Marie Ferrarella - Cavanaugh Fortune

“Montgomery usually handled the paperwork part of it—or mishandled it,” the lieutenant tacked on, clearly not pleased with Montgomery’s work ethic.

“I gathered that much,” Valri said, unaware that her comment elicited a muffled laugh from the lieutenant that the man managed to hide.

“The one time they went into the field together, Montgomery wound up in the hospital,” Latimore told her. “That made Brody more convinced than ever that he worked better alone. You’re going to change that.” It wasn’t a comment, or a prediction, it was an order.

Was that her actual assignment? she couldn’t help wondering. To get the detective to come around and get back into the swing of working with a partner? She supposed that she could do that.

“I’ll give it a try, sir,” Valri told the lieutenant.

“I don’t want you to ‘try,’ I want you to ‘do,’” he ordered in a no-nonsense voice. “Do I make myself clear, Cavanaugh?”

She squared her shoulders, every inch the consummate professional. “Crystal, sir.”

Latimore nodded, satisfied—for now. “Good talk, Cavanaugh.” He waved her out of the chair and out of the room. “Close the door on your way out.”

He didn’t have to tell her twice. Valri lost no time leaving.

When she got back to what was now her desk, Brody was still picking up the fallen files and haphazardly dumping them into a large rectangular box. The box had held a six-month supply of paper for the printer ten minutes ago. The reams of paper were now stacked in a corner.

Without a word, Valri began picking up Montgomery’s documents and depositing them into the box. Two could make the job go faster.

Alex raised his eyes for a moment. “So?” he asked as he got back to clearing the floor. He didn’t bother organizing the papers. That was a job for Montgomery, not a man who valued his sanity.

Valri took a guess as to what her new partner was asking her. “The lieutenant wanted to officially welcome me into the office.”

Alex stopped dumping pages for a moment and looked at her. The expression on his face told Valri that he didn’t believe her.

What he said next confirmed it. “That man wouldn’t ‘officially welcome’ the Three Wise Men if they came into the office.” He frowned slightly as he got back to picking up papers. He tried not to notice that her close proximity was undermining his ability to concentrate. But then he’d always been an admirer of shapely limbs and a killer smile. It was nothing personal, he silently insisted. “We’re not going to work well together if you lie to me, Cavanaugh.”

She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to level with him. After all, she hadn’t done anything to merit the lieutenant’s strange question to begin with. “He wanted to know if I got sick looking at dead bodies.”

Alex laughed, nodding to himself. “Now that sounds like Latimore. Do you?” he asked her as a sidebar.

“I don’t know.” He glanced at her again, this time raising a skeptical eyebrow. She could see the question in his eyes. “It’s what I told the lieutenant, too. I’ve never seen a dead body before.”

There were times that he wished he could say that. “All the more reason for you to stay here, working on the smashed laptop, while I go and try to find some of the late Hunter Rogers’s friends.” Picking up the last of the papers, he tossed them into the box, which was now close to overflowing. “Speaking of which, do gamers even have friends?” he asked her out of sheer curiosity. To the best of his knowledge—having never had any interest in spending endless hours competing against people he didn’t know—gamers were all a bunch of socially awkward, highly intellectual, obsessed-with-winning geeks.

“In a manner of speaking,” Valri told him, then thought to expand her response. “I guess it all depends on your definition of friends .”

That was easy. “Someone who knows all your secrets and still likes you.”

The words had come to him automatically. It was something his father had once said to him.

By that definition, he himself had no friends, Alex thought. Because he had secrets he felt he couldn’t—and thus didn’t—share with anyone. Secrets that would create chasms between himself and the people he knew.

“If that’s your criteria,” Valri countered, “I guess what it comes down to is you actually define the word likes .”

Alex blew out a breath. He was right. This world was a dog-eat-dog existence. “The gaming world doesn’t sound very warm and friendly,” he quipped.

“Well, that might be because it’s not,” she told him with an amused laugh. “It’s all about competing and winning and coming up with a better game or, barring that, a better strategy.”

“And you’re part of all that?” he asked her.

Alex liked to think that he was a fair judge of people, and she didn’t seem the type to enjoy that sort of bloodless, cutthroat competition. Nor did she seem the kind of person who liked spending time locked away, focused on a screen and annihilating the two-dimensional “enemy.”

“I was,” Valri acknowledged. “A long, long time ago, in another lifetime,” she told him. “My horizons have become broadened since then, but I do like to keep my hand in the game every so often, just for practice,” she admitted without any qualms, then added, “Keeps me on my toes.”

“So would a pair of six-inch stilettos,” he commented. Enough talk. He had to hit the streets and get cracking. “Okay, I’ll have one of the uniforms sign out the smashed laptop from the evidence lockup and you see if you can resurrect the dead while I go back to Rogers’s apartment and see if I can find something that’ll lead me to one of his buddies—if he had any.”

It hit her like a bolt out of the blue. “Randolph Wills,” she called out to her partner’s back as he was about to leave the squad room.

That stopped him in his tracks. Alex turned to look at her. He appeared somewhat skeptical at this sudden revelation. “What?”

“You said you wanted the name of one of Hunter’s ‘buddies.’ Randolph Wills hung around him a lot, trying to absorb his technique as well as his expertise. He’s kind of a leech, but his heart’s in the right place.”

“Most people’s hearts can be found in the same place,” he told her in an abrupt voice. “And you know this about Wills how?”

She made no attempt at building up the suspense. Instead, she told him point-blank, “Word of mouth.” And then she smiled. She was leading him to a sunrise and his eyes were firmly shut. “The gaming community is both larger and smaller than you think.”

Alex looked at her as if she had begun babbling gibberish. “Is that some kind of riddle for the ages?”

His sarcastic tone didn’t faze her. Growing up as the youngest had allowed her to be ready for anything and had given her a hide like a rhino. Her heart, though, was still her own and it was, for the most part, soft.

“Just a piece of information to contemplate,” she told him with a smile. “And I really think that you’re going to want me to go with you.”

They had different definitions of the word want , he thought. And his definition had nothing to do with the job and everything to do with this gut reaction he was experiencing. If ever there was a “tread lightly” situation, this was it.

“And why is that?” Alex asked her.

“Well, for one thing I think I know where you can find Wills,” she told him.

“And for another?” he asked because she clearly was building up to something.

“You’re liable to need a translator,” she told him, using the word liable out of consideration for the ego he had to have. Everyone was born with an ego and she had a feeling that his might be affected if what Wills told him—probably in a matter-of-fact voice—went straight over his head.