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  He was a firm believer that you never got to redo a first impression—and he knew that they were the ones that tended to last.

  Shadowing his new partner’s every step, Matt was half a beat behind her as they came to the bottom of the last staircase. She’d just reached the door when he stretched his hand over her head and pushed it open as she turned the doorknob.

  Kendra bit back an annoyed retort. She felt as if she was almost encompassed by the man’s long arms. He seemed to take up all the space around her, she thought grudgingly. And all the air. There was no other reason why, just for a second, she’d felt so hot and so light-headed.

  “I can push open my own door, Abilene,” she informed him crisply. Out of the stairwell, she took the opportunity to pull fresh air into her lungs. The feeling of heat began to recede.

  “Nobody said you couldn’t, Good,” Abilene replied mildly. “Just doing what I can to help. It’s a heavy door.”

  It was a heavy door, but she wasn’t about to say anything to that effect. She didn’t need some hotshot thinking he was her knight in dented armor.

  Muttering a couple of choice words under her breath, Kendra all but marched into the parking lot. She went straight for her old Crown Victoria. Number 23, the one she used to share with Joe, before the man had been seduced by the idea of retirement.

  “I’ve got the address, I’m driving,” she crisply informed Abilene.

  Wide shoulders rose slightly, then lowered again in what seemed like the most careless of fashions, as if the matter of who drove was the last thing on her partner’s mind.

  “Fine with me,” he told her. “I like riding shotgun anyway.” Opening the passenger door, he folded his long, lanky frame into the seat, then pulled out the seat belt and secured it. “Never cared much for driving in traffic.”

  Kendra frowned as she started up the vehicle. So far, Abilene seemed to be going out of his way to come across as agreeable. But she wasn’t about to be lulled into a false sense of security. Joe had tripped her up several times before they’d found their work rhythm. Since he was her first partner after she’d been awarded her gold shield, she had nothing to compare the older man to and assumed that all male partners were going to challenge her straight out of the box until she proved herself capable.

  After being on the job for over two years in the Homicide Division, she found it more than a little annoying to be sent back to square one. But that was the price she had to pay for being a woman—and for being related to the brass. Because her father was head of the CSI lab, she was acquainted with accusations of nepotism. But now that she was connected to the Cavanaughs, she had a feeling that she would never know a peaceful moment again.

  She spared Abilene a glance as they took off. Nope, she thought. Never again.

  * * *

  The five-story apartment building where Lt. Holmes had sent them was located in the more well-off—although by no means rich—section of Aurora. Leaving the unmarked Crown Victoria parked in a space intended for deliveries, Kendra made sure that the police light was visible before she and Abilene went up the four flights in the elevator to the scene of the crime.

  “What, no stairs?” Abilene asked, amused when she opted for the elevator.

  “I thought I’d let you save your energy in case there’s a need for some heavy lifting,” Kendra told him without missing a beat.

  “Thoughtful,” he quipped as they got off.

  The forced smile came and went in a blink of an eye. “I try.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” he said, looking at her significantly.

  Something in her gut undulated for half a heartbeat. She banked it down and walked faster.

  The apartment in question wasn’t hard to find. The immediate area directly before the crime scene was crowded with curious people. Apparently people from the building’s other apartments, as well as an influx of others drawn by word of mouth, were gathered about the hallway in clusters like bees circling a hive.

  The yellow tape strung across a doorway must have attracted them, Kendra couldn’t help thinking.

  The superintendent, when they finally located him, appeared rather young, inexperienced, and seemed completely distraught. Every few minutes he kept nervously repeating that this was his “first dead body” and that viewing it wasn’t nearly as “cool” as he’d thought it would be. He seemed genuinely disappointed about that.

  Kendra called the slight man a few choice names in her head, but for now kept them to herself. She glanced in Abilene’s direction and guessed by his expression that perhaps a few of the same names for the super had occurred to him as well.

  Maybe they weren’t that different after all, she mused.

  Getting down to business, Kendra went directly toward the body. Lying facedown in the middle of the living room, the victim was completely covered with a king-size blanket that appeared to have been taken from the lone bedroom. No limbs were peeking out at either end, but a pool of angry dark red blood haloed the blanket, bearing silent testimony to the fact that someone had indeed died in this apartment. No one ever lost that much blood and survived.

  Squatting down beside the victim, Kendra raised a corner of the blanket and got her first view of the dead woman. Her reaction was always the same. Her heart would feel as if it was constricting in her chest as sympathy flooded through her.

  The victim, a woman most likely in her twenties, was lying facedown on what had been a beige rug. The back of her head had been struck hard and was apparently the source of all the blood on the floor. Kendra’s first guess was that the blow to the head appeared to be the cause of death.

  Dropping the blanket back over the dead woman, Kendra rose carefully to her feet, ignoring Abilene’s extended hand, offering her aid.

  “Our killer knew the victim,” she commented, more to herself than to Abilene. She wasn’t quite ready to talk to him just yet, at least not in the role of her partner. She regarded him more as a casual observer. Baby steps, she counseled herself. “And apparently he felt remorseful enough to cover her up so he wouldn’t have to look at her after he’d ended her life.”

  “Or she,” Abilene interjected.

  Caught off guard, Kendra stopped and looked at him quizzically. “What?”

  “Or she,” Abilene repeated. “The killer could have been a woman. Doesn’t take much to pick up that statue and swing it hard enough to do some major damage at the point of contact.”

  Abilene nodded toward what appeared to be a rather cheap bust of Shakespeare lying on the floor not that far from the prone body.

  Kendra stared down at the faux bronze bust. Shakespeare, no less.

  You just never knew, did you?

  Her first thought would have been that someone who’d gone out and bought something like that would have been mild-mannered and cultured. So much for being a profiler.

  “No, it doesn’t,” she agreed.

  Moving over to the bust, she squatted down for a better look at it. It was the murder weapon, all right. There was a thin red line of blood at one corner. The killer had obviously come up behind the victim and hit her when she hadn’t been looking.

  A lovers’ quarrel? Or calculated, premeditated murder?

  Too bad the bust couldn’t talk.

  More than four hundred years after the fact and the bard was apparently still killing people off, Kendra thought cynically. Except now they didn’t get up for a final bow once the curtain fell.

  With a suppressed sigh, Kendra rose to her feet again.

  And then, just as she turned back to look at the prone figure lying on the floor beneath the ginger-colored blanket, one of the crime scene investigators who had arrived earlier came over to bag the ancient-looking bust.

  “That comment about the killer knowing the victim,” Abilene began.

  For one tension-free second, she’d actually forgotten about him. Too bad that second couldn’t have lasted a bit longer.

  Abilene’s remark, hanging in midair like that, had her l
ooking at him sharply, anticipating some sort of a confrontation regarding her thought process.

  Was he going to challenge something else she’d said? Already?

  Kendra eyed the man she knew her sisters would have thought was a living, breathing hunk, trying to see past his chiseled exterior. She waited for the verbal duel to begin.

  “Watch a lot of procedural television, do you?” he asked.

  “I don’t have to.” Although she did, she silently admitted. The shows intrigued her. But he didn’t have to know that. She debated saying anything further, then decided to go ahead. “My father’s the head of the Crime Scene Lab.”

  “Boy, you sure have every angle covered, don’t you, Good?” he laughed.

  Kendra bristled. “I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  Now that was definitely amusement in his eyes. “Would you rather I called you Bad?” It was clearly a teasing remark and perhaps under other circumstances—before life had trampled all over her heart—she might have picked up the banter, even enjoyed it. But she was what she was and there was no going back.

  Still, it didn’t stop her from noticing that the man had the kind of smile a woman could get lost in—even a sensible woman.

  But not her, of course.

  Still, she wished the chief hadn’t picked him to be her partner. Going it alone—even with an increased workload—would have been better for her in the long run.

  “What I’d rather was that my old partner was still around.”

  He surprised her by leaning in and whispering, “Lemonade, Good. When life throws lemons at you, you make lemonade.”

  Her eyes held his for a long moment. Until she found herself sinking into them. She backpedaled quickly. “I don’t like lemonade.”

  He laughed, shaking his head. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” he murmured before turning back to the murder scene.

  Chapter 3

  “Hey, Abilene, what do you—”

  Kendra stopped abruptly. She’d assumed that the detective was behind her, but when she turned around, she only saw the crime scene investigators in the room.

  “Great,” she muttered. “Now he’s wandering off.” Biting off a few ripe words, she went to look for him.

  She found her new partner in the bedroom. Abilene stood before the narrow mirrored closet. The sliding door was in the open position and he was staring into it.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Kendra saw nothing that would have captured his attention so intently. Was she missing something, or was he one of those people who stared off into space as he pieced things together in his mind?

  “So, what do you think?” she finally asked him.

  If she’d surprised him by coming up behind him, Abilene gave no indication. Turning from the closet, he looked at her as he lobbed her question back to her.

  “You’re the expert.”

  Did that mean he was unwilling to state an opinion, or that he was giving her her due? So far she really had no idea how to read this man and that bothered her. More than that, it annoyed her.

  Hell, everything about this man annoyed her, not the least of which was that he seemed to be getting under her skin and this was only day one of their temporary partnership. What was she going to be like a month into this ordeal? She didn’t want to think about it.

  Kendra was aware that learning to pick up signals from this man would take time, but she’d gotten more impatient in this difficult past year and it made her less willing to wait. Jason’s accident and subsequent suicide had made her want to seize things immediately, solve crimes yesterday. It was hard regaining her stride when all she wanted to do was run, not walk and certainly not stroll.

  Abilene was still looking at her. Waiting for her opinion—or at least pretending to. Either way, she gave it to him.

  She glanced back toward the living room, then said, “Looks to me as if Ryan Burnett and his girlfriend got into a fight—cause unknown at the moment—and in a fit of temper, he hit her with that bust. When he realized what he’d done—and that she was dead—he apparently got scared and took off.”

  “Stopping to pack?” Abilene asked.

  He indicated the cluster of bare hangers in the closet. Off to one side of the tasteful, small bedroom was a black lacquered bureau. Several of its drawers were hanging open. From the disarray left behind, it was obvious that some items had been hastily grabbed from there, too.

  She shrugged, amending her theory to fit the scene. “Maybe Ryan decided to take off permanently. Man’s going to need more than a toothbrush if he’s starting a new life somewhere else.”

  “That shows clear thinking,” Abilene protested. “It doesn’t jibe with a supposed crime of impulse,” he pointed out.

  Kendra saw no contradiction. “The man’s an accountant. He’s supposed to be a clear thinker. It’s the nature of the beast.” She glanced at the bed. It had no comforter or blanket over its crisp, coordinated navy blue sheets. That confirmed her initial theory that the blanket in the other room, now spread over the murder victim, had come from here.

  That brought her back to the theory that Ryan hadn’t meant to kill the woman. Things had gotten out of hand for some reason. But what had triggered the argument? And why now, at this particular point? The answers to that might explain everything.

  Seeing one of the two officers who had called in the homicide, she crossed to the man and asked, “Do we have an ID on the victim yet?”

  The officer nodded and offered her the wallet he’d gotten from the dead woman’s purse.

  “Her name’s Summer Miller,” he told her. He handed over the wallet, exposing the driver’s license for her benefit.

  Kendra looked down at the small picture on the license. She’d seen a larger, framed photograph of Summer in the bedroom on the bureau. She was standing in front of a smiling young man. His arms were wrapped protectively around her. The two appeared very happy, as if they didn’t have a care in the world between them.

  They did now, Kendra thought grimly. She assumed that the man in the photograph was the missing accountant, Ryan Burnett.

  “Well, at least we have a name for his girlfriend,” she said quietly, closing the wallet for now.

  Spying a pile of plastic sealable bags used for evidence, she picked one up and slipped the wallet inside. She closed the seal before tucking the wallet into her pocket. She wanted to hand-carry this piece to her father personally. There were questions she wanted to ask.

  And then she turned toward Abilene. “You up for some canvassing of the neighbors on the floor, see if anyone heard or saw anything that might prove to be useful?”

  “Lead the way,” he said, gesturing toward the doorway. “But—”

  Kendra crossed the threshold, then looked at him over her shoulder. “But?” she echoed.

  “Shouldn’t we inform her next of kin first before we start canvassing and flashing her picture around?” he asked.

  “Since we’re here, we’ll canvas the floor first.” Kendra didn’t like wasting time and she sincerely doubted that word of the young woman’s murder—as well as her name—would get out in the next hour. “She’ll still be the victim of a homicide—and dead—in an hour,” she assured Abilene. “Plenty of time to break her family’s heart in an hour instead of now,” Kendra added with a resigned sigh.

  That was the worst part of the job as far as she as concerned. Informing the family of a death, then watching the light go out of a parent’s or a spouse’s eyes. They should have a special group of trained professionals who only did that—and rendered grief counseling while they were at it.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Abilene murmured in a deep voice under his breath.

  She knew he didn’t mean it, but she took it as a token victory. In response, she paused to flash a quick, satisfied smile in his direction.

  That he smiled back pleased her more than she was happy about.

  * * *

  They wound up canvassing the apartments on the crime s
cene floor. All the people who had been milling around the hallway had mysteriously disappeared when they came out, going back to their lives and choosing not to communicate with the police.

  It turned out that only a few people—three, to be exact—were in their apartments to answer their doorbells when Kendra and Abilene came around.

  The first was a young woman with a brand-new baby. The baby looked to be less than a month old. The new mother had all but physically dragged them into her apartment when they rang her bell. It was obvious that she was desperate for adult companionship, even companionship that involved being questioned about a murder.

  It was clear that while she loved her infant son, the woman was more than ready to return to work—or at least to be in the company of human beings who knew how to do more than spit up, cry, wet and sleep.

  Moving like a woman who was sleepwalking, she admitted to not having heard anything out of the ordinary that day: no sudden shouts, no raised, angry voices, no loud crashing sounds.

  They thanked her and left as soon as they could extricate themselves.

  Two doors down, a night watchman finally opened the door after Abilene had given up ringing the doorbell and resorted to knocking—hard. Rumpled and bleary-eyed, the man appeared none too happy to be woken up. He was no more helpful than the new mother had been, shaking his head in response to the same questions.

  “No, man, I didn’t hear anything. I took a sleeping pill,” he explained, then whined, “Only way I can get some sleep. It’s just not natural to have to try to sleep during the day,” he grumbled.

  “Maybe you should try getting another job,” Kendra suggested tactfully.

  Her words brought an instant, almost malevolent look into the man’s dark eyes. “Don’t you think I would if I could?” he snapped at her. “I was a damn aerospace engineer before all those useless companies started to bail and move out of the state. This damn night watchman job was the only thing I could find after looking for five months.” He glared at her accusingly. “Now I probably won’t be able to get back to sleep because of you.”