The question seemed to have come out of the blue. Suspicion entered the scene.
“Why?” Kelly asked. What difference did it make to know this piece of information about her?
Kane shrugged. “No particular reason,” he told her with a degree of fabricated innocence. “I just thought you were pulling my leg. Were you?”
“You’ll never know,” she answered, smiling sweetly at him and content to leave him wondering rather than own up to what had become a habit for her. “Do you know any of the details about this home invasion we’re going to be investigating?” she asked.
“Just that it sounds like the same guy breaking in. One person,” Kane repeated almost grudgingly. It made her grateful that Kane wasn’t after her.
More details lined up. The site of the second home invasion was a two-story house, located in the same general vicinity as the first house.
This time the thief had made off with a number of high-end electronics and some expensive jewelry. All in all, nothing about the invasion was remarkable, except that—again—the things the thief stole all had been located on the first floor and he could have gotten in and out without arousing any suspicions.
Despite that, the thief chose to wake the victims, tie them up, bring them downstairs and have them watch as he made off with their things.
“I suppose it’s his form of bragging,” Kelly commented.
“Something like that,” Kane agreed.
“Was it just the couple present when he broke in?” she asked.
“According to the wife, they have kids, but the kids are away at school.”
She squinted as she read the street sign, making sure she was headed in the right direction. “That’s good. At least the kids weren’t home at the time, being traumatized. That kind of thing could result in their being in therapy for years.”
She rolled everything Kane had told her over in her head. “Maybe when we get back to the precinct we should double-check that these were isolated cases and that we haven’t missed other home invasions that could be tied to this creep.” A thought suddenly occurred to her. “Was there a security system?” If it was the same one, that would be their common denominator.
“Guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
She smiled, reading between the lines. “Is that your clever way of saying you don’t know?”
“That’s my way of saying that dispatch only gave me a limited amount of information,” he informed her rather abruptly. “And it serves no purpose to have you question me as if I was there when the home invasion was going down. I wasn’t.”
She nodded. “Good point. Want me to take you shopping when our shift is over?” she asked without any preamble or warning.
Kane stared at her. Where had that come from? “Why would I want to go to the mall with you?”
“Not mall shopping,” she corrected. “Food shopping.” There was a world of difference to the techniques employed in one versus the other. “And to answer your question as to why, it’s because you have absolutely nothing edible in your refrigerator. You do eat, don’t you?”
He thought back to the takeout he had sitting on the shelf. Granted he’d brought it home a few days ago, but it was still edible.
“Of course I eat. And as for not having anything edible in the refrigerator, that’s just not true,” he protested,
“Okay,” she amended. “Nothing that won’t land you in the emergency room having your stomach pumped,” she told him. “How’s that?”
He laughed shortly. There wasn’t so much as a hint of a smile on his face. “I’ll pass, thanks.”
“You’ll pass out,” she corrected, “if you don’t have anything edible at home.”
He had to set her straight before she set up camp in his head.
“Look, Cavanaugh, for however long it lasts we’re partners at work, we are not, I repeat not, 24/7 buddies. Just because we work together doesn’t mean you can invade my private life like it’s your God-given right.”
“Actually, in a way it is,” she pointed out. “It’s in my best interest to keep you as healthy as possible. If you’re not at the top of your game, how can you have my back?”
“Right now I’m getting visions of having your throat, not your back,” he told her pointedly, leaving the rest unsaid. She struck him as bright enough to make all the necessary connections. “Were you like this with your last partner?” he asked.
“I didn’t have to be,” she said defensively. “Amos didn’t believe in raising mold in his refrigerator. And he ate regularly”
Kane made a judgment call based on what he’d been observing. “I can see why the guy decided to bail out on you.”
“He didn’t bail out. He just felt like he was pushing his luck lately.” Stopped at a red light, she looked at Kane and did a quick, obvious assessment. “You’re grumpy,” she noted. “If you had a good hot meal under your belt you wouldn’t be grumpy.”
He looked at her. A meal, hot or otherwise, wasn’t going to negate the effect this woman had on those around her. Especially him. “I wouldn’t bet on that if I were you.”
Amused, Kelly laughed at the expression on Kane’s face—among other things.
The sound annoyed him and seemed to seductively pull him in at the same time.
Maybe she was right, he thought grudgingly, although he’d die before admitting as much to her. But maybe these strange thoughts wouldn’t be infiltrating his head if he’d taken something to eat with him.
There was always that drive-through place on the way back to the precinct, he reminded himself. He’d be able to get his breakfast there—provided the home invasion victims didn’t talk his ears off.
Then again, he thought it was rather a safe bet that if she hadn’t managed to accomplish that little feat yet, nothing the victims could tell him would be the least bit of a problem for him.
* * *
Just as with the first home invasion, a patrol car was parked outside the address Kane had given to her. The front door was wide-open to accommodate any necessary comings and goings involving the department.
She noticed that the CSI unit hadn’t arrived on the scene yet.
“How long ago did you say that call came in to 9-1-1?” she asked Kane as she pulled up by the front curb.
“A little before 2:00 a.m. I called you the minute I got off the phone with dispatch,” he added.
Not much time had elapsed between the call and their response time.
That would explain why the crime scene investigators hadn’t arrived yet.
She nodded in response to what Kane had just told her. Bracing herself—in her opinion, it was never easy to face a victim of a crime—she said, “Let’s see if the victims can enlighten us about the guy who robbed them.”
* * *
Edward Mitchum was a tall, heavyset CEO of a local bank, and to say he was angry would have been a vast understatement. Pacing about his family room like a tiger in captivity searching for that one glimmer of freedom, Mitchum appeared to be building up steam. An amateur boxer in his younger years, Mitchum still looked capable of knocking out his opponent.
He also appeared none-too-pleased with the police in this case.
“That bastard better hope that you find him before I do.” His booming voice resonated throughout the six-bedroom, six-bath house, only growing stronger as the minutes slipped by. “Because if I find him first, I’m going to wring his scrawny neck.”
Kane suddenly looked alert. “Was it?”
“Was what it?” the man all but barked the question. He had been compromised and held captive, helpless to do anything to save himself or his wife, and it was obviously eating away at him.
“Scrawny. You just talked about the thief’s scrawny neck. I’m just trying to verify whether or not you’re usi
ng poetic license, or if you’re actually describing accurately what you happened to witness,” Kane explained.
Mitchum shrugged, obviously annoyed at the question as well as the situation he found himself in. He definitely wasn’t accustomed to being on the receiving end of questions.
“I’m six foot one and two hundred pounds—”
“Two hundred and thirty,” his wife interjected, speaking up for the first time.
“Nobody cares about the exact figure, Sienna,” the CEO snapped. Turning back to the detectives, he continued. “To me, everybody looks scrawny.”
“Point taken,” Kane agreed. “You’ve got a lot of surveillance cameras planted throughout the house. Any chance that the man who broke into your house last night was caught on any of them?”
The woman shook her head. “None of the cameras were recording. He disconnected them,” she explained. “He made a point of telling us that.”
Unable to allow his wife to have the last word in any context, the bank president told them, “He spouted some technical garbage, saying he did this and that. Sounded really proud of himself.”
“Please think this over,” Kelly requested politely. “It’s very important. Was he at all familiar to either of you?”
Mitchum scowled at her. “Are you saying you think it’s someone we know? I’m a bank president. I don’t associate with any lowlife.”
“We didn’t mean to imply that you did,” Kelly assured him, attempting to soothe his ruffled feathers. “But maybe you encountered the man at one of the functions you attend on behalf of that foundation you started, donating meals to homeless shelters.”
He’d done that strictly as a way of paying back some whimsical high priestess of luck who had somehow loaded the dice for him while standing in his corner. It seemed that no matter what he tried, he always managed to come out ahead.
Except this time.
Annoyed, the bank president began to wonder if he’d done something to break what had admittedly been a long-running lucky streak.
Superstition, he had come to learn, could exercise almost deadly control over people who found themselves on the wrong side of Lady Luck.
He intended to change that.
As soon as possible.
“No, he wasn’t familiar to me,” Mitchum swore.
Chapter 9
Edward Mitchum remained adamant about not knowing the man who broke into his house, referring to him as a “brazen, sadistic SOB.” His irritation grew visibly at the very suggestion that someone within his sphere of acquaintances could have inflicted this act of humiliation on him.
After considerable resistance, he grudgingly agreed to draw up and send in a list of people with whom he interacted on a regular basis.
His wife, Sienna, had nothing to add. It was all she could do to keep from falling apart. The ordeal had clearly taken a huge toll on her.
Temporarily at a dead end, Kane told the couple they would be in touch and then he and Kelly left.
“Funny that both Mitchum and Osborn should have the same reaction for the experience they’d endured. Humiliation.” Kelly rolled the word on her tongue, as if testing it out that way could help her piece together the disjointed evidence. She had a feeling that somewhere amid all this was the clue as to who had engineered these home invasions.
She slanted a look at Kane. His expression gave nothing away. The man was unreadable, and it frustrated her.
“I’m beginning to feel that there’s a common thread running through these home invasions,” Kelly said, getting into the car again. Her hands on the steering wheel, she looked at Kane again to see if any of this had started him thinking the same thing.
It hadn’t.
“Which is?” Kane asked flatly. He was watching the road, his hands once more preemptively braced against the dashboard. It was obvious that he felt it was just a matter of seconds before a jolt vibrated through him.
“That our as-of-yet-unidentified suspect is robbing some pretty nasty people,” she told him.
Kane laughed shortly. The sound was devoid of humor. “No argument there.”
“Think that could be the unifying theme?” she asked, aware she was really reaching. “That someone is trying to get even with these people for some slight he’d endured at their hands?” As she spoke, Kelly began to elaborate and expand on her fledgling theory. “Maybe the thief is actually some public servant or even a laborer that Osborn and Mitchum had both used at one time or another. And when they did, they behaved condescendingly toward him, so now he’s getting even.”
Kane wasn’t convinced. “How do you explain the fact that the security system was disabled in both instances? A run-of-the-mill laborer isn’t going to have that kind of knowledge or expertise.”
She blew out a breath. “You can be a real downer when you want to be, Durant,” she murmured. And then she relented. “But you’re probably right. It was just a desperate shot in the dark,” she admitted. “What’s our next step, oh fearless leader?”
“We talk to some of the people who work for Mitchum. See if they can shed some light on this.”
“Sounds like as good a place to begin as any,” she agreed. Just then, the same kind of buzzing noise that had woken her up this morning resonated through her vehicle. She knew it couldn’t be for her. “Either your pants are vibrating,” she cheerfully said to Kane, “or that’s your phone getting an incoming call.”
Despite what she said, Kane made no move to pick up his smartphone.
Why wasn’t he answering it? “Are you going to get that?” she asked. And then the reason for his reluctance suddenly occurred to her. He didn’t want to talk in front of her. “I can pull over if you want privacy,” she offered.
“Okay. Do that,” he responded.
On his lips, it sounded more like an order and for a second, Kelly was tempted to tell him that she’d changed her mind about giving him privacy. But that would have been petulant and childish, so she refrained. She elected to take the high road first.
The moment she pulled her vehicle to a curb, Kane got out of the car. Whoever was on the other end of that call, Kelly mused, had to be very important to him.
Girlfriend?
Parent?
A hundred questions popped up and began multiplying in her head, especially while she watched Kane’s back as he spoke to the person on his cell. Kane wasn’t one to slouch—certainly he’d never done it around her—but he’d never stood at military attention before, either. He was now.
Something was up.
When he finally got off the cell phone and got back into her car, Kelly couldn’t contain herself any longer. “Bad news?” she asked, paying close attention to his eyes, even though he deliberately avoided making eye contact.
“You might say that,” he answered. He seemed preoccupied and more than a little upset. Someone on the other end of that call had gotten to him. But gotten to him how?
“Anything I can do to help?” she offered, hoping he would take her into his confidence even while she knew she hadn’t a prayer of that happening.
Without realizing it, Kane sighed. “Not unless you have a time machine tucked away somewhere.”
She thought of her brother, the one who actually believed there was more to science fiction than met the eye.
“Actually, that’s something Malloy might be tinkering with.”
“Malloy,” Kane repeated, looking at her blankly. And then it hit him. “Another brother?”
She laughed, nodding. “You’re getting good at keeping track of them, something even my own mother had trouble with from time to time.” If she had a dime for each time her mother got their names confused, she would have been a very rich woman at this point in her life.
“What with seven kids—it is seven, right?” he asked he
r.
“Right.” He did pay attention to details, she thought, surprised, and pleased—something that surprised her even more.
He continued, “With seven kids probably getting into trouble all the time, it’s a wonder that your mother didn’t lose her mind.”
“She came close a number of times,” Kelly told him. Then her mind pivoted to a completely unrelated question. “Who was that call from?”
“Just some stranger,” he answered evasively.
She didn’t believe him. Even so, Kelly thought of just letting the subject go. But it really bothered her to be at this impasse with Kane. She was trying to build up a relationship so that he trusted her implicitly. When he behaved this way, it didn’t exactly help build the kind of foundation needed to support a strong, trusting relationship.
“Did this stranger have a name?” she asked, keeping the subject open.
“Most people do,” Kane answered drily.
Kelly ignored the sarcasm. Instead, she calmly asked, “Would you like to share that with the class or just hoard it like it’s a big mystery?”
“It’s personal,” Kane informed her coldly.
His tone all but warned her not to trespass. For now, Kelly decided to back off. But not before saying, “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
“You mean whenever you’re not talking?” he asked. “And since you’re always talking, there’s no way for anyone to get a word in edgewise, including me.” It was clear he assumed that was the end of the discussion on this particular topic.
She wanted to protest what he’d just said, wanted to point out that she wasn’t always talking, but she doubted it would do any good. It was obvious Durant had gotten an image of her in his head and he wasn’t about to back off from it.
But she had to say something, had to go on the record protesting his image of her. “All you have to do is just say you want to tell me something important and I’ll listen.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he told her. But his mind was already elsewhere. The call he’d just taken had caught him completely by surprise. “Right now, I want you to head to the precinct.”
How to Seduce a Cavanaugh Page 9
