Cavanaugh Hero (6 page)

Was she pretending to defer to him in order to stay on his good side? After all, technically, she didn’t really belong on this investigation to begin with.

Getting into the car, he waited until she was in on her side and buckled up.

“You know you can’t work this case with me indefinitely, right?”

Well, that didn’t take long. Charley felt as if he’d just prodded her with a hot poker.

“Why not?”

Did he really have to explain it to her? Or was she doing this to make him relent and let her continue working with him?

“Because you’re from a different department and there are rules about this sort of thing,” Declan pointed out. To be honest, he just assumed there were rules to follow since obviously detectives couldn’t just work whatever case they wanted to. A lot of cases would go begging if that was true.

“Who can overrule the rules?” Charley asked.

Since Declan wasn’t sure if his lieutenant was coming in tomorrow, that more or less left him in charge of himself, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

In settling the matter of jurisdiction over a case, aside from the head of his department, only one name came to mind.

“The chief of Ds,” he told her.

“Good enough for me,” Charley murmured, already working on her strategy to get the man to side with her.

To her way of thinking, it was the only smart, economical way to proceed. For one thing, officially or unofficially, she intended to work this case until it was solved. For another, she was going to use her downtime to see if there was an angle they missed going over. She’d think that the chief of detectives would have wanted his detectives working together, not haphazardly, when it came to working on the murder of one of their own.

She was prepared to tell him that once she was granted an audience with the man.

Chapter 5

T
he connection between his father and the chief of detectives had come out more than a year ago, but there were times, Declan admitted to himself, when he still found it odd and a touch surprising that he and his siblings were actually directly related to Brian Cavanaugh, the chief of detectives. The man who was in charge of them all.

Nodding at his secretary, a formidable woman who had seen her share of street action early in her career, Declan knocked on his uncle’s door.

A deep voice from within the office said a single word, “Come.”

Rather than walk in once he’d opened the door to his uncle’s office, Declan first stuck his head in and asked, “Got a minute?”

Brian Cavanaugh smiled, a hint of amusement highlighting his deep, deep blue eyes. He checked his watch.

“Three, actually. Come in, Declan,” he invited. Seeing that his nephew wasn’t alone, Brian half rose in his seat, inclining his head by way of a greeting.

Belatedly, Declan realized his omission and made the introduction—or at least began to. “Sorry,” he apologized for the oversight. “This is—”

Brian’s smile widened just a touch as he extended his hand to the young woman. “Detective Charley Randolph, yes, I know.”

The greeting took Charley slightly aback as she shook the hand that was held out to her. Brian Cavanaugh’s hand seemed to all but swallow hers up. Even so, the contact managed to create a feeling of well-being rather than a feeling of being lost within something that was larger than she.

“You do?” she asked. To her best recollection, she had never had any interaction with the chief of detectives before, other than seeing him at a distance.

Brian nodded as he gestured toward the two chairs on the other side of his desk. His meaning was clear. Declan and Charley took their seats.

“I make it a habit of being familiar with all the detectives who work under me,” Brian replied. “It makes for a more efficient police department.”

Declan slid to the edge of his seat. He had no intention of overstaying. “Then you know that Lieutenant Jacobs had a family emergency that’s taken him away from the department.”

Brian nodded grimly. “Scares a man to death to hear that kind of news about his wife.” He received a report regarding the accident within minutes of its occurrence. To his way of thinking, they were all part of one very large family unit. “But she came out of surgery well and the operating surgeon believes that she’ll make a full recovery quickly.”

How did he do it? Charley wondered. How did the man stay on top of things like that and still keep tabs on what went on within the different departments and the cases they were working on? Talk about multitasking. The man probably only got about three to five hours of sleep a night—if that.

At the same time, all Charley could think of was if the chief of detectives was this up on everything, he might also very well be up on her connection to the deceased police officer. Unlike the Cavanaughs, who seemed to be in every department, neither she nor Matt talked about their relationship and they did have different surnames, so the connection wasn’t immediately made. But someone as sharp as the chief of Ds could have unearthed that sort of information with very little effort.

Charley felt herself fidgeting inside, waiting for a shoe to drop—or an ax to fall.

“Does this have anything to do with Jacobs?” Brian prodded when neither person in his office said anything further.

Even as he asked, he glanced at his watch again. He had a budget meeting to get to—it was the least favorite part about this job of his. He had a battle ahead of him, not one he relished.

“In a manner of speaking,” Declan responded. “I’m short one partner—” He could see he was saying nothing that the chief didn’t already know. Still, the request had to be formally made to someone in authority. “—and Detective Randolph volunteered to help with the investigation. Ordinarily,” he quickly explained, “we’d put this to the lieutenant but inasmuch as he’s not here and might not be tomorrow, I thought we should ask someone with the authority to grant permission—or veto it,” Declan added after a beat, feeling that he should in all fairness.

Brian turned to look at the young woman in his office, his expression thoughtful as he studied her. “Why do you want to work this case?” he asked her quietly.

Her gut told her that the man could see through lies. Charley realized that she was about to verbally walk a tightrope. She did it very carefully.

“I was the first one on the scene,” she told him, “I found the victim’s body and I thought—well, that I might be useful in the long run, being able to tie in what I saw to perhaps trap the killer.”

Brian appeared interested in her reasoning. “You have total recall?” he asked.

She was pretty good about remembering details, but she wasn’t perfect, which was what she thought he was asking about. “Total enough,” she replied.

Brian laughed, clearly tickled by her response. “Honest,” he pronounced. “Good. All right, since you’re shorthanded and for once, the narcotics division seems to be fairly caught up, Detective Randolph is free to work the case with you.” And then the smile faded from his lips as he leveled his gaze at his nephew and Declan’s new, temporary partner. “I want whoever’s responsible caught and faster than our usual time. No one kills one of our own and gets away with it.”

“Understood, sir,” Charley readily agreed. “We’ll get whoever did this.” She made the promise with zeal, not just to the chief of detectives, but to her brother, as well.

“And now,” Brian informed them, rising from his chair, “if there’s nothing else, I’m afraid I have to cut this short.”

“No, nothing else, sir,” Declan told his uncle, already backing out of the room.

“Thank you, sir,” Charley felt compelled to say before she followed Declan out.

Brian looked after them for a moment. He knew he was bending the rules, but he kept that to himself. Because he knew how he would have felt in Randolph’s place. Rules were there for a reason—but blood had a way of winning out and nobody knew that better than a Cavanaugh.

* * *

“I had no idea that he was such a nice man,” Charley commented as they got into the elevator at the end of the hall.

Declan pressed the button for the ground floor. “Yeah, he’s one of the few who remember what it was like, coming up through the ranks. A lot of other guys suddenly get amnesia when they get to the top, see it as an opportunity to lord it over the rank and file beneath them, but the chief of Ds is a real regular guy.”

He wasn’t aware that there was a touch of pride in his voice as he said what he did—but Charley was. She heard it loud and clear. She wondered if he cashed in on the connection every now and then. It would have placed a lot of people in his debt, she thought. He didn’t strike her as the type to do that, but then she really didn’t know him all that well. “Well, not
too
regular,” she pointed out. “He is, after all, the man in charge.”

And, as such, she’d noted, the man did have quite an aura, casting a shadow that was even larger than his tall stature would have ordinarily warranted.

Declan laughed under his breath. “He is that,” he agreed.

Stopping short just after they left the building via the rear exit, he looked at his temporary partner as a thought hit him.

“Hey, you hungry?” he asked her, realizing that they had worked through lunch, a fact that his stomach was now rather impatiently reminding him of.

Charley shook her head. “Not really.”

Seeing Matt like that, his life ebbed away before she had managed to find him and to possibly try to save him, had completely wiped out any trace of an appetite she might have had.

Most likely her appetite was wiped out for days to come, Charley judged. It was going to take a lot to erase that image from her mind.

Declan had never been one to quietly accept things he felt were wrong, even minor things. “You want to work with me, you’ve got to eat,” he informed her simply, taking a serious tone. “I’m not going to have you suddenly keeling over on me because you’re suffering from malnutrition.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but didn’t get the chance.

“We can get something to go, eat on the way,” he suggested. “You won’t even notice you’re eating.” He added, “I’m buying,” thinking that might be the added incentive she needed.

Arguing with him wasn’t going to get her anywhere, Charley decided. And besides, she got what she wanted—she was on the case, allowed to work it in the open rather than covertly. She didn’t want to seem as if she was giving him a hard time over something that obviously seemed to matter to him.

“Okay,” she relented.

“Great, what’s your pleasure?” he asked as he began to walk toward his car again.

The wording threw her. If she didn’t know any better, she would have said he was talking about... “What?” she said rather than wonder and come to the wrong conclusion.

“Food,” he said pointedly. “What kind do you like? Chinese, Thai, Italian, Mexican...?” He let his voice trail off as he looked at her, waiting.

She wasn’t hungry. She certainly wasn’t going to be fussy. Charley shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever you want is fine.”

He had his doubts about that. In his experience,
everyone
had some sort of a preference when it came to food. But he wasn’t going to attempt to coax it out of her. He had a feeling there would be bigger things to butt heads over before this case was solved.

He opened the door on the driver’s side and got in, waiting for her to follow suit.

“Okay,” he said, once she’d settled in, “I’ll do the ordering.”

Charley nodded, and then, sitting back, she asked, “Where are we going?”

Declan started up the car. “You mean what restaurant?”

“No, you said we’d get something to go, eat on the way,” she reminded him. “On the way to what? What’s our next stop?”

She really was eager to work this case, wasn’t she? He supposed the chief of Ds encouragement to get the shooter responsible for Holt’s murder sooner than later didn’t exactly contribute to taking a laid-back approach to this investigation, either.

He took a sharp right at the end of the block. “I thought we’d canvas the area around Holt’s house, talk to some of the people in the neighborhood. See if maybe anyone heard any loud voices, arguing or saw anything unusual around the time that Holt was murdered.” According to his father’s findings so far, the victim’s liver temperature had placed the time of death somewhere late last night, not this morning as they had first thought.

Charley nodded numbly, wondering if she was ever going to get used to that, to knowing that her brother had been killed while she was most likely watching TV? To knowing that she wouldn’t hear his voice anymore, wouldn’t see that lopsided grin of his anymore.

Ever.

How was she going to be able to face each day, to get
through
each day, knowing that she was all alone in the world now?

“Sounds good,” she heard herself saying, only because she knew Declan was waiting for some sort of a response from her. And the longer she took to answer him, the greater the odds were of his noticing just how very upset she was.

“Okay,” he said, nodding, “but first things first.”

“First” turned out to be stopping by a Mexican restaurant that was barely more than a hole in the wall, a storefront establishment whose owner spent all his time cooking and preparing and none of his time involved in the upkeep of his property or worrying about its image. The man who went by one name—Ortega—relied strictly on word of mouth from his customers. And the word was
good
.

A deceptively sleepy-eyed old woman, who might have been either his mother or his grandmother, served as the cashier, seemingly coming alive the moment their take-out order was ready. She muttered a price to Declan which might or might not have been in English.

All Charley knew was that the woman’s voice was so low, the words so garbled, she could have been speaking in any language. But Declan apparently understood her.

Either that or he knew the prices by heart and had the right amount to give her from the beginning.

As they left the tiny establishment, Declan handed one of the two bags he’d been given to her. As she took it, Charley noticed that even the paper felt warm.

She couldn’t place the aroma. “What is it?” she asked.

Declan got back into the car and began to drive. He spared Charley a glance. “Try it. You’ll like it,” he told her. He was being deliberately mysterious and he knew it.

Charley laughed shortly. “That argument didn’t work for Tommy Mason in the tenth grade and it’s not going to work now.”

The sudden image of a teenaged Charley decking some overly hormonal suitor and standing over him, threatening to do more harm if he tried anything further, had him laughing.

“Tommy Mason, huh?” Declan asked when he finally stopped laughing. “So, did he turn out to be your first love?”

“I said the line didn’t work for him,” she said pointedly. Opening the bag, she looked inside. “You’re not paying attention, Detective.”

Declan pulled over into a large parking lot on the next block. The lot was buffered by a discount furniture store on one end and a chain pharmacy on the other.

When he turned off the engine, she looked at him with confusion. “Why are we stopping?”

“Because the first few bites require using both hands,” he explained.

He took out something steaming and wrapped in wax paper. Whatever it was, it was beginning to smell pretty good, even to someone with no appetite. Seeing Declan taking a healthy-sized bite and neither tearing up nor having any sort of a coughing fit because the food was overly spicy, Charley decided to chance taking a bite out of her own portion.

Emulating Declan, she peeled back the wax paper, but rather than take a large bite, she took a small one.

The moment she did, she knew she’d made a mistake. Her eyes immediately began to tear up and her mouth felt as if she’d just bitten into a handful of red hot peppers on steroids.