Marie Ferrarella - Cavanaugh Encounter

Frankie noticed that the sign in the window that they passed by first appeared dusty, a testimony that the property had been vacant for a while now. She wondered if people in the area were just losing interest in supporting their neighborhood stores, or if this was now an ongoing trend because people preferred doing their shopping online instead of in actual buildings of brick and mortar. She’d read that somewhere, and the thought of that happening made her sad. She could remember hanging out at the mall all day with Kristin.

Everything was changing, and not always in a good way.

It felt about ten degrees warmer inside Gino’s when they walked in. It was also dimmer. The sun was bright outside, but it seemed as if someone had flipped a switch the moment they came in and the front door closed behind them.

In contrast, the person behind the counter seemed to light up when he saw them. He also appeared to be standing just a little taller by the time O’Bannon approached him.

“Why don’t you two find a table?” Luke suggested to her and his partner.

Frankie scanned the small restaurant. Finding a table wasn’t going to be a problem. Every other table in the place appeared to be empty. Was it always like this or had they come in at a bad time?

“After you,” White Hawk told her.

“Is this place always this empty?” she asked White Hawk as she sat down at the closest table.

“You’ve never been here before?” Luke asked, joining them and taking a seat. “This place makes the best pizza in town. I thought since you liked pizza so much, you would have found this place yourself.”

Frankie noticed that he hadn’t answered her question, just asked one of his own, possibly to throw her off. She shrugged. “I live in the other direction,” she said simply. “There’re a couple of decent pizza parlors between the station and my place.”

“Pizza parlors,” Luke repeated, the corners of his mouth curving.

She had no idea why that would amuse him but she braced herself for some kind of a cutting comment. “That’s what I said,” she replied crisply.

His smile only seemed to widen. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

She wasn’t, but she wasn’t ready to admit anything until she knew why he was asking and what he would do with the information once he got it.

“And just what makes you say that?” she asked.

“They’re not called pizza parlors out here,” he told her. “That’s something people say back East. Are you from back East, DeMarco?” he asked, looking at her. “You don’t sound like you are.”

Frankie didn’t really feel like sharing any personal information with O’Bannon, no matter how harmless it was, but she knew that he wasn’t going to back off until she satisfied his curiosity.

One glance at White Hawk told her that she was right on that score.

“I was four when my family moved out here. My mother loved pizza and she called them pizza parlors. I guess I picked that up from her.” She was not about to elaborate any further on either of her parents. And when she asked, “Any more questions?” it sounded almost defensively waspish to her own ear.

“I’ll let you know when I think of them,” Luke told her mildly.

Frankie had no doubts that he would do exactly that, no matter what those questions involved. And she was just as determined not to answer them. The next moment, she saw him standing up next to his chair.

“Here comes our pizza,” Luke said, waving at the teenager in the stained half apron who had emerged from behind the counter. He was carrying a large, banged-up silver-colored pizza tray in his hands and had a lost look on his tanned face.

“What do I owe you?” she asked O’Bannon when the teenager placed the extra-large pizza on the table before them. She reached into her pocket to extract her wallet, but it turned out not to be necessary.

“Your undivided attention when I need some work done,” Luke replied.

Her eyes narrowed. He was playing games with her. “I meant for the pizza.”

Luke’s smile was wide and innocent—and didn’t fool her for a moment. “So did I.”

“Look—” Frankie tried again, not willing to be in anyone’s debt, least of all O’Bannon’s. “I asked for a pizza, you got the pizza, now I want to pay my share of the pizza—”

“Just accept it, DeMarco,” White Hawk advised, helping himself to a slice. “Nobody’s ever won an argument with this guy. You might as well not let your pizza get cold,” he told her. “Or your blood pressure go up.”

She thought of O’Bannon’s response when she asked what she owed him. She didn’t like owing someone something that sounded so vague, but she supposed she had no choice—at least, for now.

“I’ll pick up the next one,” she told O’Bannon.

She expected the lead detective to offer an argument of some sort over that, too, but all O’Bannon said was, “Okay.”

Frankie picked up a slice and began eating, not trusting herself to say anything further to the man. Having her mouth full was a way to curtail that.

“You’re right,” she grudgingly admitted several moments later. Much as she hated to do it, she had to give the man his due. “This is good pizza.”

“I’m always right,” Luke replied. And then, because of the look that she had just shot him, he added, “At least, usually.”

* * *

Less than forty-five minutes later, all three of them were pulling into the rear parking lot of the police station.

Once back in his parking space, Luke popped open his trunk and carefully removed the two laptops he had placed there. Each was securely wrapped within a large plastic envelope to preserve possible prints, although the odds of getting a set of useful ones were small.

“Are you sure I can’t help out by taking one of the laptops to work on?” she asked, giving it one last try. “The search’ll go twice as fast if each of us takes one laptop.”

“Not that Valri wouldn’t appreciate you volunteering,” Luke told her, “but she has a certain way of doing things.” Ways he knew that she didn’t want interfered with, he thought. In her own unassuming way, Valri was a tyrant when it came to operating her area of the computer lab. “And as for the search going twice as fast, you’ve never seen Valri work. That woman’s fingers fly over those keys almost faster than the speed of light—or, at least, it seems that way,” he said, deep admiration resonating in his voice as all three of them walked to the back entrance of the building.

“She’d appreciate hearing you say that once in a while, you know,” White Hawk told him.

Luke looked at him as if his partner was talking nonsense. “Valri knows how good I think she is. How good everyone thinks she is.”

Frankie laughed shortly. She agreed with White Hawk. “Knowing is not the same thing as hearing,” she told him. She couldn’t help thinking that O’Bannon was just being thick.

“Speaking from personal experience?” Luke asked her, his expression unreadable.

“As a human being, yes,” Frankie retorted, opening the door to the stairwell. “But, hey, you do whatever you want to.”

He was about to press for the elevator, but stopped as he looked at her. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Well, since you don’t want me working on one of those laptops,” she reminded him, “I’m going up to the squad room.”

He’d figured that was where she was going, until he saw her opening the stairwell door. “Why are you taking the stairs?” he asked.

She assumed that the answer was self-explanatory. “That was a filling lunch. I thought I’d walk off a little of the pizza.”

If she was looking to burn off the calories, she needed to do a lot more than that. “It’s only five flights up to the homicide squad room, not fifty.”