Cavanaugh Rules (4 page)

“Is that a requirement with you? ‘Short and sweet’?” she repeated when he just looked at her.

His mouth curved devilishly. “As a matter of fact, yes, it is.”

She’d been right about him, she thought as she got in behind the wheel of the Crown Victoria. Abilene was a player, trading on his exceedingly good looks and satisfying his appetite whenever the spirit moved him. She bet it moved him a lot.

“Where to now?” he asked as he buckled his seat belt.

“Back to the precinct to see what kind of information we can find about the late Summer Miller.” She turned on the ignition. “By the way, what was that back there? With the actor,” she specified.

“It’s called being a detective and gathering information. Also questioning a witness. Why?” he asked her. “Wasn’t I supposed to do any talking? Am I just supposed to be your strong, silent backup?”

She sincerely doubted the man
knew
the meaning of the word
silent.
For now, until she got used to him, she just wanted him to stay out of the way, not suddenly step up and take the lead. She had no problem sharing that position if the person she was sharing it with had respect for her. But Abilene wasn’t giving off any of those vibrations. At least none on a frequency she was receiving.

“I only thought, this being your first case, you’d just observe,” she told him.

“This is my first
homicide,
not my first case,” he corrected. He wasn’t some wet-behind-the-ears rookie to stand in awe of her. If that was what she wanted, she should have gone with one of the department’s newly minted detectives, not him. “The actor just brought up some questions for me. Sorry, was I supposed to clear them with you first before asking him?”

It wasn’t exactly a belligerent question, at least not in tone. But she could feel him challenging her nonetheless. Rules and boundaries needed to be established, here and now. Or maybe she was just reading too much into it. These days, she wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

Maybe she just needed to unwind. Find a way to relax a little. She wondered what her sisters were doing after work tonight. Bridget was usually all caught up in her fiancé these days, but that still left Kari.

Maybe she’d give Kari a call—after she called Thomas to ask him to look into her new partner’s background. She’d feel a lot better if she knew the kind of person she would be working with. Hotshots and red-hot investigators tended to come across the same way sometimes. It would be good to have a second opinion on what, exactly, she had on her hands here.

“Well, was I?” Abilene pressed.

Kendra blinked, then realized that she’d lost the thread of the conversation. She needed to ask for clarification—and that annoyed her.

“Were you what?” she asked, sparing him a quick glance as she eased the car to a stop at a red light.

Abilene suppressed an impatient sigh. “Was I supposed to clear it with you first before I asked the actor any questions?” This time, there was an edge to his tone.

That would be nice.

She knew the detective was being sarcastic. She supposed, in his place, she would have felt the same way.

Okay, so she was being testy. But that was because she didn’t like change and she didn’t like the fact that he had a way of looking at her that made her stomach muscles cramp up.

Kendra did her best to temper her own voice. “Of course not. I was just surprised to hear you asking questions, that’s all.”

Matt decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. Shrugging, he stood down and relaxed again. Maybe the woman wasn’t a class-A pain in the butt. She just came across like one. But maybe she had a reason to—one that he intended to find out, provided there
was
a reason.

“Look,” he said amicably, “there’s going to be a period of adjustment. I get that. If we’re going to make this work, then we need to get things out in the open.”

She was on her guard again. “What things?” she asked.

“Things that bother us about the other person.”

She could feel his eyes on her. It made her feel like squirming. So much for a truce. She would still hang on to the hope that this collaboration of theirs
was
only temporary.

Kendra made a right turn at the next corner. “I’ve got a better idea.”

“Okay, I’m game.”

Pushing down on the gas, she flew through the next light just as it was turning red. She wanted to spend as little time in close quarters with this man as possible. For some reason, he seemed to deplete her oxygen supply. “Why don’t we just see if we can find out who killed Summer Miller and just where Ryan Burnett ultimately ran off to.”

He laughed shortly. Yeah, that was definitely another option. “You mean just work the case.”

Kendra continued to look straight ahead as she drove. “I mean just work the case.”

Abilene tempered the sarcastic retort that rose to his lips. “It might surprise you to know, but that was what I was doing when you asked me what I was doing,” he told her.

Kendra blew out a breath. Maybe the key to surviving this union was to exchange as few words as possible—and to keep to well-ventilated areas. “Point taken. Okay, Abilene, as you were.”

He grinned. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Kendra wondered just how long she had to wait before she could officially request a change of partners without having the chief think that she was being unreasonable.

Chapter 4

U
tilizing a couple of prominent social networks, a little more than an hour into her internet search, Kendra discovered that Summer Miller had no immediate family in the state.

The only listed relative turned out to be a distant cousin, someone named Sandra Hill, who lived in Springfield, Illinois.

But even that proved to be a dead end. When she tracked down the cousin’s phone number and tried it, she was informed by an automated voice that the number she had dialed was “no longer in service.”

Dropping the handset back into the cradle, Kendra sighed and shook her head.

Abilene looked up from the list of newly accumulated phone numbers related to the case. “Something wrong?”

“Just hit a dead end, that’s all.” Her frown deepened as she stared at the last site she’d pulled up. “Hopefully not the first of many,” she commented. In response to the questioning rise of Abilene’s eyebrow—the extraneous thought that her partner had incredibly well-shaped eyebrows for a man floated through her head out of nowhere—Kendra filled him in. “The victim’s cousin’s phone is currently disconnected and I can’t seem to find anyone else to call.”

Although relieved not to have to notify a grieving family member of the young woman’s untimely death, she felt sad to think that no one was there to make funeral arrangements for Summer Miller.

“Maybe there’s a roommate or a best friend who can supply us with the names we need,” Abilene suggested. “We can go check out where she lived. You still have her license, right?”

She’d almost forgotten about slipping that into her pocket. Her intent had been to drop the wallet off with her father at the crime lab—it would give her an opportunity to ask him some questions about the body—but then she’d gotten sidetracked. “Right.”

“All right, then. Let’s go,” he said, already on his feet. “We’ve got the address, let’s see if there’s a roommate or a talkative neighbor.”

Before she could rubber-stamp his suggestion, Abilene’s cell phone rang. He paused, digging it out of his shirt pocket. Glancing at the caller ID, it was his turn to frown. Without thinking, he dropped back into his chair and turned it almost 180 degrees, deliberately cutting himself off from his partner.

When he spoke, his voice dropped down a couple of decibels.

Either action would have aroused Kendra’s curiosity. That he did both increased her curiosity a hundredfold. Ever since she could remember, she’d always had this almost overwhelming desire to know—
every
thing—to get to the bottom of any matter.

This was no different.

As she pretended to write out her notes and some of the points she wanted to touch on later, Kendra listened intently, taking in what Abilene was saying to whomever was on the other end of his call. Lucky for her, Kendra had excellent hearing because her partner’s voice was so low, it almost could have qualified for mental telepathy.

“No, I can’t right now.” He sighed, like a man searching for the right words and the strength not to raise his voice and yell in utter frustration. “You knew that this was going to be just temporary. Yes, you did,” he insisted. “You’re smart enough for that. No,” he said in a firmer voice. Then, in the next moment, as Kendra continued to eavesdrop, she heard her partner relent. “All right, all right, don’t cry,” he told the person on the other end—obviously a woman. She could tell from his tone that he was a man who really hated tears. “Okay, I’ll see you after work,” he agreed. “We’ll go out.” Abilene paused, listening. As did Kendra, trying to piece together what was going on without being obvious about it. “It’s the best I can do.”

With that, he terminated the call. Dropping the cell phone back into his pocket, Abilene blew out a frustrated breath. As he glanced toward his partner’s desk, it took him less than a second to come to the conclusion that she’d been listening in on his half of the conversation. Given her nature, it didn’t surprise him.

His eyes met hers and he waited. He wasn’t about to say anything unless she was.

He didn’t have long to wait.

“Former girlfriend you dumped?” she asked, nodding toward the pocket with the cell phone in it. Getting up, she pushed in her chair.

“No,” was all he said. They went into the hall together.

The single word vibrated with finality and an entire collection of No Trespassing signs.

So be it, she felt in a moment of empathy. If the tables had been turned, she wouldn’t have wanted to be quizzed, either. She thought back to a little more than eighteen months ago. There’d been some really intense, poorly muffled conversations with Jason in the days before his suicide that she wouldn’t have wanted to repeat, either.

“Sorry,” she apologized, hitting the Down button for the elevator. “None of my business.”

He hadn’t thought that she was capable of an apology—at least, not one to him. Not when it came to something like this.

Because she had backed off, Matt found himself loosening up just a little.

“That was my mother,” he told her.

Kendra looked up at him sharply. That wouldn’t even have been her tenth guess.

“Your mother?” Kendra replayed the short conversation in her head, viewing it in a completely different light. She was still convinced that the other woman had been crying. Compassion flooded through her, not to mention a new, warm feeling as she regarded the man who’d been sitting across from her.

“You need to see her, I can cover for you,” she offered.

Matt shook his head. Running to his mother’s side wasn’t going to help anything—or change anything. “Thanks, but no. This isn’t anything new, even though she never seems to see it coming.” The elevator car arrived and they got in. He paused for a second, debating whether or not to say anything else, then shrugged. It wasn’t all that much of a big deal, he told himself. “My mother’s got a habit of getting mixed up with the wrong kind of men.”

Kendra thought of her desk and the brand-new notes she’d just written that now rested like so many new snowflakes on top of her other, older notes. Who knew—maybe that was ultimately Summer Miller’s story as well. “A lot of that going on lately.”

“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.