Cavanaugh's Surrender (11 page)

“Don’t make me get tough, Richardson,” he warned. There was a glint in Logan’s eyes that she couldn’t quite read.

Destiny thought about ignoring him, but she had a feeling that he wasn’t going to drop this until he saw her getting up and leaving the precinct.

Okay, if that was the way he wanted to play it, she could do that. She could leave. But she wasn’t going to go home. She wanted to go back to her sister’s apartment and see what she could find there now that she had something to look for—a love letter or a note, or some sort of communication that could give her more of a hint as to just who had killed her sister.

Or, at the very least, maybe she could discover the identity of the person her sister had been involved with before everything had fallen so ignobly apart.

“Okay. I’ll go home,” she agreed docilely.

This was too easy. Logan eyed her suspiciously. “Okay?” he echoed. “Just like that?”

“Just like that,” she repeated innocently. She smiled at him, doing her best to seem guileless. “You’re very persuasive.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “And you must think I’m very dumb.”

“No, on the contrary,” she told him. “I think you’re very smart and you make a lot of sense.” She looked down at the outfit she’d had on now for close to forty-eight hours. “Besides, I
am
beginning to feel like I smell a little gamey in this outfit,” she told him. “I could stand to take a hot shower, maybe eat a sandwich and then get some rest. I feel dead on my feet,” she confessed with just the right note of sincerity to sell this.

Logan’s expression was impassive as he appraised her. For just a moment, his mind had conjured up the image of her naked, with the hot water hitting her body. It took him a long moment to tear his mind away. When he did, he nodded at what she’d just said. “Nice to hear you being reasonable.”

She shot him a wide smile. “Maybe you’re just rubbing off on me.”

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he told her once they’d reached the ground floor.

“Not necessary,” Destiny protested, but only marginally since she knew he expected it. If she made too much of a big deal about his walking her to her car, he might suspect that she wasn’t going home the way she’d told him.

“Humor me,” he said.

“You’re the primary on this,” she responded, symbolically waving a white flag.

So he walked her to her car, and under his watchful eye she got in behind the steering wheel and turned her ignition key. The car was instantly ready to peel out. Instead, she slowly eased out of her parking spot.

Using her rearview mirror, she could still see Logan watching her as she pulled out of the parking lot.

Destiny didn’t let go of the breath she was holding until she had gone more than a mile. Remaining vigilant, she saw no sign of his vehicle following hers.

She’d made good her escape.

Releasing a deep, cleansing breath, she turned her car toward Paula’s apartment.

Chapter 8

T
he yellow police tape was still up. Just as she’d hoped, the police guard was gone.

Destiny tried not to focus on the tape as she ducked under it. Just seeing it there, before the door of the apartment where Paula had lived, created an eerie, oppressive sensation in the middle of her chest.

Using her key, Destiny let herself into the apartment, then eased the door closed behind her.

Only then did she reach for the light switch and turn it on. The moment she did, she jumped, startled. Her gun was in her hand in less than a heartbeat despite the fact that her heart was beating fast enough to break the sound barrier.

“Easy, it’s just me,” Logan said to her, his hands up as he took a couple of steps toward her. And then, he slowly dropped them to his sides, watching her with awe. “My God, that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen anyone draw their weapon. You should enter some sort of competition. You’d win, hands down—no pun intended,” he tacked on.

Destiny drew in a deep breath, trying to steady her nerves. For a split second, she’d thought she’d stumbled across her sister’s killer.

“What the
hell
are you doing here?” she demanded, holstering her weapon. It took all she could do to keep her hands from shaking.

“Same thing as you,” Logan answered mildly. Actually, that wasn’t true. He was here to see what she’d look for, fairly certain that left on her own, she wasn’t all that keen about sharing what she found.

“I could have shot you,” she cried. Didn’t he realize that? Why had he been there, in the dark like some kind of creature of the night?

“But you didn’t,” Logan countered. “I like to look on the bright side,” he added.

“How did you know I’d come here?” she asked. There was no other way to interpret his standing there in the dark like that. He’d been lying in wait for her, confident that she was going to show up, even though she’d told him she was going home.

“Just a hunch.” Because she was obviously waiting for more, he elaborated. “You had me going for a while—until you said that I was the primary.”

“Well, you are,” she said. It came out almost like an accusation.

“It was more the way you said it,” he amended. Logan shook his head. “It came out much too docile for you.”

“What are you, an expert on me now?” Destiny stared at him, completely mystified. “You’ve only known me for, what, a day?”

“Almost two,” he corrected, as if that explained it all. “And sometimes, you just know things.” He smiled at her with an air of satisfaction that immediately got under her skin. “I would have done the same in your shoes.”

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to understand. Was he drawing parallels between them? Or was he just trying to get her to drop her guard?

Don’t hold your breath, Cavanaugh.

“So exactly what are you saying? That I’m just like you?”

“Oh, God, I hope not.” He said it with such feeling that just for a split second, she believed him. “What fun would that be?”

Was that how he viewed his job? This investigation? As fun? Was he
that
irreverent?

“I wasn’t aware that we were supposed to be having fun,” she said cynically.

“You create little pockets of it along the way,” he told her, and she had the feeling that despite the easygoing smile on his lips, Logan was absolutely serious. “Otherwise, this job’ll eat you alive.”

For now, she let that go. “How did you get here ahead of me?” she asked. “I drove away with you still standing in the parking lot, watching me leave.”

“I took a shortcut,” he told her. “Besides, I have the car with the pretty little dancing lights and the siren I can turn on whenever I’m stuck in traffic.”

“What would you have done if I hadn’t come here?” she challenged.

“Oh, but you did, and I figured it was a pretty safe bet from where I was standing. So,” he said, getting down to business, “what is it that we’re going to be looking for?”

For a second, the private part, the part that had always been protective of Paula and their mother before that, wanted to defiantly dig in. But what was the point? Protecting Paula no longer really mattered. What mattered was not letting whoever had done this to her sister get away with it. And if that person was the serial killer the way she believed him to be, well, then finding him and making him pay for all this as well as keeping him from killing anyone else would at least in some minor way give some sort of meaning to Paula’s death.

She shrugged her shoulders in answer to his question. “Something. Anything.”

“Well, that’s really pinning it down.” He laughed shortly. “In other words, we’ll ‘know’ it when we see it.”

“Yes.” And then, as he began to head toward Paula’s bedroom to conduct a second, more thorough search through her closet and bureau drawers, Destiny recalled something. She addressed his back. “When we were kids, Paula used to keep a diary. I don’t know if she still does—still did,” Destiny corrected herself, still struggling with the fact that she had to use the past tense. “But it’s worth looking for.”

The first wave of crime scene investigators had taken the laptop they’d found—presumably Paula’s—back to the precinct. The technician who had gone over it—Brenda Cavanaugh—the chief of D’s daughter-in-law—was exceptionally thorough.

“They didn’t find anything besides her daily schedule on her computer,” Logan told her.

That was no surprise. “They wouldn’t have,” Destiny told him, beginning her search in the kitchen. “In some ways, Paula was kind of old-fashioned. She liked the thought of writing personal things down using a pen and paper.” Her mouth curved just a little as she remembered her sister’s words. “Paula said she thought it was more ‘romantic’ that way.”

Logan paused and glanced in her direction. “Sounds like she was a really unique person.”

Destiny suppressed the heartfelt sigh that rose in her throat.

God, but she was going to miss Paula. Even though they hadn’t gotten together all that much and Paula had her own set of friends, friends that she gathered she, Destiny, didn’t have all that much in common with, she would miss the
idea
of Paula, the comforting feeling that Paula was somewhere in the world with her. Now she had to accept the cold, hard fact that she would never see Paula again no matter how much she wanted it or how hard she wished for it.

Her baby sister was gone, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

But the next best thing would be finding Paula’s killer and making him pay for this. It was all she had to cling to.

“Yeah, she was,” Destiny agreed in a small, strained voice.

With that, she turned back to the kitchen and began opening all the drawers, checking all the shelves, including the refrigerator and the freezer. Paula wouldn’t have put it somewhere obvious, not since Destiny had accidentally stumbled across it under her sister’s mattress when she was changing the sheets years ago. Because Paula had become secretive and uncommunicative, she’d read a couple of pages—just enough to discover that David Chesnee had been Paula’s first and that Paula had been disappointed because there were no shooting stars, no wild feelings of fulfillment.

That was as far as she’d gotten before Paula walked in and caught her. Absolutely livid, Paula didn’t talk to her for a month.

With all her heart, she wished that Paula wasn’t talking to her now. That it was just anger and not death that separated them.

Pressing her lips together, she blinked several times to keep back the tears. She had no time for tears.

Destiny moved about the kitchen methodically, carefully going through one section at a time. But the result was still the same. She was coming up empty. The diary—if it existed—wasn’t wrapped in a plastic bag and tucked in the recesses of the refrigerator. It wasn’t in a plastic case on the bottom of the freezer. And it definitely wasn’t in any of the cabinets or the small pantry.

Stumped, Destiny was on the verge of admitting that her sister no longer kept something as old-fashioned as a diary when her foot hit the bottom of the refrigerator. The long, rectangular plastic section just beneath the refrigerator door came loose.

She looked down at it and frowned. She had the same problem with the one in her apartment. Having removed it to clean the coils in the front, she’d found that reattaching the section was far trickier than she had anticipated. It kept coming loose, bedeviling her. In Paula’s case, Destiny doubted that she’d taken it off to clean the coils. Cleaning had never exactly been high on her sister’s priority list. Most likely she—

Destiny stopped and stared at the loose section as if seeing it for the first time.

The next moment, she dropped to her knees in front of the refrigerator. Pushing the rectangular section out of the way, Destiny reached beneath the refrigerator as far as she could. Fingers outstretched, she felt around.

Which was just the way Logan found her, hunkered down, flat on the floor with her arm underneath the refrigerator. Not knowing what to think, only that she was lying on the floor, he rushed over to her. Logan quickly got down on the floor beside her.

“Richardson, you okay?” he asked, concerned.

She could have sworn that her fingertips had just barely brushed against something. Positive it had to be the diary, she focused on coaxing it out and was oblivious to whatever Cavanaugh was saying.

The next moment, a pair of strong hands pulled her back, away from the refrigerator. And then, just as if she was some weightless rag doll, she was off the floor and in his arms. How she’d gotten turned around, she wasn’t sure. Just as she wasn’t sure how he’d managed to get her up without tearing off the arm that had been snaked under the refrigerator. The only thing she
did
know was that there were less than two inches between them and she found herself looking into those magnetic green eyes of his.

Her stomach tightened into a knot. He was much too close.

There was concern written all over his face. “What happened?” he asked. Then, before she had a chance to utter a single word, Logan urgently demanded, “Are you all right?”

For just a split second, as her breath struggled to move back into her lungs, Destiny was utterly at a loss for words. Her mind had gone numb. But not her body. Her body felt as if a blanket of heat was wrapped all around her.

And then, with a determined surge of strength, she pulled herself together. The heat receded and her senses returned. Her mind was functioning again.

“Yeah, I’m fine, except that I think my right arm is longer than my left one now.” The sarcastic tone faded as she told him, “I think I felt something.” Turning, she pointed to the refrigerator. “It’s under there. I’m sure of it.”

“It’s probably just dust—or the dead carcass of a rodent,” he guessed.

She blocked the latter image from her mind. She’d seen more than her share of dead bodies—Paula’s included—but a dead rat made her squeamish.

“No,” she insisted, “this felt like something straight and flat—like the edge of one of those black-and-white copybooks. You know the kind I’m talking about.” She looked at him expectantly, as if, for this one moment, he could access her thoughts.