Cavanaugh on Duty(9)

It was a start, she thought.

Kari heard Morrow grumble almost inaudibly under his breath. All she caught was something that made a vague reference to his retirement still being too far off. Then the man said more distinctly, “No time to make small talk right now. You and the hyphen here are up. She’s got the address. I’ll talk to you later,” he emphasized, looking accusingly at the newest member of his team before he went back into his glass-enclosed office.

“The hyphen?” Esteban repeated, looking at Kari. He’d told himself that for the most part, after last night, he was just going to ignore her, but for once his curiosity got the better of him.

“Cavelli-Cavanaugh,” she reminded him. “It’s hyphenated.”

He shook his head in disbelief. The last three years his very survival had depended on traveling under the radar, not attracting any attention to himself. He saw her name as being the exact opposite.

“You’re really using both?” he asked her.

To Kari, it was the only logical way to go and it made perfect sense.

“Since I thought I was born the one, but was really born the other and there’s family attached to both names, I figured...why not?” she asked.

Esteban shrugged indifferently in response to her rhetorical question. “Makes no difference to me,” he told her. “I don’t care what you call yourself as long as you answer if I call you.”

This, she thought, was going to be one hell of an interesting partnership—for as long as it lasted, and she still had her doubts it would live out the week, given his attitude.

“By the way, coffee’s yours,” she told him just as he was about to walk back toward the doorway.

Esteban stopped and regarded the container with less than enthusiastic interest. “I didn’t—”

“No,” she cut in, anticipating what he was about to say, “but I did.” Then, just in case he wasn’t following her—or possibly wasn’t even listening to her—she clarified, “I bought coffee for you. Sort of a welcome-to-the-department offering,” she explained before Fernandez could ask her why she had bothered to buy him coffee at all.

Esteban picked the container up and fell in place beside her.

“You were that sure I was going to come in?” he wanted to know. If that was the case, that put her one up on him, he thought, since he hadn’t known he was coming in until a couple of hours ago.

“You said you would,” she reminded him, leading the way down the hall to the elevator.

His laugh was dry and completely devoid of humor. “And you believed me?”

She would be the first to admit that she was entirely too trusting in her dealings with people. As a detective, that worked against her. As a human being, though, she felt it didn’t.

“You haven’t given me a reason not to yet,” she replied.

“The day’s still young,” he countered. He took the lid off the container and took a sip of the black brew. “It’s cold,” he told her. It wasn’t a complaint so much as an observation about the state of the liquid. Hot or cold, as long as the coffee was black, he wasn’t fussy. It all went down the same way.

“It wasn’t when I got it,” she told him pointedly.

It was a little after eight now. She must have come in before then. “Which was—?” He deliberately left it open for her to jump in.

She saw no reason not to oblige him. “At seven this morning.”

“You not only expected me to show up, you actually expected me to be early?” he asked incredulously.

Reaching the elevator door, they stopped and she pressed the down arrow on the tiled wall.

“Seemed like something you might possibly do, at least on your first day,” she answered.

Her eyes swept over him and she was again struck by the fact that this clean-cut man hardly looked like the man who she’d barged in on last night.

The man who had also briefly set fire to her world, she caught herself thinking with no small longing right now.

She’d promised herself not to dwell on that, Kari reminded herself sternly. However, the memory refused to fade. Exerting something akin to a superhuman effort, she managed to push all thoughts concerning Fernandez into a nether region, hoping that would free up the working part of her brain for more important things.

“You’re staring at me,” Esteban said abruptly just as the elevator arrived. The stainless-steel doors yawned open, temporarily awaiting their pleasure. “My shirt inside out or something?”

As he asked the question, he looked down to check himself out. Nothing appeared to be out of order to him, but he couldn’t see the total picture.

“Your clothes are just fine,” she told him, confident that he was already aware of that small fact.

His attitude might have sounded careless to the undiscerning ear, but her gut told her that Esteban Fernandez was far from a careless man. For one thing, he wouldn’t have been able to survive in the world he’d previously chosen to descend into if he’d been cavalier by nature.

“I was just thinking that you clean up nicely,” she finally told him.

Compliments, when they were intended for him rather than the persona he’d assumed these past three years, made Esteban uncomfortable. He had absolutely no idea how to accept them or what was expected from him by way of a response.

So he shrugged, trying to appear unfazed—something he had gotten exceedingly good at—and mumbled, “Thanks, you too.”

To Kari’s knowledge, yesterday she hadn’t exactly looked like something the cat had dragged in—the way he most definitely had—but rather than begin a debate and possibly set him off, she decided to ignore the comment. “Okay. Moving on now.”

They got out on the first floor, and she led the way to the rear of the building rather than to the front of it. The back was where the department vehicles were all kept parked.

“You okay with my driving?” she asked, turning toward him suddenly. At least one of her brothers and two of her old partners had never felt comfortable when she was behind the wheel. She came to the conclusion that they all had issues that had nothing to do with her. She, on the other hand, was secure enough to have someone else drive if that was what kept them happy.

“Why?’ he asked suspiciously. “Something wrong with your driving?”

It amused her that that was the first thing that occurred to him. “No, it’s just that most males prefer to be the ones behind the wheel.”

He shrugged again. “Well, not this male. You’re the one with the address, right?”

“Right.” She was still just a tad wary of his motives. That it might just be a simple matter seemed too simple. For now, she reserved her judgment.

“So, you drive.”

To him, it seemed like the logical, not to mention simple, approach. He only cared about being the one behind the wheel when he didn’t trust the other people in the car.

But he wasn’t part of that world anymore, he reminded himself for possibly the dozenth time since yesterday. Having someone else behind the wheel was the least of the things he was going to need to get accustomed to with this new job that had been thrust on him.

Provided he stuck around.

“Okay, then,” Kari declared, pushing open one of the glass double doors and walking out. “The car’s parked right over there.”

Pointing for form’s sake, she led the way down the steps and through the lot. Her route formed a rather zigzag pattern.

Esteban remained at her side, matching her step for step without offering a single word, like a tall, unobtrusive shadow.

That, Kari silently promised herself, was going to have to change.

And soon.





Chapter 5



“What the hell kept you?” were the first words out of the storage-utility manager’s lips when Kari identified herself and her silent partner some fifteen minutes later.

There was a look of contempt on his pockmarked face as he eyed the IDs that were held up for him. “I was just about to use the bolt cutters on the lock and open the unit myself.”

Rather than risk further undermining their authority by making excuses to the already hostile man, Kari deftly changed the subject, “Then you don’t have keys to the unit?”

The manager—Alfred Jennings, according to the sun-bleached stencil on the door of his closetlike office—looked annoyed that the female detective should even ask that question.

“Can’t you read?” he demanded, every syllable dripping with sarcasm. “Didn’t you see the words Self-Storage outside? That means the renter provides his or her own lock with its own key. Gives them privacy,” he added with a condescending snort.

“It also costs you less if they provide their own lock,” Esteban pointed out somberly. The manager began to scowl but confronted by the dark look on Esteban’s face, he quickly backed off.