Cavanaugh's Surrender (7 page)

The pharmacist on duty expressed an initial reluctance to answer her questions about her sister’s medication until Destiny flashed her badge and ID for him. Mentally, she crossed her fingers that the young pharmacist wasn’t the belt-and-suspenders type. Because if he was, she had the sinking feeling that he would have felt compelled not just to take note of her ID but to call in and verify with her superior whether or not she was really supposed to be there, asking questions.

Destiny held her breath until the pharmacist finally lifted his rather thin, sloping shoulders, then dropped them again in what amounted to a disinterested shrug. With that, he went to the computer to access the prescription in question.

After several minutes had passed and the pharmacist still hadn’t stopped searching, Destiny felt compelled to ask, “Is there anything wrong?”

“That depends on your point of view,” he told her. His brow furrowed in frustration. “I can’t seem to find that prescription number. Are you sure that you got the numbers down right?”

There were a great many things that she was uncertain about, but that didn’t include her ability to recall things in crystal clarity. “Positive,” she told the pharmacist.

The young man frowned, his thin lips all but disappearing. “What did you say the patient’s name was again?”

“Paula Richardson,” she repeated, then recited, “Her date of birth is oh-three, oh-six, nineteen eighty-six.” Taking a breath to help steel herself off, she said, “She was found dead today.”

Startled, the pharmacist immediately asked, “And you think that the prescription was responsible? I assure you, every chemical used is of the highest grade. It couldn’t have been our—”

She held up her hand to stop him. When she spoke, it was in the small, soothing voice she’d once used to chase away Paula’s nightmares.

“No one is accusing your pharmacy of anything. We’re just trying to gather as much information as we can right now.”

Temporarily placated, the pharmacist returned to his computer. Hitting the keyboard, he scrolled down several pages.

“Well, she’s here in our records—we filled a standard antibiotic for her at the beginning of the year. Amoxicillin. For the flu,” he said, still staring at the screen. He hit several keys that took him back and forth between a couple of screens. “Nope, no sleeping pills,” he verified. “You’re sure that was her name was on the bottle?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Her mouth curved for a second in a semblance of a smile, doing her best to silently reassure the man that no one at the pharmacy was in trouble. She had the information she needed. “Thanks for your help.”

He seemed a little confused. “But I didn’t find anything.”

No, on the contrary, you did,
Destiny thought. The pharmacist with the baby face had indirectly found that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble and had carefully staged her sister’s death scene. The person had even gone to the trouble of replicating a prescription medication.

That meant that someone had
planned
to kill her sister. Had actually targeted Paula.

But why?

And to what end?

This didn’t sound like the work of an obsessive serial killer, because there were too many details adhered to. Besides, as a rule of thumb, a serial killer didn’t try to make a murder victim look like someone who committed suicide. Covertly or blatantly, serial killers were usually quite proud of their sick handiwork and enjoyed showing it off. Enjoyed basking in splashy headlines. At the same time, they usually were daring law enforcement agents to try to catch them.

This had been covered up, its sole purpose appearing to have been to kill Paula.

Again,
why?

It was half an hour later and she was back mentally staring at that question. And back driving toward the police station.

With this new information, there were things she needed to check out, to look into. The precinct was the only place she knew of with the kind of wealth of information and access to that information that she needed.

* * *

The precinct parking lot looked almost emptier this time than it had just a little while ago. Blocking the effects, Destiny hurried up the stairs for a second time, eager to get started. Eager to get to her desk.

She needed to document what she’d discovered. In the morning, she’d get in touch with Cavanaugh—she assumed the good-looking detective would be the one to work her sister’s case—and let him know that the prescription he’d found in the medicine cabinet and felt went a long way in supporting his suicide theory didn’t belong to her sister.

It belonged, in one way or another, to the killer. The prescription number, when she’d finally prevailed upon the pharmacist to look through the pharmacy chain’s archives, had once been the number on a bottle of cough medicine that had been prescribed for a child with bronchitis.

She couldn’t help wondering if there was some obscure connection there. Tracking down the name on the actual prescription would be her first order of business, she decided.

Armed with coffee from the vending machine and her determination, Destiny got off the elevator when it came to a stop and opened in the basement. Trying to think only of making progress and not about her sister, she made her way down the winding corridor to her office.

It never occurred to her that she might fail in reaching her objective. Because, as the popular saying she believed with all her heart went, failure was not an option here. She wouldn’t allow it to be.

Chapter 5

“S
o, Dad, how’s it going?”

Walking into the newly redecorated, state-of-the-art criminology lab at the ungodly hour of 7:00 a.m. the next morning, Logan crossed to the middle of the room. His father stood over a table that was rivaled only by the enormous one in Andrew Cavanaugh’s dining room.

The head of the crime lab was busy testing the contents of some substance Logan wasn’t even going to try to identify.

Wearing his white lab coat, Sean glanced up to see his son approaching. Surprised, he looked over Logan’s head at the clock on the wall behind him.

Well, this was unusual.

“You’re in early,” he commented. Logan was the one they used to have to dynamite out of bed to get him to school on time. As far as he knew, his son still loved sleeping in.
Early
was not a word Logan regarded with any semblance of approval. “Something to do with the case?”

Logan moved his shoulders in a vague shrug. “In a manner of speaking, I guess, but I wasn’t asking you about the evidence just now.”

Still working, Sean raised a quizzical eyebrow in response. “Oh?”

“No,” Logan told him, “I was asking you ‘personally’ how it was going.”

“Fine.” There was a note of amused caution in Sean’s voice. Then, because he did possess a measure of curiosity and Logan was behaving rather strangely, Sean pressed for details. “Are you asking about anything specifically—personally?” he tacked on, deliberately highlighting the word Logan had used.

Oh, the hell with it. He might as well just blurt it out, Logan decided. “Kenny said that you and Matt’s mother are seeing each other,” he said, referring to his sister, Kendra. “Regularly,” he added in case his father was going to try to pretend not to know what he was talking about. “I just wanted to ask how that was going.”

So, that was it. Sean had wondered how long it would take for word to spread. Apparently not very long at all. The Cavanaugh grapevine seemed to have an even faster connection than the Cavelli grapevine did.

“Sabrina Abilene and I are more than ‘seeing’ each other, Logan,” he informed his son, doing his best to sound serious and keep the laughter at bay.

Logan sighed dramatically, leaned his hip against the long, sleek stainless-steel table that displayed a host of mysterious instruments and said to his father in a low, serious voice, “Well, young man, I think it’s time that we had ‘The Talk.’”

Sean laughed then, affectionately cuffing the back of his son’s head the way he’d sometimes done when Logan and his brothers were younger and had been guilty of doing something stupid.

“That’s enough out of you, or there’ll be some serious consequences, Detective Cavanaugh. Go, make yourself useful.” He pointed toward the door. “Do some detective work and earn that big, hefty salary the city’s paying you.”

“That only takes about two hours out of my day.”

If he looked at his pay and divided it by the number of hours he put in overall, he was getting paid a pittance. But he wasn’t in it for the money, or even because it was the family business. He believed in his work. Believed in making a difference. But that wasn’t anything he wanted to advertise. It clashed with his devil-may-care image.

Nodding toward what his father was testing, he asked, “You find anything new?”

“Nothing we haven’t already surmised. Paula Richardson had enough sleeping pills in her system to put a school of sharks to sleep. The slashed wrists were just overkill. Too bad. She looked like a lovely girl.”

“A lovely girl somebody really wanted dead,” Logan commented. “How’s your chief assistant holding up?”

Sean smiled, noting how hard Logan was trying to appear as if he was completely detached in his view of the case and Destiny’s connection to it. If Logan had really been detached, Sean mused, he wouldn’t have felt the need to have that point driven home.

“On the surface, she’s behaving very professionally. But I won’t pretend that I’m not concerned about her, Logan. She’s keeping everything bottled up inside, and that kind of thing can only be sustained for so long before the inner pressure gets to be too much. Keep an eye out on her for me, will you?”

Logan was surprised by the request. “Dad, I’m going to be working the case, remember?”

“Yeah, well, so will she, no matter what anyone says to the contrary.” He smiled to himself. “She’s stubborn enough to be one of us,” he told his son. “By the way, she went by the pharmacy where the prescription was issued.”

Logan was about to protest that he had kept the prescription container in his possession, dropping it off at the lab last night, but that obviously hadn’t made a difference.

“And?”

“And it turns out that they never issued the prescription to our victim. They have a file on her and the number came out of their pharmacy, but years ago and not for sleeping pills but for some cough medicine for a little girl. Backs up Destiny’s theory that her sister was murdered. By the way,” he added mildly, “her desk is at the other end of the floor—in case you want to swing by sometime and, you know, exchange theories,” he concluded euphemistically.

Logan merely shook his head. “You know, Dad, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you had something up your sleeve.”

Sean innocently raised one hand into the air, demonstrating. “Just my arm, boy. Just my arm.”

It was a well-known fact, especially around his family, that people in love tended to want to pair up everyone else in the firm belief that
everyone
should be as happy as they were.

Standing in the doorway, Logan took a good look at his father, seeing him in a completely different light since when he had first entered.

“Dad?”

Sean was already refocused on his task. His “Yes?” was more than a little distracted.

The thought of his father in a romantic relationship had never really crossed his mind before. He wasn’t certain how to react, really. But he and his siblings had always been cautioned about leaping to conclusions, so he decided to ask first before trying to get used to the idea.

“You’re not in love or anything, are you?”

“Define ‘or anything,’” Sean countered, amused by the question. When his son seemed at a loss for words, Sean told him. “You’ll be the second to know when and if I am,” he promised.

“Who’ll be the first?” Logan asked suspiciously. He fully expected his father to say “Sabrina.”

But again, his father surprised him. “Me,” Sean replied simply.

Logan left the lab, feeling more than a little bewildered even if he didn’t show it. His world had been turned upside down. First they had discovered that his father had been accidentally switched at birth with another male infant and that he, and thus
they,
were actually part of the Cavanaugh family. If that wasn’t enough, now it looked as if after years of being content to be their sole parent, his father was dating.

Seriously
dating, from the sound of it.

At twenty-eight, Logan felt he was too old to be entertaining the idea of getting a stepmother. Wasn’t that something children acquired?

You’re not the one who matters here.

That was just plain weird, he thought. He could almost hear Bridget’s voice in his head. Bridget, the one who always put him in his place.

The main thing to remember, he told himself, was that his father seemed happy, and heaven only knew his father
deserved
to be happy.

Arriving at the closed elevator door, he was about to press the button on the wall beside it when a light pooling along the floor down the hall caught his eye, and then his attention. He’d come in early to catch his father alone so that he could feel him out about the woman he was seeing—he’d run into Kendra and Matt on his way out of the precinct last night and they had mentioned the change in his father’s evening schedule. Logan knew his father was always in early and always alone, which made it a good time to talk to him.

Was he wrong? Did his father have a kindred spirit amid the CSI unit?

Curious, Logan moved away from the elevator bank and made his way down the hallway.

He had a hunch the light was coming from Destiny’s office even before he actually got to the doorway and looked in. Given the current case the unit and he had just caught, her being here early didn’t exactly come as a great shock to him.

But it did surprise him that Destiny appeared to be wearing the same clothes she’d had on yesterday.

“Didn’t you go home last night?” he asked.

Completely absorbed by what she was doing, Destiny jumped at the sound of Logan’s deep voice intruding into her world. She pressed her lips together just in time to suppress the yelp of surprise that automatically rose to her tongue.