Cavanaugh Fortune Page 10

  It involved operating a software program that in turn allowed the final “sketch” to be compared against a database filled with the faces of previous offenders. In this case, the group comprised hackers ranging from hardened criminals to budding geniuses who got off pitting themselves against complicated security systems meant to keep the common hacker out.

  Alex’s attention was focused on the gamer sitting by Mara’s desk. “It was like dealing with an overgrown, socially challenged kid.”

  “No argument there,” Valri guaranteed. “But that overgrown kid might provide us with an actual lead, so it’s really in everyone’s best interest to keep him happy and cooperative.”

  Alex’s deep blue eyes shifted to look at the woman beside him. She was growing on him faster than he would have thought possible. He found himself annoyed at the idea of her availing herself of the company of gamers. She was better than that. How could she have put up with the likes of people like Wills and Bigelow?

  The realization that he was reacting like a man and not like a cop suddenly hit him. He needed to get his priorities straight. What his partner did during her free time was her business, not his.

  Still, there were questions that begged for input if not actual answers.

  “And this was your world?” he asked Valri incredulously.

  A smile played on her lips. Looking back, at times she caught herself wondering the same thing.

  “Emphasis on the word was,” she pointed out, keeping her voice low. She didn’t want to distract Jason from working with Mara to create a sketch of the man he saw talking to Rogers.

  She had aroused his curiosity—he refused to believe that she’d aroused something more as well. Long hours were making him punchy. “What made you stop?” Alex asked.

  Valri lifted her shoulders in a quick, dismissive shrug. “I grew up, I guess.”

  He could accept that. “Good reason.”

  It took almost an hour before Bigelow was finally satisfied with Mara’s rendition of the man he said he’d seen with Rogers. The man who might have been involved in Rogers’s murder.

  Valri moved in closer to look at the drawing, just in case the man appeared familiar to her.

  He didn’t.

  Mara indicated the sketch. “I’ll get this into the system right away. The minute I get a match, I’ll notify you,” she promised, then looked at the two detectives. “Which one of you is lead on this?”

  “He is,” Valri said before her partner had a chance to answer the question.

  For his part, Alex was surprised that Cavanaugh hadn’t just said it was her. After all, she was the one with the background in the tech world, and they had never actually spoken outright about who was in charge. He was the one with more time under his belt, but that wouldn’t have stopped some people from claiming lead.

  Maybe this so-called partnership could work after all, even if she was a rookie and a Cavanaugh to boot. This time, the thought evoked a kind of half smile from him rather than his usual reaction.

  “What’s your cell number, detective?” Mara asked.

  Alex gave her his card. “It’s got my cell number on the bottom,” he told her. “The other one is the phone on my desk in the squad room.”

  Mara wrote both down on the edge of her sketch pad and then pocketed the card.

  Getting to his feet, Bigelow looked like an elf getting all revved up. “What’s next?” he asked them. It seemed obvious that he enjoyed being in the center of things, liked the attention he was garnering. “Next, we send you home,” Alex informed the gamer flatly.

  Bigelow looked disappointed, and then nervous. He’d made a point, while on the way to the precinct, of telling them how much he loved his solitude, loved getting in touch with people only through the medium of video games. But now the prospect of being alone seemed to frighten him.

  “Home? What about that protection you promised?” he demanded, looking from Alex to Valri.

  “It’ll be there,” Valri assured him. The look she spared Alex told the detective that she expected him to back her up and make all this happen. “We’re posting a guard outside your mother’s house. Most likely,” she continued in a calming voice, “nobody even knows you left your gaming console, which means that you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Yeah, tell that to Wills,” Bigelow muttered audibly as Alex signaled to the closest uniformed policeman to come join them.

  Valri managed to hide her surprise as she looked at the gamer. “Then you did know who I was talking about when I mentioned that Wills was dead, too.”

  “Yeah, I knew,” Bigelow admitted, his tone daring her to make something out of his admission. “I beat him in a tournament once. Real sore loser,” Bigelow recalled with a dismissive shake of his head. “Can’t say I’m sorry that he’s gone, ’cause I’m not.” And then something occurred to the gamer. “Hey, now with The King gone, that means that everything’s going to be thrown wide open.” His small brown eyes were practically shining as he cried, “There’s gonna have to be a new king.”

  And she knew just what the gamer was thinking. But she had a feeling that he wasn’t built for long-range strategy.

  “You work on your game, Jason,” she told him, giving him a pat on his arm. “Officer Callahan here will take you home,” Valri said, then turned Bigelow over to the tall, strapping policeman.

  “And you actually associated with guys like that?” Alex marveled as Bigelow was being ushered down the corridor toward the elevator.

  “For a while,” Valri qualified. Looking back, that period of her life almost felt as if it had happened more than a lifetime ago. In reality, it had just been three years in her past.

  Wanting to change the subject a little, she regarded Alex and asked, “Now what?”

  “Now more legwork,” he told her. “How many other names did you manage to recover from Rogers’s defunct laptop?”

  “Just two others,” she admitted, this time taking out the paper with their names and addresses on them and volunteering that to Brody. “But I’m sure there’re more,” she added. “If I keep at it, trying different recovery programs, I’m pretty sure I can extract at least a few more names.”

  The expression on her face told Alex that she was bracing herself to hear him tell her to remain here and work on the laptop.

  But because she had turned over her one bargaining chip to him—the names and addresses of the other two gamers the deceased had corresponded with—he decided to take her along.

  “That’ll be your homework assignment,” Alex told her. “For now, why don’t we go and talk to those two guys you did find.”

  Her smile reminded him of sunshine after a long bout of rain. “Sounds like a plan,” she agreed.

  * * *

  Before they went to talk to the first name on the two-man list, Alex drove to a fast-food restaurant.

  Confused, Valri looked around. This had nothing to do with the two men on the list. “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’d give it a wild guess and say, ‘Getting a late lunch.’ In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t taken a break and we worked right through the morning hours.”

  “I noticed,” she answered. “I just thought that was what you did when you reached detective level.”

  “Can’t have you dropping from hunger your first week as a detective,” he told her, guiding his car into the drive-through lane.

  Rather than eat on the go, Alex pulled his vehicle into a parking space and turned the engine off. When she eyed him questioningly, all he said was “Compromise.” She took it to mean that was his answer to stopping altogether and eating inside the restaurant versus eating on the move.

  “Think Bigelow got it right?” Alex asked her as they were both making short work of their cheeseburgers and fries.

&nb
sp; Valri held her hand up, indicating that she had to swallow before answering him. “What do you mean?”

  “That ‘The King’—” he said the title with an edge of sarcasm in his voice “—created a false cell tower for someone?”

  She had already thought that through herself. “It’s very possible,” she told him.

  “Then why kill him?” Alex asked. “Wouldn’t he be more valuable to this person or persons alive?”

  She’d thought about that, too, and gave Alex her conclusions, such as they were. “Maybe he got greedy and wanted more than he’d been paid. Or maybe they did it to keep him from telling anyone else what they were doing. Rogers wasn’t the type to keep quiet,” she told Alex.

  “Elaborate,” Alex coaxed, interested.

  “He liked to thump his chest, tell people how smart he was, how good he was. He wasn’t humble by any means. That’s why he got that nickname. And maybe that was what got him killed,” she guessed.

  Alex looked at her for a long moment. “I’m having a harder and harder time picturing you involved with people like that,” he confessed. The more he got to know her, the less plausible her association with gamers seemed.

  “They’re not all like that,” Valri assured him. “But the thing that everyone who’s part of that world is, is very competitive.” She recalled what it was like signing on for a tournament. “You start out challenging yourself and wind up pitting yourself against everyone else.”

  The adrenaline high was thrilling at first. But eventually, there was just the tension and it outweighed the thrills.

  “After a while, that kind of thing gets old. At least, it did for me.” She wiped her hands with a napkin and put that and the empty wrapper into the paper bag that her lunch had come in.

  “Were you ever tempted to hack into someone’s security system?”

  The question came at her out of the blue and caught her completely off guard for a moment. She stared at her partner incredulously.

  “I’m a Cavanaugh,” Valri pointed out. “We don’t do that kind of thing, remember?”

  “I didn’t ask you if you did it. I asked if you were ever tempted.” His eyes held hers. “There’s a difference.”

  “You’re asking me if I was ever tempted to hack into a system just to see if I could do it?” She thought that was rather a strange question to ask, but she addressed it seriously. “Sure.” She could remember two such instances, but neither had gone beyond idle curiosity. “But there are consequences for anything you do, and satisfying my own sense of curiosity wasn’t worth turning my dad’s hair gray—not to mention bringing shame to the Cavanaugh name.”

  “So you took the safe route and became a cop,” he concluded, amused.

  After finishing his cheeseburger, he crumpled up the wrapper it had come in and deposited it along with the empty French fries container into his paper bag.

  “Point taken.” Her sunny grin seemed to fill up every single empty space inside the car, bringing warmth along with it.

  He caught himself wishing that they weren’t working together. That he could just drive to some nice little club with her where they served drinks and bluesy music. Some place where they could talk—or not talk—for hours and maybe even dance together.

  Knock it off, he ordered himself.

  They had a case to solve and that was his reality right now, not some fantasy he wasn’t free to act on.

  And that was probably a good thing, he decided. But they were and that was his reality right now. “Time to roll,” he announced, starting the engine.

  * * *

  They struck out with the other two gamers, both of whom turned out to be only on the very fringes of the existence that had represented the whole world for the two victims. The two gamers they questioned had been on Rogers’s followers list.

  “What the hell is a followers list?” Alex asked her as they got back into his car.

  He’d let the term slide when the first gamer had used it, but now that the second one had cited it as well, his curiosity was aroused.

  Valri was more than familiar with the term. “Think of it as a groupie list. Once upon a time, only big movie stars had a following. Now everyone who’s been in the limelight for ten seconds has one. What with Facebook and Twitter social media and all the other ways of instant mass communications, people can acquire professions of love or hate in the blink of an eye. The people doing the ‘professing’ are followers.”

  Alex shook his head. “That can’t be a good thing.”

  “Oh, but it can,” she argued. At best, these followers were harmless. At their worst, they became stalkers. “The problem is that every good thing has a bad side to it.”

  Alex couldn’t have agreed more.

  * * *

  “I did it,” Shamus Cavanaugh—former police chief and present CEO of a thriving home security company that he ran with the occasional help of his oldest son—declared as he walked into Andrew Cavanaugh’s kitchen.

  It was a known fact that if Andrew, the former Aurora police chief, was home, there was more than a 90 percent chance of finding him in his kitchen, creating something new out of old standbys.

  Today was no different.

  Andrew had had his back to his father when the latter had burst in.

  “Did what, Dad?” Andrew asked. When it came to his father, Andrew never knew just what to expect, or what the man was up to. The family patriarch was nothing if not unpredictable. Dull was definitely not a word that could ever be associated with the older man.

  “Joined the French Foreign Legion,” Shamus cracked, then said impatiently, “What do you think I did?”

  “I haven’t a clue, Dad. That’s why I asked,” Andrew replied calmly, pondering what ingredient his version of Hungarian goulash was missing. While it was tasty, something was off and he just couldn’t put his finger on it.

  “I asked her.”

  That caught Andrew’s attention more than his father’s loud entrance.

  “Her?”

  Andrew had a strong suspicion he knew who his father was referring to, but he wanted to be sure. He understood the danger of making an assumption that, in the end, wasn’t correct. His father’s moods changed as quickly as eastern weather patterns.

  “Lucy. Noelle O’Banyon’s grandmother,” he said, mentioning the name of the latest woman who had joined the family by marrying one of their own. “I asked her,” he repeated, emphasizing what to him was the most important word.

  Before his son could express his surprise—or demand to know what the hell he was thinking, getting married again at his age—Shamus was quick to head him off.

  “I figured I wasn’t getting any younger, but I wasn’t dead yet either, and hell, what did I have to lose? Your mother, God rest her soul, died a long time ago and I got used to that empty space inside of me. But after I met Lucy—and we hit it off right from the start—I realized that it didn’t have to be that way. That space didn’t have to stay empty. So I asked her,” he concluded proudly.

  Andrew let the goulash take care of itself and turned around to face his father squarely. He needed to get something cleared up. “Asked her to marry you or just to move in with you?”

  Shamus scowled at his firstborn. “I wouldn’t insult a lady like Lucy by asking her to shack up with me,” he said indignantly.

  “No offense, Dad,” Andrew said in apology because he knew that was what his father was waiting to hear, “but you are unpredictable.” Loose cannon was a more apt description for the man, but Andrew kept that to himself. It would only get his father incensed. “I take it by that big grin on your face that she said yes.”

  “She did, son. She did, indeed,” Shamus said happily, sounding every bit like a teenager in love for the first time. If he grinned any harder, his face might be in danger of spl
itting in half. “Lucy and I want you to throw the reception together for us.”

  Andrew wouldn’t have had it any other way. He loved any excuse for getting the family together to celebrate something.

  “Sure, I’d love to,” he told his father. “Have you two set a date?” he asked, moving over to the calendar that was hanging on the wall.

  “Next Saturday,” Shamus replied.

  Andrew turned to look at his father, certain that he had to have heard wrong. “Next Saturday? You’re kidding, right?”

  Shamus frowned and eyed his oldest as if his son was not connecting the dots here.

  “I did mention that I’m not getting any younger, didn’t I?” It was a rhetorical question. “Now that I found someone I want to spend the rest of my life with, I don’t want to waste any time. There’s not as much of ‘the rest of my life’ left as I’d like, so I’m not waiting any longer than I absolutely have to. I already got in touch with a priest. Father Gannon said he’s free on that day, so he’ll marry us.” He narrowed his eyes, pinning his son down. “Now, can we have the reception here, or are we going to have to hold it in the precinct parking lot?”

  Andrew rolled his eyes heavenward. His father could go utterly dramatic on him at the drop of a hat. “You don’t have to have it in the precinct parking lot, Dad. I can have it here. It’s just a little short notice, that’s all.”

  Shamus clapped his oldest son on the back. “I’ve got great faith in you, boy. When it comes to a party, no one throws it together better than you do. We just have to get the word out, that’s all.”

  “Get the word out about what?” Rose Cavanaugh asked as she walked into the kitchen, drawn there by the sound of voices as well as to check on her husband’s progress with dinner.

  “Rose, my beautiful, darling Rose,” Shamus cried, taking both her hands in his and all but dancing about the room with the youthful-looking blonde. “You’re getting a new mother-in-law.”

  Accustomed to her father-in-law’s less than run-of-the-mill behavior, Rose still stopped dead in her tracks and stared at the man.