Cavanaugh on Duty Page 17

  A selfless person. Just like the first two victims, Kari thought, although not the third. None of this was making any sense. Could they have all been living secret lives, part of some secret society that ultimately led to their deaths? Instead of answers, she was grappling with more and more questions.

  “Would you mind if we came by tomorrow to ask you a few more things about the judge? You know, pick your brain after you’ve had some time to get a good night’s sleep?” she suggested to Greer and her husband.

  “I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep tonight,” Blake speculated.

  Greer slipped her hand into his, silently offering Blake her support. “Let’s go home, Blake,” she urged. “We won’t be much help and we’ll only get in the way right now.” Very gently, she guided the judge away from the crime scene. But before she left, she made eye contact with Esteban. “Get this bastard,” she mouthed.

  Saying nothing, Esteban acknowledged her request with a nod.

  It was enough.

  * * *

  Despite the fact that she was still wearing the silver cocktail dress, Kari decided to go straight to the squad room with Esteban rather than making a pit-stop at home to change into something more functional. The hope that this latest victim would somehow cause the dominoes to finally fall into place outweighed her need to throw on something that was a bit more comfortable than the slinky evening dress.

  Kari pinned the latest victim’s photograph next to the others and started a fourth column listing what they knew so far.

  “Maybe once we get a chance to talk to Blake, we’ll find that common denominator we’re looking for,” she said to Esteban.

  “What if there isn’t one?” he countered. “What if our serial killer is just some certifiable crazy who slashes people’s throats whenever the mood strikes or he perceives some slight—real or imaginary?”

  She refused to even consider that possibility right now.

  “No, there’s got to be something, some trigger, something about these people rather than all the other individuals he comes across in his day-to-day life that turns him into a homicidal maniac. At the very least, there has to be some common place where their paths cross.” Kari stared at the board. There wasn’t nearly enough information under each victim for them to work with. “It’s going to drive me crazy until I figure it out,” she said, more to herself than to him.

  Kari sank down in front of her computer, pulling up the files she’d compiled on the first three victims, and tried to see if there was any sort of overlap, any common links between any of them and the judge.

  Completely immersed in her search, she wasn’t aware that Esteban had stepped away from his desk until she swung back around to answer the phone on her desk.

  Where had he gotten to? she wondered as she said into the phone receiver, “Cavelli-Cavanaugh.”

  “Put your traveling shoes on, Hyphen,” the lieutenant’s deep voice rumbled into her ear. “There’s been another one.”

  “You’re kidding,” she cried in disbelief. Nothing for almost a week and a half, and now two in one day? What was it that drove this killer?

  “I never kid before dawn, Hyphen,” he told her sardonically, then rattled off the address he’d just received. “Oh, and before you start complaining about being overworked, I’m filling out the paperwork to get you and Fernandez a task force to help you with this case. Just because you’ve got two names doesn’t mean I expect you to do twice as much work. You got any problem working with Donnelly and Choi?” he asked, naming two detectives attached to another section of the department.

  “Donnelly and Choi will be fine,” she told him, then asked with a glimmer of humor, “Haven’t you heard? I’m easygoing.”

  “Yeah, right.” He laughed shortly. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “And the sun rises in the west. Get yourself over to the crime scene, Hyphen.”

  The line went dead. The lieutenant wasn’t much for hellos or goodbyes.

  Kari sighed, hanging up just as she saw Esteban walking back into the squad room. He was carrying a covered coffee container in each hand.

  “Thought you might need this,” he explained, setting one cup down in front of her on her desk.

  Kari rose to her feet and picked up the container. “Don’t take the lid off,” she told him as he was about to sit down and get comfortable. “We just got a call that there’s been another murder.”

  He stared at her for a moment as if she’d lapsed into another language. “You’re kidding.”

  “Same thing I said,” she told him, grabbing her purse. “Unfortunately, the lieutenant was serious.”

  Esteban put his hand on her shoulder, stopping her before she could stride out of the squad room. “You look beat. Want me to drive?” he asked.

  “Coffee, chauffeuring. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were being nice to me. I’m not dying, am I?”

  “Not that I know of,” he deadpanned.

  She took a breath, forcing herself to deal seriously with what she took to be the situation. “Look, I just want you to know I don’t expect any special treatment just because—well, just because,” she concluded. They were alone, but the squad room was no place to talk about this in any kind of detail.

  “Duly noted,” he told her. “But for the record, you do look beat. The offer still stands,” he said. “Want me to drive?”

  She liked being in control, had fought for it for half her life. But sometimes it was nice to have someone else take over and carry the load. Maybe this was one of those times.

  “I won’t say no,” she said.

  “First time for everything,” Esteban commented. His expression gave no indication that he was pleased. He put his hand out for the keys.

  After a beat, Kari surrendered them.

  * * *

  “You were right, you know,” Esteban stated quietly several miles into their trip to investigate the latest crime scene.

  “Of course I was,” she said with feeling. When he gave no indication that he was going to clarify what he meant, she was forced to ask, “About what this time?”

  He carefully picked his way through what he considered a minefield. Each word brought with it a memory, memories he didn’t feel equipped to deal with. “About knowing me from high school. I did go to the same school you did, and I was the football quarterback.”

  Kari reminded herself that she wasn’t supposed to know any of his backstory between the end of high school and the moment he’d walked into the squad room. It wasn’t easy. But keeping that in mind, she asked the first logical question that would have occurred to her under those circumstances.

  “Why did you lie about it?”

  He looked straight ahead at the road, his expression stony. “Because I buried all that a long time ago.”

  She told herself to leave it alone, but would he have expected her to? She ventured forward cautiously, testing the waters as she went.

  “Mind if I ask why?”

  “Because everyone I cared about was alive back then, and if I think about that, then I have to think about their deaths and the pain hits me all over again,” he said fiercely, struggling with his emotions. “I can’t go through that. It’s better just to leave everything buried.”

  She knew he wasn’t asking her for advice, but she gave it anyway—because she could see he was in pain and she wanted to help.

  “Those people you loved, they wouldn’t want to see you like this,” she said gently, trying to appeal to his sense of logic. “They’d want to see you try to be happy.”

  Happy was not a sensation he was well acquainted with, not anymore. Happy had been another state of mind, locked away in his youth. The very best he could hope for, he thought, was not to be too miserable.

  And nothing Kari with her hyphenated names could say
was going to change that.

  “Leave it alone, Kari,” he ordered gruffly.

  About to continue with her argument, she stopped when it suddenly occurred to her. “You realize that was the first time you called me by my first name?”

  He snorted. Leave it to her to pick up on just that. “Won’t happen again,” he promised shortly.

  Kari sighed. “You are a hard nut to crack, Esteban,” she told him.

  He liked it better when she called him by his last name. It made it less personal somehow. “I wouldn’t try if I were you,” he warned.

  There was nothing to be gained for her. He wasn’t about to shed his frog skin and become a prince for her if she said just the right words.

  She smiled at him. It was that wicked smile that got under his skin. Now that he’d made love with her, he was even less immune to it than before.

  “But you’re not me,” she told him. “Maybe once this investigation is over,” Kari suggested, “we should give walking a mile in each other’s shoes a try. Who knows...it might go a long way toward building a strong partnership.”

  Not to mention other things, she added silently.

  He glanced down at the silver-heeled sandals she was wearing. “As long as the shoes I have to walk in aren’t those damn high heels you have on.”

  She pretended to scrutinize them, then looked over toward his feet. “Oh, I don’t know, from what I saw, you have pretty decent legs. You might even look cute in them.”

  “Let it go, Hyphen,” he gritted out.

  Too late, she thought. But rather than continue exchanging witty banter, all she did in response was smile at him.

  He found that even more unsettling than her banter.

  Chapter 16

  “He was an assistant district attorney?” Kari asked the man who had called the police to report discovering the body of the latest murder victim.

  Still pale and shaking, investment broker George Springsteen squeezed a yes out of a throat that sounded like it was about to close up on him any second now. He looked apprehensively at the long black bag containing his longtime friend as two of the medical examiner’s assistants wheeled it out of the victim’s den on a gurney.

  “We had a...a date to play tennis this morning,” the stricken broker said, struggling to maintain control over his voice. “Philip is—was—never late. He was obsessive about that.” The breath he blew out sounded more like a shudder. “When he didn’t show up at the court and didn’t call me, I knew something had to be wrong.”

  “Wrong?” Esteban questioned the ashen-faced man. “What do you mean by ‘wrong’?”

  Springsteen shrugged helplessly, his expression saying that it all seemed so insignificant now. “A flat tire, his ex-girlfriend showing up at the house, making a scene, that kind of thing.”

  Kari picked up on the angle immediately. There was always a chance that this murder was done by someone taking advantage of the current spree and had nothing to do with the serial killer they were pursuing.

  “She has a temper?” Kari asked the broker.

  Taking in another deep breath, Springsteen nodded numbly. “She was always on him about something. That’s why he broke it off with her.” He stared at the wooden floor where he had stumbled across his friend’s body, his pallor growing even whiter. “But I didn’t think she would do something like—like this.”

  Now that she gave it a little thought, neither did she, Kari decided. For one very important reason. But all bases had to be covered, so she asked, “Can you describe her?”

  Springsteen looked as if his thoughts were scattered in a hundred different directions. It took him a moment to pull himself together enough to form some sort of answer.

  “I don’t know...five-three, a hundred pounds maybe, give or take. I’m not good at this kind of thing,” he protested.

  “You’re doing fine,” Kari assured him in a kind, soothing voice. “Given your description, you wouldn’t really say she was a big-boned, strong woman, right?”

  “Ria? Hell, no.” The laugh that escaped his lips was devoid of any humor. “If she was any thinner, she’d look like a walking beanpole. She’s fanatical about not looking fat.”

  She exchanged looks with Esteban and could tell by the look in her partner’s eyes that they were on the same page. The ex-girlfriend couldn’t have slashed the A.D.A.’s throat so cleanly. That would have taken a certain amount of strength, strength a lightweight couldn’t have managed.

  That wasn’t to say, however, that, inspired by the recent series of murders, she hadn’t hired someone to slash her ex-boyfriend’s throat, Kari thought.

  “Would you happen to have an address and phone number for this Ria?” Esteban asked the distraught broker.

  He nodded numbly. “I haven’t deleted it from my phone yet.” Taking his phone out, he pulled up the woman’s phone number. Below it was her address. Springsteen offered his cell to Kari as he sighed deeply. “I guess I should take George’s number off my directory, too.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be taking any more calls,” she told the dead man’s friend gently.

  * * *

  “I’ve moved on,” Ria Long snapped indignantly when Kari asked if she remembered the last time she’d been in contact with her former boyfriend.

  The painfully slender young woman was standing in the doorway of her modest town house, the gossamer robe she had on barely covering all her assets as a breeze teased the material.

  “What’s this all about? Philip send you over to plead his case?” she demanded haughtily, tossing her long brown hair over her shoulder. “Too bad. He had his chance.”

  “So you don’t remember when you saw him last?” Esteban pressed.

  The dark-haired woman smiled like a predator spotting a new prey as her eyes swept appreciatively over Esteban.

  “A week ago. I saw him a week ago. He brought my stuff over and dumped it on the doorstep. The spineless jerk thought I wasn’t home, but I saw him slinking off. Why?” she wanted to know, her eyes narrowing as she honed in on Kari. “Did he say I took something?” She instantly became defensive. “That watch was mine—it belonged to my father. I gave it to Philip as a token of my love, but I don’t love him anymore so I took it back. If he—”

  Kari cut the other woman off before she could get carried away, telling her curtly, “This isn’t about a watch.”

  “Then what’s with all these questions?” Ria demanded, fisting one hand on her almost nonexistent hip. “What’s going on?”

  “Ms. Long, where were you between the hours of twelve and three?” Kari asked, citing the approximate time of death the medical examiner had provided.

  The woman looked from Kari to Esteban and then back again. It was obvious that her indignation hadn’t allowed her to connect the dots yet. “In bed. With my new boyfriend.”

  “This new boyfriend have a name?” Esteban queried.

  Ria gave up flirting and rolled her eyes. “Of course he has a name. Donald Barry. Now, why are you giving me the third degree?” she wanted to know. And then it finally hit her. Her eyes darted suspiciously back and forth between the two detectives. “Did something happen to Philip? Is that why you want to know where I was? Did he tell you I did something to him?”

  Kari wrote down the other man’s name. They were going to have to speak to him in order to verify the alibi they’d just been given.

  “I’m afraid he’s not saying anything anymore.” Kari faced the A.D.A.’s ex-girlfriend, hating the words she was about to say even though she’d taken an instant dislike to the woman she was talking to. The words were never easy to utter, because, in most cases, they confirmed the worst fears of the person on the receiving end of them. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, Ms. Long, but Philip Watson was murdered sometime between mid
night and three a.m. this morning.”

  Ria’s dark eyes widened in shock and disbelief. “No. You’re lying. This is some sick joke of Phil’s to get me to stay away. He’s not dead,” the woman shouted at them, tears of fear springing to her eyes even in the heat of her anger. “He can’t be dead. He can’t be!” Dissolving into despair, she crumbled to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. “He can’t be,” she repeated hoarsely, saying the words to herself rather than to them.

  * * *

  “Either she is one hell of an actress or that was on the level,” Kari said nearly an hour later as she and Esteban drove back to the precinct. Getting her second wind, she was behind the wheel again and, at the moment, annoyed with herself for feeling sorry for the woman they had just left in the arms of her current boyfriend. The latter, it turned out, had been in her bedroom the entire time they had conducted their interview with Ria on her front doorstep.

  “Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing,” Esteban told her. “For what it’s worth, I think she’s innocent. This was definitely our slasher striking again.”

  Kari nodded, slanting him a surprised glance as she came to a stop at a red light. “Wow, we agree on two points. This is almost scary.”

  Whatever he was going to say in response was put on hold because his cell phone was ringing. Shifting slightly, he took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen.

  Still waiting for the light to change to green, Kari saw that he was staring at the small screen. It looked to her as if he was debating letting the call go to voice mail.

  “You want to take that?” she asked, guessing the problem. “I promise not to listen.”

  He startled her by laughing at her offer. “Like you could help listening.”

  “I’ll hum,” she told him, then gave him a short demonstration as the light turned green.

  Esteban held up his hand as he pressed the green bar on the lower part of the screen, allowing the call to come through.

  “Please,” he requested, “don’t bother.” And then he was completely focused on his caller. “Hello, everything all right?”