She blinked at him a few times before tugging down the scarf wrapped around her lower lip. “Hi, I hope I’m not too late.”
Daire stared dumbly at her for a few seconds before standing aside to let her in. “Ah, no, not at all.”
She whisked by him in a flurry of puffy coat and fly-away wool. “Good. I had to park a couple of blocks away. I’d forgotten how hard it is to park in a neighborhood not your own.” So, that explained her red-tinged face.
He closed the door. “Yeah, it can be a problem. I should have recommended that you Uber it.”
Parker placed her bulging briefcase on the floor between her legs as she pulled her outwear off. “No, that’s okay. I wanted to drive so there’d be no third-party record of my coming.”
Her words startled Daire. He froze mid-reach for her things. “You’re really worried about that?” He agreed with her, of course. He’d been the one to insist on this private meeting because he believed there were too many dirty cops lurking around. It surprised him, however, to hear she felt the same.
Li handed him her coat, scarf, and hat. Her hair flew up with static electricity, the real kind. Not the kind they both had tried to fool each other and themselves into thinking sent that spark of awareness between them when they’d shaken hands. As tiny as she was, she looked like a school girl patting her hair back into place. The look she gave him, however, was that of a mature woman. It conveyed how stupid she found his question.
“Yes, and I thought you were, too,” she replied, giving his home the onceover.
Daire took her things over to the pegs screwed into the wall by the front door and hung them up. “I do. I just didn’t think you did. I mean, I hear myself say I can’t trust too many people on the force and it sounds crazy. Like I think I’m in some kind of thriller with Denzel Washington and maybe Charliz Theron.”
When he turned back, he found her already laying her briefcase on the dining room table. He went to join her, grateful he’d settled on a long sweater to wear with new jeans, because fuck it all, the sight of her slender form in casual clothes had roused his slumbering cock. Apparently, he wasn’t so old that he couldn’t get hard twice in one hour. Shit.
“I can understand your feeling that way. Since we met in your office, I’ve been mulling this whole thing over some more.” She tossed a glance at him over her shoulder and gave this tiny, strangled sounding cough before returning to her task. “Anyway, my boss thinks Mahurin and this other cop we’ve linked to him, Forrester, are one-off rogues. He wants me to wrap it up quickly and move on.”
Daire joined her at the table, although he walked to the other side. Best to keep the big, oak table between them. “You don’t think so.”
Slapping a file down, she pierced him with a fierce glare. “No, I don’t think so. Neither of these people strike me as being particularly bright, yet I’m still digging out bank accounts and safety deposit boxes where Mahurin stashed a lot of money. He’d been on the take for years. How did he manage it without being caught unless someone else or multiple some ones directed him?”
“Not Forrester?”
“No way. Forrester’s much younger, a few years ahead of you, I think, at the academy, and did a really lousy job of covering the money trail. There have to be others around Mahurin’s age involved.”
She pulled out a small netbook computer and placed it next to her files. “I have more stuff on this and figured we could go over it and see what, if anything, rings bells for you.”
Daire nodded once in agreement. “Sounds like a plan. Um, can I get you anything to drink?” He scratched the back of his head as he asked the question, feeling far more awkward than a man of his age should around a woman.
“Do you have any green tea?”
Daire racked his brains. Finn kept some different teas for the Keurig. “I think maybe I do.”
Li gave him a bright smile. Every thought in his head fled in the presence of the sheer beauty of her face. It was perfect in every way. Before, in his office, he’d been too wrapped up in suspicion and anger to really allow himself to study it. Inappropriate as it might be to do it now, he couldn’t help himself.
If someone had asked him not an hour ago if he had a “type” when it came to women, he’d have said tall, leggy, and stacked. He’d also always been drawn to the cool beauty of blondes as a nice contrast to his dark hair. Now, all of that flew out the window. Petite, slender in perfect proportions, with midnight hair to rival his own and deep brown, almond-shaped eyes he could just fall into and never leave again. Not a lick of make-up covered her skin, yet it glowed with a radiant beauty that hadn’t been caused by mere cold.
She stared back at him unblinking, and even though her height forced her to tilt her head up to look at him, she didn’t appear diminished at all. This was a woman of power, and she knew it. He would bet his left nut she’d finished at the top of her class at the police academy and could hold her own against far larger opponents. Maybe she could hold her own against him. Somehow, the thought that she might be able to pin him down excited him, or at least his cock, even more. Shit, did that mean he was like Regan’s boyfriend, Kyle? Did he want a woman to tie him up and beat his ass? No, probably not. He really liked the idea of wrestling around with her, though.
She cleared her throat delicately, signaling he’d stared a little too long. He broke eye contact guiltily and embarrassed for being caught ogling her. With a jerk of his body, he went into the kitchen to hunt up k-packs. He almost crowed in triumph when he found some green tea ones, happy to be able to give her what she wanted. He ran the water through it and brought her tea in one of his nicer mugs. It counted as such because there were no chips in it and it didn’t contain any snarky sayings.
“Would you like something in it,” he called from the kitchen. “Milk?”
“No, thanks,” she called back.
He brought the tea in and placed it on the table near her stuff, only slightly chagrinned that his mother’s old table had seen better days. He and his brothers were lousy at using table cloths and coasters.
Parker chased away his blues by picking up the mug and sipping at it while she pulled up some files on her netbook. Her eyelids drooped slightly in appreciation, and just that small indication of joy pleased him far better than it should. His reaction to her made him uncomfortable, too, given they were not only working, but he outranked her. Sexual harassment on the job was no joke. She had the right to be free from his drooling over her while visiting him at home to help on a case.
After taking a few more sips of her tea, she put the mug down and gestured toward him. “Come over here, please, sir. I want to show you what I’ve cobbled together so far.” She sat down with the netbook in front of her.
Daire hesitated a second before doing as she asked. Being next to her didn’t strike him as such a good idea. He couldn’t possibly come up with a plausible reason why not, however, so he slid into the seat next to her and peered at her computer screen. Mahurin’s official department picture loomed in vivid color. His gut twisted a moment before he forced himself to relax. Hating his father’s former partner, a man his father had called friend, didn’t help anything. The strong emotions would only clog up the part of his brain that wasn’t already focused on the subtle perfume and body heat of Parker Li. He needed to focus.
“Okay,” he said with determination. “Mahurin I knew just about my whole life. My father and my uncle, Jack Malloy, counted him as a trusted friend. At least my uncle says he did, and I have no knowledge of my father suspecting Mahurin had turned dirty. I could be wrong about that. He didn’t confide his suspicions to me before he died.”
And that little fact ate away at him and would do so for the rest of his life. Maybe he was being stupid, but he couldn’t help wonder whether his parents would still be alive if his father had trusted him with the truth. Even though he’d only been a rookie back then, he might have been able to help in some way. Those thoughts and regrets got him nowhere. He shook them off and concentrated on wh
at Parker was saying.
“From what I’ve been able to dig up, Mahurin went bad almost immediately.”
Daire shook his head. “I can’t believe he hid it from my father for all those years.” When Parker shot him a look, he realized how that sounded. “I guess he was good at hiding his true self, and I know my father was too trusting to suspect a good friend without evidence.”
Parker gave a non-committal nod and clicked her touch pad to bring up a new picture. This one was two side-by-side, actually. On the left, an angry young man sneered his way through his mug shot. On the right, the pallid face of a corpse lay with eyes closed.
Daire knew who this guy was as well. Even if he hadn’t seen the official records of the recently deceased Seamus O’Malley, he’d seen other pictures in Ronan’s evidence stash of O’Malley at various ages handing off packages.
“O’Malley,” he said simply. “My father’s snitch and a murder victim a few months ago.”
Parker nodded again. “The prevailing wisdom, proffered by your brother and his partner, is that O’Malley had been paid off for something, maybe in connection with your parents’ murders, and then got killed as a lesson to others when he started blackmailing Mahurin.”
“Or some of Mahurin’s friends. Ronan and Diego never found any evidence one way or another.” He winced inwardly at the partial lie. While the stash of potential evidence Diego had unearthed, which now sat tucked up in the crawl space of the house, held interesting possibilities, they still didn’t have a complete picture of what was going on, nothing to take to the D.A., anyway. “They closed the case with Mahurin as the murderer, but the evidence for that was circumstantial at best.”
Parker nodded again before clicking to the next picture. “Everyone liked Mahurin as the killer and the higher-ups wanted the case closed.” The next picture showed another official cop headshot, a woman with light brown skin and an engaging smile. Daire found the face vaguely familiar.
“This is Forrester,” Parker announced.
Daire sat back in his chair, as much to put distance between him and the distracting Parker as in surprise at the information. “Really? I guess I just assumed you were investigating a man.”
Parker gave him one of those stares women gave men when they’d done or said something stupid. “Women can be dirty, too.”
“Yeah, of course, I just…you know?” He shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t know her. Nothing in particular rings any bells. She certainly wasn’t anyone I ever saw my father with.”
Parker turned in her chair, angling her body to look at Daire more fully. “Would it surprise you to know that she was the first cop on the scene when your parents were killed?”
Daire’s eyes widened in confusion. “I know a woman in uniform was first on the scene. Officer Warren.”
“Her name was Warren. Now it’s Forrester.”
“She got married,” he said because of course that would explain the name change and he’d never really focused on the first responder in the case.
“Actually, she got divorced and changed her name back. She’d been married to a Mr. Warren since graduating from college. Within a year after your parents’ murders, this cop, whose career had thus far been mediocre, made detective and split up with her husband. Lots of change in her life in a short amount of time.”
Daire shifted his gaze to a far corner as he tried to work out the surprising information. Forrester didn’t show up in any of the pictures he’d pored over with his brothers, Regan, and Diego. No women did. All of the illegal activity Mahurin had haphazardly catalogued for some rainy day scenario had involved men, a real sausage fest. So where did Forrester fit in, and why, after going to the trouble of hiding all the other information, did Mahurin leave stuff lying around about Forrester?
He looked back at Parker, who calmly sipped her tea and watched his internal musing with apparent patience. “May I ask how you picked up on the Forrester connection?”
“It was easy. Mahurin’s phone records showed numerous calls to and from her, plus he kept a file in a desk at home showing payments he’d made to her. The bookkeeping left something to be desired, but it didn’t take much effort to track down the bank accounts and tie the timing of the payments to cases Forrester had been working on in vice. Mahurin’s security efforts sucked, to be frank.”
Or he’d deliberately left the Forrester trail as a sop for a possible investigation. Again, Daire thought of all the stuff in Diego’s box of wonder. Maybe Mahurin had been smarter than anyone thought. Give internal affairs someone to chew on and hold up as proof the rot had been rooted out while the real bad apples laid low and got away. Mahurin might have been playing both angles, protecting his accomplices while compiling evidence he could use for his own blackmail if things turned bad for him. Obviously, he hadn’t planned on being killed.
Daire looked into the serious eyes of Li and had to bite his tongue to stop himself from confessing what he had.
Putting her mug of tea down, Parker clicked on another screen. A neatly organized spreadsheet popped up filled with numbers and dates. “This is what we found. The D.A. is worried that it isn’t enough to hang Forrester. There’s talk that she’s going to claim she and Mahurin had a personal relationship and that’s why they talked so much and he gave her money.”
Daire couldn’t stop himself from picturing Mahurin as he’d last seen him at Uncle Jack’s birthday party. Then he tried picturing the younger and fairly attractive Forrester tapping that. He gave Parker a skeptical look.
She shrugged. “There’s no accounting for taste. My father is fifteen years older than my mother,” she added. “It happens.”
“I am aware. I’m still not buying the relationship angle. Why not lean on Forrester to name names to help herself? I can’t believe she’d be willing to take the fall for everyone else.”
“She might if they offer her financial security when she gets out. There’s nothing concrete to tie her to your parents’ murders, or any for that matter. The most we’d get her on is corruption. She’d still have plenty of life to live, and that’s the other thing. Remember what happened to O’Malley.” She leveled Daire with a hard stare. “People who cross them end up with their throats slit.”
With a heavy sigh, Daire nodded in agreement. “Yeah.” Before he could think of a better response, the front door flew open. Both he and Li jumped up and faced the entryway, ready for a fight, although he knew within another second they had nothing to worry about.
“Why do I have to look at this stupid photo album? It’s not like any of these people are really my ancestors.” A fuming and slouched teenager preceded his harried looking foster parents by a stride length.
Finn, then Michael, followed him into the house, their faces shining red and expressions grim. Daire figured their ruddy complexion had less to do with the cold and more to do with frustration. It might not speak well of him, but he did get sadistic satisfaction out of seeing his baby brother get a little of his own back.
“Because,” Finn said through gritted teeth, “you have to write about some ancestors and you refuse to write about your own blood relatives.”
The teenager flopped down on the couch without even acknowledging Daire or Li’s presence. “I hate them. I’m not going to write about some dead people who are responsible for creating my fucking parents who kicked me out.”
“Language!” Michael admonished before casting an uneasy smile in Daire’s direction. “Hi, there. Sorry to barge in.” His gaze shifted to Li, and he smiled more broadly. “Sorry to interrupt, too.”
Finn stuttered to a halt by the couch, his attention on Daire and Li. His mouth hung open a second while his eyes darted back and forth between the two of them. “Oh, yeah, sorry, bro. I didn’t realize you had a date?” His voice went up a few notes on the last word as if the idea of his older brother being on a date was beyond the realm of possibilities.
“It’s not a date.” He and Li said it at the same time.
That pronouncem
ent, stated quickly and a bit defensively on both their parts, had even Craig looking at them. His guest’s cheeks took on a dusky hue, telegraphing her discomfort with the direction of things. An urge to protect her from embarrassment or discomfort of any kind rose up in him.
Stepping forward to put distance between them, he shot Finn the same look he’d perfected over the years as his guardian, warning him to watch his mouth. His brother’s face morphed into a confused expression, so Daire moved to head off any more awkward questions.
“This is Detective Parker Li from internal affairs.” He angled his body in order to glance at her. “This is—”
“Your brother, Finn Callaghan, and Detective Sergeant Michael Caruso,” she said before he could finish the introduction. She stood ramrod straight, the same stern woman who’d entered his office a few days ago.
Funny, just a minute earlier as she’d sipped her tea and talked to him about Mahurin’s dealings, she’d seemed more relaxed, less stiff and humorless. He supposed working in the rat squad did that to a person, always bracing for rejection if not an out-and-out brawl, albeit a verbal one.
He switched his attention back to his brother and Michael, both of whom regarded Li with obvious suspicion. Craig, mercifully had gone back to brooding and ignoring them all with the kind of silent disdain that teenagers excelled at.
“Is there a problem?” Michael moved closer to Finn, ever the protective mate, and it eased Daire’s ever present worry about his family to see how quickly this man was to guard the baby in the Callaghan family.
“No,” Daire assured him and Finn both. “Li is here to go over what she has on Mahurin, and well…” he added, glancing back at her. “She’s looking into the murders.”
He didn’t have to say which murders. There were only two murders, the importance of which hung constantly over this household. Finn’s whole demeanor shifted in a way that would have been unnoticeable for anyone other than his brother.
Finn put his hand on Michael’s shoulder, gaining the man’s attention. “Honey, would you mind taking Craig up to my room and showing him the photo album? You know what I’m talking about, right?”
Internal Affair Page 3
