Cavanaugh Or Death. Marie Ferrarella
* * *
Moira made it back to her home in what amounted to a new record, at least for her. Her lungs were near bursting as she shed her clothes all the way to the shower, littering the floor with them.
Jumping into the glass enclosure, she turned on the water before she had even securely locked the shower door. Five very swift minutes later she was toweling herself dry, leaving tiny pools of water to mark her path to her closet.
She had no time for breakfast or the life-affirming coffee she usually swore by. Instead, dressed, Moira was back out on the pavement less than twelve minutes after she had first inserted her key into her condo’s front door.
She hoped she could find something edible and at least vaguely nutritious in the vending machines at the station. She had her doubts.
Pulling into the station’s rear parking lot, Moira could have sworn she saw someone who vaguely reminded her of the dark-blond stranger who had helped her to her feet.
At least, he resembled the man from the rear, which was the only view she had at the moment. Tall, dark blond and broad shoulders, he could have been the stranger from the cemetery.
Or, more likely, just another private citizen coming to the station to lodge a complaint or to respond to a call from one of the many police detectives inhabiting the building.
Her curiosity still on high alert, Moira quickened her pace in an attempt to catch up with the blond stranger.
He entered the building before she did. Moira stepped up her pace again.
As she got into the building, she discovered that not only should she have quickened her pace, she should have increased it to a sprint. The stranger she was trying so hard to get a better look at was nowhere to be seen.
“Must have caught an elevator,” she told herself under her breath.
It was either that or accept the explanation that the stranger had vanished into thin air. She preferred the elevator.
“You know, they say the mind’s the first to go for some police detectives. Of course, that’s assuming that they have a mind to lose, which, in your case, the jury is still out about.”
Moira didn’t have to turn around to know who was talking to her. But she’d learned a long time ago that ignoring her brother and pretending he wasn’t there didn’t make him go away. If anything, it just made Malloy up his ante.
With a sigh, she turned around to face him. “I see that someone woke up on the right side of the bed this morning.” The smile she forced to her lips looked deliberately phony by all accounts.
The grin on the tall, handsome detective’s face was, according to more than half the female population, incredibly enticing.
“Actually, little sister,” he told her with a wicked wink, “it was on the right side of the lovely Patricia Morgan, but why quibble over words?”
“Why indeed?” Moira asked crisply, striding toward the elevator quickly.
She knew there was no losing her brother, but for the sake of the game, she had to look as if she at least tried.
“Hey, you okay?” Malloy asked, catching her by the shoulder to take a closer look at her face. “You look like someone rode you hard and put you away wet,” he observed seriously.
Moira pulled away from him, although her expression never changed. “Ah, you’re as golden-tongued as always, big brother. I can see why all the ladies find you so terribly charming. You obviously have to beat them off with a stick.”
“Seriously, Moira, you all right?” Malloy asked. “The back of your head is partially damp. Are you trying for some sort of a new style, or did they turn off your electricity while you were in the middle of blow-drying your hair?”
This time Moira frowned. She hated when he started being too observant when it came to her. “You’re the detective, you tell me.”
Malloy arched a bemused eyebrow. “Since when has anyone ever been able to tell you anything?” he called after her as Moira walked into the elevator.
“I always listen to someone who makes sense,” she replied innocently, then added, “I guess that leaves you out, doesn’t it?” just as the elevator doors closed, taking her away from his view.
Only when the doors were securely closed did Moira reach behind her head and touch the back of her hair—and frowned.
Damn, she thought, annoyance nibbling away at her. Malloy was right. For some reason, in her hurry to get to the precinct on time, she had somehow neglected to dry the length of hair right in the middle.
She briefly thought about going into the bathroom and making unorthodox use of the hand-dryer, but shrugged away the idea.
With luck, no one would look in her direction until that section of her hair air-dried itself.
Right now she had something more important on her mind, Moira reminded herself as she reached her floor. She wanted to tell her lieutenant about the suspicious scene she’d stumbled across at the cemetery.
Much as she hated being restrained, she knew that she needed his blessings before she could begin to investigate.
Before getting down to the business at hand, Moira paused in the break room long enough to get a cup of what passed for coffee in the precinct. It was universally agreed that the quality was poor, but at least the coffee was hot. In addition, it was also extremely bitter. The combination definitely revved up her engine and put her in a fast-forward mode.
Fortified and sufficiently jolted into a keenly alert state, Moira placed what was left of the black swill on her desk and marched herself into her superior’s small, glass-enclosed office.
Legend had it that Lieutenant Jacob Carver had once been a passably decent-looking man. Years on the force had etched themselves into his jowl-lined face, giving him what appeared to be a permanent hangdog frown, accented by scowling, bushy eyebrows that came close to meeting over the bridge of his patrician nose; all of which looked more than mildly intimidating to most newly minted detectives assigned to his squad.
Although Moira didn’t welcome interaction with the less-than-jovial man, she wasn’t intimidated by him, either. Growing up in a family of seven, most of which had excelled in rowdiness before they had reached the age of three, had given her a spine of steel and a sense of self that served Moira quite well in her chosen field. She was polite, and deferred to higher authority when she had to, but she was never intimidated.
The door to Carver’s office was closed. He wasn’t—and never had been—an open-door kind of superior. If a subordinate wanted an audience with the man, they had to follow a number of rules—the first of which was knocking before entering. The second of which was to be invited in before entering.
Moira paused to knock and then, not waiting for an invitation, she opened the lieutenant’s door. “Got a minute, Lieutenant?”
“Got sixty of them in every hour,” he responded without looking up from the report he was currently writing.
Since Carver hadn’t said no, Moira took that as an invitation by default and proceeded to enter the man’s inner sanctum.
“I’d like to run something past you,” she told the man, closing the door behind her.
Ordinarily she would have just left it open, but she knew that Carver was incredibly secretive about every conversation he had with anyone, especially any of his people. It didn’t matter about what. He liked maintaining an air of secrecy.
Carver ignored her for a moment, undoubtedly with the hope that she would simply go away. But everyone in the precinct had come to realize that the name Cavanaugh was synonymous with stubbornness and, though it irritated