The Woman Who Wasn't There

She slowly shook her head. “No, I’m looking for something.”

Troy’s dark eyebrows drew together over his nose in a puzzled, wavy line. Talking wasn’t this woman’s strong suit, he decided. Considering what he was accustomed to from the women in his family, reticence was a pleasant change. But not when he wanted information. “Mind telling me what?”

Yes, she minded, Delene thought. She minded having to explain herself to anyone. It brought back too many bad memories. She was trying to forget about endless months of explaining herself, of justifying every move she made, every second she was away from the house.

But Detective Cavanaugh wasn’t asking out of personal curiosity. This was all part of his job.

“You did see the yellow tape, didn’t you?” Troy prompted when she didn’t immediately respond.

Delene could feel that old familiar flash of temper coming on. “Vision’s twenty-twenty the last time I had my eyes checked.”

The flippant answer was as mechanical as breathing for her. Being flippant was the defense mechanism Delene employed to keep people from asking her too many probing questions. She banked down a lot of other words, as well. After all, the man was just doing his job.

And what you’re doing is going above and beyond the call of duty. But she knew she had to at least try, she thought.

There was more to the woman’s eyes than twenty-twenty vision, Troy caught himself observing. Her eyes were a deep, dark shade of green. So green, he felt as if he’d fallen into the center of an emerald mine. So green that they could very easily mesmerize him and dissolve his thoughts if he allowed it.

Troy cleared his throat. “Nice to know. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

Her mouth rose in an amused smile that took him prisoner. “I thought you gave me a choice.”

He didn’t follow. “A choice?”

“Yes.” She raised her head to look up at him. “You said, ‘Mind telling me what?’ That would indicate if I do mind, I don’t have to answer you.”

Troy moved in a little closer, although he wasn’t completely aware that he had taken a step. She liked to argue. Maybe she wasn’t all that different from the women in his family.

“Which automatically puts you on my list of people to look at more closely.”

The way he said it, Delene got the distinct feeling the detective wasn’t just talking about the murder. That he meant something more intimate than that.

For just the barest instant a wave of heat passed over her, spreading out all through her body. That same funny, silly, overwhelming sensation experienced by teenagers during the “did-he-notice-me-or-didn’t-he?” ritual from years gone by.

Get a grip, Dee. You’re not sixteen anymore.

She told herself she was just hallucinating, that what she felt was merely a by-product of countless nights with too little sleep because of the damned nightmares.

It had been years since she’d reacted to a man. Any man. And she intended to keep it that way.

“Then you’d be wasting your time,” she told him softly.

Her voice, low, sexy and intoxicating, got under his skin. He was having some very unprofessional thoughts right now. “My time to waste.”

She drew back, shifting gears. That had been a dangerous road she’d just touched on. Dangerous for her. “Not when the department is paying you. Daddy wouldn’t like it.”

She had the pleasure of watching the handsome detective stiffen. Obviously she’d stumbled across a button she could press if needed. She wondered if there was friction between the older and younger Cavanaughs.

The grin on Troy’s lips hardened ever so slightly. “Are we going to play this game all evening or are you going to tell me what made you come back to the motel room where Petrie was killed? As far as I understand the duties of a probation officer, your business here is over.”

He was putting her in her place. She didn’t like that. Delene took the upper hand. “Relax, Cavanaugh, this isn’t an old-fashioned melodrama. The killer isn’t coming back to the scene of the crime.” Shoving her hands into her back pockets, she shifted slightly on the balls of her feet. It was a habit she had when she was searching for a way to calm down. “Clyde has a daughter.”

“All right.” Troy drew the words out, waiting for the woman to follow up the statement with more concrete information. “So he has a daughter. What’s that got to do with you?”

Nothing. Everything. Because I was cursed with a conscience.

She ignored his question. “Her name was tattooed on his forearm.”

He’d noticed the tattoo when he was examining the body. “Rachel” in common ink. “Not exactly top grade,” he commented.

“He was probably stoned out of his mind when he got it. That doesn’t promote the best judgment as to where to get one,” she said. “He was lucky he didn’t get blood poisoning from a dirty needle.”

“Whatever luck he might have had ran out today,” Troy said.

“Yeah, it did.” She sighed, glancing around the room. Anywhere but at the chalked outline. “I figure his daughter has a right to know that he’s dead and didn’t just take off and leave her.”

There was something in the way she said the last part that had him looking at Delene. And wondering.

“Is that the way it happened?” he asked softly. He knew he was intruding, but she’d been the one who had inadvertently thrown it out there.

Delene pulled back her shoulders, as if unconsciously bracing for a blow. “What?”

“To you,” he said, taking the same tone with her that his cousin Patience took with the wounded animals she cared for in her capacity as veterinarian. “Did your father leave your mother. And you?”

Her expression hardened. All traces of friendliness vanished. “Don’t try to analyze me, Cavanaugh. You’re out of your league. I just felt sorry for the poor slob. And for the little girl he brought into the world. End of story.” All totaled, she’d worked with Clyde Petrie for almost three months, inheriting his file when another officer had retired. She’d made it a point to learn his background, to know what she was up against. “I know he tried to clean up twice, always saying that a daughter deserved to be proud of her father.”

She looked around once more. The motel room looked no better in the late-afternoon light than it had in the predawn hours. An oppressive feeling of hopelessness seemed woven in with the stains and the grime. That and an almost disabling loneliness.

“I thought maybe he had her address here or a phone number.” It was her intention to exhaust the regular avenues of search before resorting to the Internet.

Tying up those loose ends wasn’t exactly within the probation department’s jurisdiction, but he liked the way the woman thought. “Do you know what her mother’s name is?” he asked.

Delene shook her head. “Clyde never married her so it’s not on our records. I wouldn’t have known about the girl at all except during one of the department’s impromptu visits, I found Clyde sitting by the window, holding her picture. There were tears in his eyes. He told me she was four, maybe five. He wasn’t too good with dates.”

Troy had his own thoughts about the origin of those tears. Probably Clyde realized that he didn’t have enough money to score, he thought. “Well, I guess he wasn’t ready to take on the dad from The Brady Bunch for the title of Father of the Year.”

She moved her shoulders in a half-dismissive shrug. “I suppose Clyde did the best he could, given how weak he was.” This time she did look down at the chalk outline. “At least he tried.”

What was she really doing here? Troy wondered. He caught himself wondering other things about her, as well. Things if he asked, he was confident he’d only get a flippant response to. He decided that once he was off-duty, he was going to do a little homework. See just what he could find out about Agent Delene D’Angelo. If all else failed, he was pretty sure he could always ask Brenda, his brother Dax’s new wife. The woman could make a computer do anything but sit up and beg—and maybe even that, too.

“Want me to help you look around?” he offered.

The first response that occurred to Delene was she didn’t want to be indebted to anyone. Favors required favors in return.

“It’s not that big a place,” she told him, then reconsidered. This was his crime scene, not hers. Technically he could order her off. “Sure, why not? Two sets of eyes are usually better than one.” Approaching the largest pile of fast-food wrappers, discarded soda cups and stained carryout bags, she paused to take out her gloves. “What is it that you’re looking for? Just in case I stumble across it first.”

He gave her a grin that she found much too engaging. “I don’t know.”

Their eyes met. Hers were incredulous. “You don’t know?”

Admitting it didn’t seem to phase him, and she found that unusual. Most men liked to look as if they knew what they were doing.

“Nope. Just that I’ll know it when I see it,” he said.

Her mouth quirked and he felt something skip a beat inside his chest. Probably had to do with the burrito he’d had for breakfast. Ordinarily, three days out of five, breakfast time would find him at his uncle’s house, seated at a table that never seemed to run out of leaves or chairs in its ever-expanding mode.

His father’s older brother, Uncle Andrew, had put himself through the academy as a short-order cook in a diner. When he retired to raise what was, at the time, his motherless family, Uncle Andrew indulged himself in his only passion outside of law enforcement and his family. Cooking.

And when, one by one, the members of his family began to spread their wings and fly away from home, he’d insisted on having everyone return each morning for breakfast. To entice them, Andrew went all-out, preparing not just a meal but what could pass as a gourmet feast. Troy hadn’t been able to make it to Uncle Andrew’s house this morning, because of the homicide call. So breakfast had turned out to be the first semiedible thing he could get his hands on.

Troy knew exactly what expression would descend over his uncle’s face if the older man heard that he’d grabbed a breakfast burrito at a fast-food restaurant.

“You’ve obviously been watching too many cop shows,” Delene was saying to him.

Actually, he found himself addicted to the slew of crime dramas that were on the air, taping the ones he didn’t get a chance to watch. He flashed her another grin. “Doesn’t make it any less true.”

He thought he heard her say something about the level of intelligence of the new wave of detective these days, but he couldn’t be sure. The next moment, she was riffling through the drawers in the battered and scarred bureau that dominated the wall beside the tiny bathroom.

He let the comment go.

Between them, they went over the entire length and breadth of the motel room, coming up empty when they finished.

It bothered Delene that she couldn’t even find Rachel’s photograph. She found it telling.

“Why is this significant?” Troy asked.

She closed the closet. The hangers had been empty. Whatever clothing Clyde had possessed was in the heaps on the floor.

“Because someone must have taken the photo,” she told him. “I know I saw it.”

“Why would someone want to take a picture of a drug dealer’s daughter? It’s not as if they could kidnap her and hold her for ransom. It certainly doesn’t look as if Clyde had any money.”

“Not just any someone,” she corrected him. “Her mother.” Maybe the woman, whoever she was, didn’t want him having anything to do with the little girl.

“Or,” Troy theorized, “Petrie could have easily lost it.”

Delene didn’t believe that. She shook her head. “It meant too much to him.”

“When he was sober,” Troy pointed out. “All bets are off when he was high.”

But Delene remained unmoved. “Some things remain constant, even for addicts.”

He wondered if the woman even realized that she had become passionate about her subject. “Is that firsthand knowledge?” he asked.

Her chin rose defensively. “That’s firsthand information. The people the county has on probation are not exactly all the crème de la crème.”

Which led him to the question that had been echoing in his head since he first laid eyes on her this morning. He couldn’t see her going down into the trenches, getting dirty in their filth. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a business like this?”

Now there was a line, Delene thought. “Earning a living.”

“Got to be other ways to do it.”

She looked at the piles of wrappers. It was hard not to just scoop them up and throw them away. She hated chaos, always had. “I like the hours,” she quipped.

“You mean round-the-clock?” Troy scoffed. “What are you, a bat?”

“Get your facts straight, Detective. Bats don’t operate during the day.”

“Guess their union’s stronger than yours.” He finished going through the last pile and found that it was exactly what it appeared. Garbage. “Nothing,” he announced, rising to his feet.

An exercise in futility. Delene bit back an oath. “Did you check out Mendoza yet?”

He’d placed a call to his sister to check out D’Angelo’s story. When it rang true, he and Kara had gone to see the self-appointed drug lord at his opulent house, only to be told by one of Mendoza’s underlings that the man was on vacation in Florida, visiting his sister. Troy didn’t believe the excuse for a moment, but the location had a true ring to it.

“Mendoza’s out of town.”

She gave him a pointed look. “He wouldn’t have to pull the trigger himself.”

It was Troy’s turn again to grin. “Trying to tell me how to do my job, D’Angelo?”

“Just making a helpful observation.”

Before he could comment on the helpful nature of her observations, a commotion outside the motel room had them both becoming alert. Troy had his weapon out in under a heartbeat.

“Stay here,” he told her.

She had her own weapon and the department had spent its fair share of money training her on its use. She unholstered it.

“The hell I will,” she declared, following him out.

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