Cavanaugh on Duty(33)
Happy was not a sensation he was well acquainted with, not anymore. Happy had been another state of mind, locked away in his youth. The very best he could hope for, he thought, was not to be too miserable.
And nothing Kari with her hyphenated names could say was going to change that.
“Leave it alone, Kari,” he ordered gruffly.
About to continue with her argument, she stopped when it suddenly occurred to her. “You realize that was the first time you called me by my first name?”
He snorted. Leave it to her to pick up on just that. “Won’t happen again,” he promised shortly.
Kari sighed. “You are a hard nut to crack, Esteban,” she told him.
He liked it better when she called him by his last name. It made it less personal somehow. “I wouldn’t try if I were you,” he warned.
There was nothing to be gained for her. He wasn’t about to shed his frog skin and become a prince for her if she said just the right words.
She smiled at him. It was that wicked smile that got under his skin. Now that he’d made love with her, he was even less immune to it than before.
“But you’re not me,” she told him. “Maybe once this investigation is over,” Kari suggested, “we should give walking a mile in each other’s shoes a try. Who knows...it might go a long way toward building a strong partnership.”
Not to mention other things, she added silently.
He glanced down at the silver-heeled sandals she was wearing. “As long as the shoes I have to walk in aren’t those damn high heels you have on.”
She pretended to scrutinize them, then looked over toward his feet. “Oh, I don’t know, from what I saw, you have pretty decent legs. You might even look cute in them.”
“Let it go, Hyphen,” he gritted out.
Too late, she thought. But rather than continue exchanging witty banter, all she did in response was smile at him.
He found that even more unsettling than her banter.
Chapter 16
“He was an assistant district attorney?” Kari asked the man who had called the police to report discovering the body of the latest murder victim.
Still pale and shaking, investment broker George Springsteen squeezed a yes out of a throat that sounded like it was about to close up on him any second now. He looked apprehensively at the long black bag containing his longtime friend as two of the medical examiner’s assistants wheeled it out of the victim’s den on a gurney.
“We had a...a date to play tennis this morning,” the stricken broker said, struggling to maintain control over his voice. “Philip is—was—never late. He was obsessive about that.” The breath he blew out sounded more like a shudder. “When he didn’t show up at the court and didn’t call me, I knew something had to be wrong.”
“Wrong?” Esteban questioned the ashen-faced man. “What do you mean by ‘wrong’?”
Springsteen shrugged helplessly, his expression saying that it all seemed so insignificant now. “A flat tire, his ex-girlfriend showing up at the house, making a scene, that kind of thing.”
Kari picked up on the angle immediately. There was always a chance that this murder was done by someone taking advantage of the current spree and had nothing to do with the serial killer they were pursuing.
“She has a temper?” Kari asked the broker.
Taking in another deep breath, Springsteen nodded numbly. “She was always on him about something. That’s why he broke it off with her.” He stared at the wooden floor where he had stumbled across his friend’s body, his pallor growing even whiter. “But I didn’t think she would do something like—like this.”
Now that she gave it a little thought, neither did she, Kari decided. For one very important reason. But all bases had to be covered, so she asked, “Can you describe her?”
Springsteen looked as if his thoughts were scattered in a hundred different directions. It took him a moment to pull himself together enough to form some sort of answer.
“I don’t know...five-three, a hundred pounds maybe, give or take. I’m not good at this kind of thing,” he protested.
“You’re doing fine,” Kari assured him in a kind, soothing voice. “Given your description, you wouldn’t really say she was a big-boned, strong woman, right?”
“Ria? Hell, no.” The laugh that escaped his lips was devoid of any humor. “If she was any thinner, she’d look like a walking beanpole. She’s fanatical about not looking fat.”
She exchanged looks with Esteban and could tell by the look in her partner’s eyes that they were on the same page. The ex-girlfriend couldn’t have slashed the A.D.A.’s throat so cleanly. That would have taken a certain amount of strength, strength a lightweight couldn’t have managed.
That wasn’t to say, however, that, inspired by the recent series of murders, she hadn’t hired someone to slash her ex-boyfriend’s throat, Kari thought.
“Would you happen to have an address and phone number for this Ria?” Esteban asked the distraught broker.
He nodded numbly. “I haven’t deleted it from my phone yet.” Taking his phone out, he pulled up the woman’s phone number. Below it was her address. Springsteen offered his cell to Kari as he sighed deeply. “I guess I should take George’s number off my directory, too.”
“I don’t think he’ll be taking any more calls,” she told the dead man’s friend gently.
* * *
“I’ve moved on,” Ria Long snapped indignantly when Kari asked if she remembered the last time she’d been in contact with her former boyfriend.
The painfully slender young woman was standing in the doorway of her modest town house, the gossamer robe she had on barely covering all her assets as a breeze teased the material.
“What’s this all about? Philip send you over to plead his case?” she demanded haughtily, tossing her long brown hair over her shoulder. “Too bad. He had his chance.”
“So you don’t remember when you saw him last?” Esteban pressed.
The dark-haired woman smiled like a predator spotting a new prey as her eyes swept appreciatively over Esteban.
“A week ago. I saw him a week ago. He brought my stuff over and dumped it on the doorstep. The spineless jerk thought I wasn’t home, but I saw him slinking off. Why?” she wanted to know, her eyes narrowing as she honed in on Kari. “Did he say I took something?” She instantly became defensive. “That watch was mine—it belonged to my father. I gave it to Philip as a token of my love, but I don’t love him anymore so I took it back. If he—”
Kari cut the other woman off before she could get carried away, telling her curtly, “This isn’t about a watch.”
“Then what’s with all these questions?” Ria demanded, fisting one hand on her almost nonexistent hip. “What’s going on?”
“Ms. Long, where were you between the hours of twelve and three?” Kari asked, citing the approximate time of death the medical examiner had provided.
The woman looked from Kari to Esteban and then back again. It was obvious that her indignation hadn’t allowed her to connect the dots yet. “In bed. With my new boyfriend.”
“This new boyfriend have a name?” Esteban queried.
Ria gave up flirting and rolled her eyes. “Of course he has a name. Donald Barry. Now, why are you giving me the third degree?” she wanted to know. And then it finally hit her. Her eyes darted suspiciously back and forth between the two detectives. “Did something happen to Philip? Is that why you want to know where I was? Did he tell you I did something to him?”
Kari wrote down the other man’s name. They were going to have to speak to him in order to verify the alibi they’d just been given.
“I’m afraid he’s not saying anything anymore.” Kari faced the A.D.A.’s ex-girlfriend, hating the words she was about to say even though she’d taken an instant dislike to the woman she was talking to. The words were never easy to utter, because, in most cases, they confirmed the worst fears of the person on the receiving end of them. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, Ms. Long, but Philip Watson was murdered sometime between midnight and three a.m. this morning.”
Ria’s dark eyes widened in shock and disbelief. “No. You’re lying. This is some sick joke of Phil’s to get me to stay away. He’s not dead,” the woman shouted at them, tears of fear springing to her eyes even in the heat of her anger. “He can’t be dead. He can’t be!” Dissolving into despair, she crumbled to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. “He can’t be,” she repeated hoarsely, saying the words to herself rather than to them.
* * *
“Either she is one hell of an actress or that was on the level,” Kari said nearly an hour later as she and Esteban drove back to the precinct. Getting her second wind, she was behind the wheel again and, at the moment, annoyed with herself for feeling sorry for the woman they had just left in the arms of her current boyfriend. The latter, it turned out, had been in her bedroom the entire time they had conducted their interview with Ria on her front doorstep.