Cavanaugh Rules

“Shouldn’t you be going up to your floor to get your things?” she asked him.

Just for a moment, he’d allowed himself to watch her walk, appreciatively taking in the way her hips swayed ever so slightly. Her question pulled him back to reality. He nodded toward the squad room just behind her. “I thought I’d see where my desk is first.”

“And what?” she asked. “If it doesn’t meet with your standards, you’ll stay where you are?”

Abilene grinned, amused. “Is that a hopeful note in your voice I hear?” He studied her for a moment, looking beyond her high cheekbones and her fascinating eyes. “You don’t do change very well, do you?”

The last thing she wanted to put up with was being analyzed. Kendra’s eyes blazed as she tossed her head. “What I do or don’t do is none of your business,” she informed him.

The way he saw it, that wasn’t quite true. “Some of it will be. And I want to see where my desk is so I don’t have to wander around aimlessly when I come down with an armload of my stuff.” He looked at her with eyes that seemed earnest. “Does that meet with your approval?”

Rather than answer him, she merely sighed and beckoned him to follow her through the door. Crossing the floor, she stopped at what seemed to be the center of the room.

“This is yours,” she told him, gesturing toward the cleared expanse of desk that butted up against hers.

A greater contrast between the two areas would have been difficult to find. One desk was the picture of virgin territory without so much as a scrap of paper on it, while the other desk bore silent testimony to a very cluttered style. There was a computer off to one side, its keyboard stretched out before it rather than neatly tucked out of sight. The rest of the desk was buried beneath files and a snowstorm of scattered, interweaving papers. Not so much as a square inch of desktop was visible.

Matt made no verbal comment, but the way his mouth curved seemed to say it all. At least, she read a great deal into it.

Kendra took umbrage at what she perceived as criticism from her new, God-help-her, partner. Periodically, she went through everything on her desk and cleared spaces, trying her best to organize the raft of papers into some sort of a system, but inevitably, the stacks would bleed into one another again, merging and creating a chaotic pile.

“I’ve got a system,” she retorted defensively in response to the amusement in Abilene’s liquid-green eyes.

“I’m sure you do.” To the untrained ear, Abilene’s mild tone sounded completely agreeable. Why, then, did it make her want to scratch his eyes out or at least challenge him to a weapons proficiency contest on the gun range?

Absently, Matt opened the center drawer of his new desk, then checked, one by one, a few of the other drawers. Like the surface of the desk, they were all pristinely clean.

He shut the last drawer. “Your old partner did a thorough job cleaning things out. He didn’t leave anything behind.”

“Not even any hope,” Kendra murmured under her breath. The amused sound coming from her new partner told her that her voice hadn’t been quite as low as she’d thought.

Great, Pretty Boy has hearing like a bat.

Stepping back, Abilene pushed his chair into his desk. “I’ll go get my stuff now.”

“I can hardly wait,” Kendra deadpanned, pasting a pained smile on her lips.

Matt paused for a moment, his eyes slowly sliding down the length of this sharp-tongued woman. Thanks to his chaotic upbringing, he was basically nomadic in his lifestyle and his relationships. It gave him the ability to take whatever came down the road because, good or bad, he knew it was only temporary and would eventually change.

“You know,” he told her, “I’m really not such a bad guy to work with. Not as good as some, but better than most. You might want to put the pitchfork down, Good, and reserve judgment for a while.”

The fact that Abilene wasn’t heaping endless laurels on himself surprised her. Someone like him, who exuded sensuality with his every movement, ordinarily had the inside track on vanity, possessing an ego that made passage through narrow doorways an ongoing challenge.

She supposed she could be wrong about Abilene, but she didn’t care to debate it with herself right now, one way or the other. She wasn’t feeling all that magnanimous or friendly.

“The jury’s still out on that one,” Kendra informed him.

Matt supposed that was the best he would get for now. And maybe that was good because he could see himself being attracted to her, but that might complicate matters. And all he was interested in for now was a truce while he got his bearings. Later might prove to be another story, he mused, but right now, he just wanted to settle in.

He flashed an easy smile. “Sounds fair enough,” he replied.

Turning on his heel, he was about to leave. All his things could be packed up and transported in one trip. Unlike his new partner, once he closed a case, he didn’t hang on to the papers that went with it. Instead, he placed everything onto a flash drive and preserved the information that way. It took up a great deal less space. And it made for a neater desk. He worked better that way.

Matt got exactly three steps toward the squad room door when he heard his name being called.

“Hey, Abilene!”

When he turned around again, Matt found himself looking down at an older man with thick silver hair and a far thicker waistline. Rather than hiding the latter behind the all-forgiving folds of a jacket, the older man had left his jacket in his office and was wearing just his shirt. The sleeves of his slightly rumpled shirt were rolled up and his tie appeared to have been hastily loosened, as if leaving it in its initial position would have eventually wound up choking him.

“Abilene?” the older man repeated, this time turning the last name into a question.

From the looks of the man, this had to be his new boss, Matt thought. He doubled back in long, loping strides.

“Yes, sir,” he responded easily, extending his hand to the other man, who stood only slightly shorter than he did. However, his slumped shoulders gave the impression that he was shorter than he was.

After a beat, the older man took Abilene’s offered hand. The handshake was surprisingly hearty. “I’m Lt. Holmes,” Isaac Holmes told his newest detective. “You’re just in time.”

Abilene cocked his head, the very gesture a query. “For?”

“You and Cavelli—you’re still Cavelli, right?” Holmes asked Kendra, sparing her a quick glance, then turning away before she had a chance to answer. “Just caught a case,” he concluded.

Matt jerked his thumb in the general direction of the hall—and the elevator. “I was just about to bring down my stuff,” Matt told him.

“Your stuff can wait. It’s not going anywhere. But you are.” Tearing off the top page from his pad where he’d written down the incoming information, the lieutenant pressed the paper into Kendra’s hand. “Super found a dead body. Not the one he expected to.” Glancing over toward Abilene, he added, “Welcome to Homicide.”

Kendra glanced at the paper Holmes had handed her, then tucked it into her pocket. “The Super expected to find a body?” she questioned.

“Not expected-expected,” Holmes clarified. “Guy who lives there hasn’t been seen for three days, so his boss sent someone to his apartment. When he didn’t get an answer, the kid got the super.”

“And they found a dead body in the apartment who wasn’t the guy who lived there,” Kendra guessed.

Holmes nodded. “I want you to find out whose body’s in the apartment and see if you can get a handle on where the guy who pays the rent is. Apparently, he’s still missing.”

“You got it, boss,” Abilene promised as he fell into step beside Kendra.

“Jump right in, don’t you?” Kendra commented as she increased her pace. But even so, Abilene more than kept up. Man had legs that belonged on an ostrich, she thought darkly.

“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” he asked innocently as they went into the hall. If this wasn’t going to be an all-out territorial war, he needed to do what he could to put her mind at ease. He was definitely not out to become king of the hill—at least, not this hill. “Look, I’m not trying to snag your territory, if that’s what you’re worried about. From what I hear, there’s more than enough work to go around for everyone. This isn’t a competition.”

He was analyzing her again. Kendra gave him a cold look as she yanked open the door to the stairwell. She hated being analyzed. “Nobody said it was.”

Abilene stopped short. Was she taking the stairs? “Hey, aren’t we supposed to be taking the elevator down?” he asked.

“Go ahead,” Kendra tossed over her shoulder. “Nobody’s stopping you.”

Like a door to a tomb, the stairwell door all but thundered as it closed behind her.

Peace at last.

Kendra’s heels met the metal steps, emitting a quick, rhythmic staccato sound as she hurried down to the first floor. She was only halfway down the first flight with three more to go when she heard the stairwell door above her opening again. She didn’t have to look to know that Abilene was now behind her—and catching up fast.

Couldn’t she get at least a couple of minutes away from this man? She wanted to be able to clear her head and having him around was not at all conducive to that.

He had no idea how the woman’s mind worked. Was she intent on trying to ditch him, or make him fail in front of the boss? Was she just playing some sort of a game where only she knew the rules? He wasn’t about to take a chance on being left behind on the first assignment that he—that they—had just caught.

He was a firm believer that you never got to redo a first impression—and he knew that they were the ones that tended to last.

Shadowing his new partner’s every step, Matt was half a beat behind her as they came to the bottom of the last staircase. She’d just reached the door when he stretched his hand over her head and pushed it open as she turned the doorknob.

Kendra bit back an annoyed retort. She felt as if she was almost encompassed by the man’s long arms. He seemed to take up all the space around her, she thought grudgingly. And all the air. There was no other reason why, just for a second, she’d felt so hot and so light-headed.

“I can push open my own door, Abilene,” she informed him crisply. Out of the stairwell, she took the opportunity to pull fresh air into her lungs. The feeling of heat began to recede.

“Nobody said you couldn’t, Good,” Abilene replied mildly. “Just doing what I can to help. It’s a heavy door.”

It was a heavy door, but she wasn’t about to say anything to that effect. She didn’t need some hotshot thinking he was her knight in dented armor.

Muttering a couple of choice words under her breath, Kendra all but marched into the parking lot. She went straight for her old Crown Victoria. Number 23, the one she used to share with Joe, before the man had been seduced by the idea of retirement.

“I’ve got the address, I’m driving,” she crisply informed Abilene.

Wide shoulders rose slightly, then lowered again in what seemed like the most careless of fashions, as if the matter of who drove was the last thing on her partner’s mind.

“Fine with me,” he told her. “I like riding shotgun anyway.” Opening the passenger door, he folded his long, lanky frame into the seat, then pulled out the seat belt and secured it. “Never cared much for driving in traffic.”

Kendra frowned as she started up the vehicle. So far, Abilene seemed to be going out of his way to come across as agreeable. But she wasn’t about to be lulled into a false sense of security. Joe had tripped her up several times before they’d found their work rhythm. Since he was her first partner after she’d been awarded her gold shield, she had nothing to compare the older man to and assumed that all male partners were going to challenge her straight out of the box until she proved herself capable.

After being on the job for over two years in the Homicide Division, she found it more than a little annoying to be sent back to square one. But that was the price she had to pay for being a woman—and for being related to the brass. Because her father was head of the CSI lab, she was acquainted with accusations of nepotism. But now that she was connected to the Cavanaughs, she had a feeling that she would never know a peaceful moment again.

She spared Abilene a glance as they took off. Nope, she thought. Never again.

The five-story apartment building where Lt. Holmes had sent them was located in the more well-off—although by no means rich—section of Aurora. Leaving the unmarked Crown Victoria parked in a space intended for deliveries, Kendra made sure that the police light was visible before she and Abilene went up the four flights in the elevator to the scene of the crime.

“What, no stairs?” Abilene asked, amused when she opted for the elevator.

“I thought I’d let you save your energy in case there’s a need for some heavy lifting,” Kendra told him without missing a beat.

“Thoughtful,” he quipped as they got off.

The forced smile came and went in a blink of an eye. “I try.”

“Yeah, me, too,” he said, looking at her significantly.

Something in her gut undulated for half a heartbeat. She banked it down and walked faster.

The apartment in question wasn’t hard to find. The immediate area directly before the crime scene was crowded with curious people. Apparently people from the building’s other apartments, as well as an influx of others drawn by word of mouth, were gathered about the hallway in clusters like bees circling a hive.

The yellow tape strung across a doorway must have attracted them, Kendra couldn’t help thinking.

The superintendent, when they finally located him, appeared rather young, inexperienced, and seemed completely distraught. Every few minutes he kept nervously repeating that this was his “first dead body” and that viewing it wasn’t nearly as “cool” as he’d thought it would be. He seemed genuinely disappointed about that.

Kendra called the slight man a few choice names in her head, but for now kept them to herself. She glanced in Abilene’s direction and guessed by his expression that perhaps a few of the same names for the super had occurred to him as well.

Maybe they weren’t that different after all, she mused.

Getting down to business, Kendra went directly toward the body. Lying facedown in the middle of the living room, the victim was completely covered with a king-size blanket that appeared to have been taken from the lone bedroom. No limbs were peeking out at either end, but a pool of angry dark red blood haloed the blanket, bearing silent testimony to the fact that someone had indeed died in this apartment. No one ever lost that much blood and survived.

Squatting down beside the victim, Kendra raised a corner of the blanket and got her first view of the dead woman. Her reaction was always the same. Her heart would feel as if it was constricting in her chest as sympathy flooded through her.

The victim, a woman most likely in her twenties, was lying facedown on what had been a beige rug. The back of her head had been struck hard and was apparently the source of all the blood on the floor. Kendra’s first guess was that the blow to the head appeared to be the cause of death.

Dropping the blanket back over the dead woman, Kendra rose carefully to her feet, ignoring Abilene’s extended hand, offering her aid.

“Our killer knew the victim,” she commented, more to herself than to Abilene. She wasn’t quite ready to talk to him just yet, at least not in the role of her partner. She regarded him more as a casual observer. Baby steps, she counseled herself. “And apparently he felt remorseful enough to cover her up so he wouldn’t have to look at her after he’d ended her life.”

“Or she,” Abilene interjected.

Caught off guard, Kendra stopped and looked at him quizzically. “What?”

“Or she,” Abilene repeated. “The killer could have been a woman. Doesn’t take much to pick up that statue and swing it hard enough to do some major damage at the point of contact.”

Abilene nodded toward what appeared to be a rather cheap bust of Shakespeare lying on the floor not that far from the prone body.

Kendra stared down at the faux bronze bust. Shakespeare, no less.

You just never knew, did you?

Her first thought would have been that someone who’d gone out and bought something like that would have been mild-mannered and cultured. So much for being a profiler.

“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed.

Moving over to the bust, she squatted down for a better look at it. It was the murder weapon, all right. There was a thin red line of blood at one corner. The killer had obviously come up behind the victim and hit her when she hadn’t been looking.

A lovers’ quarrel? Or calculated, premeditated murder?

Too bad the bust couldn’t talk.

More than four hundred years after the fact and the bard was apparently still killing people off, Kendra thought cynically. Except now they didn’t get up for a final bow once the curtain fell.

With a suppressed sigh, Kendra rose to her feet again.

And then, just as she turned back to look at the prone figure lying on the floor beneath the ginger-colored blanket, one of the crime scene investigators who had arrived earlier came over to bag the ancient-looking bust.

“That comment about the killer knowing the victim,” Abilene began.

For one tension-free second, she’d actually forgotten about him. Too bad that second couldn’t have lasted a bit longer.

Abilene’s remark, hanging in midair like that, had her looking at him sharply, anticipating some sort of a confrontation regarding her thought process.

Was he going to challenge something else she’d said? Already?

Kendra eyed the man she knew her sisters would have thought was a living, breathing hunk, trying to see past his chiseled exterior. She waited for the verbal duel to begin.

“Watch a lot of procedural television, do you?” he asked.

“I don’t have to.” Although she did, she silently admitted. The shows intrigued her. But he didn’t have to know that. She debated saying anything further, then decided to go ahead. “My father’s the head of the Crime Scene Lab.”

“Boy, you sure have every angle covered, don’t you, Good?” he laughed.

Kendra bristled. “I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

Now that was definitely amusement in his eyes. “Would you rather I called you Bad?” It was clearly a teasing remark and perhaps under other circumstances—before life had trampled all over her heart—she might have picked up the banter, even enjoyed it. But she was what she was and there was no going back.

Still, it didn’t stop her from noticing that the man had the kind of smile a woman could get lost in—even a sensible woman.

But not her, of course.

Still, she wished the chief hadn’t picked him to be her partner. Going it alone—even with an increased workload—would have been better for her in the long run.

“What I’d rather was that my old partner was still around.”

He surprised her by leaning in and whispering, “Lemonade, Good. When life throws lemons at you, you make lemonade.”

Her eyes held his for a long moment. Until she found herself sinking into them. She backpedaled quickly. “I don’t like lemonade.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” he murmured before turning back to the murder scene.

Chapter 3

“Hey, Abilene, what do you—”

Kendra stopped abruptly. She’d assumed that the detective was behind her, but when she turned around, she only saw the crime scene investigators in the room.

“Great,” she muttered. “Now he’s wandering off.” Biting off a few ripe words, she went to look for him.

She found her new partner in the bedroom. Abilene stood before the narrow mirrored closet. The sliding door was in the open position and he was staring into it.

Glancing over his shoulder, Kendra saw nothing that would have captured his attention so intently. Was she missing something, or was he one of those people who stared off into space as he pieced things together in his mind?

“So, what do you think?” she finally asked him.

If she’d surprised him by coming up behind him, Abilene gave no indication. Turning from the closet, he looked at her as he lobbed her question back to her.

“You’re the expert.”

Did that mean he was unwilling to state an opinion, or that he was giving her her due? So far she really had no idea how to read this man and that bothered her. More than that, it annoyed her.

Hell, everything about this man annoyed her, not the least of which was that he seemed to be getting under her skin and this was only day one of their temporary partnership. What was she going to be like a month into this ordeal? She didn’t want to think about it.

Kendra was aware that learning to pick up signals from this man would take time, but she’d gotten more impatient in this difficult past year and it made her less willing to wait. Jason’s accident and subsequent suicide had made her want to seize things immediately, solve crimes yesterday. It was hard regaining her stride when all she wanted to do was run, not walk and certainly not stroll.

Abilene was still looking at her. Waiting for her opinion—or at least pretending to. Either way, she gave it to him.

She glanced back toward the living room, then said, “Looks to me as if Ryan Burnett and his girlfriend got into a fight—cause unknown at the moment—and in a fit of temper, he hit her with that bust. When he realized what he’d done—and that she was dead—he apparently got scared and took off.”

“Stopping to pack?” Abilene asked.

He indicated the cluster of bare hangers in the closet. Off to one side of the tasteful, small bedroom was a black lacquered bureau. Several of its drawers were hanging open. From the disarray left behind, it was obvious that some items had been hastily grabbed from there, too.

She shrugged, amending her theory to fit the scene. “Maybe Ryan decided to take off permanently. Man’s going to need more than a toothbrush if he’s starting a new life somewhere else.”

“That shows clear thinking,” Abilene protested. “It doesn’t jibe with a supposed crime of impulse,” he pointed out.

Kendra saw no contradiction. “The man’s an accountant. He’s supposed to be a clear thinker. It’s the nature of the beast.” She glanced at the bed. It had no comforter or blanket over its crisp, coordinated navy blue sheets. That confirmed her initial theory that the blanket in the other room, now spread over the murder victim, had come from here.

That brought her back to the theory that Ryan hadn’t meant to kill the woman. Things had gotten out of hand for some reason. But what had triggered the argument? And why now, at this particular point? The answers to that might explain everything.

Seeing one of the two officers who had called in the homicide, she crossed to the man and asked, “Do we have an ID on the victim yet?”

The officer nodded and offered her the wallet he’d gotten from the dead woman’s purse.

“Her name’s Summer Miller,” he told her. He handed over the wallet, exposing the driver’s license for her benefit.

Kendra looked down at the small picture on the license. She’d seen a larger, framed photograph of Summer in the bedroom on the bureau. She was standing in front of a smiling young man. His arms were wrapped protectively around her. The two appeared very happy, as if they didn’t have a care in the world between them.

They did now, Kendra thought grimly. She assumed that the man in the photograph was the missing accountant, Ryan Burnett.

“Well, at least we have a name for his girlfriend,” she said quietly, closing the wallet for now.

Spying a pile of plastic sealable bags used for evidence, she picked one up and slipped the wallet inside. She closed the seal before tucking the wallet into her pocket. She wanted to hand-carry this piece to her father personally. There were questions she wanted to ask.