“Thanks for letting me tag along,” he responded wryly. Considering the exchange between Cavanaugh and her cousin, in his opinion a cardboard figure could have taken his place.
Valri stopped just short of the elevator and turned to face him. She hadn’t meant to make him feel belittled.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I have a tendency to get carried away and take over.”
“Really?” Brody said sarcastically. “I hadn’t noticed.”
Okay, she’d obviously hurt his ego, but that certainly hadn’t been her intent. Her apology should have leveled the playing field.
“I apologized,” she pointed out needlessly. “What more would you like me to do?”
Now that was a loaded line, he couldn’t help thinking.
“Oh, so many things I don’t even know where to begin, Cavanaugh. But for now, let’s just go back and get that posturing little gamer out of his cave and into protective custody. I’ll call the marshal’s department to get the ball rolling so that he’ll have his new identity all set up by the end of tomorrow.”
Valri nodded her agreement. “I’m not going to be able to relax until we get Randy out of there and into a hotel room.”
Well, at least they agreed on some things, Alex thought. “That makes two of us.”
When they arrived at Randy Wills’s house twenty minutes later, Alex parked his car in the driveway just the way he did the first time. And, just like the first time, there were no actual lights coming from the house, only the hint of a glow from the TV monitor that dominated the gaming pit, otherwise once known as the living room.
Getting out quickly, Alex reached the front door first. When he began to knock, the door moved beneath his knuckles.
Frowning, he slowly tried the doorknob and found that the door wasn’t locked.
“This can’t be good,” Valri murmured to herself, then out loud she looked toward her partner and commented, “I don’t think I like this.”
“Looks like that makes two of us again,” Alex said. Drawing his weapon, he slowly eased the door open with his free hand.
Valri had her own gun out as she entered half a step behind her partner.
At first glance, everything looked the way it had when they had previously entered the house. The lights were off, and the TV monitor that took up such a large part of the room was running the same video game that had been on earlier.
And Wills was sitting on the sofa, apparently so consumed with the action on the monitor that he wasn’t aware of anything else. There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the house.
“We’ve got your deal, Wills,” Alex called out. “Right here on this paper from the ADA. All nice and legal. All you have to do is sign it and you can start your new life.”
The gamer didn’t answer him or even acknowledge his presence.
And there was something else he wasn’t doing, Valri noticed. Rather than say anything, she caught her partner by the arm. When Brody looked at her quizzically, she pointed to the controller in the gamer’s hand.
“His hands aren’t moving,” she said in a quiet voice, dropping her own hand from Brody’s arm. “He’s not playing.”
Brody stalked around the sofa so he could get a frontal view of the gamer. He lightly put his hand on the gamer’s shoulder. The man instantly slumped over in the opposite direction.
“He’s dead,” Valri pronounced.
Alex put two fingers to the gamer’s neck area, looking for any sign of a pulse. There was nothing, not even a hint of life struggling to continue.
“Looks that way to me,” Alex agreed. He scanned the immediate area. “There’s no sign of a struggle.”
“Or a break-in,” Valri concurred. “He knew his killer.”
“Either that, or the killer had a spare key,” Alex suggested.
Valri shook her head. “I don’t think so. If the killer had let himself in, he would have used that key to lock up when he left.”
“Maybe he’s not a neat freak,” Alex countered.
“It has nothing to do with being neat,” she told him. “He’d lock the door behind him to add to the air of mystery, put another bump in the road. No, I think Randy let whoever wound up killing him in. Which means that it was—”
“Another gamer,” Alex concluded. “Our boy here doesn’t strike me as a well-rounded person with his share of friends,” he guessed. “He’d only know other gamers and geek types.”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” she told him.
“Present company excluded,” he said, inclining his head toward her. “Besides, you’re not a gamer, you’re a cop, remember?”
She gazed down at the face of the man who had been alive just a short while ago. “I remember,” she replied grimly.
Alex took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and used it to keep from touching the light switch on the wall as he flipped it on. Despite the illumination that flooded the room, the pervading aura of gloom continued.
The video game was partially at fault for that. Alex rectified that next by turning off the set.
With the added light, Alex could see things more clearly. Circling the victim, he came up behind the gamer again and was able to make out what he hadn’t seen the first time.
“He was shot from behind.”
“Execution style,” Valri confirmed.
“Think the killer was trying to make some sort of a statement with that?” Alex asked.
“Yes—that he was acting out some secret agent/spy fantasy. I did a quick background check on Randy before we came to talk to him the first time—”
“A background check?” Alex echoed. “I thought you said you knew him.”
“I did, but just in a passing sense. I didn’t want us to have any surprises.”
Alex shook his head. “Well, that didn’t exactly work out well, did it?”
She looked down at the gamer, thinking what a terrible waste it was to have life snatched away at such a young age. “No, I guess not.”
“Call this in,” Alex told her. “We’re going to need forensics to go over this place with a fine-tooth comb. Who knows, the killer might not have been as careful as he thought he was.”
Valri took out her cell phone to do as he’d suggested. “What are you going to be doing while I’m calling?” she asked.
“I’m going to make sure that our killer isn’t by some chance hiding in any of the closets.”
“He’s not,” she told him as she started to place her call.
Walking to the rear of the house, Alex stopped. “What makes you so sure?” he asked.
“No car in the driveway, no car parked at the curb or nearby,” she pointed out.
“Maybe our killer is a public transportation kind of guy,” Alex countered.
The expression on her face was highly skeptical. “The man just offed another man. He’d be much too wired, much too high on adrenaline, to calmly ride a bus back to wherever he came from.”
“You don’t mind if I just satisfy my own curiosity and check, do you?” he asked sarcastically.
“Not in the slightest,” she assured him.
And then he watched her become alert. Obviously someone had just picked up on the other end of the call.
“Yes,” he heard his partner saying, then giving her shield number to identify herself. “We need someone from the coroner’s office to come pick up a body. Yes, a human body,” she stressed. Pressing the mute button on her cell, she looked in Brody’s direction. “What kind of calls go into the coroner’s office?” she asked in wonder.
Alex laughed. “You’d be surprised,” he told her. “They rake in more prank calls than the other departments combined. Gallows humor, I think it’s called.”
But he could see that the lively blonde was no lon
ger listening to him. Her attention was exclusively focused on the voice coming from her cell phone.
* * *
There was no one else in the 1,400-square-foot house. He’d gone into every closet, looked under every bed, searched every inch of space. Other than rumpled sheets on a double bed in what he assumed was the master bedroom, there was not even any indication that anyone had been in the rooms, other than the gaming pit.
“Satisfied?” Valri asked him when he came back to the scene of the crime.
He wasn’t a person who ignored the obvious—even when he would have liked to. “You were right, there wasn’t anyone there.”
“But there will be soon,” she said as she heard the distant wail of sirens in the background—growing louder as they came closer.
* * *
Processing the crime scene took more than two hours for the CSI team. Alex realized that his presence on the site, as well as Cavanaugh’s, wasn’t necessary, but he was anxious to see if the investigators could come up with something he could physically use when he went in search of his quarry the next day.
He decided to pack it in when nothing useful seemed to turn up. By then, their day was supposed to have ended a couple of hours ago.
When they got back to the precinct parking lot, Alex dropped her off by her car, said “good night,” and was about to drive off when Valri called out, “See you in the morning.”
See you in the morning.
It was the kind of sentence that inherently spawned the juvenile comeback “Not if I see you first.”
He refrained from saying it, but his thoughts were his own.
Any way he emphasized it, those simple words changed his destination from home to the hospital. There was someone he needed to touch base with.
Tonight.
* * *
Lying in the hospital bed, his eyes all but glazed over out of boredom, Jake Montgomery listlessly looked over toward the door when he heard it opening. A tall hulk of a man who looked completely out of place in a hospital bed, he instantly brightened when he saw who was walking into his room.
“Hey, Brody,” he cried, grinning. “Come to see if I was a corpse yet?”
Alex dropped into the orange plastic chair beside his partner’s bed. “No, I came to see if you were tired of faking it and ready to come back to work.”
“Faking it?” Montgomery echoed indignantly. “You try getting run over by a tricked-out Jeep SUV and see how good you feel.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Alex said, waving a dismissive hand at his partner’s words of protest. “All I know is that you’d do anything to get some time off with pay, even pull a fool stunt like that to get out of doing any of your paperwork. Well, FYI, those reports are piling up, and I don’t care if they block out the sun, I’m not cleaning those files up. That’s your mess.”
Shifting in his chair, Alex leaned in closer to Montgomery. “Seriously, buddy, you’ve got to concentrate on getting well and out of this bed. I need you back on the job, like yesterday.”
They’d been partners for three years now and this was the most serious he’d ever been with his partner. It obviously caught Montgomery off guard. “Since when?” Montgomery asked.
“Since the chief of Ds made me chief babysitter to his niece—or grandniece, or whatever she’s supposed to be called, although between you and me, ‘pain in the butt’ is more apt a description for the likes of her. The woman is making me crazy.”
Montgomery stared at him, surprise etched all over his wide, hangdog face. “You’ve got a new partner?” he asked.
Alex was rather surprised that Montgomery hadn’t heard yet. Were they keeping his partner in the dark for a reason? he wondered. Or was there some other reason not to keep Montgomery up on the latest news?
He was quick to do damage control in case Montgomery found the news upsetting. “It’s just temporary. You know, like being sent to purgatory is just temporary, until you’re deemed worthy and pure enough to enter heaven. As far as I’m concerned, I’m good to go anytime now. I’ve got the scars to prove it.”
Flashing the bedridden man an encouraging grin, Alex rose from the chair. “I’d better let you get your rest. The faster you heal, the faster you come back to the squad room,” he said cheerfully, savoring the image of that for a moment. “I’ll even listen to your corny jokes—at least in the beginning,” he amended in the interest of being honest.
“Brody, about that,” Montgomery began hesitantly, stopping Alex in his tracks as surely as if he had put a nail gun to good use and nailed down the soles of his partner’s shoes.
“What about it?” Alex asked, his throat suddenly growing exceedingly dry. A premonition undulated through him. He wasn’t all that certain he wanted to hear what was coming next. But he also knew that he didn’t exactly have a choice.
He hated being blindsided.
“Annie wants me to take a desk job in the department when I get off medical leave,” Montgomery began, mentioning his wife of twenty-one years. “She’s got this crazy notion that I’ve used up my supply of good luck and that there’s still a bullet with my name on it out there, waiting to find me.
“If I’m out in the field, sooner or later, it will find me,” Montgomery guaranteed. “Nothing personal, Brody. You’ve been a great partner and I wouldn’t even be here now if it weren’t for you, I know that. You saved my life. But Annie made it clear—fieldwork or her, I have to choose. I can’t have both and I kinda gotten used to having her around. At my age, where am I going to find someone who’ll put up with me? I’m not exactly George Clooney, you know.”
Alex felt as if he’d just slipped into one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons and the coyote was holding up a safe, waiting to drop it on the unsuspecting roadrunner. He knew that the safe should somehow wind up dropping on the coyote, but it didn’t. The rope had snapped and the safe was heading straight for the roadrunner.
And in an odd twist, it looked as if he was the roadrunner.
Chapter 7
“You understand, don’t you, Brody?” Montgomery asked him uneasily after a couple of minutes had passed and he still hadn’t said anything.
There was no point in snapping at his partner, Alex thought, or in telling him to “man up.” Thanks to practically being mowed down by the suspect’s Jeep SUV, Montgomery had come face-to-face with his own mortality and it had done a number on the man, he got that. He was even sympathetic toward what his partner was going through.
Besides, just because Montgomery was bailing on him didn’t automatically mean that the hot little number that the chief had assigned to him was going to wind up being his permanent partner. Their teaming up was labeled temporary right from the start and he intended to hold the chief of Ds and the chirpy little blonde to that with every fiber of his being.
Easy on the eyes though she was, he wasn’t ready to be paired up with either a rookie or an almighty Cavanaugh—certainly not someone who was both. He preferred partners who didn’t come with a pedigree and who could carry their own load by themselves. Someone who had gotten to where he or she was through pure merit, not nepotism.
“Sure I understand, Montgomery. A good woman versus possibly being on the receiving end of a game-ending bullet. That’s a no-brainer from where I’m standing. You’ve got to keep your wife happy, right?” Alex forced a grin to his lips. He’d gotten good at that. Faking it while keeping his real feelings totally under wraps. “After all, she’s the one you come home to every night.”
Banged up though he still was, Montgomery brightened visibly. “Thanks, partner. That’s a real load off my mind. Speaking of coming home at night, soon as I’m up and about, you’re coming over for dinner, you hear? Bring your current squeeze of the moment, too,” his about-to-be-former partner added.
“Yeah, sure.” Alex rose from the thickly u
pholstered chair. “Well, I’d better let you get your rest. They toss you out of these places as fast as they can so you might as well be up to it.”
“I am kind of tired,” Montgomery admitted. Using the remote control that was fastened to his side railing, he pressed the down button and the upper portion of his mattress slowly lowered until it was almost flat. “See you when I blow this joint,” he promised.
“See you,” Alex echoed.
His partner was asleep before he reached the door.
Ex-partner, Alex amended. He frowned as he walked down the corridor. He was going to have to get used to thinking of Montgomery in the past tense.
And thinking of Cavanaugh only in the present tense, he added tersely.
He entertained the idea of hitting Malone’s on his way home, then decided against it. The way he felt right now, it was going to take more than just one beer to unclench his insides. He didn’t feel like leaving his car in the bar’s parking lot and calling a cab to drive him home.
Stopping at the first grocery store he came to, Alex bought a bottle of Southern Comfort liqueur and hoped it would live up to its name.
* * *
Her eyes felt as if someone had deliberately glued them shut, and there was this quick, sharp pain in her neck when she moved her head a little to the right.
She knew better than to attempt to stretch. Her muscles would all cramp up.
That was the price she paid for falling asleep at her desk, Valri thought ruefully, annoyed with herself. She really hadn’t meant to doze off at her workstation, and she certainly hadn’t intended to spend the night in the squad room.
The problem was she had kept giving herself “just a few more minutes” as she wrestled with the knotty problem of attempting to resurrect the smashed laptop. She kept moving forward by fractions of an inch.
Whoever had taken the sledgehammer to the laptop had obviously thought that was enough to kill any and all data on the hard drive. Overconfidence caused whoever had done it not to take the extra precaution of wiping the hard drive clean, as well.
Cavanaugh Fortune Page 7
