Cavanaugh in the Rough

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Well, that’s a new one,” he said, rolling the image over in his mind. “Never been compared to a blow-up clown doll before.”

  Suzie had no idea why, but she suddenly felt bad. O’Bannon had, after all, brought her dinner even after she’d been less than friendly toward him, all but telling him to get lost.

  She relented. “That wasn’t exactly meant as an insult,” she murmured.

  And then there was the grin again, the one that belonged to the happy-go-lucky, lighthearted boy he had to have been. The one, for all she knew, he still was.

  “I know,” he told her with a conspiratorial wink.

  That pulled her up short. Either they were on some kind of a wavelength she was totally unaware of, or he had one hell of an ego.

  “You know?”

  “Why don’t we stop dancing around like this, Suzie Q, and eat before it gets cold?” he suggested, pulling a carton closer to him. He opened it up. “Although I have to admit I do like Chinese food cold.” He raised his eyes to hers, creating, just like that, an intimate air. “For breakfast the next day.”

  Suzie pressed her lips together in annoyance, waiting for some sort of innuendo or maybe even a graphic scenario to follow. But there was none. There was just Chris, grappling with his chopsticks as he tried to bring at least a few strands of lo mein to his mouth.

  He failed, but tried again. And again, valiantly trying to conquer the two slender pieces of polished wood and make them do his bidding.

  Unable to stand it any longer, Suzie put down her own chopsticks, then picked up his and carefully positioned them in his hand.

  When the result was less than successful, she tried another approach.

  This time, she placed the chopsticks in his fingers and wrapped her hand around his, carefully guiding it to the contents in the container.

  After three attempts, Chris, with her help, managed to secure a single morsel of shrimp. When, with her hand still around his, he brought the piece to his lips, Suzie experienced a feeling of triumph that somehow, in the next moment, seemed to transform into a completely different emotion.

  She felt a warmth traveling through her limbs and torso, and even felt, heaven help her, a momentary shortness of breath that had nothing to do any condition that might have sent her hurrying to the ER, and everything to do with the man she was attempting to instruct.

  Suzie pulled her hand away as if she had just come in contact with a hot frying pan filled with boiling oil.

  “I think you have the hang of it,” she said crisply, doing what she could to distance herself from the moment—and from the man.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Chris confessed. “But it certainly isn’t for lack of you trying. You know,” he told her with a laugh, “I think I might have discovered a brand-new kind of diet. We could call it the chopstick diet. Dexterity-challenged people like me eat all their meals using chopsticks. The pounds’ll start dropping off from day one,” he enthused. “And people won’t have to invest in some big initial layout of cash. All they have to buy is a pair of chopsticks and then try to eat what they normally eat.” He smiled broadly at her. “I can smell the success from here.”

  Suzie shook her head. He was actually laughing at himself. He really was one of a kind, she thought. She pushed the plastic fork toward him.

  “Eat,” she told him. “You don’t need to lose any weight. You’re fine the way you are.”

  Chris put his hand over his chest, feigning surprise. “Why, Suzie Q, is that a compliment?”

  “That,” she informed him, “was a slip of the tongue. Now eat,” she ordered. “These containers can’t stay here while I do my work, so once I finish eating, they’re going to have to be cleared away.”

  “Fair enough,” he agreed, nodding. “I consider myself warned.”

  As she watched, he picked up the chopsticks again. “Use the fork,” she told him.

  If he continued to eat using the chopsticks, he would be here half the night, and despite what she’d just said, she couldn’t very well toss him out, not after he’d sprung for dinner the way he had—never mind that she hadn’t asked him to.

  But he’d already begun to eat again.

  To her surprise, as she watched, Chris didn’t drop anything. As a matter of fact, he was wielding the chopsticks like someone who didn’t just use them on occasion, but who was very skilled with them.

  When he looked up to see her watching him, her lips slightly parted in surprise, Chris set down his chopsticks for a moment.

  “What can I say?” he asked with an expression she was forced—unwillingly—to describe as modest. “I learned from the very best, and you, Suzie Q, are a very skillful teacher,” he concluded, adding a postscript. “Thanks for taking the time to teach me.”

  He was good, she thought. Ordinarily, she would have said he was a con artist. But in this case, she didn’t know if O’Bannon was being genuine, or if she’d just been played.

  He did look sincere.

  Because she couldn’t decide one way or the other, for now she decided to concentrate strictly on the meal, which she had to admit, with its variety, was excellent. If nothing else, Christian Cavanaugh O’Bannon did have one redeeming quality.

  The detective knew where to find a good Chinese restaurant.

  Chapter 5

  Since he felt his best approach to a conversation was to talk to her about work, he casually asked, “Did you recognize anyone on those videos?”

  Suzie shook her head. “No.” She got the impression from the way he watched her that he had recognized someone in them. “I don’t get out much,” she said, reaching for an egg roll.

  He’d had the same thought about the egg roll at the same time, and his fingers brushed against hers. He pulled his hand back, allowing her first choice.

  “You were out last night,” he reminded her, taking the second egg roll out of the container.

  She’d gone to the party trying to reconnect with the person she once was. “That was a mistake,” she replied decisively.

  “Why?” Chris asked, studying her. “Because you met me?”

  That would have made him think he mattered to her, and he didn’t. Once upon a time, she would have easily been won over by his charm. But that was back when she didn’t hold everything and everyone suspect. Her trust, when she actually did give it, was hard-won. So far, only Sean Cavanaugh merited it.

  She gave Chris a simplistic answer. “No, because parties aren’t my element anymore.”

  He immediately read between the lines. “But they were once.”

  She had no idea why it even mattered what O’Bannon thought, but she did have to work with him, at least for the time being. So she set him as straight as she could, given her circumstances. “Well, I didn’t exactly grow up in a cave.”

  Chris easily slid to the logical question. “Where did you grow up?” he asked.

  “Not here,” she informed him, hoping that was the end of it.

  “I kind of already picked up on that,” he admitted.

  Warning flags instantly went up. These days, because of her past, suspicion was never far away.

  “Oh?”

  Chris could sense her tension and continued talking casually. It was the only way he knew how to disarm her wariness. In some ways, she reminded him of a wild animal that had been mistreated at some point. They had to be won over with great care and patience, but once done, they turned out to be the most loyal.

  He couldn’t help wondering just what had happened to the woman to make her this leery.

  “I asked Sean how long you’d been working here, and when he said nine months, I asked where you’d transferred from. I thought he was going to tell me the name of some other department, but he said Arizona.” He smiled at her. “See, all perfectly innocent.”

  “Except for the part where you were asking questions about me,” she pointed out.

  If she meant it as an accusation, it went right by him, unnoticed. “I’m a red-blooded, single mal
e in the prime of my life, and you’re a knockout. Why wouldn’t I ask questions about you?”

  A knockout?

  For just the slightest instance, he caught her off guard. But then she reminded herself that the man on the other end of the chopsticks was a smooth operator. She had to remember that.

  “Well, for one thing, you should be asking questions about the dead woman.”

  “I can do both.” He took another helping of the shrimp in lobster sauce. “I learned to multitask at a very early age. My mother insisted on it.”

  He really didn’t strike her as the kind of man who listened to his mother. Or made references to her. “Your mother?”

  He nodded. There was no mistaking the pride that entered his voice when he talked about the woman. “She was widowed young, had seven kids to raise while holding down a job at the firehouse.”

  “She was a firefighter?” Suzie questioned incredulously.

  “No. Actually, she drove an ambulance,” he corrected. “We all learned to do our part and take care of one another while she was on call. On rare occasions, whenever she was too tired to move, we got to take care of her, too.”

  Suzie stared at him. Was he pulling her leg? He sounded sincere, but she was beginning to suspect that was just part of his con. They didn’t make families like the one he claimed to have grown up in outside of old TV series.

  “Aren’t you laying it on rather thick?” she challenged.

  Looking back, he did remember some things in a better light than they’d happened in. But that was just because of the way he felt about his family. He said as much out loud. “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  “Which part?” she asked, still highly skeptical. “The seven kids, the widowed mother, the ambulance job?”

  “All of it,” he told her simply. He could see the suspicion in her eyes again. “Hey, you want verification, you can ask your boss. Uncle Sean’ll back me up.”

  Would he say that if it wasn’t true? He should know that she would ask his uncle, and Sean Cavanaugh wasn’t the kind of man to lie, even for a member of his family. “You’re serious?”

  “One of my very few moments, but yes. By the way,” Chris said as he began to clear away the empty containers, depositing them in the paper bag he’d brought them in, “I wouldn’t give up on reentering the social scene if I were you.” He thought of the way his breath had backed up in his lungs when he’d first caught a glimpse of her at the party. “It wouldn’t take much to get into the swing of things again.”

  Suzie frowned. Going out last night had been a momentary lapse in judgment on her part. She’d allowed a friend—more of an acquaintance, actually—to talk her into going with her to a club in the next city. The place was just off the coast and had sounded interesting. In a moment of weakness—and longing for the life she’d lost, a life filled with friends and good times—she’d agreed to accompany the other woman to the club. There’d been a party in progress, it turned out.

  But her friend Sheila had paired off with someone less than an hour into the evening, leaving Suzie on her own. She’d been about to call a cab to take her home when her path had crossed O’Bannon’s. At the time she knew him only by his sexy wink, which he’d aimed right at her the second he saw her. She had no idea that they both worked for the Aurora police department.

  As soon as he started talking, she knew she was in over her head, and the first second he had turned away, she made her escape.

  She hadn’t exactly felt good about vanishing without a word, but it was better to be rude than to wake up with a bucketful of regrets. And the police detective with the killer smile and the sexy wink was just too sinfully good-looking to resist. She didn’t need that sort of complication at this point in her life, not while she was still trying to come to terms with everything.

  So, the first opportunity that came up, she’d split. “It would be harder than you might think,” she told him dismissively.

  But he wasn’t about to be put off. “You’re being way too tough on yourself, Suzie Q.”

  She might as well nip this in the bud now. She had no idea who’d told him that was her nickname, but she intended to set him straight.

  “That’s another thing. Please don’t call me that. Only my friends can call me Suzie Q.”

  That didn’t put him off. “I intend to be your friend, Suzie.”

  She didn’t think she’d ever encountered anyone as brazen as this man. “What you intend and what actually happens can be two very different things,” she informed him coldly.

  He only smiled and said, “We’ll see.” Having cleared her work area of the various cartons and eating utensils he’d brought, Chris rose. “Okay, I guess can leave you to that midnight oil you wanted to burn, knowing that you won’t keel over from hunger now. By the way, you might want to take a close look at the first video,” he said almost too casually. “If you look really hard, you might find that you’re in for a surprise.”

  Suzie spent less than half a second arguing with herself over the issue. She didn’t want to ask O’Bannon for details, because she thought it was all just a ploy on his part to stay longer. But in the end—a very quick end—her curiosity got the better of her. She’d watched the videos and had all but gone cross-eyed. It was obvious that she had to have missed something.

  “Who is it?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she pressed, “Who did you see?”

  “Why, Suzie Q, do you want me to do your work for you? Hey, that rhymes,” he realized with a laugh, followed by the killer smile he seemed to be completely unaware of flashing at her.

  Suzie clenched her hands before her. “Here he lies dead, after taking a blow to the head. That rhymes, too,” she snapped. “Now, if you don’t want that on your tombstone...”

  Chris laughed. “All right, you twisted my arm. I was going to tell you anyway,” he added in a whisper. “It’s pretty quick, so you have to watch for it, but one of the partygoers looks like Warren Eldridge. Another one is a dead ringer for Simon Silas.”

  She looked at the detective uncertainly. The names were familiar, although she had no idea what either man looked like.

  “The philanthropists?” she asked in disbelief.

  An expression of triumphant satisfaction came over Chris’s face. “So you do get out more than you said.”

  That had nothing to do with it. “I read the newspaper,” she corrected.

  Most people he knew got their news online and couldn’t be bothered with the printed page. “Newspapers, huh? My mother’d love you,” he told her, throwing the takeout bag into the closest wastepaper basket.

  He’d lost her again—and she was getting the impression that he enjoyed doing that.

  “Why?”

  “Because she thinks it’s a shame that newspapers are a disappearing art form,” he answered. “She says that she can remember her father reading the Sunday comics to her and her brothers when she was a kid.”

  Chris was distracting her again, Suzie thought. Tossing her a piece of useful information and then quickly burying it beneath a pile of rhetoric that had absolutely nothing to do with the case—and the case was all she cared about.

  The case was always all she cared about, Suzie reminded herself. Because if she had been more vigilant, more alert, more into her surroundings and less into the trappings of her life, she would have realized a great deal sooner that the father she adored and worshipped—the man who made such a point of donating his time, money and effort to their local church group, to the homeless shelter; the man everyone thought so highly of—was a monster.

  If she hadn’t been so blinded, she would have been able to pull back the curtain and save some of those poor girls he’d killed.

  But she hadn’t. And she didn’t care what anyone said, that was on her.

  “Hey, you okay?” Chris asked, touching her arm in an effort to get through to her.

  Startled, Suzie blinked. “What? Yes, why?” She bit off the words in staccato fash
ion, embarrassed that she’d allowed herself to drift off like that, regressing to an earlier time, before everything fell apart.

  He drew his hand away and dropped it to his side. “For a minute there you kind of turned pale on me. I thought that maybe there was something in the food you were allergic to.”

  “No, the only allergy I have is to people who ask a lot of invasive questions.” She looked at him pointedly.

  “Yeah, I know. Don’t you hate that?” he asked sympathetically, as if he didn’t realize she meant him. “Get some rest, Suzie Q,” he advised as he began to leave. “Our victim is going to be just as dead tomorrow as she is today. Calling it a night isn’t going to make any difference to her.”

  “But it might make a difference to the next victim,” Suzie said, thinking of all the women who had been lured to their deaths because they had the same failing she had: they couldn’t see beneath the surface.

  That stopped him in his tracks. Chris turned around and looked at her, debating if she was just talking or if there was something in those videos he’d missed.

  Or if, possibly, she knew something he didn’t.

  “What next victim?” he asked, the playfulness in his voice totally gone.

  Suzie shrugged, silently upbraiding herself for her slip. Usually, she was a great deal more closemouthed. What was it about this detective that made her forget to keep her guard up?

  “Just a hunch,” she said, hoping that would be enough for him.

  She should have known better.

  “Based on what?” he asked.

  Based on my father. “A hunch is just a hunch, a gut feeling,” she stressed impatiently, knowing she wasn’t getting anywhere. She waved a dismissive hand at him. “Forget I said anything.”

  But Chris showed no such inclination. Instead, he was suddenly very alert and gave every indication of being on the job.

  “Did I miss something?” he asked.

  “Probably a lot of things,” Suzie answered flippantly. But because he kept on looking at her, waiting and not saying anything, she finally told him what had just now occurred to her. “Unless someone had it in for this girl—and if they did, why not dispose of her body so no one could find it? Why deliberately leave her to be found with the leftover trash from the party?” she asked.