Cavanaugh′s Surrender
Cavanaugh's Surrender
Marie Ferrarella
Crime scene investigator Destiny Richardson receives the shock of her life when she finds her sister dead in a bathtub. Detective Logan Cavanaugh thinks it’s an openandshut suicide case. But Destiny’s convinced her sister was murdered. And she’s not about to have some arrogant cop tell her otherwise – even if he is the sexiest man she’s ever met.
“I’ll be fine.”
Destiny could see that Logan was waiting for her to convince him. “I don’t have any other choice. Paula’s killer is out there somewhere and I intend to catch him. I can’t do that if I fall apart.”
“No, you can’t,” he agreed. “But if you need someone to talk to—or not talk to,” he added with a smile that was beginning to weave its way under her skin even though she was doing her best to ignore it, “I’m available.”
“You’re a good guy, Logan Cavanaugh,” she told him quietly just before she impulsively brushed her lips against his cheek.
Logan felt something within his gut tighten so quickly and so hard, for a second it was difficult for him to draw in a breath.
Every fiber of his being wanted to pull her into his arms and to kiss her back. The right way. And he had a strong feeling that he wouldn’t get any resistance from her.
But that would be taking unfair advantage of her vulnerable state. Their time would come—he was fairly certain of that. But not tonight.
Dear Reader,
You are holding in your hands the latest book in the CAVANAUGH JUSTICE series. Logan Cavanaugh is another one of Sean Cavanaugh’s (aka Cavelli) sons. A free spirit who takes just about everything in stride, Logan finds his laid-back attitude challenged when he is temporarily paired with Destiny Richardson, his father’s chief assistant in the crime lab. She also just happens to be the sister of what appears to be a serial killer’s latest victim.
The latter designation has yet to come to light since the murders are all staged to appear like suicides—except that Destiny is positive that her younger sister would have never committed suicide, and she is prepared to go to hell and back to prove it. Logan, the primary investigative detective on what started out as an open-and-shut case, has no choice but to follow Destiny in order to keep her safe. But who is going to keep each of them safe from one another?
I hope you enjoy this latest installment. As ever, I thank you for reading and from the bottom of my heart I wish you someone to love who loves you back.
Marie Ferrarella
About the Author
MARIE FERRARELLA, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA
Award-winning author, has written more than two hundred books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com
Cavanaugh’s Surrender
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To
Sumay Li,
who is a joy to know
Prologue
“Paula, I’m letting myself in with the key you gave me,” Destiny Richardson called loudly as she stepped over the threshold into her younger sister’s apartment. “It’s Destiny, the sister you’ve been ignoring lately.”
Again, she added silently.
She and Paula, her junior by a little more than three years, had finally gotten to a point in their relationship where they were getting along again. Where everything out of her mouth didn’t get Paula’s back up and mark the beginning of yet another prolonged argument that ended up with Paula not speaking to her for weeks at a time. That, mercifully, was now all behind them.
And then, for the past six weeks, it was as if Paula had stepped into a parallel universe. She was available only for a glimmer of time and then she’d disappear again. In between she’d return phone calls late and break lunch dates at the last minute.
Destiny had ridden it out for a couple of weeks, then finally asked her sister if this change in behavior was because of a man. Reluctantly—although she was glowing at the time—Paula had admitted that there was a new man in her life. But she wouldn’t say any more, not even what his name was.
“Not yet, Des,” she’d confided. “I don’t want to jinx anything.” Her eyes had all but danced as she’d added with a big grin, “He’s just too good to be true.”
Paula believed in the old adage that if something was too good to be true, it usually was too good to be true. But she’d bitten her tongue and said nothing, not wanting to jeopardize this new, improved relationship between her sister and her. It felt good to have Paula as a friend again, so she’d done her best to tread lightly and make no demands even though her gut had warned her that there was a problem.
She hated it when she was right in cases like this.
This morning, she’d gotten a text from Paula. It said simply: He left me. Thinking a few choice names directed at the man she’d never met, she’d called her sister almost immediately—and got no answer.
During the course of the day, she’d tried over and over again to reach Paula, using every single phone number associated with her sister. Home, work, cell, all with the same results. Paula wasn’t picking up.
So, right after work, convinced that Paula was taking this breakup incredibly hard, she’d come to her sister’s apartment and used the key Paula had given her for the very first time. She just wanted to make sure that her sister was all right.
She looked around now. Every single light in the upscale, two-bedroom apartment was on.
“You better be home, kid,” she called out, still addressing her words to the air. “Otherwise you’re making the electric company very rich for no reason.”
This was typical Paula, though. Her sister had a habit of turning on all the lights whenever she was depressed. She claimed it helped chase away the hopelessness she felt.
“Paula, where are you?” Destiny called, growing just a bit worried. Her mysterious “perfect” lover must have done a real number on her if Paula was too depressed even to answer her. “He’s not worth it, you know,” she said, making her way through the apartment. “Not worth being this upset over.” She walked into Paula’s bedroom. “If he could leave you just like that, you’re better off without him. He doesn’t sound very stable to me. He—”
For just half a second, Destiny froze in the doorway between the master bedroom and the lavishly remodeled bathroom.
Her heart stopped.
She’d found Paula.
“Oh, my God, Paula! Paula, what have you done?” she cried, racing into the bathroom.
The water in the bathtub had overflowed and spread out onto the tiled floor. The red tinge discolored everything. Her sister was immersed in the tub, and the water was red with her blood.
Paula’s wrists were slashed.
Destiny Richardson had spent the past six years diligently working in the crime lab, at first part-time while she went to college and earned her degree in criminology, then, after graduation, full-time. From the very beginning, she had constantly gone the extra mile, putting in longer hours whenever she had a case.
In short order, she impressed Sean Cavanaugh, the man in charge of the crime lab’s day shift. He promoted her to his chief assistant.
The first cardinal rule for a crime scene investigator was not to move or touch anything. But she wasn’t a crime scene investigator tonight. She was Paula’s sister, and she desperately wanted to save her.
But even as she grabbed her sister, ready to pull Paula out of the discolored water and perform CPR to try to save her, she knew it was too late. Paula’s skin was abnormally cold and clammy.
And there was no heartbeat. Not even a faint flutter.
Paula was dead and had been for a number of hours.
“Oh, Paula, Paula, what did you do?” Destiny grieved, sinking down to the floor beside the bathtub. Water soaked into her clothing. She didn’t care.
Because there was no one there and she had never felt so very alone in her life, Destiny allowed herself to break down for a moment.
Just for a moment.
She buried her face against the knees she’d brought up to her chest and sobbed as if her heart was breaking. Because it was.
Chapter 1
If police work wasn’t for all intents and purposes the family business—doubly so now that he, along with the rest of his siblings and his father, had irrefutable proof that they comprised what amounted to the long-lost branch of the Cavanaugh family—Detective Logan Cavanaugh, known until recently as Logan Cavelli, would have been sorely tempted to give serious thought to another career choice.
Granted, Logan would have been the first to admit that he loved being a cop. Loved the idea that in some small way, he was fighting the good fight, righting wrongs and, along with his brothers and sisters, giving Aurora’s everyday citizens that thin blue line that they knew was out there to protect them.
But there were times when the hours that went along with being a detective just about killed him. In the absolute sense, they were the same kind of hours that a doctor was expected to keep.
Doctors and police detectives were always expected to be on call—except that a doctor made a hell of a lot more money than he made, Logan thought darkly as he now drove—alone—to the address his lieutenant had handed to him when the man had torpedoed the very eventful evening he had planned for himself and his utterly luscious date.
One minute.
One lousy little minute. Sixty seconds and counting down, that’s all he’d had left to his shift and then this evening with all its sensual promise would have become a reality.
He had already powered down his computer because Stacy, displaying a rare flair for punctuality, had just waltzed through the squad room door and had instantly made him the envy of every other breathing male in the vicinity.
Stacy, with the hips from heaven and the sinful mouth, who simply by walking across the floor could cause a eunuch to have lustful thoughts, was his date tonight. He was taking her out for dinner, dancing and a hot night of even hotter sex. The blond would-be model was his kind of woman. Gorgeous, passionate and totally uninterested in a permanent relationship.
Tonight had all the makings of an absolutely perfect evening.
But then his lieutenant had summoned him away from the doorway just as he was a hair’s breadth away from being free and clear and making it into the hall.
No, that wasn’t actually true, he thought in resignation, his hands tightening on the steering wheel until his knuckles were all but straining against his skin. Even if he had been in the middle of that passionate evening, enjoying all of Stacy’s fabulously assembled attributes, his cell would have rung, calling him away from the ecstasy that shimmered before him, beckoning him onward because duty called.
When you’re the next one up, you’re the next one up. It was a simple, albeit hard, fact of life that went along with carrying a shield and a weapon.
So, instead of hot filet mignon, his dinner tonight would probably be the last couple of slices of the cold, leftover pizza in his refrigerator. And instead of a hot woman in his bed, he’d be sleeping alone tonight.
That was, if he got any sleep at all. A homicide detective with four years of experience under his belt, he’d learned that some cases unfurled slowly, inch by painful inch, while others ran you right into the ground from the moment you stepped into the crime scene arena and silently pledged to solve whatever needed solving.
Daylight had receded and the evening was making itself comfortable. He drove, looking for the right building, still wishing that he’d been engaged in a job that defined specific hours where the end of the day was the end of the day.
Wishing wouldn’t make it so. Besides, Stacy, pouting prettily, had perked up at the promise of a rain check.
He laughed softly to himself, wondering if the woman thought that rain was actually involved in a rain check. He wouldn’t put it past her. Luckily, it wasn’t her brain that attracted him. After having to be on his toes all the time, it was nice to kick back sometimes and just let his brain rest.
Pulling up before the right apartment building, Logan saw that there were absolutely no empty spaces available along the long block. He debated driving to the parking structure on the next block, but he decided instead to double-park his vehicle in the fervent hope that his part in this wouldn’t take all that long.
From the sketchy details he’d been given, it sounded pretty much like a cut-and-dried suicide—end of story. Once he verified that it was, maybe he could still even get hold of Stacy and at least get to enjoy the second half of the evening—that was, after all, the only thing that either one of them actually wanted from the other. Hot sex, enjoyable and a few minutes respite from the world they dealt with on a regular basis.
The thought made him smile as he got out of the car and locked it behind him.
The apartment in question was on the third floor. Once he got off the elevator, Logan found he didn’t need to acquaint himself with the floor’s layout or the way the apartment numbers were arranged to locate the one where his services were needed. The yellow tape and the stoic police officer standing guard did that for him.
Vaguely recognizing the weary-looking older officer, he nodded at the man. Their paths had probably crossed at one point or another, Logan thought.
“My dad here yet?”
It was actually meant as a rhetorical question. This was the tail end of the day shift, but his father, the head of the CSI day lab, was dedicated beyond belief. He was the one who had instilled his work ethic in him and his siblings long before they had discovered that they were related to the Cavanaughs.
Besides, there was all this yellow tape across the front of the entrance, a sure sign that his father and some of the team who worked for him were in there, carefully documenting and preserving everything with such precision it would have absolutely stunned the average mind.
The officer, Dale Hanlon, shook his head. “No, not yet.”
Logan stopped, surprised as he turned to regard the officer. Unless there were multiple crime scenes happening at once—something that had yet to occur in Aurora—in the past year—his father had taken to being present with his team at each crime scene that they processed.
This wasn’t making any sense to him. “Then who put up all this yellow tape?” he asked.
“I did.”
The low, controlled female voice came from behind him. The vague thought that the voice was more suited to an intimate dinner than a crime scene crossed Logan’s mind as he turned around again.
Logan found himself looking into the saddest blue eyes he’d ever seen.
They were also, quite possibly, the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, which was saying a great deal considering that the Cavanaughs were fairly littered with members who had blue eyes of all hues and shades.
The eyes were set in a striking, heart-shaped face that would have easily launched a thousand love songs, he couldn’t help thinking. Sometimes, Logan decided, this job did have its perks.
“Are you part of the crime scene investigation unit?” Logan heard himself asking as he quickly assessed the slender, pale-looking blonde standing before him. “Or do you just have a thing for crime scene tape?” he quipped wryly, trying to lighten the moment. She seemed much too serious for someone so young. He knew this job, especially this part of the job, could really get to people if they didn’t take any precautions and insulate themselves properly.
His flippant manner caught Destiny off guard for a second. Since the officer at the door hadn’t tried to turn the man away, that had to mean that he was with the Aurora police force.
Terrific. Just her luck. They’d sent a brash, cocky detective who looked as if he was in love with the sound of his own voice and, most likely, with the image he saw in his bathroom mirror each morning. Dark-haired, green-eyed, he was as handsome as they came, and she was certain that he knew it.
She was familiar with the type, and right now it was the last thing she needed. She needed a professional detective, not a male model.
“I’m with the crime scene investigation unit,” she told him, her voice low and remarkably stoic. She surprised herself.
It was all she could do to hold it together. Part of Destiny still didn’t believe that any of this was actually happening. The other part felt as if she was slowly slipping into shock and would, at any moment, just completely lose it.
You can’t. If you do, you won’t be able to help Paula.
The moment the thought formed, it struck Destiny as ironic. After all, at this point nothing would help Paula. Nothing was going to bring her back.
Destiny struggled to keep her angry tears in check.
Logan nodded, taking the attractive woman’s information at face value. “I guess this is just an open-and-shut case,” he surmised. “A suicide,” he added, telling her what the lieutenant had told him. Then, his mouth curving in a particularly captivating smile, he asked, “How is it that I’ve never seen you before?” He would have certainly remembered someone who looked like her. He had a feeling that if she smiled, she could light up a room. Even somber, there was something exceedingly attractive and compelling about her. “Are you new to the team?”
She didn’t bother answering his last question. At another time and place, she might have been more than mildly interested in his attention. Destiny wasn’t averse to having an occasional good time, as long as no promises were exchanged or expected. She was married to her work, and most of the men she’d encountered felt that they should come first in a woman’s life, not second.
Right now, all her energy was focused on not breaking down and, more important than that, on finding who had done this to her sister.
“It’s not a suicide,” Destiny informed the detective firmly.
About to walk to where he could view the deceased’s body, Logan turned instead and focused on the intense crime scene investigator. She sounded as if there was no room for argument.
“Why?” he asked, the detective in him pushing the playboy far into the background. “Did you find something that would indicate that the woman was murdered?”
“Not yet,” Destiny answered between clenched teeth. “But I will.”
Okay, he was officially confused, Logan thought. Was there some sort of an agenda he was missing? Exactly what did this woman mean by “not yet”? What did she know that he didn’t? He didn’t like playing catch-up.
“If there are no indications that it’s not a suicide, what makes you think that it isn’t?” he asked the shapely blonde.
“Because she wouldn’t commit suicide,” Destiny informed him heatedly.
Really curious now, Logan looked at the young woman who, he realized, had more going on, even without the aid of painted-on clothing, than Stacy ever did. She didn’t reek of raw sex, but there was a subtle promise there that intrigued him. A lot.
Since the department paid him to solve cases, not ruminate on beautiful women who said baseless things, Logan forced himself to focus on the wild claim the crime scene investigator had just made and not the fact that the words had come out of nearly perfect lips.
“And you know this because …?”
A very tempting chin shot up like a silent challenge. “Because she’s my sister.”
It took him a second to absorb that. “You weren’t called in, were you?” Logan guessed.
No, she hadn’t been. She’d come here looking for answers and had wound up face-to-face with a dreadful question: Who killed Paula?
“I did the calling,” she told him.
As if in a bad dream, once she knew that Paula was beyond resuscitating and she’d stopped crying, she’d pulled herself together and called her boss, even though protocol would have had her calling 911 first.
The sound of Sean Cavanaugh’s voice had almost made her lose it again, but Destiny had managed to hold herself together enough to describe what she’d found when she’d walked into her sister’s apartment. Sean in turn had set everything else in motion, promising to be there as soon as he possibly could. He told her not to leave.
As if she could.
With no knowledge of what had taken place between his father and the crime scene investigator, Logan had a different take on things.
“You can’t be here,” he told her, transforming from a devil-may-care man who enjoyed his share of the nightlife to a homicide detective who was considered to be damn good at his job.
Logan saw the woman’s slender shoulders stiffen as if she’d been jabbed with a hot poker. She reminded him of a soldier, galvanized in order to withstand whatever came her way.
The flash of anger in her eyes was almost mesmerizing to him.
“The hell I can’t,” she snapped. “She’s my baby sister and the only family I have left. Had left,” Destiny amended, trying hard not to allow the words to choke off her air supply. “Somebody killed her, and I intend to find out who.”
Having brothers and sisters of his own, Logan could easily relate to the way she felt. But she still needed to go. “I get it, but leave it up to—”
“To who?” Destiny demanded. “To you? To the professionals?” She guessed at the word he was about to use. “I am one of the professionals.”
That might be true, but there was another, bigger factor that she was apparently missing—or deliberately ignoring. “You’re also personally involved—”
“You bet I am,” Destiny snapped, her eyes flashing again, “and no rules and regulations are going to make me stand on the sidelines like some clueless civilian, waiting for someone to find something that would point to my sister’s killer—especially when they’re not even going to be looking.”
“Now wait a minute—”
No, she wasn’t going to “wait a minute.” And she certainly wasn’t going to allow him to snow her with rhetoric.
“A minute ago, you were all ready to write this off as a suicide. You were willing to go with what you saw—or thought you saw.”
Only up to a point. Where did she get off, criticizing his work if she hadn’t seen him in action? Gorgeous or not, she needed to be told a few things and put in her place.
“Not if the autopsy contradicts the idea of a suicide.”
Autopsy.
The very word brought up a chilling scenario with it. Someone cutting up her little sister, reducing Paula to a mass of body organs examined, weighed, catalogued and then impersonally stuffed back into her body like wrinkled tissue paper that has served its purpose.
Suddenly, Destiny could hardly bear the wave of pain she felt.
Logan saw the horror that washed over the woman’s fine-boned features before she apparently got herself under control again. Observing her, he had to admit he felt really sorry for the woman. He knew how he would have reacted if that was Bridget, or Kendra, or Kari in the next room.
No rules or orders would have kept him on the sidelines. If he couldn’t have been part of the investigation outright, he would have found a way to conduct his own investigation covertly until he found answers that satisfied him.
Until he found the killer.
He felt a budding respect as he looked at the woman for the first time, not assessing her comely features but taking measure of the person who existed beneath. Thinking of what she was feeling and taking stock of what had to be crossing her mind right now.
Logan relented, backing off from his initial stand. “Look, what if I promise to keep you filled in? Will that be enough for you?”
The moment the words emerged from his mouth, he knew they had come out wrong. He made it sound as if he was trying to dismiss her. He wasn’t doing anything of the kind.
Destiny tossed her head, anger and sadness mingling with the very stubborn streak that had seen her through a less than typical childhood, one that would have conquered a lesser person. And she had been a child at the time.
“No, sorry, not good enough,” she fired back.
“He’s right, you know.”
She didn’t have to turn around and look to know who was behind her. But she turned around anyway. Turned around and looked up at the man she respected and secretly regarded as the father she hadn’t had for all these many years, not since he’d walked out on her, Paula and their mother.
“I thought you’d be on my side,” she said to Sean. She was more than a little disappointed to hear him taking the side of company policy.
“I am always on your side,” Sean reminded her kindly. “But the rules are clear about working on a case that you’re personally involved in.”
She knew all the rules backward and forward. She also knew they weren’t going to stop her from working this investigation.
“Sean, please,” she implored hoarsely, her voice brimming with emotion. She laid a hand on Sean’s arm in mute supplication.
“Of course,” Sean continued loftily, as if she hadn’t said anything, “you are a grown woman and I can’t be expected to tie you up and throw you into some corner if you happen to do some poking around into the present case behind my back.” He saw his son staring at him, undoubtedly surprised at this break with protocol. “Oh, like you and those brothers and sisters of yours never bent a single rule,” he mocked.
“Not saying we didn’t,” Logan replied to his father, deliberately flying above this minefield. “But I’ve got to say that I’m really surprised that you’re considering it.”
“Not considering it,” Sean corrected, putting down his fully loaded case that he meticulously organized at least once a week. “But well, what happens when I’m not looking, happens,” he told his son innocently. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe the actual scene of the crime is in through there?” He pointed to the bedroom, looking to Destiny for confirmation.
Destiny only half nodded. “That’s the way to the bathroom,” she confirmed. “Whether or not that’s the actual scene of the crime remains to be seen.”
Sean gave her an encouraging smile. “An open mind is the best way to approach anything,” he agreed.
With that, he walked ahead of his son and the young woman to process this particular crime scene.
Chapter 2
Following Sean Cavanaugh through the bedroom and into the bathroom where her sister’s body was, Destiny could feel every single bone in her own body stiffening as the battle began all over again. Her protective instincts warred with the ones she had developed as a crime scene investigator.
The latter dictated adherence to the first cardinal rule of investigation: that nothing was to be touched, nothing was to be moved. It was of the utmost importance that the scene be preserved just as it was when the deceased died. This had to be done to piece together facts leading up to that person’s final moments. And, with that, the identity of the killer, if there was one.
But Destiny’s protective instincts were just as deeply rooted within her, if not more so. She was the older sister, the one who had always looked out for Paula.
Yeah, and how’s that going for you? Destiny silently mocked herself.
Being the older sister hadn’t been easy. Though she had never doubted her sister’s love for her, Paula had fought her all the way, desperately wanting to assert her independence.
“I’m a big girl now, Destiny. You can’t hover over me forever.”
Destiny could feel the corners of her eyes beginning to sting again as she struggled for the umpteenth time to hold back her tears.
Yeah, well, you would have done better if I had hovered, Destiny couldn’t help thinking now. There was no doubt in her mind that Paula would be alive right now if she had hovered.
If.
Her protective instincts had made her want to cover Paula up, to give her sister some small semblance of modesty and dignity by draping something over her—at least a towel. She didn’t want to leave her where everyone coming into the beige-and-blue-tiled bathroom could see her like this, utterly naked and exposed.
As if sensing her turmoil, Sean told her, “I promise I’ll make this as quick as I can, Destiny.”
She was grateful to him for his kindness. Pressing her lips together, Destiny nodded, doing her best to smile her thanks and succeeding only marginally.
“Thank you,” she said hoarsely.
Logan, who had entered behind his father and the victim’s sister, squatted down now, his attention focused on the opened cell phone that apparently had slipped from the dead woman’s hand just as life had ebbed away from her.
The cell phone was in the open position and it was still turned on. As he crouched closer to it, Logan could see that there was a text message on the screen. One last message just before death had found her.
Was it a last-minute regret and a plea for help? Or was this intended to be a virtual version of a suicide note?
Using his handkerchief to keep from getting his fingerprints on the phone or contaminating any prints besides the victim’s on the device, Logan was about to pick it up when he stopped and looked over toward his father. “Did you already take a picture of this?”
“Tagged and photographed,” Sean answered as he continued examining Destiny’s sister.
Logan lifted the phone and looked at the screen. There were only three words in the text message: He left me.
“We need to find out who this number belongs to,” Logan said, thinking out loud as he examined the cell number the message had been sent to.
“Not necessary,” Destiny told him stoically.
Each word she uttered felt as if it scraped along an incredibly dry tongue. Her whole mouth felt like a desert in the midst of a seven-year drought. And she was having trouble getting air into her lungs. Part of her was numb, the other was almost on fire.
“She texted you?” Logan guessed, glancing toward her and reading her body language.
Right now, the woman appeared to be shut down tighter than Fort Knox. Logan absently wondered what it would take to loosen her up, then dismissed the thought since right now, knowing that wasn’t going to help him. Thinking of her as a woman was completely out of line. She was the victim’s sister and his father’s assistant, nothing else.
At least, not right now.
Logan caught himself hoping that there would be a later.
Destiny heard the detective’s voice as if it had originated in an echo chamber. It sounded as if it was coming at her from a great distance.
She blinked, forcing herself to stay focused. If she let her mind wander, she wouldn’t make it out of this room without coming apart. She’d already cried once. That was all she could afford to grieve. She had work to do.
“Yes, it’s my number. I called her back almost immediately after she sent the message, but she didn’t pick up.” She pressed her lips together, taking a breath before continuing. Her voice sounded strained. “I’d been calling her all day without a response, so I got worried.”
“Why?” Logan asked. “Was she unstable? Were you afraid that she was likely to harm herself?”
Destiny stared at him. What was he talking about? He didn’t know Paula. He had no right to his assumptions. She took offense at the implication behind his questions.
“I got worried because I’m her sister,” she retorted angrily. “Because Paula normally keeps in touch. And she doesn’t send short text messages.” The three-word text was out of character for Paula. “She goes on and on, whether it’s a phone call, a text or in person. My sister is—was,” she corrected herself painfully, “not a person of a few words. She never said anything in three words that she could say in forty.”
He thought of pointing out that distraught people, especially people about to commit suicide, didn’t always conform to their normal behavior, but he had a feeling she wasn’t in the mood to be contradicted.
Instead, he focused on another piece of the puzzle. “Who’s this ‘him’ she’s referring to?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Destiny took a deep breath, angry with herself for not having pushed when Paula had opted to keep the man’s name a secret. If she’d badgered Paula enough, she knew Paula would have finally caved in. Why hadn’t she pushed? Why had she just elected to respect her sister’s boundaries? At the very least, this mystery man of Paula’s could give them insight to her frame of mind the last time he saw her as he left.
If he’d left her, Destiny amended, ruling out nothing.
“You don’t know?” Logan echoed, more than mildly surprised. “Then you two weren’t close?” That was the only conclusion he could draw.
“No, we were,” Destiny insisted. “Very close.” They had been that way once and they had gotten that way again just in the past couple of years.
“Then why don’t you know the name of the guy your sister was seeing?”
Because I’m an idiot.
“Paula was a little superstitious. She said she didn’t want to jinx the relationship by saying anything about it too soon.”
God, that sounded so lame, so childish now that she said it out loud, Destiny thought, on the edge of exasperated despair. Why hadn’t she pushed? Insisted? Maybe if she’d known more of the details, she could have somehow prevented this. Even though she didn’t believe in her heart of hearts that her sister had done this, had committed suicide, a tiny part of her was afraid she had.
“All she’d tell me was that he was someone ‘important.’ And, that for now, he wanted to keep their relationship ‘special’ by keeping it out of the public eye. Apparently, I was part of the public eye,” Destiny said with barely controlled frustration.
Most likely, the guy was married, Logan thought, and when he’d decided to go back to his wife, the victim had killed herself.
“And you don’t think that this is a suicide?” Logan asked again. It was obvious from his tone that he felt that the evidence they’d reviewed so far clearly pointed in that direction.
“No,” Destiny said with feeling. “If this ‘important’ bastard had left her, she wouldn’t have killed herself. Paula was the type to have gone upside his head, to have raised a stink, not taken the breakup docilely, given up all hope and killed herself.” She raised her chin defiantly as she added, “I know my sister. That’s just not like her.”
Did anyone really know anyone else? Logan wondered. Of late, since the big revelation that had jolted his family down to their roots, he’d faced that question more than once.
“That’s what you think,” Logan pointed out. And, as far as he was concerned, there was an entire world of difference between prejudiced perception and actual fact.
“No,” Destiny said flatly. “That’s what I know. My sister believed in revenge,” she was quick to add, seeing the suspicious light coming into the detective’s all-but-magnetic green eyes. “And by that, I mean she would have dolled herself up, found the first good-looking male she could and deliberately shown up somewhere where she knew that ‘Mr. Special’ would most likely be. Then she would have flaunted the fact that she was having an exceptionally good time with someone new and gorgeous. Paula was not the kind to just give up,” she insisted. “She was stubborn that way.”
How long was it going to take to get used to referring to Paula in the past tense? Destiny wondered, her heart aching in her chest.
“I take it stubbornness runs in the family?” Logan surmised, watching her. There was just a hint of an appreciative smile on his lips.
Her blue eyes narrowed into slits. “Damn straight it does.”
“You might be right,” Sean interjected as if there was no other conversation taking place. Having completed his preliminary examination of the dead woman, he straightened up.
“About which part?” Logan asked, just taking it for granted that his father was talking to him and not to the sexy, headstrong woman before him.
Instead of answering his son immediately, Sean focused his attention on the person in the room who needed him the most.
“Was your sister right-handed?” he asked Destiny.
She shook her head. “No, Paula was left-handed. Why?” Had he found something to substantiate her gut feeling that her sister hadn’t taken her own life? Without realizing it, Destiny began to pray.
“Just trying to get my facts straight,” Sean said thoughtfully, never one to give away anything too soon. Pausing a moment longer, he then said, “I don’t believe she killed herself.”
Yes!
The relief that flooded through her limbs just about took Destiny’s breath away. At least she wasn’t going to have to fight everyone tooth and nail about this. If the head of the crime lab backed her up, the battle over that at least was over. Now the major one began: finding Paula’s killer.
“Thank you,” she said to Sean. The words came out on a nearly breathless sigh.
While he knew that his father wouldn’t just say something like that to put his assistant at ease, Logan still wanted proof.
“What makes you say that?” he asked his father.
“When a person slashes their wrists, depending on whether they’re right-handed or left-handed, the cut is deeper on the opposite wrist since they’re using their good hand.”
If the person followed regular procedure, Logan thought. Maybe this one hadn’t. “She might have slashed her right wrist first,” Logan suggested. “That would have made her right hand weaker when she was delivering the final cut.”
“True,” Sean allowed.
Concerned, Destiny immediately asked, “Then you’re changing your mind?”
Again, rather than answering directly, Sean turned toward his son, opting for a demonstration. “If you were to slash your wrists, how would you go about it?” he asked.
Logan firmly believed that there wasn’t anything in the world that would cause him to give up all hope and just apathetically end his life.
“I wouldn’t,” Logan said flatly.
“Good to know,” his father murmured. “But if you did, if you put yourself in the place of someone who’d lost all hope and given up wanting to live,” Sean proposed, “how would you slash your wrists?”
Logan honestly didn’t know what his father was getting at. “The usual way,” he answered with a careless shrug.
“Show me,” Sean urged. Taking a pen out of his breast pocket, he handed it to Logan. “Pretend this is a knife. Show me how you’d go about ‘slashing’ your wrists if you were committing suicide.”
With another, somewhat more pronounced shrug, Logan took the pen from his father and then, holding it in his right hand, traced a slightly slanted line from left to right across his left wrist. And then, changing hands, he took the pen into his left hand and reversed the process, “slashing” his right wrist from right to left with the imaginary knife. Both times the lines he created were slightly slanted, going from higher to lower.
“Okay, consider them slashed,” Logan said, handing the pen back to his father. His curiosity had been piqued. “Now what?”
“Now you’d bleed out,” Sean said matter-of-factly. “All right, keeping your methodical procedure in mind, I want you to take a look at Paula’s wrists,” he told both his son and his assistant. “What do you see?”
Each wrist had a long, deep cut going across it. “Slashes,” Logan answered.
Destiny narrowed her eyes, distancing herself from the actual person in the bathtub and focusing only on the victim’s wrists. She looked intently at the cuts that had caused her sister to die.
After scrutinizing the two cuts, she felt no more enlightened than she had been at the outset.
Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t—”
“Look carefully,” Sean repeated, cutting her off.
“I did,” she protested.
And then she saw it, saw what Sean was trying to point out without actually physically doing it. Her eyes widened and she looked at him.
“The slashes are both going in the same direction!” But there was more than just that, she realized. “And they’re both upside down.”
Instead of slanting slightly at the top and then dipping down as it reached the opposite side, each cut seemed to go from the bottom to the top, left to right, on both wrists.
“This is too awkward,” Destiny concluded, her excitement growing. And then she repeated what she had been maintaining all along. “Paula couldn’t have done this to herself. Someone else had to have done it to her.”
He could see his father trying to spare his assistant and make her feel better, but there were other matters to consider, Logan thought.
“There’s no sign of a struggle,” he pointed out, then continued, “There’s no huge amount of water along the perimeter of the old-fashioned tub, leaving the actual tub low, as if there’d been a wild, last-minute struggle. There are no outstanding bruises visible on the victim’s body, and her long, salon-applied nails all seem to be intact. They wouldn’t have been if she was fighting for her life.”
“There wouldn’t be any struggle if the victim was drugged,” Sean told his son, his voice as mild as if he were discussing the garden section of the Sunday paper. Turning, Sean pointed to the wine goblet he had already photographed and that now stood, bagged, on the bathroom floor exactly where he had found it. “A simple analysis can tell us about that.”
Logan still didn’t see that as proof. “A lot of suicides build up their courage with a drink first. Maybe the victim wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t experience a last-minute surge of regret that might cause her to stop what she was doing.” He looked at his father. “Despondence can do that to you.”
“Maybe to you,” Destiny fired back. “But not to Paula. She did not kill herself. I’d stake my badge on it,” she insisted.
“Besides,” Sean interjected, “there are the cuts to her wrists. Our killer obviously slipped up there.” Returning the items he’d taken out previously, as well as packing up the samples he’d taken into his case, Sean glanced at Destiny. “Are you absolutely sure your sister never mentioned this man’s name? Dropped a hint, used initials? Something like that?”
To each suggestion, Destiny could only shake her head no. Each time she did so, she felt her frustration growing larger and larger.
“No.”
The truth of it was that despite her initial concerns, she’d been really hopeful that Paula was finally looking to settle into a lasting relationship. And due to that, she hadn’t wanted to cause any waves by hounding her sister for details.
“And you didn’t press her?” Logan asked incredulously. What kind of a woman didn’t ask for details? he couldn’t help wondering. Was it because she was too wrapped up in her own love life? Was there some guy she was going to go running home to, to cry on his shoulder?
From out of nowhere, Logan felt just the slightest prick of jealousy. He shrugged it off, thinking he was just frustrated because he’d had to break his date with Stacy.
Destiny could only shrug impotently. “I figured she’d tell me when she was ready.”
He couldn’t help staring at her. Was she for real? If this had been one of his sisters, the other two would have been all over her until she finally broke. The life expectancy of a secret in the household where he’d grown up had been about a day and a half—if the one with the secret was in a coma.
“Wow, a woman with no curiosity,” he marveled, only half in jest. “I thought that was like, you know, an urban myth or something. Kind of like a unicorn,” he tagged on.
If nothing else, the man was mixing his metaphors. He was also being colossally annoying.
“Unicorns don’t wander around urban areas,” she pointed out, irritated at the detective’s flippant manner and not bothering to hide the fact, even if he was Sean’s son. Maybe he was adopted, she thought. Her eyes narrowed as she pinned him with a glare. “Are you going to take this seriously or not?” she asked.
“I’m officially ruling this a murder,” Sean announced, interrupting what appeared to be an argument in the making—he knew for a fact that Logan didn’t like being challenged. “Don’t worry. He’ll take it seriously now,” he assured his assistant with a note of finality in his voice.
She was overreacting. Her sister’s murder—just finding Paula this way—was making her lose her perspective. If she continued down this road, then she really would wind up being thrown off the case.
And soon.
At the very least, she wasn’t any good to anyone if she unraveled this way.
Destiny took in a deep, shaky breath, getting herself back under control. Her spine snapped into place, ramrod straight.
“Sorry,” she said to Sean.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” Sean told her warmly. Placing a fatherly arm around her shoulders, he gently escorted Destiny from the room.
The sound of fresh activity was heard coming from the living room. The M.E.’s team had just arrived, pushing a gurney between them.
Nodding at the duo, Sean said, “The victim’s in the bathtub. She’s had a preliminary workup and is ready to go.”
“It’s a suicide, right?” one of the men asked, looking at the sheet attached to his clipboard. The latter was lying on top of the gurney.
“No, it’s a homicide,” Logan corrected, answering for his father.
He wasn’t oblivious to the relieved smile that Destiny shot him. Though it lasted only half a second, he’d been right. Her smile did have the makings to light up a room.
Hearing what Logan said, one of the two men sighed and shook his head. “It’s going to be another long night,” he anticipated, addressing his words to no one in particular.
“C’mon, don’t just stand there and make it any longer,” the other man prodded.
Pushing the gurney before them, they entered the next room.
Once they were gone, Sean turned to Destiny. “I should be the one who’s saying he’s sorry,” he said to her, continuing what he was saying before the two assistants from the M.E.’s office had entered the apartment. “And I am. I am deeply sorry for your loss,” he emphasized. “And we will find the person responsible for this, Destiny,” he said. “I give you my word.”
Destiny blinked back her tears. It felt as if she’d been fighting them all along. Her supervisor wasn’t making things any easier for her.
“I believe you,” she murmured, her voice hardly above a whisper. Any louder and she knew she would risk breaking down entirely.
Again.
To the best of Logan’s knowledge, it was the first time he’d ever heard his father make a promise that he wasn’t a hundred percent certain ahead of time that he could back up.
This assistant had to mean a lot to him, he concluded, then couldn’t help wondering why.
Chapter 3
“Were you two on the outs?” Logan asked Destiny as his father continued processing the rest of the small apartment.
Why did he keep coming back to that?
“No. She was my only family. We were close—as close as two people who lived two different, busy lives could be,” she qualified, emphasizing the word busy. “We didn’t get together as much as I would have liked, but that couldn’t have been helped.” Her eyes narrowed slightly as she regarded Logan, looking for some kind of an indication as to what was really on his mind. She began to suspect that he wasn’t the typical vapid, shallow pretty boy. There was substance, a trait she’d always found far sexier than looks.
But right now, she was in a place where things like that didn’t matter.
“Why are you asking?” she asked.
He answered her question with a question. “Is there any reason you can think of why she wouldn’t have told you who she was seeing?”
Logan was still having a lot of trouble swallowing the scenario the woman’s sister had given him. All three of his sisters not only knew everything there was to know about each other’s boyfriends, or, in Bridget’s case, her fiancé, they were also aware of their friends’ current dates. He couldn’t fathom a woman who was willingly oblivious to that sort of information—and actually content to remain that way.
Suppressing a sigh, she said, “Probably to avoid hearing me tell her to go slow and to be careful.” She saw the question in the detective’s eyes. Under another set of circumstances, they might have even been intriguing eyes. Right now, they were just annoyingly probing. “My sister doesn’t—didn’t,” she corrected herself, hating the fact that she had to, “have the greatest track record when it came to picking men. They were all very good-looking on the outside. On the inside, not so much.”
Holding her hand out, she waffled it to indicate just how much each of the previous men in her sister’s life had deviated from the straight-and-narrow path. There hadn’t been a decent one in the lot.
“So in other words, she didn’t give you any details about who she was seeing because she didn’t want you to be judgmental,” Logan concluded succinctly.
She nodded, wishing with all her heart that she hadn’t come down as hard on Paula over the last one as she had. Not that he didn’t deserve every insulting adjective she had hurled at his memory. Slick, charming, with a Southern drawl, Bo Wilkins had managed to deplete half of Paula’s bank account—granted, that didn’t exactly amount to a king’s ransom, but it was still Paula’s money—before just vanishing off the face of the earth.
She’d begged Paula to let her know the next time she gave away her heart, because she’d said she intended to run a check on whomever the next Romeo was. If no prior arrests came up, then at least her sister would have a fighting chance of keeping the fillings in her teeth.
Paula hadn’t found that funny, she recalled. And she deliberately hadn’t said anything about meeting someone new—until she’d been pinned down.
That was when Paula had told her that she didn’t want to say anything yet because she didn’t want to jinx the relationship. And, if it became serious, then she would say something.
Given that, Destiny had seen no reason to push.
But apparently, it had been serious. Which meant that Paula had lied to her, Destiny realized with a sharp pang. It obviously had to have been serious if Paula had been despondent enough to text that message to her.
If she texted that message, a little voice in Destiny’s head whispered.
Her eyes widened as the thought sank in.
What if Paula hadn’t even been the one to text that message? What if her killer had? The same killer who had botched the appearance of a suicide by slashing her wrists upside down.
Trying not to get ahead of herself, she turned toward Sean. “We have to process her cell phone for any fingerprints on the keypad that aren’t hers. The guy probably wore gloves, but maybe he got careless….”
Destiny’s voice trailed off as she made eye contact with her supervisor. He wasn’t saying anything, just letting her talk, but she could see by the expression on his face that he was already way ahead of her. He always seemed to be two steps ahead of everyone.
“You already thought of that,” she said, nodding her head.
“We’re on the same page,” Sean told her kindly. “Same page that Logan’s on,” he said, nodding toward his son.
Feeling anxious and yet dull-witted at the same time, an area she had never inhabited before, Destiny turned toward the detective, curious why he wasn’t saying anything.
The answer to that was simple. Because he wasn’t standing there anymore.
“Cavanaugh?” she called, raising her voice.
“In here,” Logan answered, his voice floating back to her from the back of the apartment.
Apparently a thought had occurred to him and he’d gone back into the bedroom to look at something, or for something.
Actually, the man had gone back to the bathroom, Destiny realized as she followed the sound of the detective’s deep voice.
As she entered the bedroom, she had to shift to one side. The medical examiner’s team had slipped Paula’s body into that one-size-fits-all black body bag and was now wheeling her sister back out. Once outside the building, they’d put her into the coroner’s van they’d driven over here.
Paula didn’t like the color black, Destiny recalled with a pang. It was the only color missing from her meticulously arranged wardrobe.
“Black is the color of death, Destiny. I don’t want it anywhere near me.”
It is now, pumpkin. It is now, Destiny thought, feeling her heart twist inside of her.
Walking into the bathroom, painfully aware that her sister was no longer here—no longer anywhere—she found Logan standing before the medicine cabinet. The door was open and the detective was peering at the shelves. He was obviously taking inventory of what was inside. She didn’t exactly care for the thoughtful frown she saw on his face.
Now what?
Bracing herself, thinking that she would have to defend her sister again, Destiny forced herself to ask, “What?”
Logan read the generic name imprinted on the container’s label again. This put a crimp in the woman’s theory. He held the container up so that she could see it, as well.
“This was just filled,” he told her.
She had no idea what “this” was but had a feeling she wouldn’t be happy once she heard the answer.
Even so, though she knew Logan had to do it, she resented this man’s prying into her sister’s life. And, by proxy, into her life. Resented the lack of understanding and compassion in his voice.
Granted, as a good detective, he was supposed to be impartial, but keeping this kind of a distance between himself and the victim didn’t help him understand the kind of person her sister had been. Didn’t make him fiercely want to solve this tragic crime because the world was that much the lesser for the loss of her.
Taking yet another breath, Destiny was satisfied that her voice wouldn’t crack. Only then did she finally answer him. “Yes, so?”
Still holding the bottle up, he shook it. Hard. There was no sound to correspond with the movement, no pills being disturbed and forced to rattle around the small container.
“So it’s empty,” he pointed out needlessly. “According to the date it was filled, there should be approximately twenty-five pills in here. There aren’t.” He looked at her. “What do you want to bet that toxicology is going to find that those pills are in your sister’s system? Her wrists didn’t need to be slashed,” he told her. “Your sister swallowed enough of these things to have killed a small horse.”
“Or was forced to swallow,” Destiny interjected. She wasn’t going to let him just forget about what his father had pointed out. Evidence that pointed to her sister being murdered.
“There’s no sign of a struggle, remember? Maybe, before the full effects of the pills kicked in, your sister actually did try to slash her wrists but she was so loopy from the pills that she did an awkward, botched job of it.”
Taking the vial from him, Destiny turned the container around so she could read the label. When she did, the name of the drug was vaguely familiar. Her sister was taking prescription sleeping pills, one of the newer ones on the market.
“Ever since we were little, my sister has had trouble sleeping. When these came on the market—” she nodded at the empty container “—and she tried them, she was overjoyed. She’d finally found something that worked. But she never took more than the prescribed dosage,” Destiny maintained firmly. “It wasn’t because she was a saint,” she added angrily, reading the skepticism in Logan’s eyes. “She just didn’t want to feel drugged in the morning. The idea of falling asleep behind the wheel while driving to work terrified her,” she emphasized.
Logan took back the container, intending on giving it to his father to send to toxicology.
“Still, over time, people develop a tolerance for medications. Maybe she found that one pill wasn’t enough for her anymore and she took two—and then more. Or maybe she just wanted to sleep forever because her boyfriend dumped her.”
He was back to that again. What was he, Johnny One-note? she thought angrily. How many ways did she have to say this before it finally sank into the thick skull of his?
“No,” Destiny insisted with feeling. “Paula wouldn’t have done that. Someone killed my sister,” she said, enunciating each word separately. “I don’t know who it was, but I do know that Paula didn’t do it herself—accidentally or otherwise,” Destiny added in case he was going to suggest that next.
“All right,” Logan relented.
His father’s lead assistant wasn’t about to come around to his side or even remotely entertain the idea that her sister had committed suicide. And since his father seemed to believe that someone else had delivered the slash marks to the young woman’s wrists, for the time being he’d go along with the popular theory.
Besides, he really didn’t enjoy upsetting her, considering that she was still dealing with the shock of finding her sister dead.
“We’ll approach it that way for now.” Leaving the bathroom, still holding the prescription container with his handkerchief wrapped around it, Logan handed it to his father.
“The pills are probably all in her stomach,” he told him not as his father, but as the head of the crime scene lab.
“You’re most likely right,” Sean agreed. “Whoever killed her probably slipped the pills into her drink. That way there’d be no resistance to what he was going to do next.” He lowered his voice so that only Logan could hear. “Poor thing never stood a chance.”
Logan nodded vaguely. He wasn’t doing anyone any good just standing here, he decided, and announced, “I’m going to canvass the floor, see if anyone heard or saw anything out of the ordinary.”
“But you don’t think so,” Destiny surmised.
“I didn’t say that,” Logan maintained. He didn’t like being second-guessed. For the most part, he liked to think that on the job he was unreadable. He prided himself on that.
Besides, he was always open to possibilities. This job consisted of equal parts skill and luck.
“Hey, you never know. Stranger things have happened. And not everyone works nine to five,” he added cavalierly. “So maybe someone did hear something.” Logan paused just next to his father as he began to head out the front door. “Maybe I’ll see you this Sunday.” It was as close as he allowed himself to get to making a commitment that involved his new family.
“Maybe,” Sean echoed with a faint nod.
“Sunday?” Destiny repeated, her smattering of curiosity getting the better of her when it came to this handsome, arrogant would-be crime fighter. “What’s this Sunday?”
Since he knew that this woman worked closely with his father—it had to be closely for his father to display this kind of regard for her, treating her as if she was another one of his daughters—he was surprised that she didn’t know.
“The former chief of police, my new uncle,” he added, amused by the whole concept of getting such a huge number of brand-new blood relatives at his age. “He likes to throw family get-togethers. Word has it that any of us can drop by his table to get a full breakfast any day of the week, but apparently he goes all out on Sundays.
“My father is settling into this new life and doing his best to show up every Sunday to prove how serious he is about being assimilated by the Cavanaughs—and making up for lost time.”
Destiny nodded. Though Sean Cavanaugh wasn’t an overly talkative man, he had shared some of this with her already. She had to admit that she rather liked the fact that he confided to her about this new venue of his private life.
It also made her realize how much she missed having a family of her own, people to talk to and use as sounding boards. People who cared how she felt and if she was getting enough sleep or running herself into the ground. After her mother had died, there’d been only Paula. And now even she was gone. That left only her, and it was true what they said. One is the loneliest number.
“Must be nice having more family than you know what to do with,” she commented, trying to sound offhanded.
He would have had to have been completely deaf to have missed the wistfulness in her voice. Although he wasn’t given to being touchy-feely and was rather careless at times about other people’s feelings, Logan upbraided himself now for not realizing that he was talking about family life to a woman who no longer had one.
He felt a genuine stab of guilt.
The next moment he heard himself trying to make amends. “Feel free to drop by on any morning or on Sunday,” he added. “The man goes all out then,” he repeated. When he saw her looking at him, obviously puzzled, he guessed at what was going through her mind. “Don’t worry, the chief won’t mind.”
“But you just said that he had family gatherings,” she pointed out. And right now, she was part of no one’s family.
“To the chief, anyone who’s part of the force is family.”
Okay, so maybe the handsome detective wasn’t just an empty vessel. He was being kind to her because she was alone. She got that. But she was no one’s charity case. Allowing a spasmodic smile to reach her lips, then go, she thanked him.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Logan knew a brush-off when he heard one, and ordinarily he’d just let it ride. But this woman was obviously someone special to his father, and initially he had been rather coarsely oblivious with her.
“No, really,” he emphasized. “I’m sure my father would like you to come, too. He seems to regard you as another daughter,” he said, trying to add weight to his invitation. He waited for that to sink in before saying anything more. Overkill was just as bad as neglecting to say anything at all.
At the mention of his father, Destiny allowed herself a small smile. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure the man was still in the other room, she said, “Your father’s a very nice man.”
“Well, we agree on that,” Logan told her.
And more than likely on very little else, Destiny added silently.
With a preoccupied nod, she began to leave the apartment. She’d let Sean do his work. If she felt there was anything to add, she still had the key to Paula’s apartment in her pocket. She could come back at a later date, when there was no one to get in her way.
Her hand on the doorknob, Logan’s question made her pause in midstep.
“You want someone to take you home?”
Was he treating her like a civilian? Or did he just assume that she’d locked down her hysteria and was just a tiny step away from having a complete meltdown?
Turning to face the younger Cavanaugh, she looked at him, not exactly certain just how to interpret what he’d just said.
“What?”
“Would you like an officer to take you home?” he asked her, tendering the offer with a smile. “I’d offer to take you home myself, but I seem to be a little tied up at the moment.”
He was serious. Either he was being too kind—or too cynical and doubting her actual feelings. She wasn’t sure which bothered her more.
“Why would you think that I’d need someone to take me home?” she asked.
Why did she take everything as a challenge to her authority? He was trying to be understanding. Obviously that was wasted on this woman. “Well, you did just have a big shock.”
“I’m not going home,” she told him. Not wanting to explain herself any more than she absolutely had to, Destiny walked out.
“Are you going to be all right?” Sean asked as she passed him.
Sean’s concern, at least, she didn’t have to wonder about. She knew it was genuine and smiled with gratitude.
“Yes,” she told him, not wanting the man to worry about her. He had enough to deal with these days. He didn’t need her to burden him. Besides, she wasn’t about to share her pain with him or with anyone. That was hers and hers alone to deal with.
And the way to deal with it was to keep busy.
She wasn’t going home right now, even though the hour grew late. Home was just a medium-size shell that she got to rattle around in, waiting for the beginning of her next workday.
And, since technically she wasn’t supposed to be working this case on the city’s dime, she had to do it on her own time. That meant going into the lab and the small cubbyhole that comprised her “office” during something other than her regular work hours.
As in now.
She took the elevator down to the ground floor. It went straight down without a stop. Getting off, she walked directly to the double outer doors and pushed them open. The night air was chilly and damp as it greeted her.
Destiny drew in a deep breath and then another, trying to make herself come around.
With renewed purpose and borrowed energy, she walked briskly from the entrance to the apartment building to the curb where she’d parked her car.
And then she stopped dead.
There was no way she was going anywhere. Some jerk had double-parked his car parallel to hers and was completely blocking her exit.
She was stuck.
Biting back a barrage of less than flattering words that leaped to her lips, Destiny peered into the offending vehicle, trying to see if she could ascertain what kind of village idiot belonged to the car.
That was when she saw the official markings. And the communications radio that was mounted beneath the dashboard.
A standard Crown Victoria, the white car was an unmarked police vehicle. And she had a really strong hunch she knew whom it belonged to.
Chapter 4
When he heard the elevator opening, Logan automatically looked in that direction. He was surprised to see Destiny getting off.
“Forget something?” he asked, raising his voice in order to be heard.
Canvassing the floor, he was clear down the hall from the elevator. So far, he’d had next to no luck getting anyone to answer, despite the hour.
The only door that had opened so far had been by a very grumpy older man in a stained T-shirt and rumpled trousers of an indeterminable color. Both items of clothing looked as if the man had slept in them for at least the past year.
The man also, when questioned, didn’t seem to speak any English. Whatever language he did speak, Logan was entirely unfamiliar with it. He was fluent in Spanish and knew a handful of other languages well enough to at least identify what they were. The old man was muttering at him in what he could only guess was an offshoot of some Slavic language, definitely not Russian in origin.
Thanking the man, Logan went to the next door. And the next.
So far, no one else had answered, but he’d canvassed only a quarter of the floor before his father’s chief assistant had stepped off the elevator again.
“No, I didn’t forget anything,” Destiny retorted, irritated because she wanted to be on her way already, “but I think you did.”
Logan cocked his head and eyed her, the person who might or might not be behind the next door temporarily forgotten. He watched as she walked toward him, appreciating the subtle sway of her hips. She was one of those people who was totally unaware of just how stunning she was.
But it wasn’t lost on him.
She didn’t seem like the type to play games, especially not at a time like this, so whatever she was referring to had to be on the level. The problem was, he had absolutely no idea what that was.
“Come again?” he finally said.
“You double-park your car downstairs?” she asked pointedly.
“No. Yeah,” he amended in the next breath, remembering.
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Marie Ferrarella
Crime scene investigator Destiny Richardson receives the shock of her life when she finds her sister dead in a bathtub. Detective Logan Cavanaugh thinks it’s an openandshut suicide case. But Destiny’s convinced her sister was murdered. And she’s not about to have some arrogant cop tell her otherwise – even if he is the sexiest man she’s ever met.
“I’ll be fine.”
Destiny could see that Logan was waiting for her to convince him. “I don’t have any other choice. Paula’s killer is out there somewhere and I intend to catch him. I can’t do that if I fall apart.”
“No, you can’t,” he agreed. “But if you need someone to talk to—or not talk to,” he added with a smile that was beginning to weave its way under her skin even though she was doing her best to ignore it, “I’m available.”
“You’re a good guy, Logan Cavanaugh,” she told him quietly just before she impulsively brushed her lips against his cheek.
Logan felt something within his gut tighten so quickly and so hard, for a second it was difficult for him to draw in a breath.
Every fiber of his being wanted to pull her into his arms and to kiss her back. The right way. And he had a strong feeling that he wouldn’t get any resistance from her.
But that would be taking unfair advantage of her vulnerable state. Their time would come—he was fairly certain of that. But not tonight.
Dear Reader,
You are holding in your hands the latest book in the CAVANAUGH JUSTICE series. Logan Cavanaugh is another one of Sean Cavanaugh’s (aka Cavelli) sons. A free spirit who takes just about everything in stride, Logan finds his laid-back attitude challenged when he is temporarily paired with Destiny Richardson, his father’s chief assistant in the crime lab. She also just happens to be the sister of what appears to be a serial killer’s latest victim.
The latter designation has yet to come to light since the murders are all staged to appear like suicides—except that Destiny is positive that her younger sister would have never committed suicide, and she is prepared to go to hell and back to prove it. Logan, the primary investigative detective on what started out as an open-and-shut case, has no choice but to follow Destiny in order to keep her safe. But who is going to keep each of them safe from one another?
I hope you enjoy this latest installment. As ever, I thank you for reading and from the bottom of my heart I wish you someone to love who loves you back.
Marie Ferrarella
About the Author
MARIE FERRARELLA, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA
Award-winning author, has written more than two hundred books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com
Cavanaugh’s Surrender
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To
Sumay Li,
who is a joy to know
Prologue
“Paula, I’m letting myself in with the key you gave me,” Destiny Richardson called loudly as she stepped over the threshold into her younger sister’s apartment. “It’s Destiny, the sister you’ve been ignoring lately.”
Again, she added silently.
She and Paula, her junior by a little more than three years, had finally gotten to a point in their relationship where they were getting along again. Where everything out of her mouth didn’t get Paula’s back up and mark the beginning of yet another prolonged argument that ended up with Paula not speaking to her for weeks at a time. That, mercifully, was now all behind them.
And then, for the past six weeks, it was as if Paula had stepped into a parallel universe. She was available only for a glimmer of time and then she’d disappear again. In between she’d return phone calls late and break lunch dates at the last minute.
Destiny had ridden it out for a couple of weeks, then finally asked her sister if this change in behavior was because of a man. Reluctantly—although she was glowing at the time—Paula had admitted that there was a new man in her life. But she wouldn’t say any more, not even what his name was.
“Not yet, Des,” she’d confided. “I don’t want to jinx anything.” Her eyes had all but danced as she’d added with a big grin, “He’s just too good to be true.”
Paula believed in the old adage that if something was too good to be true, it usually was too good to be true. But she’d bitten her tongue and said nothing, not wanting to jeopardize this new, improved relationship between her sister and her. It felt good to have Paula as a friend again, so she’d done her best to tread lightly and make no demands even though her gut had warned her that there was a problem.
She hated it when she was right in cases like this.
This morning, she’d gotten a text from Paula. It said simply: He left me. Thinking a few choice names directed at the man she’d never met, she’d called her sister almost immediately—and got no answer.
During the course of the day, she’d tried over and over again to reach Paula, using every single phone number associated with her sister. Home, work, cell, all with the same results. Paula wasn’t picking up.
So, right after work, convinced that Paula was taking this breakup incredibly hard, she’d come to her sister’s apartment and used the key Paula had given her for the very first time. She just wanted to make sure that her sister was all right.
She looked around now. Every single light in the upscale, two-bedroom apartment was on.
“You better be home, kid,” she called out, still addressing her words to the air. “Otherwise you’re making the electric company very rich for no reason.”
This was typical Paula, though. Her sister had a habit of turning on all the lights whenever she was depressed. She claimed it helped chase away the hopelessness she felt.
“Paula, where are you?” Destiny called, growing just a bit worried. Her mysterious “perfect” lover must have done a real number on her if Paula was too depressed even to answer her. “He’s not worth it, you know,” she said, making her way through the apartment. “Not worth being this upset over.” She walked into Paula’s bedroom. “If he could leave you just like that, you’re better off without him. He doesn’t sound very stable to me. He—”
For just half a second, Destiny froze in the doorway between the master bedroom and the lavishly remodeled bathroom.
Her heart stopped.
She’d found Paula.
“Oh, my God, Paula! Paula, what have you done?” she cried, racing into the bathroom.
The water in the bathtub had overflowed and spread out onto the tiled floor. The red tinge discolored everything. Her sister was immersed in the tub, and the water was red with her blood.
Paula’s wrists were slashed.
Destiny Richardson had spent the past six years diligently working in the crime lab, at first part-time while she went to college and earned her degree in criminology, then, after graduation, full-time. From the very beginning, she had constantly gone the extra mile, putting in longer hours whenever she had a case.
In short order, she impressed Sean Cavanaugh, the man in charge of the crime lab’s day shift. He promoted her to his chief assistant.
The first cardinal rule for a crime scene investigator was not to move or touch anything. But she wasn’t a crime scene investigator tonight. She was Paula’s sister, and she desperately wanted to save her.
But even as she grabbed her sister, ready to pull Paula out of the discolored water and perform CPR to try to save her, she knew it was too late. Paula’s skin was abnormally cold and clammy.
And there was no heartbeat. Not even a faint flutter.
Paula was dead and had been for a number of hours.
“Oh, Paula, Paula, what did you do?” Destiny grieved, sinking down to the floor beside the bathtub. Water soaked into her clothing. She didn’t care.
Because there was no one there and she had never felt so very alone in her life, Destiny allowed herself to break down for a moment.
Just for a moment.
She buried her face against the knees she’d brought up to her chest and sobbed as if her heart was breaking. Because it was.
Chapter 1
If police work wasn’t for all intents and purposes the family business—doubly so now that he, along with the rest of his siblings and his father, had irrefutable proof that they comprised what amounted to the long-lost branch of the Cavanaugh family—Detective Logan Cavanaugh, known until recently as Logan Cavelli, would have been sorely tempted to give serious thought to another career choice.
Granted, Logan would have been the first to admit that he loved being a cop. Loved the idea that in some small way, he was fighting the good fight, righting wrongs and, along with his brothers and sisters, giving Aurora’s everyday citizens that thin blue line that they knew was out there to protect them.
But there were times when the hours that went along with being a detective just about killed him. In the absolute sense, they were the same kind of hours that a doctor was expected to keep.
Doctors and police detectives were always expected to be on call—except that a doctor made a hell of a lot more money than he made, Logan thought darkly as he now drove—alone—to the address his lieutenant had handed to him when the man had torpedoed the very eventful evening he had planned for himself and his utterly luscious date.
One minute.
One lousy little minute. Sixty seconds and counting down, that’s all he’d had left to his shift and then this evening with all its sensual promise would have become a reality.
He had already powered down his computer because Stacy, displaying a rare flair for punctuality, had just waltzed through the squad room door and had instantly made him the envy of every other breathing male in the vicinity.
Stacy, with the hips from heaven and the sinful mouth, who simply by walking across the floor could cause a eunuch to have lustful thoughts, was his date tonight. He was taking her out for dinner, dancing and a hot night of even hotter sex. The blond would-be model was his kind of woman. Gorgeous, passionate and totally uninterested in a permanent relationship.
Tonight had all the makings of an absolutely perfect evening.
But then his lieutenant had summoned him away from the doorway just as he was a hair’s breadth away from being free and clear and making it into the hall.
No, that wasn’t actually true, he thought in resignation, his hands tightening on the steering wheel until his knuckles were all but straining against his skin. Even if he had been in the middle of that passionate evening, enjoying all of Stacy’s fabulously assembled attributes, his cell would have rung, calling him away from the ecstasy that shimmered before him, beckoning him onward because duty called.
When you’re the next one up, you’re the next one up. It was a simple, albeit hard, fact of life that went along with carrying a shield and a weapon.
So, instead of hot filet mignon, his dinner tonight would probably be the last couple of slices of the cold, leftover pizza in his refrigerator. And instead of a hot woman in his bed, he’d be sleeping alone tonight.
That was, if he got any sleep at all. A homicide detective with four years of experience under his belt, he’d learned that some cases unfurled slowly, inch by painful inch, while others ran you right into the ground from the moment you stepped into the crime scene arena and silently pledged to solve whatever needed solving.
Daylight had receded and the evening was making itself comfortable. He drove, looking for the right building, still wishing that he’d been engaged in a job that defined specific hours where the end of the day was the end of the day.
Wishing wouldn’t make it so. Besides, Stacy, pouting prettily, had perked up at the promise of a rain check.
He laughed softly to himself, wondering if the woman thought that rain was actually involved in a rain check. He wouldn’t put it past her. Luckily, it wasn’t her brain that attracted him. After having to be on his toes all the time, it was nice to kick back sometimes and just let his brain rest.
Pulling up before the right apartment building, Logan saw that there were absolutely no empty spaces available along the long block. He debated driving to the parking structure on the next block, but he decided instead to double-park his vehicle in the fervent hope that his part in this wouldn’t take all that long.
From the sketchy details he’d been given, it sounded pretty much like a cut-and-dried suicide—end of story. Once he verified that it was, maybe he could still even get hold of Stacy and at least get to enjoy the second half of the evening—that was, after all, the only thing that either one of them actually wanted from the other. Hot sex, enjoyable and a few minutes respite from the world they dealt with on a regular basis.
The thought made him smile as he got out of the car and locked it behind him.
The apartment in question was on the third floor. Once he got off the elevator, Logan found he didn’t need to acquaint himself with the floor’s layout or the way the apartment numbers were arranged to locate the one where his services were needed. The yellow tape and the stoic police officer standing guard did that for him.
Vaguely recognizing the weary-looking older officer, he nodded at the man. Their paths had probably crossed at one point or another, Logan thought.
“My dad here yet?”
It was actually meant as a rhetorical question. This was the tail end of the day shift, but his father, the head of the CSI day lab, was dedicated beyond belief. He was the one who had instilled his work ethic in him and his siblings long before they had discovered that they were related to the Cavanaughs.
Besides, there was all this yellow tape across the front of the entrance, a sure sign that his father and some of the team who worked for him were in there, carefully documenting and preserving everything with such precision it would have absolutely stunned the average mind.
The officer, Dale Hanlon, shook his head. “No, not yet.”
Logan stopped, surprised as he turned to regard the officer. Unless there were multiple crime scenes happening at once—something that had yet to occur in Aurora—in the past year—his father had taken to being present with his team at each crime scene that they processed.
This wasn’t making any sense to him. “Then who put up all this yellow tape?” he asked.
“I did.”
The low, controlled female voice came from behind him. The vague thought that the voice was more suited to an intimate dinner than a crime scene crossed Logan’s mind as he turned around again.
Logan found himself looking into the saddest blue eyes he’d ever seen.
They were also, quite possibly, the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, which was saying a great deal considering that the Cavanaughs were fairly littered with members who had blue eyes of all hues and shades.
The eyes were set in a striking, heart-shaped face that would have easily launched a thousand love songs, he couldn’t help thinking. Sometimes, Logan decided, this job did have its perks.
“Are you part of the crime scene investigation unit?” Logan heard himself asking as he quickly assessed the slender, pale-looking blonde standing before him. “Or do you just have a thing for crime scene tape?” he quipped wryly, trying to lighten the moment. She seemed much too serious for someone so young. He knew this job, especially this part of the job, could really get to people if they didn’t take any precautions and insulate themselves properly.
His flippant manner caught Destiny off guard for a second. Since the officer at the door hadn’t tried to turn the man away, that had to mean that he was with the Aurora police force.
Terrific. Just her luck. They’d sent a brash, cocky detective who looked as if he was in love with the sound of his own voice and, most likely, with the image he saw in his bathroom mirror each morning. Dark-haired, green-eyed, he was as handsome as they came, and she was certain that he knew it.
She was familiar with the type, and right now it was the last thing she needed. She needed a professional detective, not a male model.
“I’m with the crime scene investigation unit,” she told him, her voice low and remarkably stoic. She surprised herself.
It was all she could do to hold it together. Part of Destiny still didn’t believe that any of this was actually happening. The other part felt as if she was slowly slipping into shock and would, at any moment, just completely lose it.
You can’t. If you do, you won’t be able to help Paula.
The moment the thought formed, it struck Destiny as ironic. After all, at this point nothing would help Paula. Nothing was going to bring her back.
Destiny struggled to keep her angry tears in check.
Logan nodded, taking the attractive woman’s information at face value. “I guess this is just an open-and-shut case,” he surmised. “A suicide,” he added, telling her what the lieutenant had told him. Then, his mouth curving in a particularly captivating smile, he asked, “How is it that I’ve never seen you before?” He would have certainly remembered someone who looked like her. He had a feeling that if she smiled, she could light up a room. Even somber, there was something exceedingly attractive and compelling about her. “Are you new to the team?”
She didn’t bother answering his last question. At another time and place, she might have been more than mildly interested in his attention. Destiny wasn’t averse to having an occasional good time, as long as no promises were exchanged or expected. She was married to her work, and most of the men she’d encountered felt that they should come first in a woman’s life, not second.
Right now, all her energy was focused on not breaking down and, more important than that, on finding who had done this to her sister.
“It’s not a suicide,” Destiny informed the detective firmly.
About to walk to where he could view the deceased’s body, Logan turned instead and focused on the intense crime scene investigator. She sounded as if there was no room for argument.
“Why?” he asked, the detective in him pushing the playboy far into the background. “Did you find something that would indicate that the woman was murdered?”
“Not yet,” Destiny answered between clenched teeth. “But I will.”
Okay, he was officially confused, Logan thought. Was there some sort of an agenda he was missing? Exactly what did this woman mean by “not yet”? What did she know that he didn’t? He didn’t like playing catch-up.
“If there are no indications that it’s not a suicide, what makes you think that it isn’t?” he asked the shapely blonde.
“Because she wouldn’t commit suicide,” Destiny informed him heatedly.
Really curious now, Logan looked at the young woman who, he realized, had more going on, even without the aid of painted-on clothing, than Stacy ever did. She didn’t reek of raw sex, but there was a subtle promise there that intrigued him. A lot.
Since the department paid him to solve cases, not ruminate on beautiful women who said baseless things, Logan forced himself to focus on the wild claim the crime scene investigator had just made and not the fact that the words had come out of nearly perfect lips.
“And you know this because …?”
A very tempting chin shot up like a silent challenge. “Because she’s my sister.”
It took him a second to absorb that. “You weren’t called in, were you?” Logan guessed.
No, she hadn’t been. She’d come here looking for answers and had wound up face-to-face with a dreadful question: Who killed Paula?
“I did the calling,” she told him.
As if in a bad dream, once she knew that Paula was beyond resuscitating and she’d stopped crying, she’d pulled herself together and called her boss, even though protocol would have had her calling 911 first.
The sound of Sean Cavanaugh’s voice had almost made her lose it again, but Destiny had managed to hold herself together enough to describe what she’d found when she’d walked into her sister’s apartment. Sean in turn had set everything else in motion, promising to be there as soon as he possibly could. He told her not to leave.
As if she could.
With no knowledge of what had taken place between his father and the crime scene investigator, Logan had a different take on things.
“You can’t be here,” he told her, transforming from a devil-may-care man who enjoyed his share of the nightlife to a homicide detective who was considered to be damn good at his job.
Logan saw the woman’s slender shoulders stiffen as if she’d been jabbed with a hot poker. She reminded him of a soldier, galvanized in order to withstand whatever came her way.
The flash of anger in her eyes was almost mesmerizing to him.
“The hell I can’t,” she snapped. “She’s my baby sister and the only family I have left. Had left,” Destiny amended, trying hard not to allow the words to choke off her air supply. “Somebody killed her, and I intend to find out who.”
Having brothers and sisters of his own, Logan could easily relate to the way she felt. But she still needed to go. “I get it, but leave it up to—”
“To who?” Destiny demanded. “To you? To the professionals?” She guessed at the word he was about to use. “I am one of the professionals.”
That might be true, but there was another, bigger factor that she was apparently missing—or deliberately ignoring. “You’re also personally involved—”
“You bet I am,” Destiny snapped, her eyes flashing again, “and no rules and regulations are going to make me stand on the sidelines like some clueless civilian, waiting for someone to find something that would point to my sister’s killer—especially when they’re not even going to be looking.”
“Now wait a minute—”
No, she wasn’t going to “wait a minute.” And she certainly wasn’t going to allow him to snow her with rhetoric.
“A minute ago, you were all ready to write this off as a suicide. You were willing to go with what you saw—or thought you saw.”
Only up to a point. Where did she get off, criticizing his work if she hadn’t seen him in action? Gorgeous or not, she needed to be told a few things and put in her place.
“Not if the autopsy contradicts the idea of a suicide.”
Autopsy.
The very word brought up a chilling scenario with it. Someone cutting up her little sister, reducing Paula to a mass of body organs examined, weighed, catalogued and then impersonally stuffed back into her body like wrinkled tissue paper that has served its purpose.
Suddenly, Destiny could hardly bear the wave of pain she felt.
Logan saw the horror that washed over the woman’s fine-boned features before she apparently got herself under control again. Observing her, he had to admit he felt really sorry for the woman. He knew how he would have reacted if that was Bridget, or Kendra, or Kari in the next room.
No rules or orders would have kept him on the sidelines. If he couldn’t have been part of the investigation outright, he would have found a way to conduct his own investigation covertly until he found answers that satisfied him.
Until he found the killer.
He felt a budding respect as he looked at the woman for the first time, not assessing her comely features but taking measure of the person who existed beneath. Thinking of what she was feeling and taking stock of what had to be crossing her mind right now.
Logan relented, backing off from his initial stand. “Look, what if I promise to keep you filled in? Will that be enough for you?”
The moment the words emerged from his mouth, he knew they had come out wrong. He made it sound as if he was trying to dismiss her. He wasn’t doing anything of the kind.
Destiny tossed her head, anger and sadness mingling with the very stubborn streak that had seen her through a less than typical childhood, one that would have conquered a lesser person. And she had been a child at the time.
“No, sorry, not good enough,” she fired back.
“He’s right, you know.”
She didn’t have to turn around and look to know who was behind her. But she turned around anyway. Turned around and looked up at the man she respected and secretly regarded as the father she hadn’t had for all these many years, not since he’d walked out on her, Paula and their mother.
“I thought you’d be on my side,” she said to Sean. She was more than a little disappointed to hear him taking the side of company policy.
“I am always on your side,” Sean reminded her kindly. “But the rules are clear about working on a case that you’re personally involved in.”
She knew all the rules backward and forward. She also knew they weren’t going to stop her from working this investigation.
“Sean, please,” she implored hoarsely, her voice brimming with emotion. She laid a hand on Sean’s arm in mute supplication.
“Of course,” Sean continued loftily, as if she hadn’t said anything, “you are a grown woman and I can’t be expected to tie you up and throw you into some corner if you happen to do some poking around into the present case behind my back.” He saw his son staring at him, undoubtedly surprised at this break with protocol. “Oh, like you and those brothers and sisters of yours never bent a single rule,” he mocked.
“Not saying we didn’t,” Logan replied to his father, deliberately flying above this minefield. “But I’ve got to say that I’m really surprised that you’re considering it.”
“Not considering it,” Sean corrected, putting down his fully loaded case that he meticulously organized at least once a week. “But well, what happens when I’m not looking, happens,” he told his son innocently. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe the actual scene of the crime is in through there?” He pointed to the bedroom, looking to Destiny for confirmation.
Destiny only half nodded. “That’s the way to the bathroom,” she confirmed. “Whether or not that’s the actual scene of the crime remains to be seen.”
Sean gave her an encouraging smile. “An open mind is the best way to approach anything,” he agreed.
With that, he walked ahead of his son and the young woman to process this particular crime scene.
Chapter 2
Following Sean Cavanaugh through the bedroom and into the bathroom where her sister’s body was, Destiny could feel every single bone in her own body stiffening as the battle began all over again. Her protective instincts warred with the ones she had developed as a crime scene investigator.
The latter dictated adherence to the first cardinal rule of investigation: that nothing was to be touched, nothing was to be moved. It was of the utmost importance that the scene be preserved just as it was when the deceased died. This had to be done to piece together facts leading up to that person’s final moments. And, with that, the identity of the killer, if there was one.
But Destiny’s protective instincts were just as deeply rooted within her, if not more so. She was the older sister, the one who had always looked out for Paula.
Yeah, and how’s that going for you? Destiny silently mocked herself.
Being the older sister hadn’t been easy. Though she had never doubted her sister’s love for her, Paula had fought her all the way, desperately wanting to assert her independence.
“I’m a big girl now, Destiny. You can’t hover over me forever.”
Destiny could feel the corners of her eyes beginning to sting again as she struggled for the umpteenth time to hold back her tears.
Yeah, well, you would have done better if I had hovered, Destiny couldn’t help thinking now. There was no doubt in her mind that Paula would be alive right now if she had hovered.
If.
Her protective instincts had made her want to cover Paula up, to give her sister some small semblance of modesty and dignity by draping something over her—at least a towel. She didn’t want to leave her where everyone coming into the beige-and-blue-tiled bathroom could see her like this, utterly naked and exposed.
As if sensing her turmoil, Sean told her, “I promise I’ll make this as quick as I can, Destiny.”
She was grateful to him for his kindness. Pressing her lips together, Destiny nodded, doing her best to smile her thanks and succeeding only marginally.
“Thank you,” she said hoarsely.
Logan, who had entered behind his father and the victim’s sister, squatted down now, his attention focused on the opened cell phone that apparently had slipped from the dead woman’s hand just as life had ebbed away from her.
The cell phone was in the open position and it was still turned on. As he crouched closer to it, Logan could see that there was a text message on the screen. One last message just before death had found her.
Was it a last-minute regret and a plea for help? Or was this intended to be a virtual version of a suicide note?
Using his handkerchief to keep from getting his fingerprints on the phone or contaminating any prints besides the victim’s on the device, Logan was about to pick it up when he stopped and looked over toward his father. “Did you already take a picture of this?”
“Tagged and photographed,” Sean answered as he continued examining Destiny’s sister.
Logan lifted the phone and looked at the screen. There were only three words in the text message: He left me.
“We need to find out who this number belongs to,” Logan said, thinking out loud as he examined the cell number the message had been sent to.
“Not necessary,” Destiny told him stoically.
Each word she uttered felt as if it scraped along an incredibly dry tongue. Her whole mouth felt like a desert in the midst of a seven-year drought. And she was having trouble getting air into her lungs. Part of her was numb, the other was almost on fire.
“She texted you?” Logan guessed, glancing toward her and reading her body language.
Right now, the woman appeared to be shut down tighter than Fort Knox. Logan absently wondered what it would take to loosen her up, then dismissed the thought since right now, knowing that wasn’t going to help him. Thinking of her as a woman was completely out of line. She was the victim’s sister and his father’s assistant, nothing else.
At least, not right now.
Logan caught himself hoping that there would be a later.
Destiny heard the detective’s voice as if it had originated in an echo chamber. It sounded as if it was coming at her from a great distance.
She blinked, forcing herself to stay focused. If she let her mind wander, she wouldn’t make it out of this room without coming apart. She’d already cried once. That was all she could afford to grieve. She had work to do.
“Yes, it’s my number. I called her back almost immediately after she sent the message, but she didn’t pick up.” She pressed her lips together, taking a breath before continuing. Her voice sounded strained. “I’d been calling her all day without a response, so I got worried.”
“Why?” Logan asked. “Was she unstable? Were you afraid that she was likely to harm herself?”
Destiny stared at him. What was he talking about? He didn’t know Paula. He had no right to his assumptions. She took offense at the implication behind his questions.
“I got worried because I’m her sister,” she retorted angrily. “Because Paula normally keeps in touch. And she doesn’t send short text messages.” The three-word text was out of character for Paula. “She goes on and on, whether it’s a phone call, a text or in person. My sister is—was,” she corrected herself painfully, “not a person of a few words. She never said anything in three words that she could say in forty.”
He thought of pointing out that distraught people, especially people about to commit suicide, didn’t always conform to their normal behavior, but he had a feeling she wasn’t in the mood to be contradicted.
Instead, he focused on another piece of the puzzle. “Who’s this ‘him’ she’s referring to?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Destiny took a deep breath, angry with herself for not having pushed when Paula had opted to keep the man’s name a secret. If she’d badgered Paula enough, she knew Paula would have finally caved in. Why hadn’t she pushed? Why had she just elected to respect her sister’s boundaries? At the very least, this mystery man of Paula’s could give them insight to her frame of mind the last time he saw her as he left.
If he’d left her, Destiny amended, ruling out nothing.
“You don’t know?” Logan echoed, more than mildly surprised. “Then you two weren’t close?” That was the only conclusion he could draw.
“No, we were,” Destiny insisted. “Very close.” They had been that way once and they had gotten that way again just in the past couple of years.
“Then why don’t you know the name of the guy your sister was seeing?”
Because I’m an idiot.
“Paula was a little superstitious. She said she didn’t want to jinx the relationship by saying anything about it too soon.”
God, that sounded so lame, so childish now that she said it out loud, Destiny thought, on the edge of exasperated despair. Why hadn’t she pushed? Insisted? Maybe if she’d known more of the details, she could have somehow prevented this. Even though she didn’t believe in her heart of hearts that her sister had done this, had committed suicide, a tiny part of her was afraid she had.
“All she’d tell me was that he was someone ‘important.’ And, that for now, he wanted to keep their relationship ‘special’ by keeping it out of the public eye. Apparently, I was part of the public eye,” Destiny said with barely controlled frustration.
Most likely, the guy was married, Logan thought, and when he’d decided to go back to his wife, the victim had killed herself.
“And you don’t think that this is a suicide?” Logan asked again. It was obvious from his tone that he felt that the evidence they’d reviewed so far clearly pointed in that direction.
“No,” Destiny said with feeling. “If this ‘important’ bastard had left her, she wouldn’t have killed herself. Paula was the type to have gone upside his head, to have raised a stink, not taken the breakup docilely, given up all hope and killed herself.” She raised her chin defiantly as she added, “I know my sister. That’s just not like her.”
Did anyone really know anyone else? Logan wondered. Of late, since the big revelation that had jolted his family down to their roots, he’d faced that question more than once.
“That’s what you think,” Logan pointed out. And, as far as he was concerned, there was an entire world of difference between prejudiced perception and actual fact.
“No,” Destiny said flatly. “That’s what I know. My sister believed in revenge,” she was quick to add, seeing the suspicious light coming into the detective’s all-but-magnetic green eyes. “And by that, I mean she would have dolled herself up, found the first good-looking male she could and deliberately shown up somewhere where she knew that ‘Mr. Special’ would most likely be. Then she would have flaunted the fact that she was having an exceptionally good time with someone new and gorgeous. Paula was not the kind to just give up,” she insisted. “She was stubborn that way.”
How long was it going to take to get used to referring to Paula in the past tense? Destiny wondered, her heart aching in her chest.
“I take it stubbornness runs in the family?” Logan surmised, watching her. There was just a hint of an appreciative smile on his lips.
Her blue eyes narrowed into slits. “Damn straight it does.”
“You might be right,” Sean interjected as if there was no other conversation taking place. Having completed his preliminary examination of the dead woman, he straightened up.
“About which part?” Logan asked, just taking it for granted that his father was talking to him and not to the sexy, headstrong woman before him.
Instead of answering his son immediately, Sean focused his attention on the person in the room who needed him the most.
“Was your sister right-handed?” he asked Destiny.
She shook her head. “No, Paula was left-handed. Why?” Had he found something to substantiate her gut feeling that her sister hadn’t taken her own life? Without realizing it, Destiny began to pray.
“Just trying to get my facts straight,” Sean said thoughtfully, never one to give away anything too soon. Pausing a moment longer, he then said, “I don’t believe she killed herself.”
Yes!
The relief that flooded through her limbs just about took Destiny’s breath away. At least she wasn’t going to have to fight everyone tooth and nail about this. If the head of the crime lab backed her up, the battle over that at least was over. Now the major one began: finding Paula’s killer.
“Thank you,” she said to Sean. The words came out on a nearly breathless sigh.
While he knew that his father wouldn’t just say something like that to put his assistant at ease, Logan still wanted proof.
“What makes you say that?” he asked his father.
“When a person slashes their wrists, depending on whether they’re right-handed or left-handed, the cut is deeper on the opposite wrist since they’re using their good hand.”
If the person followed regular procedure, Logan thought. Maybe this one hadn’t. “She might have slashed her right wrist first,” Logan suggested. “That would have made her right hand weaker when she was delivering the final cut.”
“True,” Sean allowed.
Concerned, Destiny immediately asked, “Then you’re changing your mind?”
Again, rather than answering directly, Sean turned toward his son, opting for a demonstration. “If you were to slash your wrists, how would you go about it?” he asked.
Logan firmly believed that there wasn’t anything in the world that would cause him to give up all hope and just apathetically end his life.
“I wouldn’t,” Logan said flatly.
“Good to know,” his father murmured. “But if you did, if you put yourself in the place of someone who’d lost all hope and given up wanting to live,” Sean proposed, “how would you slash your wrists?”
Logan honestly didn’t know what his father was getting at. “The usual way,” he answered with a careless shrug.
“Show me,” Sean urged. Taking a pen out of his breast pocket, he handed it to Logan. “Pretend this is a knife. Show me how you’d go about ‘slashing’ your wrists if you were committing suicide.”
With another, somewhat more pronounced shrug, Logan took the pen from his father and then, holding it in his right hand, traced a slightly slanted line from left to right across his left wrist. And then, changing hands, he took the pen into his left hand and reversed the process, “slashing” his right wrist from right to left with the imaginary knife. Both times the lines he created were slightly slanted, going from higher to lower.
“Okay, consider them slashed,” Logan said, handing the pen back to his father. His curiosity had been piqued. “Now what?”
“Now you’d bleed out,” Sean said matter-of-factly. “All right, keeping your methodical procedure in mind, I want you to take a look at Paula’s wrists,” he told both his son and his assistant. “What do you see?”
Each wrist had a long, deep cut going across it. “Slashes,” Logan answered.
Destiny narrowed her eyes, distancing herself from the actual person in the bathtub and focusing only on the victim’s wrists. She looked intently at the cuts that had caused her sister to die.
After scrutinizing the two cuts, she felt no more enlightened than she had been at the outset.
Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t—”
“Look carefully,” Sean repeated, cutting her off.
“I did,” she protested.
And then she saw it, saw what Sean was trying to point out without actually physically doing it. Her eyes widened and she looked at him.
“The slashes are both going in the same direction!” But there was more than just that, she realized. “And they’re both upside down.”
Instead of slanting slightly at the top and then dipping down as it reached the opposite side, each cut seemed to go from the bottom to the top, left to right, on both wrists.
“This is too awkward,” Destiny concluded, her excitement growing. And then she repeated what she had been maintaining all along. “Paula couldn’t have done this to herself. Someone else had to have done it to her.”
He could see his father trying to spare his assistant and make her feel better, but there were other matters to consider, Logan thought.
“There’s no sign of a struggle,” he pointed out, then continued, “There’s no huge amount of water along the perimeter of the old-fashioned tub, leaving the actual tub low, as if there’d been a wild, last-minute struggle. There are no outstanding bruises visible on the victim’s body, and her long, salon-applied nails all seem to be intact. They wouldn’t have been if she was fighting for her life.”
“There wouldn’t be any struggle if the victim was drugged,” Sean told his son, his voice as mild as if he were discussing the garden section of the Sunday paper. Turning, Sean pointed to the wine goblet he had already photographed and that now stood, bagged, on the bathroom floor exactly where he had found it. “A simple analysis can tell us about that.”
Logan still didn’t see that as proof. “A lot of suicides build up their courage with a drink first. Maybe the victim wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t experience a last-minute surge of regret that might cause her to stop what she was doing.” He looked at his father. “Despondence can do that to you.”
“Maybe to you,” Destiny fired back. “But not to Paula. She did not kill herself. I’d stake my badge on it,” she insisted.
“Besides,” Sean interjected, “there are the cuts to her wrists. Our killer obviously slipped up there.” Returning the items he’d taken out previously, as well as packing up the samples he’d taken into his case, Sean glanced at Destiny. “Are you absolutely sure your sister never mentioned this man’s name? Dropped a hint, used initials? Something like that?”
To each suggestion, Destiny could only shake her head no. Each time she did so, she felt her frustration growing larger and larger.
“No.”
The truth of it was that despite her initial concerns, she’d been really hopeful that Paula was finally looking to settle into a lasting relationship. And due to that, she hadn’t wanted to cause any waves by hounding her sister for details.
“And you didn’t press her?” Logan asked incredulously. What kind of a woman didn’t ask for details? he couldn’t help wondering. Was it because she was too wrapped up in her own love life? Was there some guy she was going to go running home to, to cry on his shoulder?
From out of nowhere, Logan felt just the slightest prick of jealousy. He shrugged it off, thinking he was just frustrated because he’d had to break his date with Stacy.
Destiny could only shrug impotently. “I figured she’d tell me when she was ready.”
He couldn’t help staring at her. Was she for real? If this had been one of his sisters, the other two would have been all over her until she finally broke. The life expectancy of a secret in the household where he’d grown up had been about a day and a half—if the one with the secret was in a coma.
“Wow, a woman with no curiosity,” he marveled, only half in jest. “I thought that was like, you know, an urban myth or something. Kind of like a unicorn,” he tagged on.
If nothing else, the man was mixing his metaphors. He was also being colossally annoying.
“Unicorns don’t wander around urban areas,” she pointed out, irritated at the detective’s flippant manner and not bothering to hide the fact, even if he was Sean’s son. Maybe he was adopted, she thought. Her eyes narrowed as she pinned him with a glare. “Are you going to take this seriously or not?” she asked.
“I’m officially ruling this a murder,” Sean announced, interrupting what appeared to be an argument in the making—he knew for a fact that Logan didn’t like being challenged. “Don’t worry. He’ll take it seriously now,” he assured his assistant with a note of finality in his voice.
She was overreacting. Her sister’s murder—just finding Paula this way—was making her lose her perspective. If she continued down this road, then she really would wind up being thrown off the case.
And soon.
At the very least, she wasn’t any good to anyone if she unraveled this way.
Destiny took in a deep, shaky breath, getting herself back under control. Her spine snapped into place, ramrod straight.
“Sorry,” she said to Sean.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” Sean told her warmly. Placing a fatherly arm around her shoulders, he gently escorted Destiny from the room.
The sound of fresh activity was heard coming from the living room. The M.E.’s team had just arrived, pushing a gurney between them.
Nodding at the duo, Sean said, “The victim’s in the bathtub. She’s had a preliminary workup and is ready to go.”
“It’s a suicide, right?” one of the men asked, looking at the sheet attached to his clipboard. The latter was lying on top of the gurney.
“No, it’s a homicide,” Logan corrected, answering for his father.
He wasn’t oblivious to the relieved smile that Destiny shot him. Though it lasted only half a second, he’d been right. Her smile did have the makings to light up a room.
Hearing what Logan said, one of the two men sighed and shook his head. “It’s going to be another long night,” he anticipated, addressing his words to no one in particular.
“C’mon, don’t just stand there and make it any longer,” the other man prodded.
Pushing the gurney before them, they entered the next room.
Once they were gone, Sean turned to Destiny. “I should be the one who’s saying he’s sorry,” he said to her, continuing what he was saying before the two assistants from the M.E.’s office had entered the apartment. “And I am. I am deeply sorry for your loss,” he emphasized. “And we will find the person responsible for this, Destiny,” he said. “I give you my word.”
Destiny blinked back her tears. It felt as if she’d been fighting them all along. Her supervisor wasn’t making things any easier for her.
“I believe you,” she murmured, her voice hardly above a whisper. Any louder and she knew she would risk breaking down entirely.
Again.
To the best of Logan’s knowledge, it was the first time he’d ever heard his father make a promise that he wasn’t a hundred percent certain ahead of time that he could back up.
This assistant had to mean a lot to him, he concluded, then couldn’t help wondering why.
Chapter 3
“Were you two on the outs?” Logan asked Destiny as his father continued processing the rest of the small apartment.
Why did he keep coming back to that?
“No. She was my only family. We were close—as close as two people who lived two different, busy lives could be,” she qualified, emphasizing the word busy. “We didn’t get together as much as I would have liked, but that couldn’t have been helped.” Her eyes narrowed slightly as she regarded Logan, looking for some kind of an indication as to what was really on his mind. She began to suspect that he wasn’t the typical vapid, shallow pretty boy. There was substance, a trait she’d always found far sexier than looks.
But right now, she was in a place where things like that didn’t matter.
“Why are you asking?” she asked.
He answered her question with a question. “Is there any reason you can think of why she wouldn’t have told you who she was seeing?”
Logan was still having a lot of trouble swallowing the scenario the woman’s sister had given him. All three of his sisters not only knew everything there was to know about each other’s boyfriends, or, in Bridget’s case, her fiancé, they were also aware of their friends’ current dates. He couldn’t fathom a woman who was willingly oblivious to that sort of information—and actually content to remain that way.
Suppressing a sigh, she said, “Probably to avoid hearing me tell her to go slow and to be careful.” She saw the question in the detective’s eyes. Under another set of circumstances, they might have even been intriguing eyes. Right now, they were just annoyingly probing. “My sister doesn’t—didn’t,” she corrected herself, hating the fact that she had to, “have the greatest track record when it came to picking men. They were all very good-looking on the outside. On the inside, not so much.”
Holding her hand out, she waffled it to indicate just how much each of the previous men in her sister’s life had deviated from the straight-and-narrow path. There hadn’t been a decent one in the lot.
“So in other words, she didn’t give you any details about who she was seeing because she didn’t want you to be judgmental,” Logan concluded succinctly.
She nodded, wishing with all her heart that she hadn’t come down as hard on Paula over the last one as she had. Not that he didn’t deserve every insulting adjective she had hurled at his memory. Slick, charming, with a Southern drawl, Bo Wilkins had managed to deplete half of Paula’s bank account—granted, that didn’t exactly amount to a king’s ransom, but it was still Paula’s money—before just vanishing off the face of the earth.
She’d begged Paula to let her know the next time she gave away her heart, because she’d said she intended to run a check on whomever the next Romeo was. If no prior arrests came up, then at least her sister would have a fighting chance of keeping the fillings in her teeth.
Paula hadn’t found that funny, she recalled. And she deliberately hadn’t said anything about meeting someone new—until she’d been pinned down.
That was when Paula had told her that she didn’t want to say anything yet because she didn’t want to jinx the relationship. And, if it became serious, then she would say something.
Given that, Destiny had seen no reason to push.
But apparently, it had been serious. Which meant that Paula had lied to her, Destiny realized with a sharp pang. It obviously had to have been serious if Paula had been despondent enough to text that message to her.
If she texted that message, a little voice in Destiny’s head whispered.
Her eyes widened as the thought sank in.
What if Paula hadn’t even been the one to text that message? What if her killer had? The same killer who had botched the appearance of a suicide by slashing her wrists upside down.
Trying not to get ahead of herself, she turned toward Sean. “We have to process her cell phone for any fingerprints on the keypad that aren’t hers. The guy probably wore gloves, but maybe he got careless….”
Destiny’s voice trailed off as she made eye contact with her supervisor. He wasn’t saying anything, just letting her talk, but she could see by the expression on his face that he was already way ahead of her. He always seemed to be two steps ahead of everyone.
“You already thought of that,” she said, nodding her head.
“We’re on the same page,” Sean told her kindly. “Same page that Logan’s on,” he said, nodding toward his son.
Feeling anxious and yet dull-witted at the same time, an area she had never inhabited before, Destiny turned toward the detective, curious why he wasn’t saying anything.
The answer to that was simple. Because he wasn’t standing there anymore.
“Cavanaugh?” she called, raising her voice.
“In here,” Logan answered, his voice floating back to her from the back of the apartment.
Apparently a thought had occurred to him and he’d gone back into the bedroom to look at something, or for something.
Actually, the man had gone back to the bathroom, Destiny realized as she followed the sound of the detective’s deep voice.
As she entered the bedroom, she had to shift to one side. The medical examiner’s team had slipped Paula’s body into that one-size-fits-all black body bag and was now wheeling her sister back out. Once outside the building, they’d put her into the coroner’s van they’d driven over here.
Paula didn’t like the color black, Destiny recalled with a pang. It was the only color missing from her meticulously arranged wardrobe.
“Black is the color of death, Destiny. I don’t want it anywhere near me.”
It is now, pumpkin. It is now, Destiny thought, feeling her heart twist inside of her.
Walking into the bathroom, painfully aware that her sister was no longer here—no longer anywhere—she found Logan standing before the medicine cabinet. The door was open and the detective was peering at the shelves. He was obviously taking inventory of what was inside. She didn’t exactly care for the thoughtful frown she saw on his face.
Now what?
Bracing herself, thinking that she would have to defend her sister again, Destiny forced herself to ask, “What?”
Logan read the generic name imprinted on the container’s label again. This put a crimp in the woman’s theory. He held the container up so that she could see it, as well.
“This was just filled,” he told her.
She had no idea what “this” was but had a feeling she wouldn’t be happy once she heard the answer.
Even so, though she knew Logan had to do it, she resented this man’s prying into her sister’s life. And, by proxy, into her life. Resented the lack of understanding and compassion in his voice.
Granted, as a good detective, he was supposed to be impartial, but keeping this kind of a distance between himself and the victim didn’t help him understand the kind of person her sister had been. Didn’t make him fiercely want to solve this tragic crime because the world was that much the lesser for the loss of her.
Taking yet another breath, Destiny was satisfied that her voice wouldn’t crack. Only then did she finally answer him. “Yes, so?”
Still holding the bottle up, he shook it. Hard. There was no sound to correspond with the movement, no pills being disturbed and forced to rattle around the small container.
“So it’s empty,” he pointed out needlessly. “According to the date it was filled, there should be approximately twenty-five pills in here. There aren’t.” He looked at her. “What do you want to bet that toxicology is going to find that those pills are in your sister’s system? Her wrists didn’t need to be slashed,” he told her. “Your sister swallowed enough of these things to have killed a small horse.”
“Or was forced to swallow,” Destiny interjected. She wasn’t going to let him just forget about what his father had pointed out. Evidence that pointed to her sister being murdered.
“There’s no sign of a struggle, remember? Maybe, before the full effects of the pills kicked in, your sister actually did try to slash her wrists but she was so loopy from the pills that she did an awkward, botched job of it.”
Taking the vial from him, Destiny turned the container around so she could read the label. When she did, the name of the drug was vaguely familiar. Her sister was taking prescription sleeping pills, one of the newer ones on the market.
“Ever since we were little, my sister has had trouble sleeping. When these came on the market—” she nodded at the empty container “—and she tried them, she was overjoyed. She’d finally found something that worked. But she never took more than the prescribed dosage,” Destiny maintained firmly. “It wasn’t because she was a saint,” she added angrily, reading the skepticism in Logan’s eyes. “She just didn’t want to feel drugged in the morning. The idea of falling asleep behind the wheel while driving to work terrified her,” she emphasized.
Logan took back the container, intending on giving it to his father to send to toxicology.
“Still, over time, people develop a tolerance for medications. Maybe she found that one pill wasn’t enough for her anymore and she took two—and then more. Or maybe she just wanted to sleep forever because her boyfriend dumped her.”
He was back to that again. What was he, Johnny One-note? she thought angrily. How many ways did she have to say this before it finally sank into the thick skull of his?
“No,” Destiny insisted with feeling. “Paula wouldn’t have done that. Someone killed my sister,” she said, enunciating each word separately. “I don’t know who it was, but I do know that Paula didn’t do it herself—accidentally or otherwise,” Destiny added in case he was going to suggest that next.
“All right,” Logan relented.
His father’s lead assistant wasn’t about to come around to his side or even remotely entertain the idea that her sister had committed suicide. And since his father seemed to believe that someone else had delivered the slash marks to the young woman’s wrists, for the time being he’d go along with the popular theory.
Besides, he really didn’t enjoy upsetting her, considering that she was still dealing with the shock of finding her sister dead.
“We’ll approach it that way for now.” Leaving the bathroom, still holding the prescription container with his handkerchief wrapped around it, Logan handed it to his father.
“The pills are probably all in her stomach,” he told him not as his father, but as the head of the crime scene lab.
“You’re most likely right,” Sean agreed. “Whoever killed her probably slipped the pills into her drink. That way there’d be no resistance to what he was going to do next.” He lowered his voice so that only Logan could hear. “Poor thing never stood a chance.”
Logan nodded vaguely. He wasn’t doing anyone any good just standing here, he decided, and announced, “I’m going to canvass the floor, see if anyone heard or saw anything out of the ordinary.”
“But you don’t think so,” Destiny surmised.
“I didn’t say that,” Logan maintained. He didn’t like being second-guessed. For the most part, he liked to think that on the job he was unreadable. He prided himself on that.
Besides, he was always open to possibilities. This job consisted of equal parts skill and luck.
“Hey, you never know. Stranger things have happened. And not everyone works nine to five,” he added cavalierly. “So maybe someone did hear something.” Logan paused just next to his father as he began to head out the front door. “Maybe I’ll see you this Sunday.” It was as close as he allowed himself to get to making a commitment that involved his new family.
“Maybe,” Sean echoed with a faint nod.
“Sunday?” Destiny repeated, her smattering of curiosity getting the better of her when it came to this handsome, arrogant would-be crime fighter. “What’s this Sunday?”
Since he knew that this woman worked closely with his father—it had to be closely for his father to display this kind of regard for her, treating her as if she was another one of his daughters—he was surprised that she didn’t know.
“The former chief of police, my new uncle,” he added, amused by the whole concept of getting such a huge number of brand-new blood relatives at his age. “He likes to throw family get-togethers. Word has it that any of us can drop by his table to get a full breakfast any day of the week, but apparently he goes all out on Sundays.
“My father is settling into this new life and doing his best to show up every Sunday to prove how serious he is about being assimilated by the Cavanaughs—and making up for lost time.”
Destiny nodded. Though Sean Cavanaugh wasn’t an overly talkative man, he had shared some of this with her already. She had to admit that she rather liked the fact that he confided to her about this new venue of his private life.
It also made her realize how much she missed having a family of her own, people to talk to and use as sounding boards. People who cared how she felt and if she was getting enough sleep or running herself into the ground. After her mother had died, there’d been only Paula. And now even she was gone. That left only her, and it was true what they said. One is the loneliest number.
“Must be nice having more family than you know what to do with,” she commented, trying to sound offhanded.
He would have had to have been completely deaf to have missed the wistfulness in her voice. Although he wasn’t given to being touchy-feely and was rather careless at times about other people’s feelings, Logan upbraided himself now for not realizing that he was talking about family life to a woman who no longer had one.
He felt a genuine stab of guilt.
The next moment he heard himself trying to make amends. “Feel free to drop by on any morning or on Sunday,” he added. “The man goes all out then,” he repeated. When he saw her looking at him, obviously puzzled, he guessed at what was going through her mind. “Don’t worry, the chief won’t mind.”
“But you just said that he had family gatherings,” she pointed out. And right now, she was part of no one’s family.
“To the chief, anyone who’s part of the force is family.”
Okay, so maybe the handsome detective wasn’t just an empty vessel. He was being kind to her because she was alone. She got that. But she was no one’s charity case. Allowing a spasmodic smile to reach her lips, then go, she thanked him.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Logan knew a brush-off when he heard one, and ordinarily he’d just let it ride. But this woman was obviously someone special to his father, and initially he had been rather coarsely oblivious with her.
“No, really,” he emphasized. “I’m sure my father would like you to come, too. He seems to regard you as another daughter,” he said, trying to add weight to his invitation. He waited for that to sink in before saying anything more. Overkill was just as bad as neglecting to say anything at all.
At the mention of his father, Destiny allowed herself a small smile. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure the man was still in the other room, she said, “Your father’s a very nice man.”
“Well, we agree on that,” Logan told her.
And more than likely on very little else, Destiny added silently.
With a preoccupied nod, she began to leave the apartment. She’d let Sean do his work. If she felt there was anything to add, she still had the key to Paula’s apartment in her pocket. She could come back at a later date, when there was no one to get in her way.
Her hand on the doorknob, Logan’s question made her pause in midstep.
“You want someone to take you home?”
Was he treating her like a civilian? Or did he just assume that she’d locked down her hysteria and was just a tiny step away from having a complete meltdown?
Turning to face the younger Cavanaugh, she looked at him, not exactly certain just how to interpret what he’d just said.
“What?”
“Would you like an officer to take you home?” he asked her, tendering the offer with a smile. “I’d offer to take you home myself, but I seem to be a little tied up at the moment.”
He was serious. Either he was being too kind—or too cynical and doubting her actual feelings. She wasn’t sure which bothered her more.
“Why would you think that I’d need someone to take me home?” she asked.
Why did she take everything as a challenge to her authority? He was trying to be understanding. Obviously that was wasted on this woman. “Well, you did just have a big shock.”
“I’m not going home,” she told him. Not wanting to explain herself any more than she absolutely had to, Destiny walked out.
“Are you going to be all right?” Sean asked as she passed him.
Sean’s concern, at least, she didn’t have to wonder about. She knew it was genuine and smiled with gratitude.
“Yes,” she told him, not wanting the man to worry about her. He had enough to deal with these days. He didn’t need her to burden him. Besides, she wasn’t about to share her pain with him or with anyone. That was hers and hers alone to deal with.
And the way to deal with it was to keep busy.
She wasn’t going home right now, even though the hour grew late. Home was just a medium-size shell that she got to rattle around in, waiting for the beginning of her next workday.
And, since technically she wasn’t supposed to be working this case on the city’s dime, she had to do it on her own time. That meant going into the lab and the small cubbyhole that comprised her “office” during something other than her regular work hours.
As in now.
She took the elevator down to the ground floor. It went straight down without a stop. Getting off, she walked directly to the double outer doors and pushed them open. The night air was chilly and damp as it greeted her.
Destiny drew in a deep breath and then another, trying to make herself come around.
With renewed purpose and borrowed energy, she walked briskly from the entrance to the apartment building to the curb where she’d parked her car.
And then she stopped dead.
There was no way she was going anywhere. Some jerk had double-parked his car parallel to hers and was completely blocking her exit.
She was stuck.
Biting back a barrage of less than flattering words that leaped to her lips, Destiny peered into the offending vehicle, trying to see if she could ascertain what kind of village idiot belonged to the car.
That was when she saw the official markings. And the communications radio that was mounted beneath the dashboard.
A standard Crown Victoria, the white car was an unmarked police vehicle. And she had a really strong hunch she knew whom it belonged to.
Chapter 4
When he heard the elevator opening, Logan automatically looked in that direction. He was surprised to see Destiny getting off.
“Forget something?” he asked, raising his voice in order to be heard.
Canvassing the floor, he was clear down the hall from the elevator. So far, he’d had next to no luck getting anyone to answer, despite the hour.
The only door that had opened so far had been by a very grumpy older man in a stained T-shirt and rumpled trousers of an indeterminable color. Both items of clothing looked as if the man had slept in them for at least the past year.
The man also, when questioned, didn’t seem to speak any English. Whatever language he did speak, Logan was entirely unfamiliar with it. He was fluent in Spanish and knew a handful of other languages well enough to at least identify what they were. The old man was muttering at him in what he could only guess was an offshoot of some Slavic language, definitely not Russian in origin.
Thanking the man, Logan went to the next door. And the next.
So far, no one else had answered, but he’d canvassed only a quarter of the floor before his father’s chief assistant had stepped off the elevator again.
“No, I didn’t forget anything,” Destiny retorted, irritated because she wanted to be on her way already, “but I think you did.”
Logan cocked his head and eyed her, the person who might or might not be behind the next door temporarily forgotten. He watched as she walked toward him, appreciating the subtle sway of her hips. She was one of those people who was totally unaware of just how stunning she was.
But it wasn’t lost on him.
She didn’t seem like the type to play games, especially not at a time like this, so whatever she was referring to had to be on the level. The problem was, he had absolutely no idea what that was.
“Come again?” he finally said.
“You double-park your car downstairs?” she asked pointedly.
“No. Yeah,” he amended in the next breath, remembering.
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Marie Ferrarella
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Crime scene investigator Destiny Richardson receives the shock of her life when she finds her sister dead in a bathtub. Detective Logan Cavanaugh thinks it’s an openandshut suicide case. But Destiny’s convinced her sister was murdered. And she’s not about to have some arrogant cop tell her otherwise – even if he is the sexiest man she’s ever met.