to that situation. But she couldn’t begin to fathom something like that. She shook her head. “Can’t say I know what that’s like. I’ve been on my own since I was fifteen.”
“What about Miss Joan?” he reminded her.
“Miss Joan looked out for me when I was fifteen,” she admitted, “but she’s not a relative.”
“It doesn’t take blood to make a family,” he told her. “All it takes is caring.”
Her mouth twisted, lost between a semi-smile and a spate of emotion that left unchecked was liable to bring on tears.
Trying to block those emotions, she flippantly told him, “You missed your calling, Cavanaugh. All these years you could have been writing greeting cards.”
Rather than get annoyed, Sully took her comment in stride. “That might be something to fall back on,” he said agreeably.
“Think they’ll get back to you?” she asked. When he looked at her, obviously waiting for more input, she elaborated, “The medical examiner and the computer wizard you texted. Do you think they’ll get back to you any time soon?”
“With any luck, I’ll hear from them first thing in the morning.” He smiled fondly as he thought of Valri. “Val looks as if she’s a very quiet, soft-spoken, laid-back young woman who loves technology, but she has this incredibly competitive streak.”
Rae didn’t understand his point. “Who is she competing with?”
He grinned. “Herself. She’s always pitting herself against her last best time, wanting to be faster, more thorough than she was the last time.”
That sounded pretty exhausting, Rae thought. “And the medical examiner?”
The medical examiner was actually married to his cousin Malloy, but he left that little piece of information out for now. No sense in confusing Rae with a barrage of names, he thought.
“Kristin just doesn’t like leaving any questions unanswered,” Sully told her.
“And you’re related to these two people?” Rae asked, attempting to organize the people, their names and fields of expertise in her mind.
“To them and to a lot more like them,” Sully answered her.
“And these ‘lot more like them,’ are they all in law enforcement?” she asked, having trouble wrapping her mind around a phenomenon like that.
“In one form or another, yes, they are,” Sully answered.
“And what do you do, exactly?” she asked.
He merely smiled and said, “My part.”
Modest, she thought and laughed softly. “Well, that settles it,” Rae declared as if she had just reached a decision after a prolonged debate. “In my next life, I’m coming back as you.”
Sully laughed then, the deep, warm sound resonating around the room and seeming to encompass most of the clinic.
“Why are you laughing?” Rae asked. Her comment might have been unorthodox, but she didn’t think she said anything particularly amusing. “What’s so funny, Cavanaugh?”
“Because you coming back as me would be a terrible, terrible waste,” he told her.
Her eyebrows drew together. “And why is that?”
“Because,” Sully explained, his eyes sweeping over her in a way that felt incredibly intimate to Rae. She felt everything tightening within her, as if poised for something—except that she didn’t really know what.
“Because?” she questioned, the lone word hanging out in space, teasing her.
“Because,” he told her in a lowered voice, “you’re perfect just the way you are.”
“No, I’m not,” she insisted, dismissing his assessment.
She felt that there was nothing perfect about her. The description, perfect, belonged to beautiful women who sat jauntily back against a wall of pillows, looking as if they belonged on the cover of exclusive fashion magazine. The word wasn’t used to describe to a woman who had rough hands and spent her waking hours working hard.
“Yes,” Sully told her, his voice soft, low. “You are.” And then, for once in his life, he didn’t think—he just reacted and went with an overpowering feeling that had been eating away at him ever since he had first laid eyes on Rae. Sully cupped her face between his hands and kissed her.
Chapter 14
Rae could feel herself responding to Sully’s kiss half a second before his lips touched hers. Her skin warmed in anticipation as her heart began to beat faster and faster. She told herself that she was overreacting, that what was happening was just a matter of one set of lips on another.
Nothing more than skin on skin.
There was absolutely no reason for her to feel as if there was a party going on inside her, especially in view of the fact that there was a dead body lyin
g several rooms away.
It didn’t matter.
Logic didn’t matter.
Rae felt as if she was a lone flower struggling to bloom in the desert, desperate for that one nourishing drop of water.
That’s what this kiss was to her.
As Rae rose up higher on her toes, absorbing the effects of this pulse-quickening kiss, she felt Sully’s strong arms slip down to her waist, holding her to him.
She surrendered herself up to the sensation, glorying in the powerful burst of desire that seemed to pour through her entire body.
A level of desire she had never experienced before captured her.
Just as she felt herself succumbing, Sully drew back from her.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “I couldn’t help myself.”
She could literally hear her heart hammering in her ears. She would have given in to him, to this desire, if he had just pushed a little.
But he hadn’t.
And he seemed to regret what had almost happened.
Rae fought hard to save face. “Don’t let it happen again,” Rae warned, her voice verging on sheer breathlessness.
His eyes held hers as he told her, “I won’t.”
But they both knew that it would happen again. And the next time it did, it wouldn’t end with Sully drawing back away from her. Nor, she knew, would she even want him to draw back.
But for now, she needed to gather herself together and focus on the task at hand: telling Miss Joan what had happened to the last man she had sent to the ranch before Sully arrived—and joining forces with the sheriff and Sully to find the man’s killer.
* * *
“The offer to come with you still stands,” Sully told her when morning finally arrived.
They had both remained at the clinic the entire night, guarding Warren’s body. Hearing about it, the sheriff’s wife had taken pity on Sully and Rae and sent over clean clothing for them, The sheriff returned to take over at first light, saying he was staying with the body until the medical examiner from the next town arrived to do an even more thorough autopsy.
Relieved of their impromptu duty by the sheriff, she and Sully were free to go about their business. For Rae, that meant that she was going to deliver the news about Warren’s murder to Miss Joan.
“I already told you,” Rae said to the detective, “I don’t need to have my hand held.”
“I know,” Sully answered. “But maybe I just want to.”
There was that smile again, she thought, the one that seemed to just slip in under her skin like a perfect incision delivered by the tip of a razor-sharp scalpel. She could actually feel it leaving its mark.
“All right,” she said, giving in, “you want to come? Come.”
The smile morphed into a grin. “Since you asked so nicely... I’m kidding,” Sully told her quickly when he saw lightning forming in her eyes. “You really need to lighten up a little, Mulcahy.”
Leaving the clinic, she didn’t see it that way. “This is a serious situation,” she insisted.
“No one’s arguing that,” Sully said, following her down the front steps. They headed toward Miss Joan’s diner. “But I learned a long time ago that a sense of humor can see you through a lot. If you don’t laugh, you cry,” he told her simply. “And crying never helped anything.”
Every step she took toward Miss Joan’s felt as if her legs were turning into lead. Listening to these mindless adages just seemed to make everything worse.
“Do you just come up with these things,” she asked him, “or are they sewn on some dish towel somewhere for your personal use?”
He grinned. “They’re right next to those greeting cards we talked about,” he told her.
She made a dismissive noise that sounded more like a muffled groan but said nothing intelligible to Sully in response.
Reaching the diner, he opened the door for her and held it as Rae walked in ahead of him.
She held her breath as she looked around.
The diner was fairly empty at this hour, having already seen its first wave of activity, earlier risers who needed to be on the job before eight. There was only one waitress on duty at this time, and she was busy clearing off the last of the tables.
Miss Joan was where she usually was, behind the counter. Her back was to the door and she was refilling the two giant side-by-side urns with fresh coffee. The first wave of customers had consumed almost all of the coffee.
Sensing their presence, Miss Joan said, “Be with you in a minute,” as she poured the last of the water into the urns. The low rumble let her and anyone else in the immediate area know that the coffee was beginning to brew.
Drying off her hands on her apron, Miss Joan turned around to face them. She didn’t look surprised, but then, her expression rarely gave anything away.
“Both of you,” she commented. “What’s up?”
“What makes you think something’s up?” Sully asked her. He was curious just how acute the woman’s thought process was. Ordinarily, anyone else would have just said hello.
“Don’t insult me, boy,” Miss Joan told him. “The breakfast here is good, but Rae’s capable of making one every bit as good. She learned everything she knows about cooking working here next to Angel—even if she claims not to like to cook.” Her sharp hazel eyes swept over both of them, searching for any telltale signs of a clue. “Now have a seat. I’ll pour you a couple of cups of freshly brewed coffee and you can tell me why you’re here.”
It wasn’t a suggestion.
Rae couldn’t wait for the coffee. She needed to get this off her chest and out in the open before it smothered her.
“John Warren isn’t missing anymore.”
Miss Joan placed one cup of black coffee in front of Rae and a second one in front of Sully. The creamer was in a polished container on the counter between them. “He turned up.”
It wasn’t exactly a question the way she said it, but Rae took it to be. She forced herself to breathe normally.
“In a manner of speaking,” she answered.
“And just what manner is that?” Miss Joan asked.
It seemed to Sully that the woman seemed amazingly calm as she went about accumulating information. His gut told him that she wasn’t going to be surprised with what Rae was about to tell her. The woman was unique, he thought, and he was beginning to see why his uncle liked her so much.
“One of the yearlings took off yesterday, spooked by the storm. Sully went looking for it and his horse stumbled over this mound of dirt,” Rae said, trying to choose her words carefully.
Miss Joan cut to the chase. “How long was Warren buried?”
Stunned, Rae stared at the older woman, momentarily speechless. “You know?”
“That’s where this story’s headed, isn’t it?” Miss Joan asked the question like someone who already knew the answer. “Given that I don’t have a fondness for long, convoluted tales, that has to be the reason in your mind why you’re telling me all this.”
Unable to remain silent any longer, Sully spoke up. “We don’t know how long he was there.”
Miss Joan nodded. “I figured as much. Rae would have led with that if you did,” she said confidently. Her eyes swept over them slowly. “Do either of you have any idea who might have done this to him?”
“No,” Sully said, answering for both of them. “Warren seemed like a nice guy who kept mostly to himself.”
Rae seconded that, adding, “Everyone seemed to like him except for Rawlings.” She frowned slightly. “But Rawlings really doesn’t seem to like anyone.”
Taking this in, Miss Joan nodded. “Much as it pains me to admit it, I might have made the wrong call about that man,” she said, clearly referring to Rawlings. “I’ll give him to the end of the month to get his act together.” She slanted a look toward Rae, pinning her in place. “I wan
t weekly progress reports on him from you.”
“Yes, Miss Joan,” Rae said dutifully.
“As for Warren,” Miss Joan continued, “did he confide in either one of you about where he came from or if he had any family anywhere?” she asked.
Both Sully and Rae shook their heads.
“I just asked the sheriff about getting a sample of Warren’s DNA,” Sully told the woman. “I thought I’d ask someone back at the police department in Aurora if they could track down any kind of personal information on Warren.”
Rae noticed that Miss Joan didn’t look surprised that Sully was doing this. Instead, she just took the information in stride. It was obvious that she approved of his efforts.
“Good. And,” she added with finality, “if you can’t find anyone, once Warren’s body is released, I’ll take care of his funeral costs.”
She said it with the same kind of emphasis she would have given to volunteering to pick up a vacationing person’s mail. No fanfare, no undo attention, just a simple fact of life.
Not for the first time Rae couldn’t help thinking how really selfless the woman was beneath all of her sharp words and her bluster.
Miss Joan looked the two people in front of her carefully. “Have you two eaten yet today?” she asked them suddenly.
“No,” Rae answered for both of them. “But we need to get back. I left Rawlings in charge, and heaven only knows what I’m going to find there by the time we get back.”
Miss Joan wasn’t impressed by Rae’s fears. “The ranch’ll keep for another hour,” the woman told her. “You’re having breakfast.”
It wasn’t a question—it was an order, one that was not to be questioned.
“And while you’re waiting on that DNA information to come back,” Miss Joan told them after placing an order for two breakfast specials with everything with the short-order cook in the back, “I’ll ask around if anyone knows anything about Warren that might not have come to light before.”
“You know,” Sully told the woman, “if you ever decide to leave the diner and Forever, you should think about coming out to Aurora. You would be a real asset to the police department.”
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