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  “Yes, sir.”

  The lieutenant surprised her with a quick, spasmodic smile as he nodded his approval. “Good. Oh, and one more thing.”

  So near and yet so far, she thought, all set to escape only to be pulled back. “Yes, sir?”

  “That laptop that was found near the body, you really think you can get something off it?” There was genuine interest in his voice rather than any condescending note, tendering the notion that she was going to fail.

  She tried to read the man in an effort to know what kind of answer he expected from her. If she said yes right off the bat, he’d undoubtedly think she was bragging and high on herself. So she couched her answer carefully. “I know I’d like to try.”

  “Yes or no, Cavanaugh. I don’t have any time for your modesty or your aw-shucks routine. Give it to me straight. Can you do this?”

  “Yes—probably,” she tacked on. There were always problems that could crop up and she didn’t want him berating her, or reminding her that she’d misrepresented herself and her abilities.

  Latimore surprised her again by laughing in response. “I guess that’ll just have to be good enough for now. Brody tends to like to work alone, so you’re going to have to stay sharp in order to keep up and not get left behind.”

  Latimore made it sound as if Brody had never worked with anyone before. “But he had a partner,” she protested.

  “Montgomery usually handled the paperwork part of it—or mishandled it,” the lieutenant tacked on, clearly not pleased with Montgomery’s work ethic.

  “I gathered that much,” Valri said, unaware that her comment elicited a muffled laugh from the lieutenant that the man managed to hide.

  “The one time they went into the field together, Montgomery wound up in the hospital,” Latimore told her. “That made Brody more convinced than ever that he worked better alone. You’re going to change that.” It wasn’t a comment, or a prediction, it was an order.

  Was that her actual assignment? she couldn’t help wondering. To get the detective to come around and get back into the swing of working with a partner? She supposed that she could do that.

  “I’ll give it a try, sir,” Valri told the lieutenant.

  “I don’t want you to ‘try,’ I want you to ‘do,’” he ordered in a no-nonsense voice. “Do I make myself clear, Cavanaugh?”

  She squared her shoulders, every inch the consummate professional. “Crystal, sir.”

  Latimore nodded, satisfied—for now. “Good talk, Cavanaugh.” He waved her out of the chair and out of the room. “Close the door on your way out.”

  He didn’t have to tell her twice. Valri lost no time leaving.

  When she got back to what was now her desk, Brody was still picking up the fallen files and haphazardly dumping them into a large rectangular box. The box had held a six-month supply of paper for the printer ten minutes ago. The reams of paper were now stacked in a corner.

  Without a word, Valri began picking up Montgomery’s documents and depositing them into the box. Two could make the job go faster.

  Alex raised his eyes for a moment. “So?” he asked as he got back to clearing the floor. He didn’t bother organizing the papers. That was a job for Montgomery, not a man who valued his sanity.

  Valri took a guess as to what her new partner was asking her. “The lieutenant wanted to officially welcome me into the office.”

  Alex stopped dumping pages for a moment and looked at her. The expression on his face told Valri that he didn’t believe her.

  What he said next confirmed it. “That man wouldn’t ‘officially welcome’ the Three Wise Men if they came into the office.” He frowned slightly as he got back to picking up papers. He tried not to notice that her close proximity was undermining his ability to concentrate. But then he’d always been an admirer of shapely limbs and a killer smile. It was nothing personal, he silently insisted. “We’re not going to work well together if you lie to me, Cavanaugh.”

  She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to level with him. After all, she hadn’t done anything to merit the lieutenant’s strange question to begin with. “He wanted to know if I got sick looking at dead bodies.”

  Alex laughed, nodding to himself. “Now that sounds like Latimore. Do you?” he asked her as a sidebar.

  “I don’t know.” He glanced at her again, this time raising a skeptical eyebrow. She could see the question in his eyes. “It’s what I told the lieutenant, too. I’ve never seen a dead body before.”

  There were times that he wished he could say that. “All the more reason for you to stay here, working on the smashed laptop, while I go and try to find some of the late Hunter Rogers’s friends.” Picking up the last of the papers, he tossed them into the box, which was now close to overflowing. “Speaking of which, do gamers even have friends?” he asked her out of sheer curiosity. To the best of his knowledge—having never had any interest in spending endless hours competing against people he didn’t know—gamers were all a bunch of socially awkward, highly intellectual, obsessed-with-winning geeks.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Valri told him, then thought to expand her response. “I guess it all depends on your definition of friends.”

  That was easy. “Someone who knows all your secrets and still likes you.”

  The words had come to him automatically. It was something his father had once said to him.

  By that definition, he himself had no friends, Alex thought. Because he had secrets he felt he couldn’t—and thus didn’t—share with anyone. Secrets that would create chasms between himself and the people he knew.

  “If that’s your criteria,” Valri countered, “I guess what it comes down to is you actually define the word likes.”

  Alex blew out a breath. He was right. This world was a dog-eat-dog existence. “The gaming world doesn’t sound very warm and friendly,” he quipped.

  “Well, that might be because it’s not,” she told him with an amused laugh. “It’s all about competing and winning and coming up with a better game or, barring that, a better strategy.”

  “And you’re part of all that?” he asked her.

  Alex liked to think that he was a fair judge of people, and she didn’t seem the type to enjoy that sort of bloodless, cutthroat competition. Nor did she seem the kind of person who liked spending time locked away, focused on a screen and annihilating the two-dimensional “enemy.”

  “I was,” Valri acknowledged. “A long, long time ago, in another lifetime,” she told him. “My horizons have become broadened since then, but I do like to keep my hand in the game every so often, just for practice,” she admitted without any qualms, then added, “Keeps me on my toes.”

  “So would a pair of six-inch stilettos,” he commented. Enough talk. He had to hit the streets and get cracking. “Okay, I’ll have one of the uniforms sign out the smashed laptop from the evidence lockup and you see if you can resurrect the dead while I go back to Rogers’s apartment and see if I can find something that’ll lead me to one of his buddies—if he had any.”

  It hit her like a bolt out of the blue. “Randolph Wills,” she called out to her partner’s back as he was about to leave the squad room.

  That stopped him in his tracks. Alex turned to look at her. He appeared somewhat skeptical at this sudden revelation. “What?”

  “You said you wanted the name of one of Hunter’s ‘buddies.’ Randolph Wills hung around him a lot, trying to absorb his technique as well as his expertise. He’s kind of a leech, but his heart’s in the right place.”

  “Most people’s hearts can be found in the same place,” he told her in an abrupt voice. “And you know this about Wills how?”

  She made no attempt at building up the suspense. Instead, she told him point-blank, “Word of mouth.” And then she smiled. She was leading him to a sunrise and his eyes were firmly
shut. “The gaming community is both larger and smaller than you think.”

  Alex looked at her as if she had begun babbling gibberish. “Is that some kind of riddle for the ages?”

  His sarcastic tone didn’t faze her. Growing up as the youngest had allowed her to be ready for anything and had given her a hide like a rhino. Her heart, though, was still her own and it was, for the most part, soft.

  “Just a piece of information to contemplate,” she told him with a smile. “And I really think that you’re going to want me to go with you.”

  They had different definitions of the word want, he thought. And his definition had nothing to do with the job and everything to do with this gut reaction he was experiencing. If ever there was a “tread lightly” situation, this was it.

  “And why is that?” Alex asked her.

  “Well, for one thing I think I know where you can find Wills,” she told him.

  “And for another?” he asked because she clearly was building up to something.

  “You’re liable to need a translator,” she told him, using the word liable out of consideration for the ego he had to have. Everyone was born with an ego and she had a feeling that his might be affected if what Wills told him—probably in a matter-of-fact voice—went straight over his head.

  Alex was taking her words literally and he scowled. “He’s foreign?”

  “No, born right here in Silicon Valley,” she attested, “but he might toss around terminology in his explanation that’ll confuse you.”

  He wondered if she realized that she had just insulted him. “I’m not exactly a functioning illiterate.”

  “It has nothing to do with literacy, Brody,” she assured him. “Gamers and hackers live in a different world from regular people—normal people if you will,” she tacked on for his benefit. “I’m just saying that he might start tossing around terms that won’t mean anything to you—and why should they? Gaming isn’t your world.”

  She saw that her explanation didn’t sit well with him. Most likely because she’d hurt his pride. She gave him a way out.

  “Besides,” she reminded him tactfully, “how can you be my mentor if I’m here in the office and you’re out there in the field? How am I supposed to learn from you?”

  Alex shrugged dismissively. “That wasn’t my first thought,” he told her.

  Not to be put off, Valri suggested gently, “Maybe you can find a way to work it in.”

  She might look like a ball of fluff that was an easy pushover, but she was tenacious, he’d give her that. And he didn’t feel like arguing the point. It wasted too much time.

  “You want to come along that much, okay, fine. You’re coming along,” he told her, throwing in the towel for now. “Let’s go.”

  “Can I drive?” she asked brightly, falling into step with him as he went into the hall.

  “No.” The single word was filled with finality, leaving absolutely no room for argument. Or so he believed.

  “But I’m the one who knows the way,” Valri pointed out.

  He punched the down button on the wall, summoning the elevator car. “You also know how to talk—God knows you know how to talk,” he said with a dramatic sigh. “That means that you can tell me how to get to Wills’s place while I’m driving.”

  “It’d be easier if I just drove,” she informed him a tad stubbornly.

  That was not his definition of easy. Nothing about this exuberant, temporary detective was easy—and he’d bet his last dime that she knew it.

  “That all depends on whose point of view you’re looking at this from—yours, or mine,” he told her. “And since it’s my car, I win. You can still stay back in the office and play twenty-one pickup with the laptop, you know. Nobody’s stopping you.”

  “I’ll ride shotgun,” she said, resigning herself to sitting in the passenger seat. She was not about to petulantly remain in the office because she didn’t get her way.

  “Nice of you to come around,” Alex told her.

  It was the first time since they had been introduced in the chief of Ds’ office that she had seen her new partner smile.

  She had an instant reaction to the smile, starting with the very center of her stomach. If she didn’t know better, she would have said that it had done a complete flip, spinning around a full 360 degrees and causing something akin to a tidal wave.

  This man could very well be lethal, given the right set of circumstances.

  It would be up to her to make sure that those circumstances never came together, at least not where she was concerned. She was here to learn, to advance, not be the target for advances.

  Despite her wise words to the contrary, it took a while for her stomach to settle down.

  Chapter 4

  Buckling up, she gave Alex the gamer’s address, then resisted the temptation to offer directions once he had pulled out of the parking lot and was on the main thoroughfare.

  Since Brody was the native—or so she assumed—and she was the transplant, Valri figured that he knew the streets of Aurora far better than she did. Following that logic, she knew it was to her advantage not to offer a running commentary about distance, speed and the availability of shortcuts.

  Even so, it was a temptation she had to do battle with, albeit silently. She’d learned long ago that men like Brody didn’t enjoy following someone else’s lead in any manner if they could help it. She’d seen that same trait manifested in her brothers, and while she could simply ignore it to her heart’s content when it came to Brennan, Duncan, Bryce and Malloy, they were family and had to get along with her no matter what. That was just the Cavanaugh way: criticize all you want, but always be there for family when the chips were down.

  Brody, on the other hand, could just up and dump her if the mood moved him, so she had to take care not to annoy him—at least not until they had a more secure partnership going. And she knew that nothing annoyed a man more than being given directions when they weren’t asked for. For some reason that sort of thing was at the top of the list of things that seemed to threaten their manhood.

  “You run out of words, Cavanaugh?” he asked her, curious as to what brought on this sudden, atypical silence. Alex glanced at the woman in the passenger seat to reassure himself that she hadn’t fallen asleep for some reason. She hadn’t. But she had been quiet for at least ten minutes. So far, from what he’d seen, that seemed out of character for her. Maybe if he knew what triggered it, he could use the information to cause her silence when he needed to.

  As if deep in thought, Valri jumped in her seat at the sound of his voice. “What?”

  “I asked if you ran out of words,” he repeated. “You’re being quiet,” he added by way of an explanation for his question.

  Valri laughed shortly. “I didn’t think you noticed.”

  “When the wall of noise suddenly just breaks apart like that, a person tends to notice.” After all, she’d been talking almost nonstop before they got into his vehicle.

  Valri shrugged. “I didn’t want to get on your nerves.”

  If that had been her goal, she pretty much failed, Alex thought.

  “Too late for that,” he quipped. In case she was one of those overly sensitive types, he added something for her to focus on. “Let’s just call this our ‘get-acquainted period.’” Alex paused, letting that sink in.

  Then, as if to live up to his word about getting acquainted, he asked her a question out of the blue. “Did they force you?”

  Valri stared at the man whom fate and the chief had made her partner. Where had that come from? And what, exactly, was he asking her?

  “Did who force me to do what?”

  “Your family. Did they force you to become a cop?”

  “No. Why would they?” Actually, Brennan as well as her father had tried to talk her out of
it when they heard that she had decided to apply to the police academy.

  Alex shrugged. “Well, every Cavanaugh I’ve run into or even heard of seems to be part of one division or other in the department. Even the one who isn’t directly in law enforcement, that vet, I think her name is Patience, the police department has her down as the doctor on call for the K-9 unit in case any of them get hurt.”

  Valri offered a smile in exchange for his speculation. “I guess to serve and protect is just built into our DNA. I believe it’s supposed to be a voluntary gene, though.” Her teasing tone changed to one that was a little more serious. “Why would you think I had to be forced into joining law enforcement?”

  “Because from what you said, you seemed to have other interests—interests that could have taken you in a completely different direction.” The way, he couldn’t help thinking, that his family’s “occupation” could have taken him in, thereby drastically changing the direction of his life. “Besides, you look like you should be a cheerleader for some professional football team, not tackling would-be bad guys.”

  “Cheerleader, huh?” She seemed to roll that idea over in her mind. “Is that a compliment or a put-down?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t meant as either,” he told her. “Definitely not a put-down. Why would you be insulted to be called a cheerleader?”

  In his opinion, the first requirement for a cheerleader was to be absolutely gorgeous. Flexibility was only a secondary requirement. He had a feeling she was both. She was certainly the first.

  “Because the way you say it, it sounds as if you think cheerleaders are bubbleheaded women who share a communal brain. At the very least, they are incapable of a single creative idea.”

  “All that came out of one sentence, huh?” Alex marveled, impressed. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you do belong in law enforcement. And, in case you’re wondering, that was a compliment.” His eyes met hers for a moment. He felt the undercurrent of something stirring, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. His sense of survival told him that it might be safer that way. “But level with me—” he began.