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  “Yeah, except that at her age, you would have thought my mother would have developed a little common sense and learned not to be charmed and taken in by some con artist’s smooth line.”

  Rarely did the heart listen to reason. If it did, Kendra would have known enough to back away, to insulate her heart right after Jason’s accident. That way his suicide wouldn’t have almost destroyed her when it had happened.

  “The heart wants what the heart wants,” Kendra replied simply. The elevator doors opened and she led the way out. “Besides, it’s a misnomer.”

  He caught up to her in less than one stride. “What is?”

  “That bit about common sense.” God, this man really had a long stride. She would never be able to beat him in a race. The realization annoyed her even though the need to outrun him would most likely never come up. “Sense isn’t common. At least not when the heart is involved.”

  “You speaking from experience?” he asked her, moderately intrigued.

  She was, but she wasn’t about to go there. Not with someone she didn’t know. It was hard enough to talk with her family about Jason and how she’d failed him—not that she actually did. For the most part, she avoided the subject altogether, even when one of her siblings—or her father—prodded her to go out socially again. She hadn’t been out on anything even vaguely resembling a date since Jason had put that gun to his chin and put himself out of his misery—and greatly intensified hers.

  “No,” she replied with studied casualness. “Just a general observation.”

  She’d paused, Matt noted. Paused just long enough to make him think that his question had a positive answer, one that she was unwilling to talk about. Why? Had a relationship of hers gone sour?

  Whoever it was probably never stood a chance against that tongue of hers, he surmised. It would take a hell of a man to go toe-to-toe with her and survive, Matt reasoned.

  He tucked away the thought for future review. Right now, they had a job to do. No one had to tell him that he had to make a good first impression. That meant not just solving the case, but solving it as quickly as possible.

  Coming up to the Crown Victoria, he opened the passenger door automatically. She seemed to enjoy driving and he enjoyed not having to bicker with her. As far as he was concerned, it was a win-win situation. He’d been the one to suggest going to Miller’s apartment, but he recalled that this had all started when Ryan Burnett had been reported missing. Maybe they should go back to that salient point and begin the investigation from there.

  “You want to check out the victim’s place of residence, or where our missing accountant-slash-suspect worked?” he asked her.

  “Let’s go there first,” she agreed. “Get a little more insight into what this guy is capable of.” About to get into the car, she paused and looked at him over the roof of the car. “You sure you don’t want to go see your mother? My offer to cover for you still stands.”

  He shook his head, although he appreciated the offer. Appreciated, too, the way her features seemed to have softened just now. He felt something distant stir inside him.

  “I’m sure,” Matt said as he got in.

  There was a pattern to his mother’s behavior. A well-worn pattern. For the next couple of hours, his mother would cry, long and hard. Cry as if her world was literally coming to an end and she didn’t know how to go on. But, eventually, when her entire body would be drained of any and all moisture, she’d sink into a peaceful, albeit reluctant, acceptance of the events and begin the arduous task of trying to rebuild her life.

  But first she would consume a half gallon of rum raisin ice cream.

  It never ceased to amaze him, how his mother could remain as thin as she did. Most people who consumed that quantity of ice cream—especially with the regularity that she did—would eventually begin to tip the scales to an ever-increasing number.

  But his five-foot-three mother had always been a size six. He supposed it was nature’s way of compensating for allowing her to drag her heart through the prickly briar patch time and again.

  “Your mother been divorced long?” Kendra asked casually as she pulled out of the parking space. She guided the car carefully to avoid hitting anything.

  He glanced at her, then decided not to ask the obvious: what made her think his mother was divorced? Divorced or widowed, the upshot was the same. His mother had no permanent man in her life—other than him. There were times when the weight of that felt almost overwhelming.

  “Yeah,” he answered absently. More like forever.

  She prodded him a little more. “How long is long?”

  “I don’t remember ever meeting my father,” Abilene said after a beat that had gone on way too long.

  His answer made her understand why he had almost not said anything. “I’m sorry,” she said with genuine feeling.

  Her father had always been there for her. However, in her case it was her mother who was missing from her life. And had been ever since she was a little girl, when her mother had lost her battle against cancer. She and her siblings had grown up with their father doing double duty as both mother and father to them. He’d more than held his own in both capacities and she loved him dearly for it. But she knew what it meant to miss a parent deep in the confines of her heart.

  “No need to be,” Abilene told her offhandedly. “All in all, it wasn’t a bad life. A little nomadic, maybe,” he allowed, “but not bad.”

  She spared him a glance as she continued down the main drag, away from One Police Plaza. “Nomadic?”

  He couldn’t think of a more descriptive word for a lifestyle that involved picking up in the dead of night and vacating the premises—quickly. “I figure that would be the best term to use for sneaking out in the middle of the night—ahead of the landlord—when my mother couldn’t pay the rent.”

  She could feel her heart going out to the boy he had been. A life of being one step ahead of the creditor was no life for a child. Had he been afraid? Ashamed? It took her a moment to reconcile the man who projected such a laid-back exterior with the person she now believed was buried inside.

  That was the moment, she later realized, that he stopped being this annoying man she was forced to put up with and started becoming her partner.

  “Did that happen often?” Kendra asked, not bothering to mask her sympathy.

  His shrug was dismissive. “Often enough, or at least it felt like it when I was a kid. Back then, I thought it was a big adventure,” he confessed. “Until I was old enough to realize that you’re not supposed to run off without paying. Sometimes,” he recalled, “when she found a decent-paying job—or a guy who initially spent money on her before he took her for everything she had—my mother would send money back to the landlord she’d skipped out on. She’d send it in an unmarked envelope so he couldn’t trace it back to her.”

  His mother had always had good intentions—just not such good luck when it came to choosing men.

  “She really didn’t like not paying,” Matt explained. It was impossible to miss the fondness in his voice when he spoke of her—even if she had made him sigh before. “More than that, I think she was afraid I’d turn out to be a thief if she didn’t make me understand that you had to take responsibility for your life—or at least your bills,” he said with a quiet laugh.

  Taking it all in, Kendra nodded now. “Sounds like a decent woman who just wanted to be loved,” she said.

  Abilene shrugged again and stared out the window. He’d said too much. Since when was that a failing with him? It wasn’t like him to talk this much. He was going to have to police himself a little more around this woman—no pun intended, he added with a bemused smile.

  “Yeah, maybe that’s it,” he agreed dismissively. And then he looked at her. His partner had subtly pulled all this out of him. Why? Was she going to use it against him somehow? She seemed and sounded sympathetic right now, but he didn’t trust her yet. That was going to take a little time. If it happened at all. “What does this have
to do with the case?” he asked, the edge back in his voice.

  “Nothing,” she told him honestly. “I’m just trying to get a handle on the guy I’m working with.”

  “You could get that out of my file.”

  She didn’t bother telling him that she didn’t have enough clout to have his file pulled—yet. The chief, of course, had access to it and probably so did her father, but she didn’t try to pull strings like that. If she did, then she would deserve all the unflattering terms that were tossed her way by people who didn’t know any better, who didn’t know her better. Shortcuts were for emergencies, not to satisfy your curiosity or for some self-serving purpose.

  But for now, she said none of this. If, for some reason, they remained partners after this case was over, he’d find out what she was like on his own.

  The thought didn’t bother her nearly as much as it would have initially.

  “Won’t tell me as much as you would. I’m not interested in You the Professional. I want to know what kind of man I’m trusting my back to. I already figured you were a decent enough detective or the chief wouldn’t have transferred you down to Homicide.”

  “Why? Is that where the elite go?” he asked. The amusement in his voice hid the slight chip that had emerged on his shoulder.

  “That’s where the best are needed,” she informed him. “I’m told that the chief tends to view this not as a job, but as a mission to protect his city. He wants to keep the people who live here safe. That’s done by keeping killers off the streets and putting them behind bars. And that’s done by putting the best detectives on the job.”

  He laughed shortly as she made a sharp right. “Now you’re beginning to sound like a city council poster trying to get people to move here.”

  That was the last thing she would have wanted, to have more people move to Aurora.

  “God forbid. Aurora’s got enough people here already. Any more and it’s going to get way too crowded for the people who initially moved here to get away from the big cities.”

  Her father would tell her stories about the city when the main thoroughfare had only two lanes, one in each direction, and there were only three traffic lights between the two freeways that buffered Aurora. That was when the developments could be counted on one hand and there were almost as many cows and horses as people living here.

  Those days were far in the past, but somehow, Aurora had managed to maintain its small town feel even if it was far more “city” than “town” these days.

  Silence descended over the vehicle and continued to travel with them for a couple of miles until Kendra decided to tender an invitation to Abilene or, actually, to his mother.

  Even as the idea formed in her brain, she had a hard time believing that she would say this. But people in pain had a way of getting to her and from what she’d overheard earlier—and what he’d just told her now—Abilene’s mother was in pain. Decent people shouldn’t have to be in pain if there was any way around it.

  “Look, I’m still just getting used to this whole deal about actually being a Cavanaugh and not who I thought I was—”

  “A last name doesn’t change who you are,” he pointed out. “Although,” he added with a touch of whimsy, “saying that you’re a Cavanaugh might make things a hell of a lot easier for you.”

  “Or harder,” she countered. “A lot of people think that just because I’m related to a Cavanaugh, I’m getting a free ride, that I don’t have to work as hard as the next guy—I work twice as hard as the next guy.”

  “Unless the next guy happens to be me,” Abilene said, his mouth curving.

  Damn but he had a sexy-looking mouth, even when what came out of it annoyed her. “I work twice as hard as the next guy,” she repeated with feeling. “No matter who the next guy is.”

  “The lady doth protest too much.” The way he said it, it was more of a question than a statement.

  It still wasn’t received well. “The ‘lady’ is busy working her tail off to prove she can do the job each and every time,” she said with feeling.

  He seemed willing to take her at her word. With a casual shrug, he said, “Okay, we got that out of the way. Now, where were you going with all this before we got sidetracked?” he asked with a grin.

  Right, the invitation. For a second, she felt awkward about extending it. After all, he might get the wrong idea—that she was interested in him. Which she wasn’t. This wasn’t for Abilene, she reminded herself. This was for his mother.

  “That the former chief of police, Andrew Cavanaugh, likes to have people over for breakfast—or any meal. He sets a really good table and, personally, I have no idea how the man does it, but there always seems to be food ready. A battalion could come by and I think that he would have enough to feed them until their sides ached.” She’d been present a couple of times when the man had juggled fifty guests and never broke a sweat. She found that incredible. “What I’m getting at is maybe you and your mother might want to drop by some morning, like on a Saturday,” she suggested. “More specifically,” she continued, suddenly remembering that her father had said something about there being a party of some sort at the former chief’s house this weekend, “this Saturday.”

  “As your guest?” he asked.

  She was about to say no, afraid he’d read into that, but then she relented. After all, it might make things easier all around if that was the initial invitation.

  “Yeah. Sure. Why not? As my guests,” she agreed. “It might just do your mother some good,” she added so that there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding about why she was suggesting this in the first place. If he thought she was interested in him, their budding working relationship would get shot to hell. “There’s a lot of warmth and love coming from that group.” She could testify to that firsthand. “Gives a person a feeling of well-being.”

  Abilene liked to keep his private life just that, private. But he needed help here. So he rolled her offer over in his mind. He loved his mother dearly and while he wouldn’t have traded her in for anything in the world, what he would have changed about her was her emotional neediness.

  She’d always been there for him and had done the best she could to raise him so that he wanted for little. If he had one wish in the world, it would be to see her finally happy—and secure.

  Maybe she’d learn how by associating with people like the Cavanaughs.

  “Sounds good to me,” he finally told his partner. “Count us in.”

  She nodded. Now all she had to do was ask her father if she’d overstepped her bounds. She made a mental note to talk to him tonight.

  The list of people she wanted to touch base with once she was off duty was growing.

  Chapter 5

  “No, I’ve never had any trouble with Ryan Burnett.” The man they were talking to looked surprised to even be asked such a question. “If I had, I would have fired the guy, not sent someone to look for him when he didn’t turn up at work or call in. Why?” he asked suspiciously, looking from one detective to the other. “What’s going on?”

  Lou Maxwell was the senior accountant and founder of the company that boasted a number of celebrity clients as well as doing the accounting for a large number of small corporations in the area, all of which he’d parlayed into a thriving business. The man had a booming voice, which was in complete contrast to his rather small, thin frame. Expensive clothes hung on his body like suits on a hanger, waiting to be pressed into service by an actual live person.

  If Maxwell was aware of the shadow he cast—or didn’t cast—he gave no indication of it.

  When neither of the two detectives who had come into his spartan office to question him about his missing accountant answered his question, he went on to ask another.

  “Kennedy said he saw a dead body on the floor,” he said, referring to the junior accountant he’d sent in search of his missing employee, “but that it wasn’t Burnett’s. Whose was it and where the hell is Burnett?” Maxwell demanded.

  Kendra sho
ok her head. “We really can’t discuss an ongoing investigation, Mr. Maxwell.”

  “You people wouldn’t have an ‘ongoing investigation’ if I hadn’t sent Kennedy to find out what was going on. Now I’m down two men instead of just one because Kennedy is still throwing up in the men’s room and you won’t tell me anything.” He glared at the detectives when they still wouldn’t tell him anything. “Look, someone on one of the news channels or one of the millions of blogs on the internet is going to find a way to ferret out the information and splash it all over the airwaves, so you might as well tell me now. I have a right to know.”

  Maxwell had a point. She could see by the look that Abilene gave her that the other detective thought so, too. She was surprised that Abilene was leaving it up to her rather than just stepping in and taking over. Maybe he did respect protocol—in his own way. He was turning out not to be such a bad guy after all. Then she cautioned herself to continue reserving judgment. After all, she didn’t exactly have a sterling track record when it came to being right about men.

  Determined to control the amount of information that came out, she kept it short and precise.

  “We found a woman in Mr. Burnett’s apartment. We didn’t find him. Would you know where he would be inclined to go if he couldn’t stay at his apartment?”

  Maxwell shook his head. “Not a clue,” he confessed. “Nice guy, but he kind of kept to himself. That’s why I liked him,” Maxwell underscored. “Worked hard from the minute he came in until the minute he left. No goofing off, no internet surfing on my time.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “About a couple of weeks ago, I heard him mention he was going to get engaged.”

  “Who did he mention it to?” Abilene asked before Kendra could. It was a natural assumption that the woman was the same one found on Burnett’s floor, but there was always an outside chance that it wasn’t.

  “Kennedy. That’s why I sent him,” Maxwell added. “Thought maybe they were friends.” The small, deep-set brown eyes narrowed further, appearing to grow even smaller. “You telling me that you think Burnett killed the girl?”