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  “Food,” he said pointedly. “What kind do you like? Chinese, Thai, Italian, Mexican...?” He let his voice trail off as he looked at her, waiting.

  She wasn’t hungry. She certainly wasn’t going to be fussy. Charley shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever you want is fine.”

  He had his doubts about that. In his experience, everyone had some sort of a preference when it came to food. But he wasn’t going to attempt to coax it out of her. He had a feeling there would be bigger things to butt heads over before this case was solved.

  He opened the door on the driver’s side and got in, waiting for her to follow suit.

  “Okay,” he said, once she’d settled in, “I’ll do the ordering.”

  Charley nodded, and then, sitting back, she asked, “Where are we going?”

  Declan started up the car. “You mean what restaurant?”

  “No, you said we’d get something to go, eat on the way,” she reminded him. “On the way to what? What’s our next stop?”

  She really was eager to work this case, wasn’t she? He supposed the chief of Ds encouragement to get the shooter responsible for Holt’s murder sooner than later didn’t exactly contribute to taking a laid-back approach to this investigation, either.

  He took a sharp right at the end of the block. “I thought we’d canvas the area around Holt’s house, talk to some of the people in the neighborhood. See if maybe anyone heard any loud voices, arguing or saw anything unusual around the time that Holt was murdered.” According to his father’s findings so far, the victim’s liver temperature had placed the time of death somewhere late last night, not this morning as they had first thought.

  Charley nodded numbly, wondering if she was ever going to get used to that, to knowing that her brother had been killed while she was most likely watching TV? To knowing that she wouldn’t hear his voice anymore, wouldn’t see that lopsided grin of his anymore.

  Ever.

  How was she going to be able to face each day, to get through each day, knowing that she was all alone in the world now?

  “Sounds good,” she heard herself saying, only because she knew Declan was waiting for some sort of a response from her. And the longer she took to answer him, the greater the odds were of his noticing just how very upset she was.

  “Okay,” he said, nodding, “but first things first.”

  “First” turned out to be stopping by a Mexican restaurant that was barely more than a hole in the wall, a storefront establishment whose owner spent all his time cooking and preparing and none of his time involved in the upkeep of his property or worrying about its image. The man who went by one name—Ortega—relied strictly on word of mouth from his customers. And the word was good.

  A deceptively sleepy-eyed old woman, who might have been either his mother or his grandmother, served as the cashier, seemingly coming alive the moment their take-out order was ready. She muttered a price to Declan which might or might not have been in English.

  All Charley knew was that the woman’s voice was so low, the words so garbled, she could have been speaking in any language. But Declan apparently understood her.

  Either that or he knew the prices by heart and had the right amount to give her from the beginning.

  As they left the tiny establishment, Declan handed one of the two bags he’d been given to her. As she took it, Charley noticed that even the paper felt warm.

  She couldn’t place the aroma. “What is it?” she asked.

  Declan got back into the car and began to drive. He spared Charley a glance. “Try it. You’ll like it,” he told her. He was being deliberately mysterious and he knew it.

  Charley laughed shortly. “That argument didn’t work for Tommy Mason in the tenth grade and it’s not going to work now.”

  The sudden image of a teenaged Charley decking some overly hormonal suitor and standing over him, threatening to do more harm if he tried anything further, had him laughing.

  “Tommy Mason, huh?” Declan asked when he finally stopped laughing. “So, did he turn out to be your first love?”

  “I said the line didn’t work for him,” she said pointedly. Opening the bag, she looked inside. “You’re not paying attention, Detective.”

  Declan pulled over into a large parking lot on the next block. The lot was buffered by a discount furniture store on one end and a chain pharmacy on the other.

  When he turned off the engine, she looked at him with confusion. “Why are we stopping?”

  “Because the first few bites require using both hands,” he explained.

  He took out something steaming and wrapped in wax paper. Whatever it was, it was beginning to smell pretty good, even to someone with no appetite. Seeing Declan taking a healthy-sized bite and neither tearing up nor having any sort of a coughing fit because the food was overly spicy, Charley decided to chance taking a bite out of her own portion.

  Emulating Declan, she peeled back the wax paper, but rather than take a large bite, she took a small one.

  The moment she did, she knew she’d made a mistake. Her eyes immediately began to tear up and her mouth felt as if she’d just bitten into a handful of red hot peppers on steroids.

  Rather than diminish, the burning sensation seemed to increase by the second. She grabbed at one of the bottles of water Declan had bought when he’d purchased the two lunches. Popping the top, she consumed almost half the bottle in under thirty seconds.

  Only then did the fire in her mouth begin to feel as if it was receding.

  Sensing she’d just had a practical joke played on her, Charley glared at her new partner. “What was that?”

  “Ortega’s specialty,” he told her.

  “His specialty is setting people on fire from the inside out?” she demanded, more than a little annoyed.

  Charley liked always being in control. She didn’t like losing her composure around people, even when it involved something so minor as being caught off guard by an overly spicy meal.

  He laughed, really amused at her reaction. “You’re exaggerating.”

  “No, I’m not even beginning to do it justice,” she informed him. Rewrapping it, she deposited her so-called lunch back into the bag it had come from. “Seriously, how can you eat that?” she asked.

  He found the meal a little spicy, but certainly nothing he couldn’t handle. Declan shrugged in answer to her question. “A cast-iron stomach, I guess.”

  “More like an asbestos-lined mouth,” she quipped with feeling. Her own mouth still felt as if it was smoldering. She drained the rest of her water, still feeling the effects of the one bite she’d taken.

  Had they not been partnered, he would have told her that she was free to try it out and see for herself whether or not his mouth was lined with asbestos—because she most certainly looked as if she could deliver the heat.

  But they were partnered, which meant that he had to behave himself and not let his mind wander in directions it ordinarily felt very comfortable wandering in. However, because things were the way they were, he had to refrain from “business as usual.”

  And, as a newly minted Cavanaugh, he felt he had things to prove, not the least of which was that he could conduct himself professionally no matter what sort of temptation he was confronted with or how close by it turned out to be.

  In this particular case, he couldn’t help thinking, temptation was sitting in the passenger seat right next to him.

  Chapter 6

  Everyone they found to question in Matthew Holt’s immediate neighborhood was willing to talk. However, no one said anything that was even remotely useful—because no one had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary that day or the day before.

  The woman who lived across the street from Matt, Kay Bishop, had noticed an unfamiliar car parked a few houses down the block, but her des
cription was decidedly vague and she had seen no reason at the time to write down the license plate number.

  “It’s a good neighborhood,” she’d immediately said in her own defense after telling Declan that she hadn’t taken note of the license plate. “Nothing ever happens here, or at least, it hadn’t,” she amended, stealing a covert glance to Holt’s house. Yellow crime-scene tape draped across the front door forbidding entrance. It stood out like a sore thumb. “I mean, the house down the block used to belong to a couple who argued every weekend, but it’s been quiet since they moved.

  “And Matthew was a cop,” she interjected in a voice that said it was taken for granted that police officers weren’t supposed to get hurt, especially not in their own home. “We all felt safe because of that. Who was going to mess with a police officer?” she asked. “It’s a terrible thing, terrible,” Kay repeated, shaking her head. She ran her hands along her arms, as if fighting off a chill. “I don’t think I’ll ever really feel safe again.”

  Charley did her best to appear sympathetic, but she was wrestling with her own problems in dealing with Matt’s death. She had little left over to spare for a stranger.

  “What it does,” Declan told the woman, “is make you very aware that you shouldn’t take anything for granted and that you should live life to the fullest every day. It also should make you realize that things that you mean to do or say shouldn’t be put off to another day, because that ‘other day’ just might not come.”

  Mrs. Bishop seemed properly impressed and moved by what the detective had said to her.

  She was still nodding her head, most likely mentally examining the meaning behind his words, as Charley and he finished with their questioning, walked away and headed back to Declan’s car.

  “That’s pretty profound for you,” Charley commented, looking at him over the hood of his vehicle.

  Declan opened up the door on his side and grinned. “Impressed?”

  “Almost,” she allowed, getting into the sedan. “You’ve been reading Hallmark cards again?”

  “That’s cold, Charley.” Adjusting his seat belt, he buckled up and closed the door. “You wound me to the quick.”

  She turned in the seat to look at him. Her seat belt clutched at her tightly, as if bracing for an accident. She found herself drawing short, shallow breaths.

  “Do you and your wounded quick have any idea what to do next?” she asked, growing serious. “We’ve talked to everyone along the block as well as behind this block and come up empty.”

  His hands on the wheel, Declan hadn’t started the car yet. Instead, his eyes swept along the length of the block they’d just covered. Nothing out of the ordinary came to mind. He hated when that happened, but no one appeared to be withholding information or lying. All too willing to talk, they were just not volunteering any sort of information that was in any way useful to their investigation.

  There was only one course of action that came to mind at this point. “We go back and see if the autopsy yielded anything that might give us a little more insight into who killed Holt.” He paused for a moment, studying her. “You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to, you know.”

  She stared at him. That had certainly come out of left field. “Why wouldn’t I want to?”

  “Well, for one thing, autopsy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea,” he told her. She had no idea what she was in for, did she? She struck him as someone who didn’t have all that much use for caution, who went charging in just to bring the element of surprise to her opponent’s doorstep.

  Charley sniffed. “If I want tea, I’ll get a tea bag.”

  She had all this bravado, but he still had a feeling there was this frightened little girl beneath all the gutsy rhetoric. Starting the car, he was back on the road again.

  “You ever witnessed an autopsy?” he asked.

  She couldn’t lie, but she didn’t want to say “no,” either. So instead, she took the high road. “Always a first time,” she replied, doing her best to sound philosophical.

  Inside, she was trying very hard to harden herself, to brace herself for what was ahead. Seeing Matt the way she never had before.

  It’s just the shell, just the empty shell on the table. It’s not Matt anymore. He’s out, free. Matt’s free now.

  “Besides, the M.E. isn’t going to be doing actual dissecting while we’re there, right?” Charley did her best to make it sound like a rhetorical question, but beneath the blasé attitude, she was actually putting the question to him.

  If she was asking, then he owed her the truth, Declan thought. “From what I gather, yeah, it’s been known to happen.”

  His older brother had a great story about Bridget, one of his sisters, turning a strange shade of green the time she’d walked in on the medical examiner taking out a murder victim’s liver. It was all she could do not to make a mad dash for the ladies’ room when he started to weigh it.

  “I could call ahead, make sure everything’s back where it’s supposed to be when we stop by the place,” he offered.

  She didn’t want special treatment because he could use that as a reason why she couldn’t come along, that she had to be treated with kid gloves. She was determined to pull her own weight.

  “There’s no reason to go out of your way,” she told him.

  He lost his patience. There was such a thing as putting up too brave a front. “Damn it, Charley, you said that Holt was a friend of yours. There’s no need for you to see your friend in pieces if you don’t have to. You don’t have to act like some steadfast little tin soldier 24/7,” he snapped.

  It was an automatic defense mechanism. Charley lifted her chin. “Seems that you’re the one who’s losing it over the idea of walking in on an autopsy, not me,” she told him.

  “Fine, have it your way,” he retorted, taking out his cell.

  She realized he was still going to make the call regarding the condition of Holt’s body, requesting it be intact when they arrived—and that she was being much too defensive, doing a complete one-eighty in order to make it seem as if she was unaffected by Matt’s death and everything connected to it.

  “You’re still calling ahead?” she asked him quietly.

  “Yeah,” he barked. Then looked at her in surprise when she touched his arm as he was about to push a preset button.

  “Thank you,” she said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper.

  He merely nodded, thinking it was probably safer that way. Charley was definitely not the easiest cipher to crack.

  * * *

  Sergeant Holt’s autopsy had been completed by the time they arrived. Likewise, all the findings had been duly noted and recorded and were now waiting to be entered into a usable report.

  “The lab results aren’t in yet,” medical examiner Dr. Donald Forest, a short, pudgy man, who seemed to be counting the days to his retirement, told them. “I can’t tell you whether or not the officer was drugged yet, but I’m assuming so because there were no signs of a struggle evident.”

  For their benefit he reviewed his lack of findings. “No bruised knuckles, no skin beneath the nails. Death came from a single bullet, fired at close range. There was visible stippling around the wound so the gun was practically pressed up against his chest. And then there were the two staples in his chest,” he barely mentioned, “but those were done postmortem.”

  The medical examiner wasn’t telling them anything that she didn’t already know. She’d taken in the single wound and had already decided that most likely, Matt hadn’t been conscious when he was killed. He almost looked peaceful, not like someone fighting for his life.

  “His blood alcohol level will probably come back rather high,” she told Dr. Forest.

  “He had a drinking problem?” the medical examiner asked, curious.

  She had another way of wordi
ng it. “He had an ex-girlfriend problem which led to the alcohol problem. It wasn’t something that was going on in his life for a long time,” she told the older man. “He’s not—wasn’t—a diehard alcoholic,” she said, correcting herself again. God, but it was going to be hard, thinking of Matt in the past tense.

  The M.E. nodded as if he had expected the answer. “I didn’t think so. His liver was in very good condition. Most likely in far better shape than mine is,” he murmured.

  “Text me the lab results as soon as you get them,” Declan encouraged the medical examiner.

  Forest gave him a rather withering, impatient look. “I don’t text, Detective,” he informed him. “I do, however, use the phone and I’ll have someone here call you when I get the tests back.”

  Declan nodded. He couldn’t ask for more than that. “Thanks.”

  A few more words were exchanged between them and then Declan took his leave, as did Charley.

  Once they were back in the corridor, away from the drawers with their resident dead and breathing air that was relatively untainted with the smell of chemicals, he looked at the woman beside him. “You’re not green,” he marveled.

  Charley wasn’t going to point out the obvious, that there had been no disjointed body in view to cause her stomach to upheave. “Disappointed?”

  “Just surprised,” he corrected, then he shared a piece of his history with her. “I threw up the first time I came into Autopsy. Of course, the M.E. was right in the middle of performing one and he had a brain in his hand when he turned toward me. It was like a really gross scene out of Frankenstein. Not my all-time favorite movie,” he confided.

  “The original version isn’t bad. It’s melodramatic enough to be funny,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Her response surprised him. There was a lot about Charley Randolph that surprised him. “Old-movie buff?” he asked. He wouldn’t have picked her to be one.

  “Partially,” she amended. She hadn’t been, not really. It was Matt who used to get a kick out of the movies that were generally referred to as “classics.” He would bring home a bunch of old movies that he found in the old video shop on Friday nights and they’d spend the weekend eating popcorn, watching old movies and taking them apart. And when it came to trivia about those old films, he beat her hands-down every time.