The Strong Silent Type (13 page)

“I figured I’d save myself a lot of grief.” He looked down at her. “But just this once.”

“Just this once,” she agreed cheerfully. “They all have good memories,” she assured him, referring to her family. “Once is all they’ll need.” Urging him on, she walked into the busy, noisy kitchen a step ahead of him. Teri raised her voice in order to be heard. “Everyone, this is my partner, Jack Hawkins.”

Sixteen sets of eyes turned and looked in his direction. Most of the women, he noticed, were blond like Teri. The men were all dark-haired and except for two, looked incredibly similar. It was easy to see that most of them were related.

For someone who’d been alone for as long as he had, the scene was a little overwhelming. He’d never seen a table that big before outside of a banquet hall or a conference room. And every place, save three, was filled. The head of the table and two chairs to the right of that.

“Here, take a seat,” Teri urged, gesturing to one of the two chairs that were side by side.

Feeling awkward and out of place, Hawk chose the one that was to the right of the head of the table. A tall, distinguished-looking man in a white chef’s apron crossed to him. The man paused to wipe his hands on the apron before extending his hand.

“Andrew Cavanaugh. Nice to finally meet you.”

The handshake was firm, powerful, accepting. “I know who you are, Chief.”

“It’s ‘chef’ now.” Andrew grinned, gesturing to
ward the professional stove against the back wall. His children had all chipped in and bought it for him for his last birthday. “I’ve dropped the
i.
”

“The hell he has.” To his right, Hawk saw a younger version of the chief rising from his seat to take his hand. Shaw, wasn’t it?

“Nice to see you again.” Shaw nodded at him. Amusement played on his rugged face. “So, you’re ready to meet the others?”

“Here, let me do this,” Teri said, cutting in. “It’ll be faster.”

Clay laughed. “That’s only because you have the fastest mouth.”

Teri gestured toward him. “You’ve just heard from Clay, my little brother—”

“By five minutes,” Clay pointed out. The protest was automatic. Ever since they’d been little, Teri had taken great glee in calling herself the older one.

“I was referring to maturity,” Teri clarified. She went around the table. “Next to Clay is Ilene, his fiancée, poor lady, and their son, Alex.” She glanced at Hawk, but there was no curiosity there. No need to know details. He was a rare man, she thought. “You’ve already met my older sister, Callie. Beside her is Judge Brenton Montgomery and his daughter, Rachel.” She purposely left their relationship un-stated, although they were slated to get married soon. Again, there was no sign that Hawk was even mildly curious as to the nature of their relationship. The man wasn’t human, she decided. “My baby sister,
Rayne—” Rayne rolled her eyes at the description “—and Cole Garrison, who for some reason wants to marry her.”

She gestured toward the other side of the table. “And these are my cousins, Patrick and Patience—their dad was my uncle Mike Cavanaugh.”

The reason she was afraid of hospitals, Hawk thought, nodding his head at the duo.

“And next to them,” she was saying, “are Dax, Troy, Jarrod and Janelle, Uncle Brian’s kids. Uncle Brian couldn’t make it this morning.”

At this point, Hawk found himself fervently wishing that he hadn’t been able to, either. He looked at her as he took his place at the table. “Neither could the partners, I take it.”

Teri ignored the curious look Shaw gave her. “We ran out of room,” she explained glibly. “Temporarily.”

“Is that how she got you to come?” Shaw asked. “By telling you that our partners would be here?”

“Actually, they are, you know,” Clay put in, looking at Ilene. “Life partners.” He looked back at Hawk. “Different emphasis.”

Andrew decided it was time to get his daughter off the hook she was wiggling on. Placing a hand on Hawk’s shoulder, he put down a plate of Belgian waffles in front of him. He noted that the younger man’s shoulder was military rigid. Andrew began to draw his own conclusions. “She really brought you here
because I was curious about her partner. I got to meet her first partner the second day on the job.”

“Was he filing a complaint?” Hawk asked dryly.

Andrew returned to the stove. The eggs needed to be turned. “Matter of fact, he was asking for ear plugs, as I recall.”

She hadn’t asked Hawk to come here just to hear her being teased. “No, he wasn’t.”

“Well, he would have except that he was too polite. I thought the least I could do was feed the poor guy, seeing as how he was stuck in a squad car with Teri for eight hours a day.” Andrew looked over his shoulder toward Hawk. “How about you—you want earplugs?”

Someone pressed a container of maple syrup into his hands. Taking it, Hawk covered the waffles sparingly. “I’ve learned how to tune her out for the most part.”

“Hey, do you give lessons?” Clay asked, his eyes gleaming. “Because the rest of us have never managed to be able to do that.”

“You just watch her lips move and think of something else.” The way he’d been struggling to do for the last two days. To think of anything else except the way her lips had felt against his. The way she had felt against him. So far, he was only succeeding marginally.

He didn’t notice that his remark was met with a smattering of laughter.

“Thanks, I think I’ll try that,” one of her cousins said.

“I think I like this guy,” Clay told Teri with an approving nod in Hawk’s direction.

Andrew noticed that rather than making a flippant retort in response to her twin’s jibe, his middle daughter was strangely quiet. Becoming mildly pensive, he took a longer, harder look at the man she’d brought to his table. There were friends to call and questions to ask.

Even though, for the most part, he trusted his children’s judgment, it never hurt to examine the facts from all sides. Never hurt to be sure. Being a father rather than being a policeman had taught him that.

“I
got it!” Excitement quickly obliterated the drowsy state that had begun to descend over her. Teri looked up from the screen where her eyes had been glued for the better part of the morning. She searched for someone to tell about the elusive connection she’d found. “I got it!” she cried again.

Deeply entrenched in thoughts that he couldn’t seem to easily shake off no matter how hard he tried, Hawk raised his head and looked in her direction. She’d been rattling around in his head and there appeared to be no signs of stopping.

“Anything I can catch?”

Not even his sarcastic question could shake the high she was feeling. She’d found the damn thread. “No, but maybe Danny Tierney is.”

The name hit him with the force of a bullet fired at close range. “Tierney,” he repeated slowly. “Danny Tierney?”

A small fraction of her excitement abated, giving way to something more personal. To a stirring of concern. There was an odd look on Hawk’s face she couldn’t begin to read. “Yeah. You said the name as if you know him. Do you?”

Hawk hardened his jaw. He’d known Tierney. Once. They’d shared a small portion of his life that he was far from proud of. “I thought he went straight.”

He hadn’t answered her directly, but what did she expect? “Then you do know him.”

“Knew him,” Hawk corrected tersely. “A long time ago.”

She studied his face. “About the same time you knew Jocko?”

“No, later.” He was already saying too much, opening up too much. And it was all her fault. “What are you, writing a biography for me?”

Teri raised her hands innocently, as if to show him that she had nothing up her sleeves. “Just trying to piece things together about my partner—nothing else.” She got back to the case and the best lead they’d come up with so far. “Would you know where we could find him?”

There were contacts he could touch, places he could look. But the Danny Tierney he’d known had
been a happy-go-lucky character who would have never blown away two people to cover his own trail.

Getting up, he rounded his desk and came around to hers. Maybe, in the end, this would wind up being just another dead end.

“Not anymore,” Hawk replied briskly. “How’d his name come up?”

He stood right behind her, looking at the screen. Teri moved to the right to give him a better view. She’d taken the information she’d hacked into yesterday, downloaded all the files and placed them into an empty folder, then spent the morning reading through the vast number of job applications from the combined valet services. The turnover at these places was overwhelming, but finally, a single name had cropped up, cited under the section marked “references” on various applicants’ employment forms.

She pointed to it on the current application she was reading. “He keeps coming up as a reference. So far, I’ve seen his name twelve times.”

“How many applications—a hundred?”

His voice was solemn, dead. She couldn’t get a reading on his feelings.

“Try three hundred. The only thing that seems to have a faster turnaround than working at a valet service are the kids behind the counter at fast-food places and my local video store.” She paused to highlight a line on the screen. “There’s a phone number here. We can get an address from the reverse phone book.”

Hawk nodded grimly. If confronting people from
his past gave him a problem, he shouldn’t have become a cop, he told himself. He always knew there would be a crossover margin, with shadows of his past life casting themselves over to his present one.

“What are we waiting for?” he said.

Swinging her chair around, Teri griped the armrests as she rose to her feet. His expression was still the same. Still troubled. Mentally, he was chewing on something. “Is there anything you want to share with me?”

She was the last person he wanted to talk to about anything. “No.”

“Okay—” she nodded gamely “—let me rephrase that. Is there anything you don’t want to share with me, but should?”

Maybe this was another Danny Tierney. It wasn’t as if it was the most unique name in the world. “Don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves.”

“Ahead? I’m just trying to stay even, that’s all.” She tried to make him understand where she was coming from. The man clearly needed a road map. “I want to know if you and this Danny character have a history that’s going to bother you.”

He resented the implication. His temper flared a little too quickly. “It’s not going to get in the way of doing my job,” he snapped.

“That’s not what I said. I specifically used the word
bother.
”

He was in no mood for this, for her probing, well-intentioned or not. He didn’t want her burrowing into
his life, making herself comfortable, making herself at home. If he couldn’t have her out of his life—his professional life—he at least wanted her out of his head.

“You know what bothers me?” he demanded, then lowered his voice to keep from attracting the attention of the other detectives in the room. “Partners who don’t know when to stop talking—that’s what bothers me.”

She’d hit some kind of a nerve. “Old news.”

“Apparently not the kind you reread.”

She sighed, finding that she had to struggle to hang on to her own temper. She needed a little space herself. “I’ll see about getting the address,” she told him, heading for the door.

“Cavanaugh?” Teri debated just continuing out, but then she turned around. Waiting. He squeezed the word out after a beat. “Sorry.”

She made no comment, merely nodded, pretending the incident was already forgotten.

But it wasn’t. Hawk had been acting like a cat on a hot tin roof even before she’d had him come to breakfast. Ever since they’d made love, she realized. And at this point, his gruffness had all but gone through the roof. She’d hoped that once he’d met her family, he would mellow out just a little. Her family had that kind of effect on people, pulling them into a group situation, making them feel as if they weren’t alone.

Maybe Hawk liked being alone.

No, that was wrong, she silently insisted. Nobody really liked being alone. She just had to be patient, that was all. Miracles took time, she reminded herself as she turned down the hall. And this man definitely needed one.

In the end, after months of following scraps of information that led nowhere, the investigation went down simply enough. They tracked down the former and present employees who had used Danny Tierney as their reference on the job application forms and questioned them one by one.

The fourth one, a skinny, nervous kid just fresh out of college, named Phil Sherman, broke relatively quickly. The threat of jail time had him singing loud and clear, citing names, implicating Tierney in exchange for the promise of a lenient sentence at a minimum-security prison. He swore up and down on a stack of Bibles that he’d only been involved in two of the break-ins before he’d quit. His nervous stomach hadn’t allowed him to continue.

“I kept thinking about those poor people being robbed,” he babbled.

Yeah, right, Hawk thought. “Details,” he pressed quietly, lowering his face against Phil’s. “We need details.”

Sherman moved his hands along the table. His sweaty palms left streaks as his eyes darted back and forth from one detective to the other. It was clear he was afraid of Hawk.

The young man’s eyes darted back toward her as if he expected her to be his shield because she was the woman here. She hated stereotyping, but she used it to her advantage. “How did you get in?” she asked him.

“Danny’s got a key-making machine in the trunk of his car,” Phil blurted out. “We’d make impressions of the house keys, get the registration from the glove compartment and no one would be the wiser for it.”

Hawk looked at Teri. “Until now.” His attention focused on Phil. “What was your cut?”

“Just a little extra every week. I never broke into anyone’s house, I swear.” He raised his shaky hand in the air, as if he was taking an oath on an imaginary Bible.

Pacing the room, Hawk fired another question at him. “How’d you pick your victims?”

Phil craned his neck to try to keep his eyes on him. “Random at first. Then Danny told us to target the more expensive cars.”

“How many keys and addresses did you give him?” Teri wanted to know.

Unsure, Phil shrugged nervously. “Maybe twenty. I told you, I didn’t do this for that long.”

“Twenty,” she repeated. There was no reason to assume that the other men on the list hadn’t given Tierney the same amount, if not more. She did the math. “But only thirty-six break-ins in all that time.”

“That we know of,” Hawk pointed out. “Maybe
some people didn’t think the police would find their things, so they didn’t bother reporting it.” He came from a world where contact with the police was avoided at all costs, no matter what. He knew the way people in that world thought. Survival was more important than monetary goods. Knowing Tierney, there might have been another reason for the difference in numbers. “And maybe he weeded them out, staking out the houses, seeing which made for an easier target.”

There was only one way they were going to find out. “We need to get information from the horse’s mouth,” Teri told him.

Because for the moment they seemed to have forgotten about him, Sherman looked from one to the other, pathetically eager, pathetically nervous. “Did I do okay?”

“You did fine,” Hawk said without bothering to look in his direction. Stepping out in the hall, he waved in a uniformed policeman standing by. “You can take him to booking now.”

Hawk was leaving the room, Teri realized a second after the other policeman came in for the prisoner. She was quick to fall in step with him. “Where are you going?”

Hawk slid his arms through his jacket, then left it open. He didn’t spare her a look. “If the address we got is right, to see Tierney.”

She glanced toward her desk in the distance. “Give me a second.”

“I’m going alone.”

Second verse, same as the first. And she’d heard this song before. “No,” she said quietly, forcefully, “you’re not.”

He’d never liked being on the receiving end of orders. Some were unavoidable. But hers weren’t. And he didn’t like what he thought he was hearing. “Don’t trust me?”

Anger creased her forehead. “That’s a stupid thing to say. Why wouldn’t I trust you? Because you knew him?” They were a team. When was he going to get that through his thick head? “I’m your partner, I’m supposed to have your back. We’re going together.”

They’d only be wasting time, arguing. He blew out a breath. “There’s no winning with you, is there?”

“Nope.” She hurried quickly to her desk and grabbed her own jacket. “Get used to it,” she told him, slipping the jacket on as she matched her stride with his.

Although, she knew damn well that if he wanted to go alone, he would have gone. Whether he knew it or not, he wanted her with him.

Getting out of the car, Hawk made his way into the twenty-story building. It was less than five years old. Danny Tierney had come up in the world. He now lived in an upscale apartment in the better part of the city. His situation was a far cry from the dirty mattress they had once shared in an abandoned warehouse.

Out of habit, his hand covered the bulge under his jacket.

Teri hurried alongside him as they went to the elevator. “You up to this?”

He scowled at her. What did this make—three? “Will you stop asking that?”

He wasn’t an easy man to help, she thought darkly as she got into the empty elevator car. “I’m your partner. I’m concerned.”

He pressed for the seventh floor. The doors shut immediately. The ride up was over in less than a minute. “Edmunds never asked me if I was feeling up to something. We just went in and did whatever needed doing.”

She walked out in front of him. “Edmunds is a toad.”

He looked up and down the carpeted hallway. It was empty. Hawk motioned her to the left. Tierney’s apartment was the third one from the visible end. “I’ll tell him that the next time I see him.”

“Do that.” Holding her weapon ready, poised, she nodded at Hawk.

He knocked on the door with his fist, banging a bit loudly. All he could think of was that here, but for the grace of a few good turns, went he. If anything, Danny had had the better foundation. At one point Danny at least had had a mother who’d loved him as best as she could. A mother who had married the wrong man. Danny’s stepfather flexed his muscles
and beat him whenever the opportunity arose, which, to hear Danny tell it, was frequently.

It was still no excuse for what had gone down.

“Danny, it’s Hawk,” Hawk said loudly. “Open up the door.”

He was about to knock again when the sound of a chain being removed was heard on the other side of the door. A second later, the door opened.

The man on the other side was slightly shorter than Hawk, but no less powerfully built. His curly black hair made him look engaging, as did the wide grin on his face. He wore an expensive black silk robe that threatened to come undone from the loosely tied belt drooping at his waist.

The wide smile faded, but only a little, as he saw the gun being pointed at him. “Hey, man, what’s going on? No need for guns.” He looked at Teri. “Tell your honey to stop waving that thing around. Come in, talk, take a load off. I’ve got something going you might really be interested in.”

Danny had changed, Hawk thought. He looked a hell of a lot better than he had the last time he’d seen him. Living off others could do that.

“Right. I would,” Hawk agreed, not moving, “but not for the reasons you might think.” He flashed his badge at the other man.

Staring at it, Tierney then started to laugh. “Nice bit of copying, Hawk. I always did say you were a natural.”

“His badge is real,” Teri said tersely, still pointing
her weapon at him. With her free hand, she dug out her own shield. “So’s this one.” She held it up in front of him.

The smile became tight around the edges. “What’s this all about?”

“About ten to twenty,” Hawk told him. “Somebody rolled on you, Danny.”

There was bravado in his laugh. “Only one rolling is my girlfriend. She’s still in bed.” He nodded toward the inside of the apartment. “Have a taste. Your type, Hawk.” His eyes momentarily washed over Teri before returning to Hawk’s face. “Not like this one. C’mon, what do you say?”