Internal Affair

Maggi raised her eyes from what she was doing. The male voice was stern, definitely territorial. From what she’d been told, she’d expected nothing less. From her vantage point, six-three looked even taller than it ordinarily might have.

Patrick Cavanaugh.

Show time.

He was more formidable looking than his photograph, she thought. Also better looking. But that was neither here nor there. She was interested in beauty of the soul, not face or body. If she was, Maggi noted absently, someone might have said she’d hit the jackpot.

They’d said that Lucifer had been the most beautiful of the archangels.

“You are,” Maggi replied mildly.

Because she didn’t like the psychological advantage her position gave him, she rose to her feet, patently ignoring the extended hand he offered her. Ground rules had to be established immediately. She was her own person.

“Then what are you doing here?” Patrick demanded.

With the ease of someone slipping on a glove, she slid into the role she’d been assigned. Once upon a time, before the lure of the badge had gotten her, she’d entertained the idea of becoming an actress. Working undercover allowed her to combine both her loves.

“I guess they didn’t tell you.”

He had a crime scene to take charge of, he didn’t have time for guessing games initiated by fluffy blondes compromising his crime scene. “Tell me what?”

“That I’m your new partner.”

Chapter 2

“The hell you are.”

Patrick glared at this woman who looked as if she would be more at home on some runway in Paris, modeling the latest in impractical lingerie than standing beside a waterlogged corpse, pretending to look for clues.

“Yes,” Maggi replied with a smile. “The hell I am.”

No one had notified him. He hated having things sprung on him without warning. In his experience, most surprises turned out bad.

“Since when?”

“Since this morning. Last night, actually,” she corrected, “but it was too late to get started then.”

He couldn’t believe that someone actually believed that he and this woman could work together. He found working with another man difficult enough; working with a woman with all her accompanying quirks and baggage was out of the question.

“By whose authority?” he demanded.

“Captain Reynolds.” She gave him the name of his direct superior, although the pairing had not originated with Reynolds. The order had come from John Halliday, the man in charge of Internal Affairs. A fair, honest man, if not the easiest to work with, Halliday had found a subtle way of getting her in so that not even Reynolds knew the true purpose behind her becoming Cavanaugh’s new partner. “He said you wouldn’t be thrilled.”

Patrick’s frown deepened. He knew why Reynolds hadn’t said anything. It was because the captain didn’t care for confrontations from within. Well, he couldn’t just slide this blonde under his door and expect things to go well from there.

“Captain Reynolds has a gift for understatement.” His voice was brittle. “I haven’t seen you around.”

His icy blue eyes seemed to go right through her. She could see why others might find him intimidating. “I’ve been there. Around,” she clarified when he continued to stare at her. She shrugged casually. “I can’t help it if you haven’t noticed me.”

Oh, he would have noticed her, Patrick thought. A woman who looked the way she did was hard to miss. She was the kind that made heads turn and married men stop to rethink their choice in a life partner. He wasn’t given to socializing, but he would have noticed her.

Something didn’t feel right, though. “How long have you been a detective?” Patrick asked.

“Three months.”

Three months. A novice. What the hell was the captain thinking? Even a man as photo-op oriented as Reynolds had to know this was a bad idea. This woman needed training, aging, and that just wasn’t his line.

Patrick waved her away. “Tell Captain Reynolds I don’t do baby-sitting.”

“I don’t think that’ll matter to him,” she told him crisply. “He doesn’t have any school-aged children.” She indicated the vehicle next to her. “Now, why don’t we just make the best of this and get back to work?”

Patrick looked at her sharply, about to make his rejection plainer since she seemed to have trouble assimilating it, when her words echoed in his brain. “We?”

“We,” she repeated. There was more than ten inches difference between them in height. Maggi drew herself up as far as she could, refusing to appear cowed. “You’ve got to know that working with you isn’t exactly my idea of being on a picnic.”

His eyes were flat as he regarded her. “Then why do it?”

Halliday had told her to blend in, to stay quiet and gather as much information as possible about Cavanaugh and his dealings. The less attention drawn to herself, the better. But from what she’d managed to piece together about him, a man like Cavanaugh didn’t respect sheep. He sheared them and went on. What he respected was someone who’d stand up to him, who’d go toe-to-toe without flinching. That kind of a person stood a chance of finding out something useful. Someone who blended in didn’t.

Maggi had her battle plan laid out. “Because I go where they send me and I always follow orders.”

His eyes pinned her to the spot. “Always?”

She met his stare head-on, his blue eyes against her own green. “Always.”

Well, knowing Reynolds, that didn’t exactly surprise him. He wondered if she was someone’s daughter, someone’s niece. Someone Reynolds owed a favor to. You never knew when you had to call a favor in, especially when you had your eye on the political arena, the way Reynolds did.

“Terrific.” He looked at her without attempting to hide his disgust. “A by-the-book, wet-behind-the-ears rookie.”

She was far from a rookie, but this wasn’t the time to get into that. For now, she left him with his assumptions. “Guess that’s just your cross to bear,” she quipped, turning her attention back to the victim.

He was accustomed to people withdrawing from him, to avoiding him whenever possible. This was something a little different. He wondered if stupidity guided her, or if she had some kind of different agenda. “You’ve got a smart mouth.”

“Goes with my smart brain.” Deciding that the corpse wasn’t going anywhere, Maggi looked at the man whose soul she was going to have to crawl into. “I graduated top of my class from the academy.”

If that was meant to impress him, she’d fallen short of her mark, he thought. He couldn’t stomach newly minted detectives, spouting rhetoric and theories they’d picked up out of the safe pages of some textbook. “There’s a whole world of difference between a classroom and what you find outside of it.”

“I know.” It was going to be slow going, finding his good side. From what she’d gleaned, he might not even have one. But she felt he’d be less antagonistic if he felt she had some sort of experience. “I was in Vice in San Francisco.”

His eyes slid over her, taking full measure, seeing beneath the jacket and matching trousers. It took more than fabric to disguise her shape. She’d probably made one hell of a decoy. “Stopping it or starting it?”

Her grin was quick, lethal. “Now who’s got the smart mouth?”

He looked away. “Difference being, I don’t shoot mine off.”

The wind kept insisting on playing with her hair. She pushed it away from her face, only to have it revisit less than a beat later. “I’ll remember that. See? Learning already.”

Annoyed, Patrick knew there was nothing he could do about the situation right now. If he ordered her away, he had a feeling she wouldn’t retreat. He didn’t want to go into a power struggle in front of the patrolmen. No one had to tell him that behind the sexy, engaging smile was a woman who’d gotten her way most of her life. You only had to look at her to know that.

He could wait. All that mattered was the end result. He didn’t want a partner. He wanted to work alone. It required less effort, less coordination. And less would go wrong that way.

Patrick sighed. “Well, I need to learn something about you.”

His eyes were intense, a light shade of blue that seemed almost liquid. She wondered if they could be warm on occasion, or if they always looked as if they were dissecting you. “Fire away.”

“Your name. What is it?”

She realized that she’d skipped that small detail. She put her hand out now. “Margaret McKenna. My friends call me Maggi.”

He made no effort to take her hand and she dropped it at her side. “What do people who aren’t your friends call you?”

“The repeatable ones are McKenna, or 3M.”

Despite himself, he was drawn in. “3M? Like the tape?”

Her gaze was unwavering. “No, because my full name is Mary Margaret McKenna.”

He could see that the revelation pained her. She didn’t like her name. That was fair enough—it didn’t suit her. She didn’t look like a Mary Margaret. Mary Margarets were subdued, given to shy smiles. Unless he missed his guess, the last time this woman had been subdued had probably been shortly before birth.

He laughed, his expression remaining unaffected. “Sounds like you should be starring in an off-Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow.”

Surprise nudged at her. She wouldn’t have thought he’d know something like that. “You like musicals?”

“My sister does.” Patrick stopped abruptly, realizing he’d broken his own rule about getting personal with strangers. And he meant for this woman to be a stranger. He didn’t intend for her to remain in his company any longer than it took to get back to the station and confront Reynolds about his misguided, worse-than-usual choice of partners for him. “I work alone.”

“So I was told.” She’d also been told other things. Like the fact that he was a highly decorated cop who’d never been a team player. Now they were beginning to think that was because he was guarding secrets, secrets that had to do with lining his pockets. Rumors had been raised. Where there was smoke, there was usually fire and it was her job to put it out. “I won’t get in your way.”

“For that to be true, you’d have to leave.”

From any other man, that might have been the beginning of a come-on, or at the very least, a slight flirtation. From Cavanaugh, she knew it meant that he regarded her as a pest. “All right, I won’t get in your way much,” she underscored.

He sincerely doubted that. But for the moment, he was stuck with this fledgling detective, and he didn’t have any more time to waste on her.

Patrick took out a pair of rubber gloves from his jacket pocket and pulled them on. He nodded toward the vehicle that had been fished out. “What have you learned so far?”

“The victim seems to be in her early twenties, on her way to or from a party.”

“How do you know?” The question came at her like a gunshot.

“Look at what she’s wearing. A slinky, short black dress.”

His glance was quick, concise, all-inclusive before reverting to Maggi. “Professional?”

Maggi paused. The panic on the victim’s face made it difficult to see anything else. “A hooker? Maybe, but not cheap. A call girl maybe. The dress is subtle, subdued yet stylish.”

He looked further into the vehicle. “Any ID?”

Maggi shook her head. “No purse. Might have been washed away, although I doubt it.”

He looked at her sharply. Even a broken clock was right twice a day. “Why?”

She’d already been over the interior of the car and found nothing. “Because there’s no registration inside the glove compartment. The glove compartment was completely empty. Not even a manual. Nobody keeps a glove compartment that clean.”

If it was an attempt to hide identity, he thought, it was a futile one. “Ownership’s easy enough to find out.”

Maggi nodded. She gave him her thoughts on the subject. “It’s a stalling tactic. Maybe whoever did this to her needed the extra time to try to fabricate an alibi.”

His eyes made her feel like squirming when they penetrated that way. The man had to be hell on wheels in the interrogation room. “So you think this is a homicide, not an accident.”

“That’s the way the department’s treating it or we wouldn’t be here.” She gave him an expression of sheer innocence.

He crossed his arms before him, looking down at her again. “Okay, Mary Margaret, what do you think the approximate time of death was?”

“Eleven twenty-three. Approximately,” she said. He was trying to get her to lose her cool. Even if this wasn’t about something bigger, she wasn’t about to let him have the satisfaction.

“Woman’s intuition?”

“Woman’s vision,” she corrected. “Twenty-twenty.” Before he could ask her what she was talking about, Maggi reached over the body and held up the victim’s right hand. The young woman was wearing an old-fashioned analog watch. The crystal wasn’t broken, but it was obviously not water-resistant. It had stopped at precisely 11:23.

The CSI team arrived, equipped with their steel cases and apparatus intended to take the mystery out of death. Patrick stepped out of their way as they took possession of the vehicle and the victim within.

Maggi looked at him. “Want me to brief them?”

Something that could have passed for amusement flickered over him. “Asking for permission?”

She served his words back to him. “Trying not to get in your way.”

Too late for that, he thought. Now they had to concentrate on getting her out of his way. Patrick gestured toward the head crime scene investigator. “Go ahead. That’s Jack Urban.”

Stepping around to the back of the vehicle, Patrick took out his notepad and carefully wrote down the license plate number before crossing to the nearest policeman. He handed the notepad to the man.

“See if these plates were run yet,” he instructed. “Find out who the car belongs to. See if it was reported missing or stolen in the past twenty-four hours.”

The policeman took the notepad without comment, retreating to his squad car.

The soft, light laugh that floated to him had Patrick looking back toward the crime scene. His so-called partner was talking to the head of the CSI team. Whatever she said had the man smiling like some living brain donor. Patrick shook his head. Obviously not everyone found his new partner as irritating as he did.

“I need to make a stop at the bank.”

Patrick spared the woman sitting beside him in the front seat a look. It was cold outside and he had the windows of his car rolled up. He hadn’t counted on the fact that along with the added warmth he’d be trapping the scent of her perfume within the vehicle.

Citing that they were partners until the captain tore them asunder, something Patrick was counting on happening in the very immediate future, the woman had hitched a ride back into town with him. When he’d asked her how she’d come to the crime scene in the first place, she’d told him that she’d caught a ride with one of the patrol cars.

The officers were still back at the scene, protecting it from contamination as best they could. With them out of the picture, Patrick’d had no choice but to agree to let her come with him.

He didn’t particularly like being agreeable.

He liked the idea of being a chauffeur even less.

“Why don’t you do that after hours?” he bit off tersely.

She shifted in her seat. Again. The woman was nothing if not unharnessed energy, exuding enough for two people. She could have been her own partner, and should have been. Anything but his.

Maggi pointed to the building in the middle of the tree-lined block. “C’mon, Pat, we’re passing it right now. It’ll only take a minute.”

She slid a glance in his direction. If looks could kill, she knew she would have been dead on the spot.

“All right, as long as you promise never to call me ‘Pat’ again.”

“Deal.” Like it or not, she was going to have to spend some time with him. She wanted it to be as stress free as she could make it. “So, what do you like being called?”

“I don’t like being called at all.”

No one said the assignments were going to be easy. “In the event that I have to get your attention,” Maggi began gamely, “do you prefer ‘hey you,’ or shall I just throw sunflower seeds at you until I get you to turn around?”

He could see her doing it, too. She had that kind of bulldog quality about her. “Cavanaugh’ll do.”

“Not even Patrick?”

He slowed down. There was a parking spot almost directly across the street from the bank. Patrick guided the car into it, then pulled up the hand brake. Only then did he turn to look at her.

“Let’s get something straight, McKenna. We’re not friends, we’re partners. We’re not even going to be that for very long, so quit coming on like some Girl Scout and stop trying to sound like you’re going to be my lifelong buddy.”

She sat there quietly for a long moment, trying to get a handle on this man. “Losing Ramirez hit you pretty hard, didn’t it?”

The look he shot her was darker than black. “The last thing I need or want is to ride around with Dr. Phil in the car. You want to analyze somebody—”

She held up her hand, not in surrender but to get him to curtail what he was about to say. “Sorry, just making conversation.”

“Well, don’t.”

Unbuckling her seat belt, she turned to look at him. The intensity on her face took him by surprise. “You know, Cavanaugh, someday you just might need someone to watch your back for you.”

“If and when I ever do, it sure as hell isn’t going to be you.”

She paused for a moment, and then she gave him a bright smile. “Roughage.”

Had she lost her mind? What kind of a birdbrain were they cranking out of the academy these days? “What?”

“Morning roughage. Does wonders in clearing out all those poisons that seem to be running around all through you,” she declared, getting out of the car. She paused to look in for a last second before closing the door. “I’ll only be a minute.”

Patrick frowned to himself. Even a minute seemed too long to remain in the car, surrounded the way he was with her perfume. What he needed right now more than solitude was air. He got out.

When she looked at him curiously, he muttered, “I need to stretch my legs.”

She pretended to glance down at them. “And long legs they are, too.”

Not waiting for him, Maggi hurried across the street, wanting to put a little distance between herself and Mr. Personality before she said something she meant and blew everything. She held her hand up, stopping traffic as she darted toward the other side.

She supposed having him this ill-tempered made her job easier. It took away any qualms she might have about spying on him.

“Hey, didn’t they teach you not to jaywalk at the academy while you were busy graduating at the top of your class?”

For less than two cents, she’d tell him what she thought of him. Exercising extreme control, Maggi turned around when she reached the curb. “You want to give me a ticket?”

“I don’t want you risking your fool neck needlessly.” What he wanted to do was give her her walking papers, but there was nothing he could do about that here.

Resigned, and far from happy about it, Patrick pushed the glass door open and crossed the threshold ahead of her. She looked surprised when he held the door for her.

“I see someone must have taught you manners somewhere along the line,” she said.

“It’s expedient. If I let the door go, you would probably walk into it and make the ER our next stop. We have to get back to the station.”

She refused to let him get to her. She knew that was what he was after, to get to her so badly that she’d march into Reynolds’s office and declare that she wouldn’t work with him, the way all his other partners had. Except for Ramirez.

Ain’t gonna happen, Cavanaugh, she thought as she walked by him.

“You can huff and puff all you want, Cavanaugh,” she informed him brightly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

With that, she picked out the shortest line. Patrick stopped by the small table with all the deposit and withdrawal slips, looking annoyed. Mercifully, this wasn’t going to take long. Mondays were usually slow.

Except where homicides seemed to be concerned, she thought, thinking back to the crime scene they’d just left. Something like that made grabbing lunch a challenge to intestinal fortitude.

The teller in the window directly to her left screamed.

The next moment, the man standing before the window whirled around.

There was a gun in his hand.

“Everyone freeze,” he announced loudly. “This is a holdup.”

Chapter 3

The man’s eyes bounced around like pinballs that had just been put into play. He seemed to aim his weapon at everyone in the bank at the same time. Patrick could almost hear the bank robber’s nerves jangling.

“Get down!” the man shouted. “Everyone get down on the floor!” His gun moved erratically from person to person, turning each into a potential target, a potential victim. “Now!”

Patrick did a quick calculation. There were fourteen other people in the bank, not counting the bank robber. Five of them tellers. The gunman looked so rattled he could start firing away at any second. It had all the signs of becoming a bloodbath at the slightest provocation.

Going through the motions of dropping down to the floor, Patrick reached for his pistol.

The rest happened so fast he only had the opportunity to absorb it after the fact. Before he knew what she was doing, the partner the department had saddled him with cried out in what sounded like utter panic. His head jerked in her direction. The bank robber stared at her.

Maggi’s eyes were wide as they were riveted on the bank robber and she was trembling. Her hands were raised above her head in total submission.

“Omigod, it’s a gun.” Panic escalated in her voice. “He’s got a gun. Oh, please don’t shoot me,” she implored. “I just found out I’m pregnant. You’d be killing two people, not just one. Me and my baby. I don’t want to die, mister. I’ve got everything to live for. Please don’t kill me.”

With each word she uttered, Maggi edged closer and closer to the bank robber. She was breathing heavily and still trembling.

“Shut up, you stupid bitch. Nobody’s going to die, just do what I tell you.” The bank robber looked panicked himself as he trained the gun on her.

“All right, all right—” Maggi’s voice hitched “—if you promise you won’t hurt me. Pretty please?”

The last two words she uttered were distinctively different from the rest. As she seemed to sag down right in front of him, Maggi grabbed hold of his gun hand. Catching him by surprise, she violently jerked his arm behind his back. In less than half a heartbeat, her own gun was in her other hand. She held it close enough to the robber’s temple to get her point across.

“Drop the gun.” He did as he was told, cursing her roundly. “Now apologize to the nice people and say you’re sorry.”

“What the—” At a loss for coherence, the bank robber let loose a string of profanities that only made Maggi shake her head.

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” she marveled. Relieved that the situation was over, Maggi took a deep breath, trying to get a hold of her own nerves. They felt as if they’d been stretched to the limit. Adrenaline still raced through her veins. “Keep that up and we’re going to have to wash your mouth out with soap, aren’t we, Detective Cavanaugh?”

As if waiting for some kind of word of concurrence, Maggi raised her eyebrow toward Patrick. He merely grunted as he pulled the man’s hands behind him and snapped handcuffs around his wrists. The look he gave her left Maggi short on description. Had she just stepped on his male pride?

The robber winced as the cuffs went on. “You’re cops?”

“No, just into a little S&M,” Maggi quipped. “We like to carry handcuffs with us.” She winked broadly at Patrick, beginning to enjoy getting under his skin. “You never know when they might come in handy.”