Cavanaugh On Call

Scottie blew out a breath. If she didn’t give him an answer and set him straight, this one looked as if he could go on talking nonsense like this indefinitely. There’d been a number of Cavanaughs in Homicide Division, as well, so she was well acquainted with the way they behaved.

She supposed this was what came of having a huge family to fall back on. People like that could afford to wisecrack and act as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

It was different for her. All there was in her world were cares. Big cares. She’d never had anyone to fall back on. Her father had died before she was eight and her mother, it had soon became apparent, hadn’t been able to keep it together for more than a few days at a time. She wound up mothering her mother as well as Ethan, who was a product of one of her mother’s one-night stands.

Things had never gone smoothly, but they had gone well enough for a while. But then, in a bid for “uniqueness,” Ethan had begun to act out, hanging around with this one small group until he’d gotten in trouble and gotten caught.

It was easy to see that the path he was on had only one final destination. Temporarily putting her own life on hold, she’d sued to become her brother’s guardian, citing that her alcoholic, pill-popping mother was unfit. Shortly after she had, her mother had overdosed and died. That had been over seven years ago.

Scottie had refused to let herself cry. She’d just pushed on, holding down two part-time jobs, going to school online and trying to make a home for herself and Ethan. For a while, things were going all right. Ethan behaved and she wound up joining the Aurora police force.

And then Ethan had fallen back on his old ways. She’d tracked him down, dragged him back and, over the course of one very long weekend during which she’d locked herself up with Ethan, she’d managed to eventually get through to him.

He’d been out of trouble, holding down a job for close to five years.

Until now. She needed to find him before it was too late.

“I just transferred from the Homicide Division,” she heard herself telling the inquisitive detective. She knew she needed to answer just enough of his questions to not arouse any undue suspicions as to her real motives for the transfer.

“By choice?” he asked.

Why was he asking her that? Did he think she had an ulterior motive for getting into his department? “Yes.”

Bryce’s expression was completely unreadable. “Whose?”

She looked at him quizzically for a moment before saying, “Mine.”

Bryce nodded. “I can’t say I blame you. It can get to you, looking at dead bodies all the time. Even one can be too many for some people.”

“Thank you for your understanding,” Scottie said crisply, hoping that was the end of it.

It wasn’t.

Bryce made no effort to vacate his chair or move it back where it belonged. “The seat’s still warm.”

Scottie blinked, totally lost. “What?”

“From my last partner. He just now literally got up and walked out the door a couple minutes ago.” Bryce nodded toward the doorway. “I think you even might have passed each other. Anyway,” Bryce said, shifting to another topic, “I’m surprised they found a substitute so soon.”

“I’m not a substitute, I’m a transfer,” Scottie corrected. When she’d put in for the transfer, no one had said anything about a position being vacated. But given the current string of break-ins, she’d just assumed that the department would be open to getting extra help.

Bryce misread her defensive tone. “I didn’t mean to make that sound belittling.”

Whether she liked it or not, if she was going to get along with this man, she had to get a grip. Learn the ropes. So she forced herself to flash a half-apologetic smile in his general direction.

“Sorry, it’s been a rough morning,” she told him vaguely.

Bryce was nothing if not a sympathetic ear. His sisters had taught him well. “Care to share?” he asked.

She’d grown up bottling up every single emotion she’d ever experienced. She’d done her best over the years to be Ethan’s pillar. But no one had ever been hers. There was no way she was about to start now.

“No.”

For some reason he hadn’t expected her to say anything else. Bryce suppressed a laugh. Instead he said, “Scottie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” paraphrasing the closing line in one of his favorite old movies, Casablanca.

“If you say so,” Scottie replied dismissively. All she wanted to do was to settle in and get down to work.

Chapter 2

She’d never heard any talk that one of the innumerable Cavanaughs to be found within the police department was a little lacking in the cerebral area. But then, Scottie assumed that wasn’t exactly a topic that anyone would bring up if they could help it. Over the years the Cavanaughs had become the very lifeblood of the police department and since the chief of detectives was a Cavanaugh—an exceptionally fair, evenhanded man, she’d heard—it seemed only prudent to not muddy the waters if it could possibly be avoided.

Still, in her opinion, the detective whose desk was butted up against hers seemed far too prone to just smile for no particular reason, like some sort of happy idiot.

She supposed he could be on the level.

What was it like, she wondered, just to be happy for no reason at all?

Was it even possible?

Great, only five minutes into her transfer and she was already waxing philosophical, Scottie upbraided herself. If she wasn’t careful, she was in real danger of turning into one of those people she had always disliked and thought of as useless. People who lived to contemplate absolutely nothing of consequence and went on about it ad infinitum.

Quickly putting away the few things she had brought with her from her old desk, Scottie was acutely aware of the fact that Bryce Cavanaugh was still hovering over her like a drone trying to decide just where to finally strike.

Scottie shut her middle drawer and focused her attention on the handsome, annoying man looming over her.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked in a crisp, distant voice.

Bryce’s smile was nothing if not affable. “No, I kind of thought it might be the other way around.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t need any help,” she informed him.

“I was just volunteering to take you to Lieutenant Handel and introduce you.” For just a fleeting second he thought he saw a silent query in the blonde’s laser blue eyes. “You know, the guy who barks out the orders and sends us out on our assignments. It’s usually protocol to report to him first thing when you join his squad.”

Damn, she’d forgotten all about that. She hated slipping up like this. She was usually so detail-oriented. But she’d been so consumed with trying to locate Ethan and head him off—if this really was Ethan’s work—as well as getting transferred to Robbery that she’d forgotten all about the final steps involved in a department transfer.

Scottie took a deep breath, pulling herself together as subtly as possible.

“Right,” she lied, “I was just getting to that. I didn’t want to just leave my things all over the place when I went to check in with the commanding officer.”

She rose and so did Bryce.

His attention entirely on his new partner, Bryce pushed his chair back toward his desk without sparing it a single glance. It still came to rest in the right place. “Let’s go,” he said.

“I don’t need an escort.” She thought she’d already made that clear. “Just point out his office.” Although she actually had a fairly good idea where to find the squad leader.

Everyone was out in the open. As with the Homicide Division, the person in charge occupied a glass office located against the wall farthest from the squad room’s entrance. Originality was not exactly the department’s strong suit.

“I was taught it wasn’t polite to point,” he told her, humor glinting his green eyes.

He’d almost be cute if he wasn’t so damn annoying, Scottie thought. But he was annoying and, besides, she wasn’t in the market for cute. She was in the market to either put her mind at ease about Ethan or, barring that, to clear Ethan’s name and extricate him, if possible, from any kind of mess he had allowed himself to get mixed up in. “Cute” had no place in that.

Bryce’s smile widened. “Humor me. You’ll find I can be a very useful guy,” he added, hoping that was the end of the discussion.

Scottie had learned to work alone. A partner, especially one who apparently fancied himself as God’s gift to womankind as this one so obviously did, would only get in her way in more ways than she could count. But she didn’t want to commemorate her first day in the department by butting heads with one of the Cavanaughs—especially since it looked as if the man was going to be her partner.

Could it get any worse? Scottie asked herself.

The question no sooner occurred to her than the answer came to her. It could be a lot worse—if Ethan was actually involved in these break-ins.

She stifled a shiver, trying not to go there mentally.

“Lead the way, Useful Guy,” she told Bryce, making no attempt to hide the sarcasm in her voice.

This is going to get interesting, Bryce thought, amused while he did exactly as she requested.

Since the door to the tiny room was open, Bryce paused to knock on the office door frame then stuck his head into the lieutenant’s space. “You got a minute, Loo?” he asked.

“Not since I signed on to take over this department,” the older man lamented.

Pausing and saving the screen he was working on, Lieutenant Mike Handel, father of three and twenty-one-year veteran with the department, turned his chair fifteen degrees to the left and looked at the two occupants standing in his cubbyhole of an office.

“Yes?”

“Phelps just left,” Bryce informed his superior. Then, gesturing toward the woman beside him, he said, “And this appears to be his replacement.”

Handel half rose in his chair in a minor show of respect. Gaunt, with what looked to be a two-day shadow, he appeared to be impressed. “Nice to know that Personnel can operate so efficiently. I don’t recall even sending down the proper request form to Human Resources for a replacement.”

“You didn’t,” Scottie said, speaking up. “It was just serendipity. I asked for the transfer.”

The lieutenant smiled but his expression beneath the smile was unreadable.

“‘Serendipity,’” he repeated. “Now there’s a word you don’t hear every day. I’m Lieutenant Handel,” he told the young woman standing in front of his desk. He extended his hand to her.

“Detective Alexandra Scott,” Scottie replied, taking the hand the man offered and shaking it.

“Tell me, ‘Detective Alexandra Scott,’ I’m curious...” Handel asked, sitting again. “Did you request to be transferred into Robbery or out of Homicide?”

Scottie paused only for a second before answering. “A little of both, sir.”

Handel nodded. “Good answer—except for the ‘sir’ part. ‘Sir’ is for my father and the Chief of Ds. If you want my attention, just say ‘Loo.’” And then Handel put his hand out again, waiting.

Belatedly, Scottie remembered that she was still holding on to her transfer orders along with a file containing a thumbnail summary of her police service background.

“Sorry,” she murmured, placing the file in front of him on the desk.

“Nothing to be sorry about, Detective.” Opening the file, Handel skimmed through it quickly then looked up at her again. “Everything seems to be in order, Detective. I take it that you already know you’ll be partnering up with Cavanaugh here.”

Scottie didn’t pretend to smile at the prospect. “Yes, sir—um, Loo. But I thought I should mention that I work better alone.”

Mentally, Scottie crossed her fingers even though she had a feeling that it was hopeless.

Just as she’d guessed, her statement had less than no effect on her new commanding officer.

“Superman works alone. The rest of us work in pairs. Except for me. I work with all of you. Trust me,” Handel went on, “in this department, you’ll need all the help that you can get. Stupid criminals exist mostly in amusing anecdotes in Reader’s Digest. Today’s breed of thief is smarter, quicker and way sharper than the thief from your father’s generation.”

Scottie was still standing at military attention. “I’ll keep that in mind, si—Loo.”

Handel laughed, clearly tickled by her struggle to address him correctly.

“Work on that, Detective. You’ll get the hang of it.” And then Handel turned to look at Bryce. “Why don’t you help the new kid here catch up on what you and some of the others have been working on?” he suggested.

“You got it, Loo,” Bryce answered, more than ready to accommodate his superior. He and Scottie turned, beginning to leave the small inner office.

“Oh, Scott,” Handel suddenly called out.

Scottie turned and glanced at the man, wondering if he was having second thoughts about her transfer or if there was something else that was wrong. She had learned, long ago, never to expect smooth sailing even if the surface of the lake was as smooth as glass.

“Yes, Loo?”

Because she hadn’t stuttered and stumbled over his name, Handel smiled his approval then told her what he’d wanted to say. “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you,” she murmured.

She followed her new partner out.

“He takes a little getting used to,” Bryce confided as if he could read her thoughts. As do you, probably, Bryce added silently.

“No more than anyone else,” she replied with a vague shrug. “Everybody’s got their rules and quirks.”

“What are yours?” he asked as they got back to their desks.

“I’ve just got two,” she told him simply. “Rules, not quirks,” she clarified. “Do a good job and never mix work with home. Can we get to work now?” she asked, signaling an end to any exchange he thought they might be making.

“Absolutely. I take it that you’re aware of the series of break-ins that have been going on these last few weeks,” Bryce said, pulling his chair up a little closer to her desk as he lowered his voice just a shade.

She’d been the one to request they get to work, yet the question he’d just led with seemed almost out of the blue. So much so that it almost appeared he was asking her personally rather than just as a general introduction to the case she would be working.

Ever mindful of the possibility that Ethan was involved in these break-ins, her main concern was that, somehow, the connection would be made and once it was known that she was Ethan’s sister—even his half sister—she wouldn’t be allowed to work to clear his name.

“Why?” she responded uneasily, watching Bryce’s every move.

Bryce studied his new partner. Suddenly she appeared rather jumpy. Was that because she was the new kid on the block or was there something else going on that he needed to look into? Something he needed to know about before things went any further, both in the investigation and besides that?

After a moment he chalked up her momentary display of nerves to her wanting to do well on her first assignment in the new division. He couldn’t exactly blame her for that.

“Because it’s all over the news these days, for one thing,” he explained, still covertly studying her reaction to this whole scenario.

“Oh, right. Sorry,” she apologized. And then she knew just how to play this—survival in all sorts of situations had taught her that. “I had too much coffee this morning and I guess I just want to carry my weight right off the bat. Didn’t mean to sound jumpy.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to carry your own weight—and mine, too,” he added with a chuckle. “I’ve got a list of people who’ve come home to find that they’ve been paid a little visit by our local friendly break-in artists. It’s here somewhere.” As he spoke, he began searching through the various files on his desk.

The files looked as if they’d been dropped on his desk by a passing hurricane. Nothing seemed to be organized.

In her opinion Cavanaugh had an awful lot of unnecessary papers scattered over on his desk. It became abundantly clear that the papers were stuck into files in no particular order, either. Finding just one specific thing would be like going on a wild-goose chase.

Finally she couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. “Wouldn’t you have more luck if you had all that on the computer?” she asked.

He countered her suggestion with a list of reasons why he hadn’t had anyone input the material into files on the computer. He was computer literate, but he had never become a fanatic about it.

“Paper files don’t suffer glitches or suddenly become unavailable because of power outages. Besides,” he said, sparing her a grin before going back to the hunt, “this way’s easier.”

Her eyes swept over the haphazard piles of files. “If you say so,” she murmured.

Eventually, Bryce laid his hands on everything he was looking for. He in turn handed them all over to his new partner.

For her part, Scottie spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon going through the various files that Bryce, his former partner and a couple of other detectives in the squad room had compiled.

There had been eight break-ins in this latest wave of home robberies. All the robberies had taken place in Aurora’s more exclusive, upper-end neighborhoods. That was the one thing all the incidents had in common. The only other thing they had in common—for now—was that there had been no one home at the time of the break-ins.

But beyond that, nothing seemed similar to her. The people who’d had their space violated had no common thread running through all their lives. They didn’t attend the same church, didn’t shop in the same stores and they didn’t send their children to the same schools. Two of the victims were single men, while the other five were families.

At first glance the break-ins seemed to all be just random invasions, haphazardly picked, but Scottie knew better than that. There had to be a common thread running through them, something that had drawn the thief’s attention in the first place, like a theme, or a memory, or payback for something.

She just prayed that the common thread running through all these home invasions wasn’t Ethan.

For the umpteenth time Scottie slipped her phone out of her pocket and swiped the screen, bringing it to life. She checked her texts and then her voice messages.

Nothing.

Ethan hadn’t called her back, hadn’t texted. Something was wrong, she knew it.

The old Ethan, the one she’d had to bail out of jail on more than one occasion before he’d finally come to his senses, wouldn’t have called her back. He would have carelessly ignored her messages until it suited his schedule to call her back. But the new Ethan, the one who was finally amounting to something, the one who gave meaning to her life, he would have definitely called her back. He would have called her the moment she’d left her first message.

It occurred to her that she hadn’t heard from Ethan in a month.

She’d just chalked it up to his being busy. She didn’t want him to feel as if she was breathing down his neck, but she really did want to know where he was.

Where are you, Ethan? she silently demanded as she stared at her phone.

“Checking for messages from your boyfriend?” Bryce asked.

Scottie swung her chair around, narrowly avoiding hitting the detective smack in his knees.

“Don’t you make any noise when you sneak up on people?” she accused.

“I think the answer to that is self-explanatory, otherwise it wouldn’t be called ‘sneaking.’ But since I have your attention, I was just curious. You’ve checked your phone at least once every hour since you started working those files. Hot date?” he asked, amused.

“To answer your question, no, I’m not checking for messages from my boyfriend. I don’t have a boyfriend, consequently there is no ‘hot date,’” Scottie informed him rather coldly.

Now that, Bryce thought, he found very hard to believe, given the way the woman looked.

But he let the topic drop, to be followed up some other time.

“Well, it’s time to call it a day, anyway. Why don’t you join me for a drink at Malone’s?” he suggested.

Malone’s, run by a retired policeman, was where more than one officer of the law could be found unwinding and temporarily setting down the burdens of the day. Bryce assumed she was familiar with it since, at one time or another, they’d all frequented the establishment.

“I thought we could celebrate your first day on the job. I’m buying,” he added, hoping that would erase any objections she might voice at the idea.

Scottie shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ll have to pass. I have somewhere else I have to be.”

Before he could ask her where, Scottie had picked up her slim messenger bag, slung the strap over her shoulder and walked quickly out of the squad room.

Chapter 3

It wasn’t until a couple of minutes later, when he started to leave the squad room himself, that Bryce saw the cell phone still laying on his new partner’s desk. The cell’s black case made it easily blend in with the desktop.

Snatching it up, Bryce quickly hurried out of the squad room and to the elevator to catch up with his new partner. But he was too late. She had already gotten on and went down.

Not bothering to wait for another elevator car to arrive—that would only cost him more time—Bryce opted for the stairs. He fairly flew down the three flights to the ground floor. But as he emerged out of the stairwell, he found the elevator car standing open and empty. Scottie was nowhere to be seen. She must have just left the building.

Just how fast did this woman move?

Not bothering to contemplate the question, Bryce exited the building via the rear entrance. The second he got out, he saw Scottie in the distance. She was just getting into her car. He whistled and called out her name, but she obviously didn’t hear him.

Bryce regarded the phone in his hand. He supposed he could just give her the cell phone tomorrow when she came in. That would be the simplest thing to do. But since cell phones were no longer just phones but the owner’s vital connection to the world, Bryce decided to give it one more try and go after her.

Pocketing the cell, Bryce hurried over to his own vehicle and got into it. After he started the car, he went out the same way he assumed his partner had.

When he left the lot, he just barely managed to catch sight of her silver subcompact making a right at the corner.

Employing his best tailing skills, Bryce followed the silver Honda for several blocks. He made sure to keep one car length behind her. He knew that he could just speed up, flip on his siren and catch up to her, but he had to admit his curiosity had been aroused. Just where else was it that his partner just “had to be” that had caused her to turn down a friendly drink and forget to take her phone?

Keeping her in his sights, Bryce wound up following his new partner beyond the city limits into the next city. Vaguely familiar with the area, he saw that she was driving toward a less than upscale neighborhood.

Just where the hell is she going at this time of day in this area?

By the time he saw Scottie’s car pull into a parking lot, his curiosity was not just aroused but fully engaged. Especially when he looked around and realized she had parked right in front of a homeless shelter.

That did not look like the kind of place someone like Scottie would go to, he thought. At least not unless she was following a lead.

Could that be it? Had she picked up something in all those files he’d given her to review and not said anything to him? Just exactly how much of a Lone Ranger was this woman?

Needing answers, Bryce pulled his car up into the lot and parked several spaces away from hers in the first spot he could find. Shutting off his engine, he sat back and waited.