Cavanaugh Undercover Page 11

  Rather than complying, the man she knew as “Wayne” remained where he was. There was no way she could physically haul him out of there if he didn’t want to go.

  She might have the gun in her hand, but she couldn’t very well just shoot the man no matter how tempting or appealing the notion might be at the moment.

  Brennan watched her, amusement highlighting his ruggedly handsome face. He could see her getting progressively angrier at him.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked the pseudomadam.

  It was hard to hold on to a temper that was becoming so frayed, especially when she was as tired as she was. Once she handed this man over to the police, she intended to go back to his room—no point in letting a perfectly good paid-for room go to waste, she reasoned—and get a good night’s sleep.

  “So you’ve changed your mind about cooperating, have you?” She grabbed hold of his arm, indicating that she was ready to drag him out if need be—she just hoped he wouldn’t call her bluff, because she could feel her strength waning even as she was standing here.

  “No, I’m still cooperating,” he told her cheerfully. “I’m just pointing out that maybe this might not be the best course of action for you to take.”

  He had to say that, she reasoned—but how could he possibly think she might even remotely agree with what he was suggesting?

  “Bringing a sex trafficker to the local police station, how can I go wrong doing that?” she asked.

  Brennan only grinned wider. “I guess you’ll just have to find out.”

  Tiana narrowed her eyes and she pointed her handgun at him. Enough was enough. “Get out of the car,” she ordered.

  “You’re the boss,” he said in an utterly innocent tone.

  Wayne’s very demeanor should have warned her that what he was saying might actually be on the level, but then, she had a feeling this man could and would brazen it out to the very end.

  She was also convinced that this person was a very accomplished, smooth liar, skillful at making just about anything sound like the truth.

  “Just move,” she told him in a voice that barely suppressed her anger.

  She kept her weapon hidden against his back as she directed him toward the modern looking building. They crossed the short distance from where she had parked her car in the lot to the steps of the police station. Her prisoner offered no resistance.

  The second she walked through the automatic doors behind her handcuffed prisoner, all sorts of alarms went off, sounding like the church bells in Westminster Abbey at Christmas.

  Within a heartbeat, Tiana found herself surrounded by half a dozen police officers.

  The blue-clad officers flooded into the main lobby, their weapons drawn and aimed directly at them.

  More specifically, since Brennan had entered ahead of her and the alarms had gone off when she followed behind him, the officers’ weapons were aimed at her.

  Brennan heard her stifling a sharp gasp. Looking at his would-be jailer over his shoulder, he said, “Now, this is just a wild guess on my part—and I might be wrong—but those alarms going off like that might have something to do with the gun in your possession.”

  “Put the weapon down!” ordered the tall officer who was at the center of the armed guard facing them.

  She glared at “Wayne” as she complied with the order, following through with exaggerated motions so that there was no mistake made as to what she was doing.

  Once she’d placed her handgun on the floor and risen, her hands automatically raised in surrender, she told the officers, “My name is Tiana Drummond. I’m with the San Francisco CSI unit.” She went on to give her badge number, taking care to enunciate each number. She knew someone would be verifying her identity the second she gave the last number. “I don’t know this man’s real name, but he’s involved with a sex trafficking ring that’s kidnapping underage girls.”

  To her relief, she saw the officer who’d issued the order lower his weapon, then holstered it. The others all followed suit.

  They believed her, Tiana thought with a grateful sigh.

  The slender blond officer at the extreme left came forward, shaking her head. When she spoke, it wasn’t Tiana she addressed but the man Tiana had brought in.

  “Jeez, Brennan,” the blonde cried, “why didn’t you tell her you were an undercover cop?”

  Brennan grinned at Valri, his youngest sister and the family’s newest law enforcement officer. Valri had graduated from the academy just in time to have her options doubled, allowing her to choose between the police department at Shady Canyon and the one here, in Aurora. Out of loyalty to him, she’d decided to move to Aurora.

  Brennan presented his handcuffed wrists to his “captor,” waiting for her to do the honors. He heard a rather exasperated sigh escape her a second before he felt her opening up his handcuffs.

  Freed, he rubbed his wrists. “Well, I kind of tried,” he told Valri, “but she kept wanting her gun to do the talking for her, and you know me, I don’t like arguing with a lady.”

  It was Valri’s turn to be amused. She laughed at the very suggestion of what he’d tried to pass off as the truth. “Since when? All you ever do is argue. You live for it.”

  “That’s at home,” Brennan pointed out. “I’m nicer outside.”

  Tiana had heard more than enough. Getting in between the two siblings, she cried, “Wait a minute. You were actually serious?” she demanded, her tone nothing short of accusing as she looked at the man she had just arrested and brought in. “You really are a cop?”

  Summoned by the receptionist the moment the duo had entered the building, Brian Cavanaugh walked into the lobby in time to hear the last exchange.

  “Yes, he really is a cop.”

  Turning her head in the direction the deep voice was coming from, Tiana noticed a tall, almost larger-than-life distinguished-looking man coming toward her.

  The man introduced himself, extending his hand. “I’m chief of detectives Brian Cavanaugh and the man you just brought in is working undercover for my department. Meet Detective First Class Brennan Cavanaugh. And you are?” he asked politely, giving her a chance to formerly introduce herself to him even though he had already heard her name, thanks to the two-way radio in his possession. It was tuned in to the receptionist’s area.

  “Stunned and embarrassed,” Tiana replied, staring at Brennan. Her eyes narrowed as she glared at him—right now, for her own satisfaction, she had to blame someone for this mistake. And he was it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did. I tried,” he corrected. “You wouldn’t listen.” He glanced at his newly discovered uncle. As far as he knew, he hadn’t heard her name when she’d stated it. “Chief, this is—”

  The least she could do was give her own name, Tiana thought grudgingly, especially since she’d apparently messed up everything else.

  “CSI Tiana Drummond, sir,” she said, shaking the hand the chief had offered.

  “Tiana, huh?” Brennan rolled her name over on his tongue. “I think I like Venus better.”

  Brian looked from his nephew to the woman who had brought him in. Obviously there were a few more things that needed clearing up. “Venus?”

  “It’s part of my cover,” Tiana quickly explained. “Or at least the name he—” she nodded at Brennan “—decided he liked better.”

  Brian shook his head. “Forgive me, Detective, but I don’t—”

  She flashed an understanding smile at him. She could see how it would be confusing to someone who hadn’t been there to begin with. “It’s a long story, sir.”

  Brian took the disclaimer at face value. “Why don’t we go to my office and you can tell it?” he suggested to the young woman. He looked around at the semicircle of police officers who were still in the lobby. “You can stand down now and go
back to what you were doing,” he told them.

  As the officers began to disperse, Brian called after them, “By the way, good job, Officers,” he told them with a smile of approval. Then, turning to his nephew and the young woman who had brought him in, he said, “Shall we go?”

  “By all means, sir,” Tiana answered, more than willing to leave the scene of her embarrassing error.

  As she followed the tall, imposing man to the rear of the lobby where the elevators were, she couldn’t help wondering if she was going to ultimately get a formal dressing-down. After all, she had in effect “arrested” the chief of detectives’ nephew.

  “Your superiors don’t know you’re down here, do they?” the man asked her as they waited for an elevator to arrive.

  It sounded like a rhetorical question, one that if he posed, he probably already had the answer to. But to assume he did and not answer would be rude, she figured, so Tiana said, “No, sir, they don’t. I took a leave of absence.”

  “Why didn’t you enlist their help?” he asked.

  That might have been the logical course of action to someone observing from the outside. But she had her reasons.

  “Because this is personal, sir,” she told him. They got into the elevator, its only occupants, and the doors closed again. “I didn’t want everyone I work with to have any reason to look down on my sister. This is already hard enough on her as it is.”

  “You know better, Detective,” Brian pointed out.

  “No, sir,” she contradicted him, much to Brennan’s surprise. “I know people, I know life, and it’s only natural to assume the worst about a person. My sister was lied to by a man she thought loved her. A man who used that ‘love’ to reel her in—in effect kidnap her—and turn her over to his boss, another low-level lowlife. As far as I know, she and whatever other girls had been either lured or abducted are going to ultimately be sent off to any one of a number of foreign countries—or enslaved in this country and shipped off to some other, unknown state. Either way, she’ll be made to disappear along with the others. To a lot of people, Janie is just another teenage prostitute, another potential statistic. I won’t have her judged.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” he pointed out. “Sometimes you just have to take a chance and let others help you.”

  They reached his floor and got out, with Brian half a step ahead, leading the way.

  She didn’t want to argue about whether or not she should have told her superiors about this. Instead, she pointed out a logical assumption and its ensuing implication.

  “The case is in your jurisdiction now. The traffickers are here, somewhere in the Aurora vicinity. That makes this your case, sir.”

  “Yes, it does,” he agreed. He walked into his office and indicated the chairs before his desk. He sat down behind it and waited for the duo to take their seats. He kept his eyes on the young woman, but his thoughts were impossible to gauge.

  Tiana found that frustrating. She was hardly aware of sitting down, her attention riveted on the chief. “Does that mean that you’ll be working it?” she asked, needing him to spell it out for her.

  “We already are,” Brennan said. He’d kept quiet up until now, but this he was qualified to talk about, especially since he was the one on the inside. “What part of ‘undercover’ don’t you understand?” he asked, referring to the words he’d used to tell her that he was part of a covert operation.

  She shrugged, feeling both frustrated and flustered at the same time. “It’s not so much a matter of not understanding as it is not believing,” she admitted. “I believe you now.”

  “We’ll take it from here,” Brian assured her kindly. “If you have a picture of your sister, I can circulate it around, have my people be alerted to her status. All due precautions will be taken to keep her safe,” he promised her. “You have my word.”

  Tiana took out her wallet and handed over the picture that had caused her to arrest Brennan in the first place.

  Brian looked at the photograph for a long moment. “She’s a very pretty girl,” he commented. “We’ll find her,” he promised again. Taking a breath—knowing how he would have felt if it had been his daughter, Janelle, who had been abducted—he banked down a wave of empathy. “Where can you be reached?”

  “I’ll be with him,” Tiana responded, nodding toward Brennan, her eyes still on the chief.

  Brian’s expression was solemn. “I can’t sanction you for this operation in your official capacity, Tiana. I have no jurisdiction over you and you in turn have none here.”

  She had expected nothing less. Her mouth curved slightly as she looked at the chief. “Then as far as you know, I’m not here.”

  They were definitely getting into a sticky gray area. “But you are.”

  She decided to be completely honest with him and make her plea.

  “Chief Cavanaugh, Janie is the only family I have. I can’t just go back to San Francisco and sit on my hands, waiting for sanitized updates from either your office or your nephew. Please,” she added in an emotion-filled, heartfelt plea.

  It was a situation that had already come up before and would, Brian knew, come up again. The ranks were filled with family members. In this young woman’s place, he would have felt exactly the same way. Hell, in his place he would have felt exactly the same and he had more relatives than any other random handful of people put together.

  Brian looked at her and said in a deliberate, measured cadence, “I don’t have the authority to escort you back to San Francisco. I can only tell you to go home. Which I just did.” He half rose in his seat, signaling the meeting was over. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I unfortunately have to face the media at a news conference. It seems that word of these traffickers and their abductions has spread and I have to assure the good people of Aurora through those news vultures circling outside that everything is being done to bring the missing girls back home and to bring to justice the people who abducted them.”

  Brian looked at the young man who had so recently come to his attention and who had literally saved his older brother’s life. “Keep me apprised as best you can, and the second you have either a name or the location where the girls are being kept, call for backup. Immediately,” he stressed.

  “Count on it,” Brennan promised.

  “A name?” Tiana questioned as they left the chief’s office. This time, Brennan directed her toward the freight elevator, which let out in a more secluded part of the building.

  They made their way down to the ground floor.

  “The name of the head of this whole ring. The chief is of the same opinion that we are, that there’s someone behind the scenes pulling all the strings. Roland is not the main man, even though he struts around like he is. He’s taking his orders from someone, and the second I can find out who that person is, we can have the whole place crawling with police.”

  He’d forgotten one salient point she’d made. “But not before we find where the girls are being held.” It was more of a plea than a comment.

  Despite his easygoing disposition, Brennan was a realist. Things didn’t always turn out the way people wanted them to.

  “Hopefully,” he said, “we can do both.”

  On the ground floor, she stopped walking and turned to face him. “You can’t call in backup until we have the location,” she insisted. “The girls are expendable to these people. They’ll kill them rather than be caught with them.”

  Brennan looked impressed. “You’re not as naive as I thought you were,” he told her. “And I mean ‘naive’ in the best possible way,” he added with a smile in case he’d accidentally insulted her.

  She pushed open the glass door and hurried down the stairs to the parking lot. “I’m not naive at all,” Tiana told him. Reaching her vehicle, she got in and waited for him to do the same. As he was buckling up, she sta
rted the car. “Except when it comes to a one-on-one relationship,” she added in a lower voice.

  The admission caught his attention. “Love turn sour on you, Venus?” he asked, curious.

  “Love hasn’t had an opportunity to turn anything at all on me,” she responded. Life with her father had caused her to think not twice, but three times before even considering entering a relationship. And so far, she hadn’t. “I’ve been too busy.”

  “What do you do for fun?” he asked.

  She drove off the lot, heading back to his hotel. “Solve crimes.”

  “Besides that.”

  “I sleep.” She held up the hand closest to him as if to warn him off. “And before you ask, no, I don’t sleep much. I don’t need to.” Or at least, she had talked herself into this mind-set. “My batteries recharge themselves with amazing speed.”

  “You are one hell of an amazing woman, Venus,” Brennan told her.

  She could almost believe him. Almost, she silently stressed. In her experience she’d come to learn that men rarely spoke the truth.

  Even men like him.

  First and foremost, they were out for themselves. They were concerned with their comfort, their terms, their gain. Women and their needs or requirements came in a distant second—if they came in at all.

  She changed the subject. “Are you really related to the chief?” she asked him.

  “So it seems. He’s my father’s cousin. This is all very recent,” he admitted. “There was this whole division of the family that I never knew anything about until about a month ago.”

  “You work here and you didn’t know you were related?” Tiana asked, surprised.

  “To understand, you’d have to know the full story.”

  “Okay, I’m listening,” she said. He now knew a lot about her. In her opinion, it was his turn to come clean about things.

  “I wasn’t over here. I started out in Shady Canyon. I worked undercover for the DEA at the time,” he interjected. “But I transferred over from the neighboring town when I was suspended for saving the former chief of police’s life. Andrew Cavanaugh,” he said, telling her the man’s name. “And yes, turns out I’m related to him, as well.”