Marie Ferrarella - Cavanaugh Encounter

Annoyed, Frankie asked, “Is that the victim’s laptop?”

Luke had noticed that she paled slightly when she first looked at the computer. What was up with that? Was this woman somehow involved in this latest homicide? He found that hard to believe, but there was no denying that her complexion resembled the hue of a melted marshmallow.

“I haven’t gotten on it yet, but considering where I found it, I’d say that’s a pretty good guess.” Luke turned his piercing green eyes to meet hers. “Is that a problem?”

She was careful not to blow out a breath or appear to be anything but blasé. “No, no problem,” Frankie lied. “Why should there be?”

To the best of her knowledge, Kris didn’t have any photographs of the two of them on her laptop. If her cousin did, then she’d find a way to explain it away, Frankie told herself.

Luke continued eying her. “I don’t know,” he answered. “You tell me. You’re the one who looks pale enough to have seven little men following you wherever you go.”

Frankie stared at him, confused.

“O’Bannon’s talking about Snow White,” the other detective explained. “That’s his clever way of telling you that you look ghostly pale.”

Her eyes momentarily shifted toward O’Bannon, then back to White Hawk. “Not all that good at communicating, is he?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I got my point across, didn’t I?” Luke asked cavalierly. And then the smile on his lips disappeared. “Seriously, is there anything on here you don’t want me to see?”

She lifted her shoulders and let them drop in an exaggerated shrug of indifference.

“I haven’t got the faintest idea what she might have had on her laptop,” Frankie told him, “so off the top of my head, I’d have to say that the answer to your question is no.”

“Good,” Luke pronounced—not that anything she could have said would have stopped him from putting the laptop into evidence. “Then I’ll hand this over to Valri and have her take a look at it after we get back from the second crime scene.”

The second crime scene. She’d forgotten about that. “You want me to come along to that?” Frankie asked as they walked out of the apartment.

Luke paused as he locked up the apartment again, then proceeded to replace the yellow crime scene tape across the door.

“Well, unless you want to walk back to the station on your own, yes, you’re invited to come along,” he told her as they walked back to his vehicle. He’d left it parked at the curb. “Why wouldn’t we want you to come with us?” he asked, curious to hear what her answer would be.

She had no solid answer for that. She’d assumed that he had brought her along only to work Kris’s crime scene, not anyone else’s.

“I thought you just took me along because I brought the crime to your attention,” she told him.

“I’ve decided to keep you on because of your keen insight,” Luke told her as he hit the key fob to open the car’s locks.

Frankie didn’t trust herself to answer the comment civilly. Instead, she looked at White Hawk. “Do you want to ride shotgun this time?”

The other detective laughed.

“You’ll find that O’Bannon is an acquired taste.”

She tried to find a graceful way out of the situation. “No, it’s just that I figured that I needed to ride up front before because I was giving O’Bannon directions. But now that he knows where he’s going, I thought maybe you’d want to trade seats.”

“That’s okay,” White Hawk demurred, opening the rear door and climbing into the backseat. “I’ve ridden shotgun with this guy for three years. You can keep him for today.”

“Shotgun for three years?” Frankie repeated, opening the passenger door and getting into the passenger seat. “Doesn’t he let you drive?”

White Hawk thought for a moment. “The one time he was wounded, he did. Although, as I recall, I had to bully him into that. He can be a real ornery son of a gun when he wants to be.”

Key in the ignition, Luke cleared his throat. “In case it escaped both of your keen detectives’ eyes, I’m right here,” he pointed out.

“I bet his disposition gets even worse when he’s been shot,” Frankie guessed, turning in her seat to look at White Hawk.

The other detective rolled his dark eyes. “You have no idea.”

“Still here,” Luke reminded them tersely. He started up the engine. “And if both of you don’t plan on walking to the next crime scene, I’d suggest tabling this little discussion right now.”

White Hawk smiled. “Sorry, O’Bannon, I keep forgetting how touchy you can get before your fourteenth cup of coffee.”

“Don’t give away all my secrets,” he told his partner with a straight face.

“No chance of that happening,” White Hawk said cheerfully. “That would take me longer than either one of us have left on this earth.”

Leaning back in her seat, Frankie continued listening to the two men bantering and exchanging quips. Very slowly, she found herself beginning to relax just a little.

Chapter 4

It was immediately obvious that the distraught-looking older woman who answered the front door had been crying. Holding on to the door almost for support, she appeared to be struggling to keep from falling apart.

Standing on the other side of the threshold, Luke politely asked, “Mrs. O’Keefe?”

“Yes?” the woman responded hoarsely.

Luke held up his credentials for the woman’s benefit. “I’m Detective O’Bannon. This is Detective DeMarco.” He nodded toward the woman on his left. “And that’s Detective White Hawk.”

Both Frankie and the other detective quietly displayed their IDs as well as their shields.

Mrs. O’Keefe’s red-rimmed eyes barely turned in their direction.

She addressed her words to Luke. “If you’re here to tell me about Ellen, I already know,” she told him, her voice breaking at the end of her sentence.

Frankie’s heart ached. She felt for the woman. More than that, she could easily relate to what Mrs. O’Keefe was going through. Without thinking, she stepped forward and took the grieving woman’s hands in hers.

“We’re very sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Frankie told her with genuine feeling. “Detectives O’Bannon, White Hawk and I are here to ask you a few questions so that we can find whoever did this to your daughter and make him pay for it.”

Mrs. O’Keefe pressed her lips together to suppress the sob that rose to her lips and threatened to burst out. When she spoke, her voice was hardly above a whisper.

“Please come in.”

Turning, the woman, bent with grief, led the way into her small, two-bedroom house.

Deferring to the lead detective, Frankie waited for Luke to follow the woman, but he surprised her by waving her in first.

“Not bad,” he mouthed to her as she passed him.

Frankie assumed he was referring to the fact that she had managed to get a sliver of the woman’s trust.

Mrs. O’Keefe brought them into her living room. Despite the fact that it was a little past noon, the room was shrouded in darkness. The house’s orientation kept the sun from coming in.

The victim’s mother turned on a lamp as an afterthought.

“Please sit,” she said, gesturing toward the sofa. And then, as if suddenly remembering the rules of etiquette, she asked, “Can I get any of you anything?”

“No, we’re fine, ma’am,” Luke assured her. There was a kind expression on his face as he asked, “Can you tell us about your daughter?”

Clutching a worn handkerchief, Mrs. O’Keefe knotted her long, thin fingers together in her lap. “Ellen was a wonderful girl. She was smart, kind, thoughtful. She was a kindergarten teacher, you know,” she told them with pride. “The children all loved her. She just graduated from college last year.” A small sigh escaped her lips. “She’d had a setback a while ago, but my daughter had finally gotten her life on track.”