Cavanaugh Stakeout Page 24

  The only one who was quiet at this point was the unconscious, drugged woman on the ground.

  Nik did as Finn instructed and pressed the number two on his phone. The second she heard Ramirez answering, she immediately told the other detective, “We got him. I mean, Finn got him,” she amended. “Garrett was about to kill another woman,” she said, her voice filled with emotion. “Send an ambulance and backup to the parking lot across the street from The Greek Isles Restaurant. Fast,” she stressed.

  Finished, she held out the phone to Finn. She could feel her heartbeat all the way into her fingers.

  “A little busy here at the moment,” Finn told her, as he passed on taking the cell from her and talking to Ramirez. “You said it all, anyway.”

  “Look, garbage-for-brains, unless you release me immediately, you are going to regret the day you were ever born, do you understand?” Garrett threatened.

  “I don’t think so,” Finn replied in a voice he figured the doctor would find maddeningly easygoing.

  Marilyn, meanwhile, was crying. “Let me go,” she begged frantically. “Please let me go.” Her head whirled as she looked from Finn to Nik. “My mother doesn’t know where I am. I have to go see her,” she insisted.

  “Damn straight you do, but not until this is over,” Nik said. Thinking of how Kim was going to take this, it hurt her to say what she did to Marilyn, but there was no other choice in her opinion.

  “But I didn’t do anything,” Marilyn cried. “Not on my own. Not because I wanted to,” she insisted. “He made me help him. He said that if I didn’t, he’d kill my mother in her sleep. I knew he would! Don’t you see, I had to help him. I had no choice!” she shouted.

  Finn saw Nik’s eyes go cold as she looked at the woman she had searched for and he had to admit that he was impressed. And proud of her for not allowing herself to be manipulated.

  “You always had a choice,” Nik said to Marilyn.

  “I didn’t, I didn’t,” Marilyn insisted.

  Her voice broke as Garrett cursed at her roundly, saying things that made her mouth drop open.

  In the background, Finn heard the sound of approaching sirens. They grew louder as they came closer.

  “None too soon,” he commented to Nik. He expected her to say something in response. But she didn’t and the look on her face grew exceedingly grim.

  Chapter 25

  It had been a long day and an even longer night. Nik felt as if she had been through a twenty-five-mile forced march through the desert in the middle of an extremely grueling heat wave.

  But when it was all over, she told herself that it was all worth it.

  Or at least a large part of it was. In the end, after questioning the homicidal doctor and his utterly clueless, hysterical accomplice in separate interrogation rooms, Finn, Nik and his task force got what they needed to build an airtight case against Dr. James Garrett. Marilyn talked nonstop once a deal for a more lenient sentence was dangled in front of her. With her evidence, Finn was confident that the psychopathic physician would never prey on another woman again, and never cause another family the kind of grief that his previous killing sprees had created.

  “This is a huge win,” Finn told Nik after Garrett and Marilyn were taken away, and he and Nik finally went back to their desks in the robbery squad room. He smiled to himself. “I knew Garrett would talk. By definition, serial killers are all self-centered narcissists who think they’re completely superior to the people they prey on. They can’t help talking about what they’ve done. All we needed was to find the right way to tap into that. And you did it.” He sat down on the edge of the desk she was using, smiling broadly at her. “You got Marilyn to talk, to tell you how Garrett coerced her to help him get to those women and have them lower their guard just enough so that they could be charmed by him.

  “And,” he continued, attempting to get her to snap out of what he took to be a depressed funk, “if it wasn’t for you getting Marilyn to open up, we would have never known just where he had that storage unit of his. It would have taken us forever to find the one he frequented. This whole area is full of storage units.” He shook his head, thinking about that. “If you ask me, Californians have way too much stuff.”

  “No argument there,” Nik agreed quietly.

  Finn paused, studying her face. Nik’s eyes looked incredibly sad to him. He had a feeling he knew why. “You’re thinking about your friend, aren’t you?”

  Nik blew out a long breath, trying not to dwell on what she had done—and what she still needed to do.

  She raised her eyes to his. “Actually, I’m thinking about the fact that I have to tell a woman who asked me to find her missing daughter that her daughter isn’t missing, but she’s an immoral accomplice who was helping a sick individual lure who knows how many women to their deaths. How do I do that?” she asked Finn. “How do I tell her that?”

  He took Nik’s hand in his and held it for a moment. “We do it together,” Finn told her.

  She shook her head. This wasn’t right. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “You’re not asking,” he gently pointed out. “I’m offering.” Finn rose from the desk, still looking at Nik. “What do you say we get out of here and go have a drink at Malone’s?” he suggested.

  She didn’t think she would be up to that, not after she finished facing Marilyn’s mother. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just go see Kim and get this over with, then go to my place.” She watched his face for a reaction.

  Finn nodded. “Yes, that’s doable, too. C’mon, let’s go and get this over with.”

  She knew that he was as wiped out as she was. And for Finn, this had turned into a complete victory. Even that last would-be victim they had gotten away from the doctor before he was able to give her another dose of Rohypnol, a lethal one this time, was going to make it according to the ER doctor. Finn should be out celebrating right now, not coming with her and holding her hand.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she told him.

  “Sure I do, ‘rookie,’” Finn told her with a smile, putting his arm around her shoulders as they walked out of the squad room. “We’re in this thing together, remember?” he reminded her.

  She remembered, all right. Remembered the exact wording he had used when he’d allowed her to work on the case with his team.

  “Just until the case was over,” she said, quoting his words when he’d “sworn” her in.

  “Well, I’m thinking we need to extend that time frame just a little longer...” he replied loftily. Finn left his statement hanging.

  That was when she realized that she loved him—and that she was in deep trouble because there was nothing she could do about that.

  * * *

  It was very late when they arrived at Kim Palmer’s house. As Finn brought his car to a stop, Nik was tempted to tell him to turn his car around and return in the morning. But she also knew that this would just be hanging over her head, growing bigger and bigger. Besides, she’d still have to face it in the morning, so she kept silent. Getting out of the vehicle, she went up to the front door and forced herself to knock.

  Rather than endure a muffled exchange through the door, Nik saw it suddenly opening before she had a chance to knock a second time.

  One look at her friend’s face told Nik that Kim Palmer knew everything.

  And she wasn’t happy about it.

  “You!” The single word came out sounding like a shrilled curse. Kim’s dark eyes darted back and forth between Nik and Finn. “How could you?” she angrily demanded. “How could you?”

  Nik started to open her mouth to defend herself, although she had no idea what she was going to say. She felt Finn’s hand on her arm, exerting just enough pressure to make her hold her piece.

  Instead, Finn spoke to the angry woman in the doorway. “I’m assuming that your daughter used her
one phone call to call you.”

  “Of course she called me,” Kim snapped. “I’m the only person who didn’t betray her.”

  “No one’s being betrayed,” Finn told her, enunciating each word in a quiet voice in order to get the woman to calm down. “The truth of it is your daughter acted as a panderer and lured unsuspecting women to their deaths by bringing them to her boyfriend and turning them over to him.”

  “Boyfriend,” Kim scoffed. “He wasn’t her boyfriend. What kind of a man threatens to kill someone’s mother if she didn’t do what he told her to?” Kim shouted. “Marilyn was just trying to protect me,” the woman insisted, almost beside herself.

  Finn began to answer Kim, but Nik held up her hand, stopping him. She wanted to answer Marilyn’s mother herself.

  “Marilyn was just trying to justify herself to you, justify the horrible things she had done. Kim, she was desperate to get Garrett to stay with her. She wanted to prove to him that she was indispensable. Marilyn was convinced that as long as she helped Garrett satisfy his bloodlust, he’d keep her around—instead of the alternative,” she concluded grimly.

  Kim’s eyes widened with fearful disbelief. “Which was?” she asked.

  Nik’s eyes met hers. “I think you know the answer to that,” she told the woman. When Kim continued looking at her, waiting even as she trembled, Nik answered her. “He would have killed her, too. Just as he had his last ‘assistant.’”

  “What are you saying?” Kim asked in a shaky, disbelieving voice. The woman seemed to all but fade into herself, looking fearful.

  “She’s telling you that Garrett had done this before,” Finn told Marilyn’s mother. “We dug through open case files in Palm Springs and we found that Garrett conducted the same sort of killing spree there, using the help of another infatuated young woman. At the end of his homicidal spree, he killed her, too.”

  Kim was shaking all over now. “You’re lying! I don’t believe you!”

  “We texted Garrett’s picture to that girl’s family. Her brother recognized Garrett as the doctor his sister had run off with. Her body was later found in a landfill,” Finn told Marilyn’s mother. “I’ll spare you the gory details.”

  Kim Palmer looked at them with tear-filled eyes. She appeared haunted and lost. “What do I do now?”

  “You cry. You pull yourself together. And you get Marilyn the best damn lawyer you can find,” Nik answered, “because she’s going to need one. And,” she added, “you be grateful that your daughter didn’t wind up being among all those other women who crossed that doctor’s path.” Finished, Nik turned toward Finn. “I need to get out of here.”

  “Yes, you do,” he agreed, guiding her away from Kim Palmer’s house.

  He waited until he got Nik to his car before he said anything. In the driver’s seat, he turned to look at her. “About that drink,” he began, prepared to coax her if he had to. If he’d ever seen someone who looked as if they needed a drink, it was her.

  He saw a sheen in her eyes and knew that she was doing her best to hold back tears. “Do you have anything to drink at your place?” she asked hoarsely.

  Finn realized that he had never felt so very protective of anyone in his life. He smiled at Nik, then started up his car. “Funny you should ask.”

  He drove her away from Kim Palmer’s house as quickly as he could, hoping distance would help her deal with what she was feeling.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, he unlocked his front door and brought Nik into his single-story house.

  “What’ll you have?” he asked, turning on the living-room light. “I’ve got vodka, rum, whiskey and—”

  He never got to the “and” part because as he’d turned toward Nik to continue giving her a selection to choose from, Nik suddenly launched herself into his arms, her mouth immediately finding his.

  “This is what I’ll have,” she told him, kissing Finn with an urgency that gave no indication it would be quenched anytime soon.

  Clothes began to go flying, falling helter-skelter to the floor without notice. Nik’s questing mouth was everywhere. She was a parched woman lost in the desert and seeking water in order to save herself.

  Finn was that watering hole.

  And he was desperate to help.

  They made love feverishly, using every single ounce of strength they could summon.

  They made love not once but twice, until finally, too exhausted to even move an eyelash, they remained where they were, on the floor in his living room. The only thing Finn could manage to do was put his arms around Nik and hold her.

  He held her until the first rays of daylight began to softly slip into the room.

  “Better?” Finn finally asked when he felt her stirring against him.

  He felt her lips forming a small smile against his chest. “I didn’t mean to attack you like that,” she said ruefully. “Sorry.”

  Nik tried to rise but Finn wanted to keep her where she was for a few moments longer.

  “I’m not sorry,” he told her.

  He felt her warm breath move along his skin as she laughed softly. “I guess you could just think of that as a last hurrah,” Nik said, attempting to make an excuse for her actions.

  But Finn didn’t understand. “Why would I think that?” he asked.

  She was trying to distance herself and it hurt. “Well, because the case is over, it’s solved, and you’ll go back to your regular cases and I’ll go back to insurance investigations and we won’t see each other anymore.”

  The finality of that tasted bitter in her mouth.

  Finn raised himself up on his elbow and searched her face. He could feel something die inside of him. “Is that what you want?”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted,” she told him. “To have me go,” she added, the words creating a sad, helpless feeling inside of her.

  She wasn’t going to cry, Nik silently insisted, but even now, she could feel something moist forming on her lashes.

  “Lady,” Finn informed her authoritatively, “you have no idea what I want. It certainly isn’t what you just said.”

  Nik didn’t want to hope. It was too awful if that hope didn’t bear fruit. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. “Oh?”

  “Yeah, ‘oh,’” he echoed.

  “All right,” she said slowly, feeling her stomach forming a hard, almost disabling knot inside her. But she knew she had to continue, knew she had to get Finn to explain what he meant—otherwise, she was going to go on nurturing this glimmer of hope for the rest of her natural life. “What do you want?”

  “You,” he said, looming over her. “I want you. For the rest of my life, I want you. I want to wake up to you, I want to go to sleep with you. And, just in case I haven’t made myself clear, Kowalski,” he told her, “I want you.”

  Laughter bubbled up within her chest. “You talk too much, Cavanaugh,” she told him, pulling his mouth down to hers.

  “Just trying to make myself clear,” he murmured, drawing away from her long enough to say that one last thing before he completely gave himself up to making passionate love with the woman he planned to marry.

  Very, very soon.

  Because when you find the one your heart has been looking for since the very beginning, he saw no reason to wait.

  * * *

  Don’t forget previous titles in the

  Cavanaugh Justice series:

  Cavanaugh’s Missing Person

  Cavanaugh Cowboy

  Cavanaugh’s Secret Delivery

  Cavanaugh Vanguard

  Cavanaugh Encounter

  Available now from

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  Her Dark Web Defender

  by Dana Nussio

  Prologue

  “Emily’s tongue was bluer than mine,” Kelly Roberts blurted in the back seat of the police car, the stinky blanket scratching her bare shoulders.

  Why she’d thought of the raspberry slushes they’d been slurping just before it happened, she wasn’t sure, just as she couldn’t figure out why the lady cop sitting next to her kept patting her arm like she was her mom or something. That itched, too. And made her want to jump out of the car and run.

  “You sure you’re warm enough?”

  “I’m fine.” But she couldn’t stop shaking, even if it was the hottest day in June so far. She would never be warm again.

  She let the officer pull the awful blanket high enough on her shoulders to cover most of her freckles and pressed her cheek against the window to get a better look outside.

  Past the yellow tape that had been strung between two trees, Emily’s new lime-green mountain bike lay abandoned across the sidewalk. It had crashed there when the scary man leaped from behind the bushes and yanked her off the seat. Her cup was on its side, the melted drink a blue puddle on the concrete.