Cavanaugh Stakeout Read online

  As far as he was concerned, this was not a laughing matter. “Only the ones I arrest,” he responded darkly. “I want you to know that if you’re withholding evidence, you’re on very thin ice—”

  She stopped him right there. “The only ‘evidence’ I have is her name, which you already know,” she reminded him. “And I’m in the process of trying to find out the name of this ‘mystery’ bad influence her mother is worried about, if her mother got that part right—and there is still a very real possibility that she didn’t.”

  “Ms. Ko-val-ski—” Finn began again, his patience running really short.

  “Nik,” she corrected again.

  “Why are you here?” he demanded, his voice rising along with his temper.

  “Well, the simple answer is I thought we could pool our resources and work together since we’re both looking for Marilyn, albeit for different reasons,” she answered.

  “Pool our resources,” Finn repeated in somewhat stunned disbelief.

  “Uh-huh.” Because he was looking at her as if he expected her to clarify what she meant by that, she said, “You tell me what you know and I’ll tell you what I know. It seems more efficient that way.”

  He was not about to work with an amateur, gorgeous or not. If she had anything he could use in his investigation, he intended to hear her out, but he wasn’t about to give her any information. As far as he was concerned, she was in the same class as the press and he made it a rule to always stay clear of the press.

  “All right,” Finn replied, tilting his head. “You first.”

  She wanted to tell him that she wanted him to go first, but she had a feeling that he would just dig in his heels. She could tell that he wasn’t the type to be receptive to that kind of a suggestion. She supposed that she needed to get this serious, distant man to trust her. The only way to do that was to be agreeable to his terms.

  “From what I’ve been told, Marilyn has always been a good girl,” she began, only to abruptly stop. “You don’t need to roll your eyes like that, Detective. There are still good kids left in the world.”

  In his experience, that was the sort of thing people said when the exact opposite was true. But for now, he let it ride.

  “Go on,” Finn said, doing his best to put a lid on his skepticism, at least for the moment. Anything to hurry this along, although he was losing his patience at what felt like the speed of light.

  “According to her mother,” Nik continued, “Marilyn has been acting strangely lately. My friend—Kim—thinks that her daughter has run off with this guy who she feels is a bad influence on her.”

  “You already said that,” he reminded her flatly. “This ‘bad influence,’ does he have a name?”

  She didn’t care for his condescending manner, but for now she went along with it. “Everyone has a name, Detective,” Nik responded with a smile.

  “Then let me rephrase that,” Finn said evenly. “Does this bad influence have a name that you’re familiar with?”

  “Not yet, but I’m trying to locate her friends, who don’t seem to be around, either,” she said.

  How convenient, he thought sarcastically. “All right, do you have a description of this so-called bad influence?”

  “No,” she told him. She hated being unable to answer his questions. As he indicated he was going to leave the squad room, she quickly said, “But I’m working on it.” Even as she said the words, she knew how lame that sounded.

  Finn nodded shortly, dismissing her. “Come back when you have something substantial.”

  The truth was he could probably get the description himself if this “bad influence” was in Seamus’s car with her as she drove away. Valri was already reviewing all the traffic-cam videos in the immediate area of the mugging, trying to spot Seamus’s car in all the recorded footage. Added to that, he had several members of his team collecting any and all surveillance videos caught on the cameras that were recording activity in the industrial center at what he approximated was the time of the mugging. However, giving the woman an assignment seemed the best way to get her to leave, he thought.

  However, as he began to walk away, she placed herself directly in his path and announced, “Your turn!”

  “My turn what?” Finn asked. There was an edge in his voice.

  “Well, I told you what I know and you agreed to pool our resources, so now it’s your turn to tell me what you know,” she explained in a cheerful voice, which he found exceedingly irritating.

  “You agreed,” he pointed out, his voice as dark as hers was light. He saw a fire enter her eyes that, under different circumstances, he might have even found intriguing.

  But these weren’t different circumstances. This was about finding who had done this to his grandfather’s brother, and until he accomplished that, nothing else was going to take center stage for him.

  “But,” he said evenly, “in the spirit of ‘sharing,’ I’ll tell you that Seamus Cavanaugh was mugged and left to die in the North Tustin Industrial parking lot while the person who did this to him drove away in Seamus’s vehicle.”

  When he said that, the words tasted incredibly bitter in his mouth. The idea of someone doing something like that to an old man, let alone a member of his family, galled him beyond words.

  “I already know that,” Nik pointed out. Finn wasn’t about to share anything, she realized.

  “Well, then I guess you’re all caught up,” Finn told her. He looked toward the doorway and began walking. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  To his annoyed surprise, she fell into step with him. When he glared at her, she responded, “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going down to the crime lab,” he growled. “I don’t know where you’re going.”

  “That’s simple,” Nik answered, still keeping her voice light. “I’m going with you.”

  Okay, time to put an end to this. He stopped dead in his tracks. Looking down at her, he told her sternly, “Oh, no, you’re not.”

  The man was very uptight and extremely territorial, she thought. Nik decided to rephrase her words to sound less objectionable to him. “I thought I’d throw my lot in with you—temporarily, of course.”

  This woman was harder to get rid of than a strip of paper covered in superglue, he thought. “There is no ‘of course,’ Ms. Kowalski,” he informed her.

  “Ko-val-ski,” Nik corrected, resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going to get him to use her first name. At least not yet.

  Finn threw up his hands. “Whatever.” And then he fixed her with a penetrating look. “Let me make this perfectly clear for you. We are not ‘working’ together,” he told her. “I’m a professional and you’re not.”

  Undaunted, she pointed out, “We’re both investigators.”

  “Only in the broadest definition of the word,” he responded, this time gritting his teeth together. She was taking up precious time with this game of hers, he thought.

  “Here,” she said, taking out her business card and holding it out to him. When he didn’t take it, she deliberately took his hand and pressed the card into it. “Believe it or not, I am very good at what I do and you might want to change your mind down the line,” she told him.

  As Nik walked away, Finn looked down at the card in his hand. “I really doubt it,” he murmured.

  * * *

  “So, do you have anything for me?” Finn asked Valri as he entered the computer lab.

  The petite woman glanced up at him from the monitor she had been reviewing now for hours.

  “What I have is a huge headache right between my eyes,” Valri told him, massaging the bridge of her nose in an effort to chase away her headache. It didn’t work. “I think I’m going to be seeing Granddad’s car in my sleep for the next six months. However...” She shrugged as she indicated the monitor.

  “So, nothing yet?” Finn asked,
frustrated.

  Valri’s mouth curved ever so slightly. “That’s what I like about you. You catch on fast.” She sighed, turning back to the monitor. “I’ll give you a call if I do find anything.”

  “Sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back,” he murmured. Locating all these surveillance tapes had been the two steps forward. But not finding anything on them felt like a giant step back.

  “No time to talk about your dance lessons, Finn. I have a car to find,” Valri told him as she resumed her search.

  “Then I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “I’ll check with Ramirez and Collins, the two detectives I have canvassing the area. Maybe they came up with something useful.”

  “There’s always hope,” Valri said, already blocking out his presence.

  * * *

  Other than the dog walker who had placed the 911 call that had brought out the paramedics, Finn and the other detectives and patrol officers working on the case weren’t able to find anyone who could add anything to the slim amount of information they already had.

  The worst part of working a case, Finn decided, was that helpless feeling that took over when he ran into a wall.

  Back at his desk, Finn closed his eyes and tried to think. There had to be something he was overlooking, a way he could get this case moving, he thought in frustration.

  He sighed. After spending a day spinning his wheels and going nowhere, he decided that he needed to go somewhere for a few hours to unwind so he could think. For him, as for so many other law-enforcement agents, that meant either attending one of Uncle Andrew’s parties, or going to Malone’s, the local saloon that was so popular with the police department.

  Since Andrew was currently involved keeping vigil over his father at the hospital—Seamus was still lapsing in and out of consciousness—that left Malone’s.

  It was misting when he drove up to the popular saloon, a rare occurrence in its own right. It hardly ever rained outside of the rainy season. Finn couldn’t help wondering if this misting was some sort of an omen.

  As a rule, Finn wasn’t superstitious, but there was a part of him that he admitted was open to things that he didn’t fully understand.

  Walking into Malone’s, he looked around. For once the place wasn’t packed to the gills the way it usually was. Instead of taking a booth, Finn decided to make himself comfortable at the counter. He slid onto the barstool that was closest to him.

  Because Malone’s was currently only half-full at this point, the patrons there provided just the right level of noise to allow him to completely submerge his thoughts. Finn promised himself that for the next half hour or so, he was not going to think about anything at all.

  Looking all the way down the bar, he spotted Devin Wilson, the bartender who was tending bar tonight, and he waved at the stocky man. To Finn’s surprise, Devin made his way over toward him. He was holding a large, frosty mug in his hand.

  He placed the mug in front of Finn.

  “I didn’t order anything yet,” Finn pointed out. He didn’t always have the same drink and Devin wasn’t in the habit of second-guessing his patrons.

  “No, you didn’t,” the retired police officer, who was one of the owners of the bar, agreed. And then he smiled. “But she did,” he told Finn, pointing toward the other end of the bar.

  Finn looked to where Devin had indicated and saw the woman who had turned herself into his own personal royal pain raising her own glass toward him in a silent toast.

  He frowned.

  It was that annoying investigator woman.

  Chapter 4

  Glaring down the bar at the woman who Devin had pointed out, Finn made his way over to her. Without thinking, he automatically brought the glass with him.

  Once he reached her, Finn asked her point-blank in a low voice, “Are you stalking me?”

  Granted Malone’s was open to the general public, but it was a known fact that this was where law-enforcement officers gathered. By definition, that meant that this was supposed to be a haven for cops, not the place where he could be confronted by someone from the outside.

  Finn watched as the woman’s lips curved. She obviously saw some humor in this, but he certainly didn’t, he thought.

  “Well, considering that I was already here when you walked in, if anything, I could ask you that question.” Nik cocked her head as she looked up at the detective innocently. “So, are you stalking me, Detective Cavanaugh?”

  Finn gritted his teeth. “You know the answer to that.”

  “Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that I don’t,” she answered. “Why don’t you pull up a stool and we’ll talk about it?” Nik gestured toward the empty stool next to hers. “Or about any subject you want, really. It doesn’t have to be about our mutual interest,” she told him.

  Dark eyebrows drew together over the bridge of his nose. “We don’t have a mutual interest,” Finn informed her.

  “Well, now, that’s not entirely true and you know it,” Nik pointed out sweetly. She paused then, fascinated as she studied his face. “Are you aware that your eyes shoot sparks when you hear something that annoys you?”

  Finn laughed dryly as he assured her with feeling, “Oh, lady, I’m tired and frustrated and I am way past being annoyed.”

  Nik shook her head. “You know, harboring feelings like that is really bad for your health, Detective,” she began, “if you want my advice—”

  “I don’t,” he interrupted sharply.

  Rather than back off, Nik continued as if he hadn’t said a thing, “I’d say that you should think about doing something about that.”

  “Oh, I’m definitely thinking about it,” Finn assured her. “But unfortunately, what I’m thinking is against the law.”

  Nik grinned as she lifted her glass to him, making another silent toast. “It’s reassuring to know you have a sense of humor,” she said.

  There wasn’t even a hint of humor evident in Finn’s voice as he told her, “I wasn’t trying to be funny, Ko-val-ski.”

  Nik nodded, as if she was evaluating his response to her. “Good deadpan, too,” she commented. Taking another sip of her drink, she waited until it wound down into her system, giving Finn enough time to relax a little—if that was even possible. “So, have you had time to think over my proposition?”

  Just then, Miles Crawford, a detective with almost twenty years on the job, came up to the bar to get another refill. It was obviously not his first refill of the evening.

  Crawford stumbled a little as he leaned against the counter and fixed Nik with a look. “If he doesn’t take you up on it, I’m free,” he told her.

  Finn scowled at him. “Why don’t you try that again when you haven’t had a few too many, Crawford?” he suggested.

  Crawford turned his head, then waited as his surroundings came back into focus. “Sorry, didn’t mean to tread on your territory,” he said, addressing Finn. “You Cavanaughs always do get the best pickings.”

  That was not the impression he was trying to project. The scowl on Finn’s face intensified. “Nobody’s picking anybody and you owe the lady here an apology,” he informed Crawford.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Crawford waved his hand at Finn. Leaning into Nik, he said, “Sorry you wound up with him.” Pushing his empty mug to the very edge of the counter, the older detective raised his voice and called out, “Fill her up, Devin.”

  Finn pulled the empty mug over to his side. When Crawford glared accusingly at him, Finn said, “I think you’ve had enough for one night, Crawford. Why don’t I just call you a cab? You’re in no shape to drive anywhere.”

  The other detective instantly took offense. “Who the hell died and made you boss of the world?”

  “I did,” Devin informed his inebriated customer as he came up to Crawford’s end of the bar. “From where I’m standing,” he continued, “a cab sounds l
ike a really good idea.”

  Crawford’s scowl just grew deeper. “Don’t like other people driving me home, putting their hands all over me getting me in and out of the back seat of some guy’s cramped little car,” the police detective grumbled.

  Devin spoke up. “It’s either that or sleeping it off on my sofa in the back office.” The bartender looked Crawford over, as if sizing him up. “You look a little big for the sofa.”

  Resigned, Crawford sighed dramatically. “Okay, okay,” he said, surrendering. “Cab it is.”

  “Smart. Hey, Dan, call this man a cab,” Devin called out to the man he had clearing off the tables.

  “Sure thing, boss,” Dan McGuire answered. At six foot five, with a frame to match, it was easy to see that Devin had him doubling as a bouncer whenever the occasion arose. Luckily for Devin, it rarely did.

  Exercising great care for a man his size, Dan slipped his arm around Crawford’s tilting form.

  As Dan took the swaying detective in hand, Devin looked at Nik and aimed his apology at her. “Look, I’m sorry about that. The people here are usually a lot better behaved.”

  “Nothing to apologize for,” Nik assured the owner. “Trust me, I’ve been subjected to a great deal worse.” For a split second, she saw a look of mild interest flash in Finn’s dark green eyes, but then it receded as if it hadn’t existed at all. He was going to be a hard nut to crack, Nik thought.

  Devin nodded in response to what she had just said. “Still, these are on me,” he told the woman and Finn, indicating the two tall foamy drinks before them on the bar.

  With that, Devin moved away to give them the privacy he naturally assumed they were looking for.

  Nik turned back toward Finn. “So?” she asked, waiting.

  “So?” Finn questioned. Because of Crawford’s interjecting himself into the scene, he had lost the thread of whatever it was that she was asking him—and he was content to let it remain that way.

  Because of the previous misunderstanding, Nik decided to reword her question. “Have you thought about what I said regarding our working together?” Before he could answer, she added, “Two heads are better than one, you know.”