Cavanaugh Strong Read online

  Noelle nodded. “I think we passed the office when we came into the complex. It’s just in front of the pool area.”

  Duncan was already on his way to the rental office when she noticed that the door adjacent to the dead man’s apartment was opened just a crack.

  Just wide enough for her to see a pair of brown eyes. Whoever they belonged to was apparently taking in everything going on in the common area between the two apartments.

  Tapping Duncan’s shoulder, she put her finger to her lips to keep him from saying anything when he turned around. She then silently pointed toward the other apartment.

  Duncan spotted the eavesdropper for the first time and nodded. Walking up to the door, he addressed whoever was standing on the other side. “We’re from the police department. Would you know if anyone else besides Walter Teasdale lives in 1F?”

  The door didn’t open any farther—but neither did it close. “How do I know you’re from the police?” the person asked, a male by the sound of the challenging, reedy voice.

  Duncan and his partner simultaneously took out their badges and IDs, flipping from one to the other and holding them up for the tenant to see.

  “Detectives O’Banyon and Cavanaugh,” Duncan announced, nodding first at Noelle and then indicating himself.

  The door still didn’t budge. “How do I know those aren’t fakes?”

  Duncan surprised Noelle by shrugging as he put his ID away and saying, “Guess you don’t. Let’s go, O’Banyon.” With that he began to walk away.

  She was about to voice a protest at his giving up so easily when the door of the adjacent apartment opened. She caught the smug look Duncan slanted in her direction before he turned around to face the resident in apartment 1E. She could almost hear Duncan’s self-satisfied thoughts: he’d played a hunch and won. The tenant in 1E was far too curious to just let them walk away.

  The tenant of 1E turned out to be an older, heavyset, balding man whose main source of “exercise” appeared to be the hand-to-mouth variety, the kind involving bags of chips and fast foods, most likely delivered to his door.

  Small, close-set brown eyes moved like syncopated marbles from one detective to the other and then back again.

  “You’re really the police?” he asked. Some of the suspicion was gone from his voice, replaced by eagerness. Whether that entailed a need for vicarious adventure or something else, Noelle wasn’t sure yet. But she was optimistic.

  “Yes, we’re really the police,” she assured the older man.

  Before she could ask him anything, the tenant laughed almost gleefully. The deep scowl that had been on his face vanished completely.

  “I knew it!” he cried triumphantly. “I knew it was too good to be true!” Interrupting his own revelry, the man told them, “He’s not home. Walt’s out celebrating, the poor jerk.” The man was practically cackling now, laughing at some joke only he was privy to.

  “Celebrating?” Duncan prodded, waiting to be enlightened.

  “Celebrating what?” Noelle asked when the man didn’t immediately reply.

  The tenant held up his hand as he struggled to stop laughing and catch his breath. It took him more than a couple of minutes. Whatever the joke was, Noelle thought, it was apparently a good one in 1E’s estimation.

  “His so-called good fortune,” the man answered. “He’s been spending money like crazy since it happened.”

  So far, this wasn’t making much sense. Noelle gave the man her most authoritative look, willing him to stop laughing long enough to let them in on what he deemed was so funny.

  “Would you mind backing up a little for us, Mr.—” Pausing, she looked at the gleeful man, waiting for him to provide them with a name.

  “Johnson,” he told them, sucking in a gulp of air. “Jonas Johnson.” His eyes were almost dancing as he asked, “Are you going to arrest him?”

  Duncan exchanged glances with his partner. There was obviously something going on here that they were missing. He enunciated his question slowly. “Why would we want to arrest him?”

  The question seemed to throw Johnson. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To arrest him. This thing can’t be legal. I told Teasdale that. But would he listen? No, he would not,” Johnson declared with a triumphant air, then added like a man who had just been vindicated, “And now he’s going to pay for that.”

  Maybe they were finally going to catch a break, Noelle thought. “You obviously seem to be in the know about what’s going on here,” she said to Johnson, playing up to the man’s vanity.

  “I am that,” he confirmed proudly. “Walt acted all cocky and self-important about it. Said he was finally going to enjoy all the things he never had the opportunity to enjoy before. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?” the balding man asked rhetorically, looking from Duncan to her, then back again, waiting for them to agree with him.

  “Not as far as I know,” Noelle replied.

  “Why don’t you tell us exactly what Walt thought was this so-called free lunch?” Duncan coaxed.

  The deep-set brown marbles were on the move again, darting from one partner to the other as if to ascertain the trustworthiness of the two detectives standing on his doorstep.

  “How much do you know?” the older man asked, looking from Duncan to her.

  “Why don’t you just pretend we don’t know anything and fill us in on the whole thing?” Duncan suggested.

  The man appeared more than ready to do just that. Gleefully. “Okay. About two years ago, this woman at the seniors’ center, the one on Lake and East Yale Loop, not the other one,” he qualified, since the city currently housed two seniors’ centers. The one he was referring to was the newer of the two.

  “Anyway, she said her name was Susan, and she approached Walt and said she had a proposition for him that he might find interesting. Well, Walt, he thought she meant that kind of a proposition—she had a real fantastic figure,” he confided, winking at Duncan. “Well, right away, he tells her that he needed a little time to get his hands on the proper medication.” Johnson paused for a moment to laugh at the memory. “She shoots down that air balloon pretty quick and tells him that her proposition involved helping him get a life insurance plan.

  “At this point, Walt’s real mad and he tells her he’s not interested, that he’s got nobody to leave the money to and he starts to walk away. She tells him that she knows all that, which stops him in his tracks. I mean, Walt’s not famous or anything, so how does she know all this?” Johnson challenged.

  On a roll, before either of them could comment, Johnson’s voice took on steam. “She doesn’t answer his question. Instead, she tells him that she was going to take care of all the details for him, pay all the premiums and give him a little something for his trouble, as well. Then she adds that if he lives for two years after the policy’s issued without any incidents, she’ll give him an extra fifty thousand dollars, kind of like a balloon payment with a mortgage, you know?” Johnson asked, looking to see if his audience was still with him.

  Satisfied that they were, he continued. “The only thing she wanted Walt to do was to put down this so-called charitable foundation she worked for as the beneficiary of the policy—”

  “What foundation?” Duncan asked. “Do you remember the name?”

  “Not a clue,” Johnson testified. And then he said, “Walt got that fifty-thousand-dollar check yesterday.”

  “You know that for a fact?” Noelle asked, studying Johnson’s every move in an attempt to verify his narrative.

  “Yeah, I know that for a fact,” Johnson said in an annoyed tone. “Walt had the nerve to thumb his nose at me, laughed and said he was going to enjoy every penny of that money. That was the last time I saw him—taking off yesterday. Said something about buying a car, then looking that woman up. So, are you going to arrest him?” he asked
eagerly, all but salivating at the very thought.

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Noelle replied solemnly.

  Johnson was visibly disappointed—as well as angry. “Why not?” he demanded. “Why can’t you arrest him? Is he missing?” He looked from one to the other again, searching for an answer. “Is that it? Is that why you were knocking on his door?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Noelle said, trying to find a way to soften the blow.

  But Johnson wasn’t about to be put off. “Then why won’t you arrest him?”

  “Because he’s dead,” Noelle finally told him.

  Some of the other man’s bravado and posturing faded. “Dead?” Johnson repeated, stunned. “What do you mean, ‘dead’?”

  “Dead,” Duncan repeated with emphasis, then went on to elaborate, “As in not breathing. Permanently. Walter Teasdale ran his car into a tree. The coroner thinks he might have suffered a heart attack and lost control of the car.”

  “Heart attack?” Johnson echoed incredulously. His apparent confusion gave way to very real irritation. “Bull!”

  “Why would you say that, Mr. Johnson?” Noelle asked, hoping that more than just jealousy was at play here.

  “Walt had the heart of an athlete. He used to run until his knees gave out a couple of years back,” Johnson recalled. “Hell, his doctor said he wished his heart was as healthy as Walt’s was. Had to be something else,” Johnson insisted, “’cause it couldn’t have been his heart.”

  So much for the coroner’s opinion, Noelle thought. “Well, Mr. Johnson, you’ve given us a lot to work with. If you think of something else, I’d appreciate it if you give me or my partner a call,” she said, handing the tenant her card.

  “Um, Detective O’Banyon?” Johnson called after her as she and Duncan began to walk away.

  Turning, Noelle gave the man her full attention. “Yes?”

  “Did Walt have any money left on him when you found him?” Johnson ventured out of the doorway of his apartment. “I mean, he’s got nobody and I’m the closest to a family member he had. I just thought, if there was any of that fifty thousand left, I could maybe use it for his funeral expenses,” he added as an afterthought, apparently thinking that might do the trick.

  “We didn’t find any money on him,” Duncan told him, sparing her the trouble of answering. “But we can check with the coroner’s office in case we missed something.”

  A definite ray of hope entered Johnson’s eyes. “Let me know,” he said just before he closed his door.

  She looked at Duncan as they walked to the complex’s rental office. They still had to rummage through the victim’s apartment for some clue that might lead them to the woman who had convinced Teasdale to take out the life insurance policy.

  Noelle’s mind, however, was on something her partner had just said. “You think that someone in the coroner’s office took the man’s stash?”

  Duncan shook his head. That answer had strictly been for Johnson’s benefit, to keep him available to them in case there were further questions. “No. I think that this mysterious woman might have decided that Walt would have no further use for the money and she took it.”

  That sounded far more plausible to her. “Before or after the accident?”

  “My guess would be just before, but I’m not married to the idea, so if you have any thoughts on the matter, I’m open to them,” he told her gamely.

  “Let’s see what we can find in his apartment first,” she said hopefully.

  * * *

  “Well,” Duncan said less than ten minutes later as he and Noelle surveyed Teasdale’s apartment—or what was left of it, “if there was anything to be found here, it’s most likely gone now.”

  The apartment the rental manager had unlocked for them had been completely tossed. Nothing was left standing or resting in its original place.

  Even so, it appeared to be an apartment at odds with itself.

  For the most part, Teasdale’s small one-bedroom apartment appeared almost Spartan in its decor—which was now scattered about on the floor. Spartan except for the huge fifty-inch high-definition flat screen TV mounted on the wall, the expensive bottle of red wine Duncan discovered in the refrigerator and the several state-of-the-art electronic devices that were thrown about the eight-hundred-square-foot apartment.

  “You see a cell phone around here?” Duncan asked, turning toward her.

  She’d chosen that exact same moment to come up behind him. As a result, his body brushed against hers and even though she quickly moved back, the flash of electricity had more than registered with her. With him as well, she realized by the expression on his face. She felt desire urging her on. That she managed to shut it away was a testimony of her inner strength—and a cause for inner frustration as well.

  “No,” she managed to say after a shaky moment. “And there wasn’t one in the plastic bag that was left with his body, either,” she recalled.

  Pretending as if he hadn’t just endured a blast of heat, Duncan nodded. “It doesn’t seem logical, given these other toys, that the man wouldn’t have a cell phone. A smartphone is a ‘must have’ for anyone who’s into electronic toys. My guess is that it could have been thrown from the car,” he theorized.

  That might have been his “guess,” but Cavanaugh certainly didn’t sound convinced, she couldn’t help thinking.

  “But you don’t really think so, do you?” Noelle said out loud.

  He didn’t and he told her why. “That cell might have had that woman’s number on it,” he said. “If she’s smart enough to come up with this scheme, then she’s smart enough to want to get rid of the evidence.”

  Taking out his own cell phone, Duncan punched in a number on the keypad. When he saw the silent question in his partner’s eyes, he said, “I think that CSI will want to take a look at this place, see what they make of it and whose prints they might be able to unearth.” And then he grinned at her. “Congratulations, O’Banyon.”

  Well, that had certainly come out of the blue, she thought. “For what?”

  “I told you to go with your instincts. Looks like your instincts were dead-on—no pun intended,” he added. The next moment, he snapped to attention as a voice came on the line.

  Noelle thought of the crumpled body she had seen on the side of the road and knew that she wished she’d been wrong.

  * * *

  “I didn’t know you’d switched over to Homicide,” Sean Cavanaugh, the head of Aurora’s CSI day shift, said to Duncan when he arrived on the scene with his crew some twenty minutes later.

  “I didn’t,” Duncan told the man. “I’m still in Vice. This investigation came about because of my partner.” He nodded toward Noelle in case there were any doubts.

  Recognition came in an instant. Sean’s customary, amicable smile instantly turned personal. “Oh, yes, you’re the one whose grandmother kept Shamus enthralled all evening,” he said with a soft laugh, referring to the father he had recently been reunited with. “I haven’t seen my father that happy looking since I first met him,” he added.

  The statement served only to confuse Noelle even further.

  Since he was her guide through all things Cavanaugh, she looked to Duncan for an explanation.

  An explanation that was not about to be forthcoming any time soon.

  “Long story,” Duncan murmured. “I’ll tell it to you some time over drinks.”

  “That’s a deal I’m going to hold you to,” she warned Duncan, putting him on notice before turning back to Sean and the crew that he had brought with him. CSI needed to be filled in on the little information that they actually had at their disposal.

  Once that was done, she and Duncan were about to go back to the precinct when Noelle had an idea. It was probably nothing more than a desperate shot in the dark, but it migh
t be worth a try.

  Instead of getting back into the white sedan, Noelle went to Johnson’s door and knocked. “Mr. Johnson, it’s Detectives O’Banyon and Cavanaugh again. Could we please have another word with you?”

  The door flew open almost immediately.

  It was obvious that what was going on in the apartment next door was the most excitement Johnson had seen in a very long time. He clearly wanted to be a part of it as much as humanly possible.

  “Sure, what word would you want to use?” he asked, laughing at his own display of humor.

  “If we put you together with a sketch artist at our precinct, do you think you might be able to describe the woman who approached your friend at the seniors’ center? I know it’s been a while,” Noelle apologized, trying to give him a way out if he didn’t recall the person’s features. “But—”

  “You don’t forget someone who makes your best friend rich,” Johnson told them solemnly.

  Apparently Walter Teasdale’s status had been upgraded in the past hour, Noelle thought, going from being just an acquaintance to suddenly being referred to as a “best friend.” She couldn’t help wondering what the dead man would be to Johnson by tomorrow morning.

  “Or a woman with such a firm butt like that one,” Johnson added, ruining the moment. From the look on his face, the neighbor was visualizing the woman he was referring to.

  “So you have no problem coming to the station with us?” she asked, wanting to be perfectly clear on the subject. They needed a sketch of this woman just in case she had done more than just feed the fantasies of an old man and inadvertently brought about his death prematurely.

  “No problem at all,” Johnson answered, sounding positively cheerful about the prospect of coming down to the precinct to tell a sketch artist what he remembered.

  “Just let me change my shoes,” he added for her benefit. “Can’t go to the police station wearing slippers.”

  Johnson was whistling something uplifting and cheerful as he went to find his shoes.