Cavanaugh on Call

by Marie Ferrarella

  “She’ll be there,” Bryce told his uncle before she had a chance to say anything.

  “Then I look forward to seeing you at my house,” Andrew told her. The next moment he was slipping away. “Excuse me. I’d like to have a few words with the new mother,” he said, taking his leave.

  Floored, Scottie looked at her partner. “I’m beginning to see where you get your pushiness from,” she murmured.

  “We prefer to think of it as warmth,” Bryce told her, amusement playing on his lips. “By the way, everyone’s grateful to you.”

  She shrugged self-consciously. “If I hadn’t been there, you would have done it.”

  Bryce was extremely grateful he hadn’t been put to the test.

  “Doesn’t change the fact that you were the one who did do it,” he pointed out. “You kept her calm and helped to bring her son into the world. That’s a pretty big deal in our book.”

  Scottie took a gamble. “Big enough to get me out of attending whatever party your uncle has in mind?”

  Bryce laughed. “Nice try. Almost, but not quite. You’ll have fun,” he promised. “What have you got to lose?”

  “Time,” Scottie said emphatically.

  “Party won’t be for a few days,” he told her. “I take it that you want to get back to work?” Bryce guessed.

  There was no hesitation on her part. “Yes!”

  He looked around the waiting area. They had had more than their share of time with Noelle. It would leave more room for the others if they left.

  “Okay, then, let’s go,” Bryce agreed. “Gridlock should be over with by now.”

  At this point, antsy to get back to the case, Scottie was willing to walk back to the police station if she had to as a last resort.

  It turned out not to be necessary. The gridlock had, for the most part, cleared up, leaving a relatively clear road from the hospital to the police station.

  They made excellent time, quickly reaching the precinct. Once there, Bryce was amazed that his partner dug right in and went back to work. He wondered if she was always this dedicated or if there was something about this particular case that motivated her.

  Maybe she was just trying to make points because this was her first case in Robbery, he mused.

  * * *

  “What are you doing?” he asked her, leaning back in his chair. It was close to half an hour later. She’d been working intently since they’d come into the squad room. He didn’t think her fingers had been still in all that time. They’d been flying over the keyboard.

  “I’m inputting all the information in these files—” she nodded at the pile next to her elbow “—into an Excel chart. Maybe the pattern will become clearer to us once I do that.”

  “You know,” Bryce told her, “you have earned a little time off, considering that you spent the afternoon helping the chief’s niece give birth.”

  “I had time off. It was called lunch,” she reminded him.

  “That was before Noelle called.” He crossed his arms and studied her for a moment. “Do you ever kick back?” he asked her.

  “Only if I’m kicked first,” she answered.

  Bryce laughed, shaking his head. About to make a comment about her stubbornness, he never got the chance. The phone on his desk rang.

  At the same time, so did hers.

  Scottie raised her eyes, looking at her partner. She could see that he was thinking the same thing she was. There’d been another break-in.

  They weren’t wrong.

  The break-in had taken place two blocks away from the victims they had questioned earlier this morning. It was almost as if the thieves had gone full circle and were starting on another round.

  “Want to hear my theory?” Bryce asked as he drove them to the site of the latest break-in.

  “Could I stop you?” Scottie quipped. When he gave her a look, she waved him on. “Go ahead.”

  “I think the thief or thieves took advantage of today’s gridlock. He or she—or they—knew that the victim they’d planned to target next wouldn’t be able to get back to the house for several hours because of the downed traffic lights.”

  She nodded. “Sounds logical. But gridlock works two ways. How did the thief, or thieves, get away?” she asked him.

  “On foot most likely. They wouldn’t risk getting stuck in this traffic.”

  She thought about the implication of what Bryce had just said. “That meant that they took only what they could carry on their person.”

  He’d seen Scottie pack the files into her messenger bag as they’d left the squad room. “Go over the list of other break-ins again,” he instructed. “I think we might have found their specialty.”

  She didn’t have to go over the lists, or ask what he thought the thieves’ “specialty” was. She didn’t have to hazard a guess. She knew. The thief or thieves were taking jewelry, rare coins and cash, all easily carried off in their pockets—or possibly just a small bag—without raising any suspicions.

  A sinking feeling took hold of the pit of her stomach. They kept coming back to rare coins, Ethan’s hobby.

  “Hey, are you all right?” Bryce questioned as they pulled up in front of the latest break-in victims’ house. “You look a little pale.”

  “Must be the lighting,” she joked, dismissing his concern.

  Raymond Miller was on several boards of directors and his wife, Grace, spent her time chairing charity events. Both were known to be generous to a fault and right now, both felt as if they weren’t safe in the home they’d thought of as their haven.

  “How could this have happened?” Miller asked. “I’ve got a top-of-the-line security system, a smart-house and so many safeguards in place that I have to carry around a book to remember all the passwords.”

  “Anything that can be created can be hacked, sir,” Bryce told him patiently.

  “Apparently,” Miller grumbled. “It’s all insured,” he told the detectives. “But still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been...” His voice trailed off.

  “Violated.” His wife spoke up, supplied the word.

  “We understand how you feel,” Scottie told the couple. “We’re doing what we can to catch these thieves. We’d like to ask you a few questions so that we can come up with a profile of the people who broke into your house.”

  “Do you really think you can catch them?” Miller asked.

  “We’re damn well going to try,” Bryce promised the couple.

  * * *

  They left with the Millers’ statement and a list of what had been stolen as well as the name of their insurance company and the company that had installed their security system. Neither was familiar or matched the names of the ones used by the other victims.

  Frustrated, Scottie turned down Bryce’s invitation to go out after hours and raise a toast to the newest Cavanaugh. She begged off, claiming that she was exhausted down to the bone—and she was.

  But that didn’t keep her from swinging by her brother’s apartment on her way home.

  He still wasn’t there.

  And he still wasn’t answering his phone.

  Something, she knew, was very, very wrong. Ethan didn’t have her dedication and serious temperament, but he wasn’t a flake, either. He wouldn’t just take off or disappear this way. Something was off, she knew it, but if she asked for help in locating him, his life would be placed under a microscope and closely examined. She couldn’t risk that. Especially if he was involved with whoever was pulling off these break-ins and she was beginning to have a progressively less than good feeling about that.

  She went to sleep dressed, with her cell phone right next to her just in case she got an urgent call from Ethan in the middle of the night.

  No call came.

  What did come was a complete
ly unwanted dream that replayed, in vivid terms and all sorts of startling, blazing colors, the sudden kiss she’d been pulled into without warning.

  Bryce’s kiss.

  After she’d relived it twice, each time more intensely than the last, she bolted upright. For a second she searched the immediate area around her, expecting to find Bryce there.

  All she found were the same shadows that had been there when she’d fallen asleep.

  “Damn it, Cavanaugh, I’ve got enough to deal with. Why are you in my head?” she demanded, scrubbing her hands over her face.

  There was no answer to that, other than he’d just caught her off guard, and...okay, the man really knew how to kiss, but so what? She wasn’t in the market for a man who could curl her toes and raise her body temperature by ten degrees.

  What am I in the market for? she silently asked herself.

  “Answers,” she said out loud. “I want answers. Where the hell are you, Ethan, and who the hell is pulling off these break-ins?”

  She got out of bed, knowing she might as well get ready because there wasn’t going to be any more sleep for her. And she definitely didn’t want to have that dream again.

  “If I find out that you’ve got a hand in it, that you let yourself be sucked into this, you’re going to be really sorry, Ethan,” she swore.

  What she was afraid of was that she was going to be sorry, as well.

  Chapter 10

  “Have you tried a hot shower and warm milk?” Bryce asked his partner as he sat at his desk several mornings later.

  Lost in thought, Scottie didn’t hear him at first. She was only aware that Bryce had said something. Scrolling to the next page on her computer screen, she asked, “What?”

  Bryce pushed the container of coffee he had brought in for her a little closer to her on her desk so that she would see it, then sat back in his chair and took the top off his own container.

  “I said, have you tried a hot shower and warm milk? To help you go to sleep,” he added when she looked at him quizzically. “Because, clearly, you’re still not getting enough.”

  She dismissed his concern. “I don’t need much sleep,” Scottie said.

  He didn’t know about that. “It’s obvious that you need more than you’re getting.”

  This time she did look up at him. “Because I look awful?” she challenged.

  “Because you look tired,” he told her. “You’ve got a long way to go before you look awful.”

  That caught her off guard. “Is that a compliment, Cavanaugh?”

  He didn’t know if she’d take what he’d just said as an insult. With Scottie, it was hard to tell. “Don’t get your back up,” he counseled. “That was just an observation.”

  “I was up early, working the case,” Scottie told him, which was, in its own way, a half truth. She was up, working the case because she was having trouble sleeping and that was case-related because she was worried about Ethan.

  “No case is worth working yourself into the ground over,” he told her. He paused to take a long sip of his extra-strong coffee. “Seriously, there are different sleep remedies you could try.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll deal with this myself.” She looked at the container in her hand. The one she’d started drinking from without thinking. With a sigh, she put it down on her desk. “And you don’t have to keep bringing me coffee.”

  He shrugged. “It’s the least I can do after what you did for Noelle.”

  She didn’t want him making a big deal out of it, didn’t want any sort of extra attention thrown her way. “I would have done it for any woman in that condition.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that you did it for Noelle.” He looked at his partner for a long moment, trying to figure her out. “Why is it so hard for you to just accept thanks?”

  Because accepting thanks was the first step toward getting close to someone and she didn’t want to be close to anyone because that never ended well. She summed up her feelings by saying, “Because it opens up doors I don’t want open.”

  She had to have gotten that philosophy from someone, Bryce judged. People weren’t born loners. “Everyone in your family like you?”

  She went back to her online search. “There is no one in my family.” Maybe he’d stop probing now.

  “Only child?” Bryce guessed. “Orphan?”

  She should have known better, she thought, exasperated. “I came riding in from the ocean on an open seashell,” she told him tersely. “Now can you please just let me concentrate on my work?”

  Rather than saying yes or retreating, Bryce came around to her side of the desk and looked over her shoulder. “Okay, Venus,” he said, referring to the image she’d just described of a famous painting. And then he looked at her monitor. She was tracking someone’s credit card. “Who’s Eva Wilkins?”

  Why couldn’t he just stay on his own side of the desk? “Just a name that popped up.”

  “When?” he asked. “I was with you when we questioned all of the break-in victims these last few days and that name never came up in any of the conversations. Neither is it in any of the files,” he pointed out and then he looked at her more closely. Scottie was hiding something. “So, who is she?”

  It had taken her two days to remember the last name of the woman Ethan’s neighbor had described seeing. She had credit reports belonging to the woman open on her monitor. They hadn’t been easy to get and she knew that Cavanaugh knew that. He wasn’t going to back off until she gave him an answer.

  “Just someone who might have some decent information on the case,” she told him.

  Bryce turned her chair around so that she was facing him squarely. He wasn’t about to continue talking to the back of her head.

  “You know, part of the beauty of working together is that we work together,” he stressed. “That means we share ideas, hunches and information with each other. Now I might not be the world’s greatest detective, but I do have the ability to recall details and names associated with the case I’m currently working on. This woman’s name never came up. Now who is she, Scottie?” he asked. “A witness? A possible suspect?”

  Scottie’s mind scrambled for something plausible to tell her partner. She didn’t want to tell him that the woman had been her brother’s girlfriend and had managed to get him entrenched with a gang of cyber thieves who’d used their expertise to pull off robberies. Ethan had turned out to be sharper than any of them and was soon their main asset. He’d done it because Eva had asked him to. Eva had been her brother’s weakness. He hadn’t been able to say no to her.

  She’d thought, when she had intervened, that Eva was a thing of the past and he wasn’t going to ever see her again.

  Obviously she hadn’t counted on the woman’s determination.

  “She’s a hacker,” Scottie grudgingly told him.

  Bryce shook his head. “Never heard of her.”

  “That’s because she’s a very good hacker.” Scottie emphasized the word.

  He looked back at the monitor. So far, he didn’t see any suspicious activity to indicate that this Eva Wilkins was spending large amounts of money. “So you think hackers are behind the break-ins?”

  She decided to tell Cavanaugh part of what she had figured out, just not enough to turn him onto Ethan if her brother was involved.

  “I think they’re instrumental in at least laying down the groundwork. Think about it. Only certain things are being stolen from the houses that have been broken into. One way to hone in on who has what is to hack into insurance companies that deal in home owners insurance. People who take out extra insurance on their things—like art, jewelry, coin collections,” she stressed, “have to list those items in their insurance policies. You hack into the insurance company’s database, find out who has things worth stealing, and half
your work is done.”

  “That’s impressive,” he said, referring to what she had figured out. “But how do they manage to break in when no one’s home?”

  She had an idea about that, as well, but for now she was keeping it to herself until she could ascertain if it was viable or not.

  “I’m working on that.”

  “You’re new to the department,” Bryce said abruptly.

  Where had that come from? “Yes? So?”

  “So how do you know all this?” he asked, gesturing at her computer screen.

  “I read a lot of mystery books,” she told him dismissively, hoping that would be the end of the discussion on that subject.

  “And this Eva Wilkins...how do you know about her?” he asked.

  She didn’t want to tell him about Ethan, so she couldn’t tell him about Eva’s connection to her brother. “A girl’s got to have some secrets, doesn’t she?” Scottie said vaguely.

  He wasn’t about to play that game. “Not from her partner.”

  “Sometimes especially from her partner,” she said pointedly. Her eyes met his for a long moment before she said, “It’s called giving you plausible deniability.”

  She was telling him she was giving him an alibi, just in case. This wasn’t making any sense. “You just made that up.”

  Well, logic isn’t working. She gave emotion a try. “Can we please stop talking and just let me follow my hunch?”

  “Sure,” he told her easily. “As long as I follow it with you.”

  Okay, this was getting annoying, she thought, frowning. “You weren’t joined at the hip to your last partner,” she reminded him.

  “I’m trying out something new,” he countered flippantly.

  Under normal circumstances she might have found this a bit intriguing, or challenging, but these weren’t normal circumstances. She was intent on finding the thieves and at the same time saving her brother if it came down to that. For that, she needed space, not a shadow.

  “Hey,” Bryce said suddenly, pointing to a line on the monitor, “it looks like this Eva person just used her credit card at a pharmacy not too far from here to buy an inhaler. Looks like our girl has asthma.”