Mission: Cavanaugh Baby (6 page)

Too bad the terrier couldn’t return the favor, she thought. She was definitely out of her element down here.

“Turn there,” Shane instructed. “To your left,” he added when she all but missed the small door that was on that side.

Grudgingly following his instruction, Ashley walked into the lab.

Unlike the corridor she’d just been down, the large rectangular room, outfitted with a myriad of strange-looking equipment and devices, was extremely well lit. All shadows had been summarily banished from this part of the basement.

Hearing a commotion behind her, the young woman in the lab coat turned from a mysterious machine she’d just inserted a test tube into.

Her serious expression instantly melted when she saw Shane. “Hi, Shane, what brings you here to my part of the world?” Her glance took in the dog as well as the young woman holding the animal. “And you brought me a visitor. Two,” she amended, looking at the terrier. Her eyes rose to meet the woman’s. “Hi, I’m Destiny Richardson,” she said, introducing herself.

Of course you are,
Ashley thought, offering a perfunctory smile.

It figured that he would have a girlfriend named Destiny, she couldn’t help thinking as she watched the two of them interact. The lab technician probably fit right in with girls who had names like Bambi and Tiffany. Ashley was willing to bet those belonged to two more of his girlfriends.

“Ashley St. James,” Ashley told the lab technician in response.

“And your friend?” Destiny asked, removing one latex glove to pet the terrier the officer was holding.

To Ashley’s surprise, the terrier didn’t instantly begin barking. Instead he allowed himself to be petted by this woman. He even seemed to like it, she realized. The woman went up several notches in her estimation. Maybe she wasn’t just a bimbo after all.

“Albert,” Ashley replied, then commented, “He seems to like you.”

“Everyone likes Destiny,” Shane interjected.

Destiny laughed softly. “That’s only because I’m a lot happier these days than I used to be,” she told Ashley modestly.

Next the woman would be batting her eyes at Cavanaugh and saying he was the reason behind the changes in her life, Ashley guessed.

It took everything she had not to just roll her eyes—or get nauseous. Had he come down here to guide her the way he’d claimed, or to flaunt one of his girlfriends at her?

As if she cared, Ashley thought.

“Maybe I should come back later?” she suggested. “Give you and...Destiny, is it—?” she asked, pretending not to have noted the technician’s name “—a little alone time together.”

Destiny looked at her, clearly more confused than Shane appeared.

“Why would we need any alone time together?” she questioned.

Shane was the one who answered her rather than the woman who’d initially made the offer. “I think that’s the officer’s quaint way of saying she thinks we’re in a relationship.”

Ashley scowled at Cavanaugh for the cavalier way he’d just volunteered her guess. He really did tick her off, and if anything, his good looks just seemed to intensify her annoyance.

But that slipped into the background the next moment when the sound of the lab technician’s laughter told Ashley that maybe she’d made a mistake.

Chapter 5

“I
’m sorry,” Destiny apologized as she stopped laughing. “I guess I do look like a woman in love,” she agreed. “But though Shane’s a terrific guy and I do love him—” she nodded in the detective’s direction “—I love him like a brother. Shane is
not
the object of my affections. His brother, Logan, is.”

It was obvious by the look in her eyes that the woman was very, very much in love with whoever this Logan person was. Undoubtedly another Cavanaugh, Ashley assumed, since she’d just referred to Shane as his brother. The police department seemed to be absolutely
crawling
with them. The only one she actually knew was Dr. Patience Cavanaugh Coltrane. She was the vet who took care of the police dogs in the K-9 division, and she was really terrific, but that in no way reflected on the rest of the family.

When it came to accepting things, she’d always been a person who needed to be shown rather than told. She’d been burned too many times not to be that way.

“We’re getting married soon,” Destiny confided in what amounted to a stage whisper.

The moment the words were out of her mouth, a wave of regret washed over her. There was concern in her eyes as they darted toward Shane. “Oh, God, Shane, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

Mindful of the officer standing between them, Shane was quick to cut his future sister-in-law off. “Nothing to be sorry about,” he told her, absolving Destiny of any residual guilt. He cited the comparison she was making as one that compared apples and oranges, even though it really wasn’t.

The concern did not leave Destiny’s face. “How are you doing these days?” she asked.

“Great,” Shane told her with feeling, as if volume could negate the sense that his heart had been turned into shredded wheat. “And I’ll be even better once you examine this ill-tempered, four-footed barking machine and let me know if the little devil’s carrying around any clues as to the identity of the person who murdered his poor mistress.”

“What happened?” Destiny asked, needing to know the circumstances surrounding the case to help her determine what she should be looking for.

“Someone performed a very primitive C-section on his owner to steal her unborn child.” It was Ashley who filled her in. Her own words caused her to shudder.

“Oh God,” Destiny murmured, trying to distance herself from the gruesome image the officer’s description created. She looked at the terrier the Animal Control officer was holding. “Did the dog bite the perpetrator?” she asked hopefully.

“We were kind of hoping you could tell us,” Ashley told her.

For a second Destiny looked at what she was doing, then, making a spur of the moment decision, set the test tube aside and said, “Sure, I’ll run some tests, see what we can find out. C’mon, boy,” she said to the terrier, taking him from the other woman. “You and I have a date with a wide-tooth comb.”

Shane watched, surprised that his future sister-in-law was not on the receiving end of a display of the canine’s hyper temper.

“Why did he bark at me and not you?” he couldn’t help wondering out loud. It wasn’t as if he made a habit of abusing dogs and Albert had sensed it.

“Maybe he’s a good judge of character,” Ashley intoned. It earned her a rather dirty, exasperated look from the man beside her.

Shane decided that taking umbrage at her comment would wind up being a waste of time, so he put it out of his mind. “Why don’t we go up to the squad room and you can give me that statement now?” he suggested instead.

Ashley looked toward the dog, now with Destiny in another part of the large lab. “I’d rather wait until she’s finished with him, if you don’t mind.”

She’d said it politely enough, but he knew she wasn’t asking for his indulgence. She was telling him she wasn’t about to leave until the animal was leaving with her. This was carrying her duties to the extreme, he thought.

“If I leave, Albert might become agitated. But you can go,” she told him cheerfully.

“Doesn’t seem like much point in going up there to take your statement if you’re not up there with me,” he pointed out, enunciating each word.

She looked at him. Was he planning on waiting around with her? “Don’t you have anything else to do?”

“No, I kinda wanted to solve this murder before noon,” Shane answered in a deliberately saccharine voice. Then his tone changed as he said more seriously, “Yes, I’ve got other things to do, but the details of this murder take precedence over everything else at the moment.”

“So, just to be clear, you’re going to wait here in the lab with me until Destiny is finished checking Albert out?” she asked in disbelief.

He got the impression that she wasn’t happy about that. Why? “Looks that way.”

To Ashley, it also looked as if she was stuck. Well, she might as well make the most of it. “Okay, answer a question for me.”

He looked at her with a touch of wariness, wondering just what the woman was up to. Well, he wasn’t going to find out by just staring at her. With a shrug, he said, “Go ahead.”

“Why did Destiny apologize for being so happy about her upcoming wedding?” she asked. “It seems only natural that she would be.”

Ashley knew that whatever was at the bottom of this was most likely a private matter, but she had to say that her curiosity had been aroused by the look of contrition on the lab technician’s face. Why would a wedding matter to this irreverent detective? People were usually happy about a wedding taking place in the family.

At the same time that she was wondering about his reaction, Ashley told herself she was curious only because she liked having all her facts straight before her, not because the situation somehow intrigued her or actually mattered to her.

When the detective made no reply to her question, she took a guess. “Were the two of you together at some point?”

“At no point,” Shane informed her tersely.

Despite his protest, had she hit a sensitive spot? “Then why?”

What was with all these questions? Shane made no effort to hide his annoyance. “Are you practicing being a detective?”

Not rising to the bait, she replied, “No, I’m just being human.”

“Good luck with that,” Shane snapped.

Damn it, he wasn’t supposed to be this sensitive about it after all the time that had passed. He’d always been one to roll with the punches and then move along. But this particular turn of events, he had to admit, had definitely sucker punched him. He’d actually thought that what he and Kitty had had was something special, something that was going to last.

That he could be so wrong had thrown him and wreaked havoc on not just his confidence, but on his ability to make a judgment call.

He’d hurt her, Shane thought. He could see it flash across the officer’s face before she quickly replaced the expression with an indifferent one. The woman was shutting down, he realized.

“Sorry,” he muttered. Apologies did not come easily to him, but he owned up to his mistakes. “You didn’t deserve that.”

While apologies had never been her undoing, neither could she remain indifferent to someone who actually tendered one to her, apologizing for his insensitive comment. That hardly ever happened to her.

“No,” she agreed, “I didn’t.” Ashley paused, obviously debating saying her next words, then deciding to go ahead. “You might want to work on your social skills when you start questioning people about this murder,” she advised somewhat stiffly.

He’d never had problems with social skills. At least, not before the breakup. He looked at Ashley for a long moment.

“I was engaged,” Shane said out of the blue after a beat.

Ashley looked at him, picking up on the key word. “Was?”

Shane frowned. What did she need, a road map? “Yeah, was.”

The two words just hung in the air, begging for a follow-up. Begging for something more substantial.

Since the detective wasn’t volunteering anything, Ashley guessed that maybe he needed to be prodded in order to continue. Nobody just threw out that type of single sentence and then left it at that.

“What happened?”

He’d asked himself that a dozen times, examining the events as they’d occurred an equal amount of times. The answers he’d come up with were unacceptable—but they were all he had. “My partner got shot.”

* * *

Ashley waited, but the detective didn’t say anything further. With a sigh, she told him, “You’re going to have to give me more of a clue than that. What did your partner getting shot have to do with your engagement breaking up?” Even as she asked, an answer occurred to her and her eyes darted in his direction. “You weren’t engaged to your partner, were you?”

Rather than answer her directly, Shane stared off into the distance as he relayed the incident. “When Vance got shot, Kitty said that she suddenly realized it could have been me in the hospital. Me in the morgue.”

Her eyes widened as sympathy flooded through her. “Did your partner—?”

He’d anticipated her question. “No, he didn’t die, but he could have. Kitty said she couldn’t live with the uncertainty of not knowing from day to day if she was going to be a wife or a widow.” His voice trailed off as he struggled to push the memory of the pain, of the feeling of being emotionally abandoned, away.

“Comes with the job,” Ashley said simply.

He looked at her then. Why couldn’t Kitty have seen it that way? Given half a chance, they could have been working on creating a family together by now.

“That’s what I told her,” he said quietly. “She wanted me to choose.”

“Between the job and her?” If Ashley had been given that sort of a choice, she knew which she would have picked. Anyone who did that sort of thing to someone else didn’t deserve to be chosen.

Shane shrugged. How the hell had they come to talking about this? “Yeah.”

Well, he was here, so that answered the logical question as to which side he’d taken. “And you chose the job.”

Shane laughed shortly, but this time his tone wasn’t nasty as he said, “Nothing gets by you, does it?”

He was trying to be flippant, but she wasn’t buying it. The man had been hurt. Deeply. And apparently, some members of his family or almost family felt he was
still
hurting.

“I’m sorry it didn’t turn out, Cavanaugh.”

“Yeah, me, too.” And then he shrugged again. “Guess it just wasn’t meant to happen. It probably would’ve fallen apart eventually, anyway.”

“The marriage?” she asked, trying to get to the bottom of what he was telling her.

“Yeah.”

Ashley wasn’t following him. “What makes you say that?”

“Statistics,” he answered tersely. When she continued looking at him quizzically, he elaborated. “Most detectives on the force are divorced once or twice. Some of them even more than that.”

“Does that go for the Cavanaughs, too?” she asked him.

Like everyone else on the force, Ashley was aware of the family and the effect they had on the police force, but she didn’t know all that much
about
them. For the most part, she kept to herself. That didn’t really allow for much of anything to get into her world.

“Actually, no,” he admitted. They were the flaw in his theory, but he didn’t like to dwell on that. “As far as I can tell, Cavanaughs get married, and they stay married.” But there was a basic reason for that, he thought. “A lot of them pick people who are part of law enforcement in some way. That gives them a leg up on all this.”

“I take it your former fiancée wasn’t part of our world.” She saw the half smirk on Shane’s face when she made the reference and correctly interpreted it. “Despite what you think of the division I work with, Animal Control
is
part of the police department.”

The corners of his mouth curved. Granted, she was cute and feisty, but there was just no way to equate the two fields.

“Meet many armed possums during the course of your day, Officer?” he asked.

“My work isn’t as tame as you seem to think it is,” Ashley said defensively. “When was the last time you caught an injured pit bull that’s just taken down a Doberman?” she challenged.

The closest he’d come to something like that was chasing down a bank robber who’d pulled a gun on him when he caught up to the man. If the gun hadn’t jammed, he wouldn’t have been here now—and Kitty’s prophecy would have come true.

“You did that?” he asked, impressed.

She hadn’t raised the example to garner any kind of recognition or bragging rights; she’d just wanted him to know that being in Animal Control wasn’t just coasting along from day to day.

“With my heart in my throat, yes,” she answered.

“How’d you do that?” he asked. “Catch the pit bull?” From what he knew about the breed, they were all teeth and bred for fighting. Without shooting it, the petite officer didn’t stand a chance against one—most people didn’t.

“All I can say is thank God for tranquilizing darts.” She’d fired three into the charging animal, praying madly. “The pit bull stopped about a foot away from me.” Half a second more and the dog’s teeth would have ripped into her flesh.

Shane shook his head. Confronted with that, he might have quit the next day. Hell, that very afternoon. “That probably qualifies as the worst few minutes of your life.”

Seemed it should. But it didn’t, not with the kind of upbringing she’d had.

“That doesn’t even make the top five.”

The remark was out of her mouth before she could think to stop herself. She didn’t even have to look at him to know that she’d captured the detective’s attention.

Shane looked at her, suddenly seeing the petite woman in a completely different light. Just what sort of a life had she led? “What are the top five?”

“Sitting in the CSI lab, making small talk while waiting for the technician to finish fine-tooth-combing a Jack Russell terrier comes to mind.”

He was beginning to realize that the woman blocked every attempt at delving into her life, or getting any answers. Why?

“I was being serious,” he told her.

“So was I,” she told him glibly.

Rising, Ashley crossed over to where Destiny was presently running a comb through the animal’s fur. “Are you almost finished?” she asked.