“Uh-huh. Nobody believes you, dear. Not even Nik.” As she said the name, Rose became aware of something. She looked around the immediate area. The younger woman was nowhere to be seen. “Where is Nik?” she asked.
“She’s...not here,” Finn said, realizing that he couldn’t just point to her the way he had intended to. He scanned the area. There was no sign of Nik and he hadn’t seen her leave. “Where did she go?” he muttered under his breath.
* * *
While the others were debating on the course of action to take regarding the APB, Nik had impulsively taken the opportunity to double back and return to the guest room. She wanted to take another stab at talking to the chief’s father.
She knocked lightly on the door, then opened it and peered inside. The chief’s father was exactly where they had left him, lying on the bedspread.
“Mr. Cavanaugh?” she asked. When the man didn’t stir, giving no indication that he had heard her, she repeated his name, then asked, “May I come in?”
Seamus’s eyelids fluttered ever so slightly, and then he slanted a look in her direction. The old man sighed. “What do you want?”
Her father had always told her she was far too brazen for her own good, but she was certain that he had meant it as a compliment. In any event, she used his assessment to bolster her courage.
Slipping into the bedroom, she closed the door behind her.
And then she started talking. Because she could always relate to people, words had always been her best tool.
“When I was growing up, my great-uncle Walter was this great big, burly guy. You know, one of those guys who just seem like they are larger than life. He was a construction foreman. One day when I was about thirteen, Uncle Walter was in this really bad construction accident. I don’t know exactly what happened, but he fell two whole stories.” As she talked, she drew a little closer to the chief’s father. “We honestly didn’t think he was going to make it,” she continued solemnly as she relived the incident. “But somehow, he did. He hung on. It took his body a long time to heal.”
“What does this have to do with me?” Seamus asked.
“Well, I’m getting to that,” she told the man. “It took Uncle Walter’s mind even longer to heal than his body. You see, because he had had the accident and fell—something he felt with all his experience he should have been able to see coming and prevented—he felt he had become a useless old man. A useless old man with absolutely nothing to offer.”
Seamus nodded to himself. “Yeah,” he said bitterly, “it happens.”
She came around to the foot of the bed to face Seamus. “But it doesn’t have to. And it wasn’t true,” she insisted. “Uncle Walter wasn’t useless, he still had a great deal to offer,” she told the man lying on the bed. “But he had to stop feeling sorry for himself in order to realize that.”
“A lot to offer,” Seamus scoffed. “Like what?”
“Like experience and knowledge,” she told him without any hesitation. “Uncle Walter had a great deal of experience stored up in his head—experience he could pass on to younger men.” She drew even closer to Seamus, trying to get her point across. “It took my great-uncle a long while to realize one very crucial thing.”
“What’s that?” Seamus asked.
“That we all do have to get older, but none of us, not a one,” she said with emphasis, “has to get old. Because ‘old’ is a state of mind that happens when you give up.” Finished, Nik looked at Seamus hopefully, searching for a sign that she had gotten through to the man.
But he just closed his eyes. “I’m tired, little girl. Let me rest.”
Her heart sank.
“Yes, sir.” There was no point in arguing with the man right now.
Even so, she made a mental note to come back and see Seamus Cavanaugh again. It wasn’t in her nature to give up. She refused to allow him to be a casualty of the person or persons who’d mugged him.
But for now, she knew she needed to go.
Nik slipped out of the guest room. After closing the door behind her, she walked smack into Finn.
“What were you doing in there?” he demanded.
She struggled to stifle her surprise. “I was just talking to the chief’s father.”
His eyes darkened as he looked toward the door she had just closed.
“Yeah, I figured that part out,” he told her. He had to struggle to keep his temper from flaring. “Did you think that if you batted your eyelashes at him, he’d wind up telling you something he wasn’t sharing with the rest of us?” Finn demanded hotly. “Damn it, that’s an old man who’s lucky to be alive, Ko-val-ski. Maybe you could try to keep that in mind the next time—when and if you get to talk to him again,” he snapped.
“I wasn’t ‘batting my eyelashes’ at him,” she retorted. “I was just telling him about my great-uncle Walter.”
“About who?” he asked, completely bewildered.
“Uncle Walter, my dad’s uncle,” she told him. “He was this big bull of a construction worker who fell two stories—”
“Let me guess,” Finn interrupted sarcastically. “He flew, right?”
Nik stopped abruptly. “Never mind, the story’s wasted on you,” she told him, turning her back on Finn and going toward Andrew and his wife. She followed the sound of voices. They were coming from the rear of the house.
She kept going until she found Andrew and his wife in the kitchen.
Andrew half rose in his chair when she entered. He saw the angry look on her face. “Everything all right?”
She assumed he was asking about things between Finn and her. She had never been the type to turn to other people to defend her or fight her battles.
Nik smiled politely at the former chief and told him in the cheeriest voice she could summon, “They just couldn’t be better.”
Andrew knew when he was being lied to. He also knew when to leave things alone. So he asked, “Would you like something to eat before you go?”
“My husband has a great reputation for making sure everyone who crosses his path is filled to the gills,” Rose told them, smiling lovingly at Andrew.
“Maybe next time,” Nik said, declining the offer.
“What she’s trying to say is that we’ve got to get back to the case,” Finn explained.
“You’ll keep me posted?” Andrew asked.
“Us,” Rose corrected. “Keep us posted. My husband sometimes forgets that we’re a unit and that I love that old man just as much as he does,” she said, nodding toward where the guest room was.
Nik nodded. “If you love him,” she advised the pair just as she began to leave, “don’t call him old.”
“Sorry.” Finn threw the apology over his shoulder as he hurried out. Nik was sticking her nose into things that weren’t any of her business, and Finn felt obliged to apologize for her.
Chapter 9
“So now you’re giving my uncle advice on how to treat his father?” Finn asked as soon as he caught up to her outside of the chief’s house.
Nik turned to face him. He obviously appeared to be annoyed at what he apparently viewed as her newest transgression. She had begun to think that they were past his finding fault with her.
Looked like she was wrong.
“I was just trying to be helpful,” she told Finn.
He scowled at her, dismissing her excuse. “Well, don’t be,” he told her.
She was doing her best to be understanding, but the man was really wearing her patience thin. “What is your problem, Cavanaugh?” Nik asked.
“Maybe my problem is I don’t like people horning their way in where they don’t belong.” The words came out before he had a chance to think them through. If he had, he might have had second thoughts about saying them. Then again, he might not have.
She looked at him sharply. He had to be kidding. Nik
refused to back off. “That would make more sense if you hadn’t asked me to join you. I didn’t call you at five this morning, you called me.” She raised herself up on her toes. “Remember?”
Damn it, she was right, he thought belligerently. Annoyed with himself for the oversight, Finn backed off. “My mistake.”
He did an about-face so fast, her head was spinning. Was this a trap? she wondered. “Is that what you really think?”
Whatever he was going to say was going to have to wait because at that moment, his cell phone rang. It was the beginning notes from “The Pink Panther Theme.” Surprised, Nik stared at the phone as Finn pulled it out and answered the call.
“You’re kidding,” he said after listening to the caller for a minute. “Valri, you’re a genius. I owe you one... Okay, I owe you more than one,” he amended. “Be right there.” He terminated the call only to see Nik looking at him. “What?”
“‘The Pink Panther Theme’?” Nik asked incredulously. “Really?”
He shrugged. “It just seemed appropriate when I input her number.”
Since he wasn’t volunteering anything, she decided to ask. “So what did she find?”
“The name of the woman in the Dumpster,” Finn said as he got into his car.
Nik immediately ran to her own vehicle across the street and got in. She wasn’t about to be left behind. She gunned her engine and took off after Finn, who had already pulled away from the curb and had hit the road. She had a pretty good idea where he was going, but just in case she was wrong, she wasn’t about to lose sight of him if she could possibly help it.
Nik managed to stick to him like glue.
When he pulled up in the rear parking lot behind the police station, Nik was right there with him. She found a space one row over and parked there.
“Where did you learn how to drive?” Finn asked, slamming his car door shut. He’d watched her the entire time in his rearview mirror. “By playing a video game?”
Instead of answering his question, Nik told him, “I didn’t go any faster than you did.”
He didn’t know what to say to that because she was right. It was just that he had deliberately squeezed through yellow lights, thinking he could temporarily lose her or at least impede her. But she had managed to fly through all the lights, making it through by a hairbreadth before the lights turned red.
He decided that it was safer just to drop the subject altogether. “Well, you’re here now so you might as well come along,” he told her.
Nik smiled broadly up at him and said, “Thank you.”
Finn didn’t detect a note of sarcasm, but he would have bet his soul that it was there, anyway, woven in just underneath.
“So who is the dead woman?” Nik asked as he hurried up the steps into the police station.
“Valri wants to show me when I get there,” he told her, walking toward the elevator. The grin on his lips wasn’t for Nik, it was there because of something that Valri had said to him. “She said if she had to work to find a match, I can get my butt down to her office so she could show me.” He shook his head. “She’s definitely getting feistier. When she first started working in the computer lab,” he told Nik, “Valri was the meekest, mildest person you ever wanted to meet.”
She could definitely see that happening. “I guess she realized how important she was to getting the crimes solved.”
Finn thought over her response. “I suppose it could be something like that.”
Nik decided to get on slightly more even footing with the detective. She knew that she was only here because he was tolerating her presence. She didn’t want to sacrifice that.
“By the way, thanks for having a change of heart,” she told him. When he raised one quizzical eyebrow, she elaborated. “You’re letting me come with you. When we left the chief’s house you sounded as if you wanted to have me banned not just from the police investigation, but just possibly from the planet as well,” she added. Her smile widened.
“Maybe I did let my temper get away from me,” Finn admitted, although his tone stopped short of being apologetic.
“Everyone has a right to be protective when it comes to their family,” she said. She actually believed what she was saying, so she wasn’t fabricating an excuse for his benefit.
They had reached the computer lab. Finn held the door for her, then followed in right behind Nik as she entered the large room.
As always, Valri was at her computer. Preoccupied, she didn’t even seem to hear them approaching until they were practically on top of her. It wasn’t until Finn said her name that she realized she wasn’t alone.
Swallowing a gasp, Valri’s hand flew up to her chest, presumably where her heart was. Taking a large breath to steady her nerves, she looked at Finn accusingly.
“Don’t you know any better than to sneak up on someone like that?” she demanded. “You could have given me a heart attack.”
“I didn’t ‘sneak,’” Finn replied. “I came in the way I always do. I could break something next time if you’d prefer to be alerted that I was here.”
“Heaven willing, there won’t be a next time,” Valri answered. “I’ve got enough people leaving their puzzles on my desk to keep busy until Christmas. Maybe even next Christmas,” she added. Valri raised her eyes to look at the woman beside her cousin. “Someone new on the force?” she asked, nodding at Nik.
Nik smiled broadly at the lab tech. “I’m Nik Kowalski,” she told her, extending her hand to Valri. “Just think of me as an adjunct investigator.”
Valri looked at her, slightly bemused. “O-o-okay,” she replied, stretching the word out. She looked toward Finn for a further explanation.
He, on the other hand, wanted the answer he had come for. “The dead woman’s identity?” he prompted Valri, waiting.
“Right.” She nodded her head, returning to the information on her monitor. “That would be Julie Everett. According to what I found, she was working at Hanover and Wallace.” Valri scrolled down to the next screen. “It says here that she was a temp at the firm. She was there a little more than three weeks.”
“Wait,” Nik suddenly blurted as the name of the firm rang a bell. “I think that’s the name of the place that Marilyn works.”
“Marilyn,” Valri repeated. “Are you talking about the woman who left a rearview-mirror partial print?”
Nik smiled, surprised that the other woman had made the connection. Valri’s mind had to be filled to overflowing with the various pieces of information she gleaned thanks to the numerous searches she wound up conducting day in, day out.
“You really are good,” Nik said, complimenting the other woman with enthusiasm.
Valri in turn beamed at her, grateful for the recognition. She laughed. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell all these people who keep trooping through my office, making requests. They take the information I come up with and are off and running without so much as even a single word of acknowledgment for all my efforts.”
Nik saw Finn opening his mouth, about to protest the generalization. She jumped in instead.
“Oh, I’m sure they appreciate you. Some people just have trouble being vocal—unless they’re yelling,” Nik qualified.
“Are you through yet?” Finn asked, looking at her. The edge she’d previously heard in his voice had made a return appearance.
Rather than retreat, or become defensive, Nik merely exchanged looks with Valri. “See what I mean?”
Finn ignored Nik and just focused on Valri. She was the one with the answers, in his opinion. “You have anything else of significance to tell me?”
“I’ve got an address for the dead woman,” she said, writing it down on a piece of paper. She held it out to Finn. “And some advice.”
“Advice?” Finn asked, slightly confused. He had no idea what this could be about.
“Yes. K
eep this one,” she told him with a wink, nodding at Nik.
“I think you’ve got the wrong idea,” he said. One that he intended to clear up quickly. “Kowalski is not part of the department. She’s an insurance investigator—” he slanted a glance at the woman who had followed him into the computer lab “—or so she claims.”
“Trust me, nobody claims to be an insurance investigator if they’re not,” Nik assured both of them. “It’s not the attention getter in a crowded room that you might think.” She looked at her watch. “It’s still early enough to go to Hanover and Wallace to find out who the last person was who saw Julie alive. Although...”
“Although what?” Finn asked, curious where Nik was going with this.
“If this Julie Everett was just a temp, nobody might have even noticed her.”
He hated to admit it, but she was right. It was a definite possibility. They’d find out soon enough.
“Thanks, Val,” he said as they turned to leave the computer lab.
Valri glanced up for a split second and murmured, “Right,” then went back to her current project. There never seemed to be any downtime in her line of work, she thought.
“What’s Valri’s favorite drink?” Nik asked Finn as they went to the elevator.
The detective looked at the diminutive woman beside him, thinking that was rather an odd question to ask, especially out of the blue like that.
“I really don’t know,” Finn admitted. And then he allowed his curiosity to take over. “Why?”
“You might want to find out and bring her a bottle of it the next time you ‘drop’ by with another riddle for her to solve. That would definitely show her that you appreciate her efforts on your behalf. Just a thought,” she added with a shrug.
As he got out of the elevator when it stopped on the ground floor, all Finn could do was study his temporary companion for a long moment.
Nik endured the scrutiny, convinced that he was going to tell her what was on his mind eventually.
Cavanaugh Stakeout Page 9