Marie Ferrarella - Cavanaugh Or Death

Moira glanced around to see if anyone was nearby who might have overheard her monologue, but although there were a few people in the hallway, no one appeared to be in close hearing range.

She would have to watch herself, Moira silently chided. She talked to herself far too often. She didn’t want anyone thinking, or worse, saying, that she was crazy.

The elevator still hadn’t arrived. Impatient, Moira pressed on the down button a second time.

Where was that damn elevator, anyway?

It seemed to her that the thing ran slower and slower every day. She was anxious to get going before Carver suddenly changed his mind and had someone come after her so he could tell her to drop her yet-to-begin investigation.

Now that she had gotten the green light to investigate the scene at the cemetery, she intended to make the most of it, especially since she was flying solo.

She could tell by Carver’s expression that he hadn’t thought there was anything to her hunch. But she did. She was a Cavanaugh and she had yet to meet a single one of her extended clan who didn’t believe in hunches or rely on them heavily when push came to shove.

The elevator still hadn’t made an appearance.

Annoyed—and growing more so—Moira glanced up to see that according to what was registering above the elevator doors, the car was still on the sixth floor, where it had been for at least the past three minutes.

What if it was broken again? The elevator had been out of commission for half a day last Tuesday. And before that it had been down for the better part of two days about a month ago.

Giving up, Moira went to the stairwell. Good exercise anyway.

The heavy door shut behind her as she entered the stairwell. Her hand was on the banister when she heard the sharp staccato of a pair of men’s shoes hitting the metal steps.

Obviously someone else had lost patience with the elevator, too, she thought, glancing overhead to where the sound of quickening footsteps was coming from.

Her mouth dropped open as, for the second time that morning, she found herself looking at the blond stranger from the cemetery.

Chapter 3

As she stood there, with the fire door closed at her back, Moira watched the blond stranger quickly make his way to the next staircase. Dressed exactly the same way as when he’d helped her to her feet outside the cemetery, the stranger appeared to take no notice of her as he headed down the stairs.

“Hey, you!” Moira called out, stunned that he’d made no acknowledgment whatsoever that he wasn’t alone in the stairwell. “Wait!”

Apparently the man had hoped to just keep going. However, since she was the only other person in the stairwell, surely he realized she was trying to get his attention.

He paused for a moment midway down the stairs and was obviously waiting for her to either say something or to ask him a question.

“What are you doing here?” Moira asked, cutting the distance between them quickly. If the man from the cemetery was surprised to see her or even recognized her, Moira noted that he gave no such indication.

“Going down the stairs,” he noted with minimal inflection. “Same as you, would be my guess.”

Was he being funny or didn’t he understand the gist of her question? Upon closer scrutiny, he looked too intelligent to be dumb, so her guess leaned toward the former, even if his expression remained dour.

“I meant in the precinct.” Her mind gravitated back to the cemetery and to what Carver had said about needing someone to sign a complaint regarding the headstone being disturbed. Was that what he was doing here? “Are you registering a complaint?” she asked. It seemed a logical explanation for his being there, although not why he was in the stairwell.

There was no inflection in his voice as the stranger responded, “Not unless you intend to do something complaint-worthy.”

Was he deliberately drawing this out or had she just misjudged him, after all, and he was just being obtuse? She tried again.

“Then why are you in the building?”

The attractive, breathless woman asked an awful lot of questions considering that they didn’t know one another, Davis thought.

“Well, for one thing, they pay me to be here.”

He watched as her eyebrows pulled together in bewilderment beneath her blond bangs.

“Wait—you work here?”

“Yes.”

Moira regarded the stranger suspiciously, once again reevaluating him. He was having fun at her expense, she decided. The man probably was used to getting by on his good looks. Well, that wasn’t going to fly with her. “Doing what?” she asked.

A slight, whimsical expression passed over his almost immobile face. “As much or as little as they want me to.”

“You’re a cop.”

“You’d make a hell of a contestant on one of those quiz shows. Me, I don’t have any patience for that kind of thing. So,” he concluded, calling an end to the unofficial interrogation session, “if you’re finished asking questions—”

Moira took another two steps down, putting herself directly into his path and temporarily blocking his escape. “You were the guy chasing those two people at the cemetery, weren’t you?”

He stifled a sigh. “Obviously you’re not finished asking questions. Why are you asking questions?” he asked, pinning her with a glare meant to put her in her place.

“Because, to begin with, I’m not usually run over at six thirty in the morning—” she began.

He cut her off, pointing out the obvious. “I didn’t run you over.”

“No, but you were chasing the people who did,” she reminded him. “Why were you chasing them?” Had he caught them in the act of grave robbing or was there another reason he had been after them?

He hesitated.

She wouldn’t know that it was Davis’s habit to play it close to the vest and never reveal too much, even when the one doing the questioning was a bright-eyed, eager blonde his father might have described as being very “easy on the eyes.”

“Let’s just say that I had a couple of questions of my own for them,” he answered simply.

“Like why they were disturbing a gravesite?” she asked pointedly.

He watched her for a long, hard moment and Moira felt as if this cop—if he really was one—was looking right into her head.

She didn’t care for the way that made her feel.

“What would you know about that?” he finally asked her.

“Nothing,” Moira admitted, “which is why I’m asking questions.”

He didn’t look as if he believed her. The man had the ability to make her want to squirm even though she was telling the truth. Only her mother used to be able to do that, Moira thought in grudging admiration. It took effort to meet his stare and not give any indication of what she was feeling.

“But you knew the gravesite was disturbed.” He said it like an accusation.

Moira refused to let him get to her. Instead she pretended she was talking to an uncooperative witness.

“Because after you helped me to my feet,” she told him matter-of-factly, “I went into the cemetery to see what was going on that would make three people come tearing out of there.”

She watched his rugged, handsome face grow stern.

“You make it sound as if I was with them. I wasn’t. I was trying to find out the same thing,” he informed her somewhat grudgingly.

She could see that getting information out of this man would be just like pulling teeth—that only made her more determined to get it.

“So you don’t know what they were doing there?” she persisted.

He shook his head. “Not a clue.”

Moira paused for a moment, debating whether or not to say anything further.

Until a couple of minutes ago she was more than happy to be investigating this possible grave robbery on her own, but it never hurt to have another set of eyes on the subject. And the blond stranger’s eyes were a really intriguing shade of blue; a perfect complement to his dark blond, somewhat shaggy hair.