The Cavanaugh Code

No, Taylor upbraided herself tersely the next moment. This wasn’t Aaron’s fault, it was hers. She was the one who’d gotten sloppy, unconsciously getting too accustomed to someone having her back at all times.

She knew better.

On this job, no matter what, you had to remain vigilant because there were no guarantees and even the best of partners could be caught napping.

Just like she had this evening, she thought in disgust.

Crossing to the front door, Taylor locked it, then tested the doorknob to make sure it held. It did. Even so, she dragged one of the chairs over and placed it in front of the ornate door. If “Houdini” decided to come back and pick the lock, he’d still wind up hitting the chair. The scraping noise the feet would make against the marble would alert her. She didn’t want to be caught off guard a second time.

Most likely, she mused, the intruder wasn’t going to come back. He was probably just happy to get away. Not that she planned to let him. She intended to find him, but that was something she’d deal with later. After she did what she came here to do.

Glancing toward the door one final time, Taylor went back to Eileen Stevens’s bedroom. Somewhere amid all the woman’s things she hoped to get a handle on the late lawyer’s life.

No doubt about it, Eileen Stevens had led an extremely busy life, Taylor concluded more than ninety minutes later, finally driving home to her own apartment. A busy life, but, as far as she could ascertain, it had been far from satisfying. The few photographs that did grace the walls in the lawyer’s study were of Eileen and the other, older partners from the firm. Eileen appeared very formal in them.

Didn’t the woman have a personal life?

From everything she’d found, it didn’t seem so. There were no love letters stashed in a bottom drawer, held fast with a faded ribbon, no secret photographs tucked away in an album of someone who had once made her pulse race. There was nothing to indicate that Eileen had made any kind of personal contact with anyone.

The only scrapbook the woman had kept was filled with newspaper articles about her cases. Cases she had won. It was all about winning for Eileen.

Can’t take a court victory to bed with you at night, Taylor thought.

“Looks like you lost, big time,” Taylor murmured under her breath to a woman who could no longer benefit from any insight she might have to give.

Is this any better than your life? an annoying voice in her head mockingly asked. Here it is, way past your shift, and what are you doing? Poking around a dead woman’s apartment.

Taylor unconsciously stiffened her shoulders. Eileen Stevens’s life wasn’t like her life, she silently insisted. She had a life, she had a family. A family that meant the world to her and who were always there for her anytime she needed them, or just wanted to kick back. Just because she wasn’t spending her nights with a lover didn’t make her anything like the dead woman.

She blew out a breath as she pulled into her apartment complex, a modest collection of garden apartments with carport parking and bright white daisies planted all along their borders.

“Great, so now you’re arguing with yourself. Maybe you should go back to Brian and have him assign that temporary partner to you,” she said out loud in disgust.

Taylor pulled into her carport and turned the engine off. For a second she sat there, listening to crickets calling to each other. In the distance was not-so-faint music coming from the pool area. Someone was having another party.

Someone was always having another party this time of year. She felt no desire to go.

Maybe you should go, anyway. Might do you good.

She shook her head. Andrew Cavanaugh saw to her social life. The former chief of police and family patriarch held enough gatherings at his place to take care of any spare time she had.

Tonight she was just tired. Tired and disappointed in herself for allowing that cocky intruder to get away. Tomorrow would be better, she silently vowed getting out of her vehicle. All she needed was a good night’s sleep and then she’d be back on track.

The good night’s sleep she’d planned on had eluded her.

Oh, she’d slept all right, but rather than a restful, dreamless event, her night was packed full of dreams. One dream flowering instantly into another, all involving the sexy intruder.

The dreams played out so vividly that she’d had trouble separating reality from fiction. In several versions, the intruder got the drop on her rather than she on him. In the last dream, things inexplicably heated up. Her clothes disappeared just as she realized that he wasn’t wearing any either.

That was when she bolted upright, waking up.

It was 7:00 a.m. and her pulse was racing. Her breathing was so shallow she thought for a moment she was going to hyperventilate. The downside was that she felt far more tired than when she’d first fallen asleep.

Exhausted, her breathing finally under control, she dropped, face forward on the comforter for a moment longer.

Who the hell was that man and how did he fit into Eileen’s life? Taylor wondered for the hundredth time.

She knew she wasn’t going to have any peace until she answered those questions, especially the first one. Sitting up again, Taylor sighed and dragged her hand through her tousled, long blond hair. First thing this morning, she would see about getting together with the sketch artist, before the intruder’s features faded from her memory.

She should be so lucky.

Throwing off the covers, Taylor marched into the bathroom. She rushed through her shower and was drying off in less than ten minutes. Dressed, she ran her fingers through her hair as she aimed the hair dryer at several sections, impatient to be on her way. She was determined to find out the man’s name and bring him in before the day was out.

Breakfast was a banana she peeled and ate between leaving her front door and reaching her vehicle in the carport.

She was on her way to the precinct less than half an hour after she’d woken up.

Tracking down the mysterious intruder turned out to be a lot easier than she ever imagined.

Arriving at the precinct, Taylor went straight up to her squad room. Her intention was to drop off her purse at her desk and then go in search of the sketch artist.

She stopped dead ten feet short of her goal.

The intruder was there, sitting in the chair beside her desk, looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

Taylor’s first instinct was to draw her weapon, but she banked it down even though training a gun on him would have been immensely satisfying. The man obviously wasn’t a criminal. A criminal didn’t just waltz into a squad room and make himself at home. Although, approaching the scene from another angle as she played her own devil’s advocate, that could actually be the perfect cover.

Either way, the stranger obviously had a hell of a lot of nerve.

Taking a deep breath, Taylor crossed the rest of the way through the room to her desk.

As if sensing her presence, the stranger turned his head and looked right into her eyes a moment before she reached him.

“You,” she spat out, making the single word sound like an angry accusation.

An accusation that apparently left him unruffled. The stranger merely smiled that maddening smile she’d previewed last night.

“Me,” he affirmed.

Instead of throwing her purse into the bottom drawer, she dropped it in. But she satisfied her need to blow off steam by kicking the drawer shut.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded, barely keeping her voice down. “And how did you get out of those handcuffs?”

“Handcuffing your dates these days?”

Focused only on the stranger, Taylor almost jumped. The question came from her brother, Frank, another homicide detective. Frank had chosen that moment to come up behind her. Fresh off solving a serial-killer case and riding the crest of triumphant satisfaction, her younger brother grinned at her.

“You know the department frowns on taking their equipment for personal use.” He moved so that he stood next to the annoying stranger.

Taylor struggled to keep from telling her brother to butt out. “This isn’t a date, this is a suspect,” she bit off.

“A suspect?” the intruder echoed, still smiling that annoyingly sexy smile that seemed to undulate right under her skin, shooting straight to her core and warming it. “For what?” he asked innocently.

As if he didn’t know. “For the murder of Eileen Stevens,” she snapped.

“A suspect?” her brother repeated in disbelief, then looked, stunned, at the seated man. “Laredo?”

Taylor’s eyebrows narrowed over eyes the color of the midmorning sky. “Who the hell is Laredo?” she demanded.

“I am,” the stranger told her affably. The next moment, he half rose in his seat and extended his hand to her. “J. C. Laredo,” he introduced himself. “I came in to see if we might be able to have a successful exchange of information. I would have asked last night,” he went on, “but you looked a little too hot and perturbed to listen to reason.”

“Taylor hardly ever listens to reason,” Frank told the man as if he was sharing some sort of a family confidence.

“Taylor also has excellent hearing and is standing right here,” she pointed out angrily to her brother, struggling to hang on to her temper.

She felt Laredo’s eyes slide over her torso as they took full measure of her. Slowly they went from her head down to her toes. It took all she had not to shiver.

“You most certainly are,” Laredo agreed in a voice that told her he highly approved of the body he’d just inventoried.

Frank leaned his head in toward Laredo and said, “I think you got her angry. I’d be careful if I were you. Taylor bites heads off when she’s angry.” With that, Frank began to retreat.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Laredo promised. His eyes shifted over to Taylor. “Taylor, is it?” he asked, rolling the name over on his tongue as if he were tasting it for sweetness. Satisfied, he smiled. “I think we got off on the wrong foot last night.”

Frank was obviously still within hearing range because she heard her brother chuckle to himself and murmur, “Like that never happened before.”

Taylor took a deep breath, struggling to get her surprisingly frayed temper under control. She was going to kill Frank when she got the chance. Never mind that he was two months shy of his wedding. She’d be doing her almost-sister-in-law a favor. Frank could be god-awful annoying when he wanted to be.

“All right,” she said, her voice straining to sound civil as she faced the man sitting at her desk. “This is the season for goodwill toward men. I’m listening, Laredo. What were you doing at Eileen Stevens’s apartment last night?”

Since the man had gotten out of the handcuffs, she saw no point in asking how he had managed to elude the security guards in the building’s lobby. That had obviously been child’s play for him.

Laredo answered without missing a beat. “Probably the same thing as you.”

She didn’t like playing games unless they involved a board and little colored game pieces. “You said you weren’t a cop.”

The look on his face was innocence personified. “I’m not.”

“Then you weren’t doing the same thing that I was,” Taylor concluded curtly. “And you weren’t supposed to be there.”

Instead of arguing the point with her, Laredo surprised her by nodding his head. But just as she began to wonder why he was being so agreeable, he admitted, “I bent the rules a little. But I am investigating her death.”

She highly doubted that there were two investigations going on at the same time. They hardly had enough people to sufficiently cover all the city’s crimes now. If another branch of law enforcement was involved, someone would have told the Chief of D’s, who in turn would have warned her.

Handsome or not, this character, she concluded, was full of hot air. “By whose authority?” she asked, thinking that she was just giving him enough rope to hang himself.

She wasn’t expecting the answer he gave her.

“Indirectly, her mother, Carole Stevens. I’m actually doing this as a favor to my grandfather. He used to date the dead woman’s mother,” he confided.

Taylor felt far from enlightened. Was this man just making this up and hoping his charm would fill in the gaps?

“You’re contaminating a crime scene as a favor to your grandfather?” she challenged incredulously.

“I know enough not to contaminate the crime scene,” Laredo assured her in a voice that she found as irritatingly patronizing now as she had the night before. The next moment, he reached into his pocket. Every nerve ending went on the alert and she started to reach for her sidearm out of habit.

Laredo noted her reaction. “Relax,” he told her in a voice that could have easily been used to gentle a wild animal. “I’m just reaching for my wallet, not my Saturday night special.”

She deeply resented the smirk she heard in the man’s voice.

“Do you own one?” she wanted to know.

The term referred to a weapon that was the common choice of thugs and penny-ante thieves more than two decades ago, before far more colorful, sophisticated and seductively affordable weapons hit the streets.

“I own a lot of guns,” he informed her easily, placing his wallet, opened and face up, in the middle of her desk.

Taylor looked down at the private investigator’s license he was showing her. The photograph in the corner was a surprisingly good one. But then, the thought whispered along the perimeter of her mind, the photograph was of a surprisingly good-looking man.

“John Chester Laredo, private investigator,” she read out loud.

Taylor raised her eyes quizzically to his. Chester? Who named their kid Chester these days, even as a middle name?

“That’s me,” he responded, taking his wallet back and tucking it into his pocket.

Taylor blew out a breath, trying to put a positive spin on things. At least she didn’t have to waste time with the sketch artist. Now, instead of arresting the annoying man, she just had to get rid of him.

“All right,” she allowed, “for the time being, let’s just say you’re on the level.”

Was it her imagination, or did his grin just get more annoying? “Let’s,” he agreed.

She frowned. “That still doesn’t give you the right to be there, ‘bending rules,’” she said sarcastically, “and poking around.”

“I wasn’t ‘poking,’” he corrected affably, “I was looking. And obviously, if I thought the police would object to what I was doing—” he leaned forward slightly “—I wouldn’t have come out and made myself known to you last night, now, would I?”

For a second, he had her. She was willing to admit he had a point.

But then, the next moment she realized that there was no way for him to have known that she was with the police department. She could have been with the housing management—or even a thief, drawn to the apartment by the yellow crime scene tape to see what she could make off with.

“You’re a little large to hide, even in a place as big as that,” she pointed out. “It seems to me, given a choice, you decided that it was best to take the bull by the horns.”

His grin was really starting to get to her, which made her increasingly uneasy.

“I wouldn’t exactly use the term bull,” Laredo told her. “I have a lot of friends on the force. I didn’t think anyone would mind.”

Taylor’s eyes narrowed. Think again, Laredo. She didn’t like anyone even remotely messing with her crime scene. “Well, then you thought wrong,” she informed him tersely.

Chapter Three

Laredo had gotten to his position in life by reading people correctly. Innate instincts had trained him to be an excellent judge of character. Consequently, he knew when to push and when to step back.

He also knew when a little extra persuasion might help him wear down barriers. He had a feeling that the sexy-looking blonde with the serious mouth did not respond favorably to being either opposed or coerced.

Moving slightly forward in the chair so that his face was closer to hers, Laredo looked into the woman’s eyes. They were a shade lighter than his own. And very compelling. You could tell a lot about a person by the way they looked at you and her eyes never wavered, never looked away.

“C’mon, Taylor,” he coaxed, “what’s the harm in sharing information?”

She didn’t want him getting familiar with her. He wasn’t her friend, he was an annoying man and she was still debating having him arrested for tampering with evidence.

“It’s Detective McIntyre,” she informed him stiffly, and then added, “and I don’t talk about ongoing investigations with civilians.” And that, she hoped, would bring an end to any further discussion of Eileen Stevens’s murder.

The corners of Laredo’s mouth curved in what she could only think of as a devilish grin. A wicked expression flared in his eyes as he said, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Taylor would have felt better if she’d thought that the air-conditioning system had broken down that morning. At least then she would have had something to blame for the sudden overwhelming wave of heat surging through her body, leaving no part untouched.

Stalling for time as she tried to get a grip, Taylor blew out a breath. Laredo’s eyes, she noted, never left hers.

The way she saw it, she had three ways to go here. She could keep sparring with this annoying private investigator and, most likely, get nowhere while taking precious time away from her investigation. That option held no appeal because she was already behind without a partner’s help.

Her second choice was to get someone to eject this overconfident ape from the premises, but she had the uneasy feeling that Laredo wasn’t lying about having friends in the department. If he knew her brother, he had to know others as well. Trying to get him thrown out might make her seem like a shrew—and it probably wouldn’t work anyway.

Or, door number three, she could toss Laredo a crumb in exchange for finding out exactly what he knew. There was the chance that he had stumbled across something. After all, he had managed to get to Eileen Stevens’s penthouse apartment before she had. Who knew how long he’d been there or what he might have seen—and taken?

Door number three it was.

Taylor braced herself. “All right, what do you have?”

She watched as his smile unfurled further. Why did she get the feeling that he was the spider and she was the fly, about to cross the threshold into his open house?

“I believe I said, ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’ That means that you go first, as it should be,” he added, “since my mother taught me that it should always be ladies first.”

Try as she might, Taylor just couldn’t form a mental picture of the woman who’d given birth to this larger-than-life, annoyingly sexy specimen of manhood.

“You have a mother?”

The question had slid from her mind to her tongue before she could stop it. What the hell was he doing to her manners and, more importantly, why was she letting him do it? Once this case was over, she was definitely going on vacation. Her batteries needed recharging.

“Had,” Laredo quietly corrected, his seductive grin toning down several wattage levels—and becoming all the more lethal for it.

Taylor did her best to steel herself. For all she knew, Laredo could just be orchestrating this to make her feel guilty. If she felt guilty enough about stumbling onto this sensitive area, he might think she’d fold easily.

It made sense, but even so, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just stomped across ground she shouldn’t have. She was extremely sensitive when it came to matters that concerned family. Family was, if anything, her Achilles’ heel.

Her family was chiefly responsible for who and what she was today. She’d joined the force and become a police detective because her mother had been one before her. And, because of what she’d seen transpiring in her family as a child, she was gun-shy when it came to relationships. The moment one appeared to go beyond being an inch in depth, she bailed, remembering what her mother had gone through with her father. No matter that her mother’s second marriage seemed made in heaven; it was the tempestuous first one that had left its indelible mark.

Taylor found it ironic that while she had implicit trust in the men she’d been partnered with when it came to life-and-death situations, she absolutely refused to trust any man with her heart. Taylor staunchly opposed revealing her vulnerability.

Rallying, Taylor squared her shoulders. “Okay, here’s what I’ve got.” She deliberately ignored the touch of triumph she saw enter his eyes. “Graduating fifth in her class from Stanford Law School, Eileen Stevens worked her way up extremely fast. She became a much sought-after criminal lawyer who rarely lost a case. None in the last five years. Her list of clients reads like a who’s who of the rich and famous—or infamous,” she added, thinking of a couple of so-called “wiseguys” who were on the list. “She was made partner at her law firm six months ago. According to the electronic calendar they found by her bed, the woman ate and slept work 24/7. She didn’t appear to have a social life that wasn’t connected to the firm.”

Taylor paused for a moment, wishing she understood how a woman with no social life could end up the victim of a very personal crime. “But someone hated her enough to tie her up and wrap a wet piece of leather tightly around her neck, then wait for the strip to dry and strangle her. My guess is that the process took at least a couple of hours.”

“How do you know they waited?”

Laredo didn’t look impressed by her conclusion, just mildly curious, like someone asking study questions they already knew the answer to.

She told him anyway. “The carpet is thick and lush—my guess is that it’s fairly new. There was a set of shoe prints set in it next to the bed, like someone had stood there for more than just a minute. The killer, watching her die.” The comforter beneath the woman’s body had been all tangled, as if Eileen had thrashed around while tied to the bedpost, trying to get free, but Taylor didn’t add that, waiting to see if Laredo would.

He didn’t. Instead, he merely nodded at her narrative. “So far,” the private investigator told her, “we’re of a like mind.”

“And you have nothing to add?” she demanded. He was playing games with her, just trying to find out what she knew. She didn’t like being duped.

“I didn’t say that,” he told her evenly, his gaze locked on hers.

“So?” she asked impatiently.

“I don’t have anything from the present—yet,” Laredo qualified. “But what I do have is more of a background on Eileen.”

Taylor crossed her arms before her, waiting. “Go ahead.” It was an order, not a request.

Laredo obliged and recited what he’d learned since his grandfather had come to him with this.

“Eileen Stevens was thirty-eight and the complete epitome of an obsessed career woman. But she wasn’t always so goal oriented. When she was a seventeen-year-old high school junior, Eileen got pregnant.” He saw the surprise in Taylor’s eyes and knew she wouldn’t be challenging the worth of the exchange between them. “Her mother wouldn’t allow her to have an abortion. The baby, a boy, was turned over to social services the day he was born. From what I gathered, the experience made Eileen do a complete one-eighty. She turned her back on her former wild life and buckled down to become the woman she is today.”

“Dead,” Taylor couldn’t help pointing out.

A hint of a smile touched his lips. “I don’t think that was in her plans.”

If Laredo was trying to undermine her by laughing at her, he was in for a surprise, Taylor thought. She’d survived growing up with Zach and Frank, expert tormentors both.