Internal Affair

Her grin was quick, lethal. “Now who’s got the smart mouth?”

He looked away. “Difference being, I don’t shoot mine off.”

The wind kept insisting on playing with her hair. She pushed it away from her face, only to have it revisit less than a beat later. “I’ll remember that. See? Learning already.”

Annoyed, Patrick knew there was nothing he could do about the situation right now. If he ordered her away, he had a feeling she wouldn’t retreat. He didn’t want to go into a power struggle in front of the patrolmen. No one had to tell him that behind the sexy, engaging smile was a woman who’d gotten her way most of her life. You only had to look at her to know that.

He could wait. All that mattered was the end result. He didn’t want a partner. He wanted to work alone. It required less effort, less coordination. And less would go wrong that way.

Patrick sighed. “Well, I need to learn something about you.”

His eyes were intense, a light shade of blue that seemed almost liquid. She wondered if they could be warm on occasion, or if they always looked as if they were dissecting you. “Fire away.”

“Your name. What is it?”

She realized that she’d skipped that small detail. She put her hand out now. “Margaret McKenna. My friends call me Maggi.”

He made no effort to take her hand and she dropped it at her side. “What do people who aren’t your friends call you?”

“The repeatable ones are McKenna, or 3M.”

Despite himself, he was drawn in. “3M? Like the tape?”

Her gaze was unwavering. “No, because my full name is Mary Margaret McKenna.”

He could see that the revelation pained her. She didn’t like her name. That was fair enough—it didn’t suit her. She didn’t look like a Mary Margaret. Mary Margarets were subdued, given to shy smiles. Unless he missed his guess, the last time this woman had been subdued had probably been shortly before birth.

He laughed, his expression remaining unaffected. “Sounds like you should be starring in an off-Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow.”

Surprise nudged at her. She wouldn’t have thought he’d know something like that. “You like musicals?”

“My sister does.” Patrick stopped abruptly, realizing he’d broken his own rule about getting personal with strangers. And he meant for this woman to be a stranger. He didn’t intend for her to remain in his company any longer than it took to get back to the station and confront Reynolds about his misguided, worse-than-usual choice of partners for him. “I work alone.”

“So I was told.” She’d also been told other things. Like the fact that he was a highly decorated cop who’d never been a team player. Now they were beginning to think that was because he was guarding secrets, secrets that had to do with lining his pockets. Rumors had been raised. Where there was smoke, there was usually fire and it was her job to put it out. “I won’t get in your way.”

“For that to be true, you’d have to leave.”

From any other man, that might have been the beginning of a come-on, or at the very least, a slight flirtation. From Cavanaugh, she knew it meant that he regarded her as a pest. “All right, I won’t get in your way much,” she underscored.

He sincerely doubted that. But for the moment, he was stuck with this fledgling detective, and he didn’t have any more time to waste on her.

Patrick took out a pair of rubber gloves from his jacket pocket and pulled them on. He nodded toward the vehicle that had been fished out. “What have you learned so far?”

“The victim seems to be in her early twenties, on her way to or from a party.”

“How do you know?” The question came at her like a gunshot.

“Look at what she’s wearing. A slinky, short black dress.”

His glance was quick, concise, all-inclusive before reverting to Maggi. “Professional?”

Maggi paused. The panic on the victim’s face made it difficult to see anything else. “A hooker? Maybe, but not cheap. A call girl maybe. The dress is subtle, subdued yet stylish.”

He looked further into the vehicle. “Any ID?”

Maggi shook her head. “No purse. Might have been washed away, although I doubt it.”

He looked at her sharply. Even a broken clock was right twice a day. “Why?”

She’d already been over the interior of the car and found nothing. “Because there’s no registration inside the glove compartment. The glove compartment was completely empty. Not even a manual. Nobody keeps a glove compartment that clean.”

If it was an attempt to hide identity, he thought, it was a futile one. “Ownership’s easy enough to find out.”

Maggi nodded. She gave him her thoughts on the subject. “It’s a stalling tactic. Maybe whoever did this to her needed the extra time to try to fabricate an alibi.”

His eyes made her feel like squirming when they penetrated that way. The man had to be hell on wheels in the interrogation room. “So you think this is a homicide, not an accident.”

“That’s the way the department’s treating it or we wouldn’t be here.” She gave him an expression of sheer innocence.

He crossed his arms before him, looking down at her again. “Okay, Mary Margaret, what do you think the approximate time of death was?”

“Eleven twenty-three. Approximately,” she said. He was trying to get her to lose her cool. Even if this wasn’t about something bigger, she wasn’t about to let him have the satisfaction.

“Woman’s intuition?”

“Woman’s vision,” she corrected. “Twenty-twenty.” Before he could ask her what she was talking about, Maggi reached over the body and held up the victim’s right hand. The young woman was wearing an old-fashioned analog watch. The crystal wasn’t broken, but it was obviously not water-resistant. It had stopped at precisely 11:23.

The CSI team arrived, equipped with their steel cases and apparatus intended to take the mystery out of death. Patrick stepped out of their way as they took possession of the vehicle and the victim within.

Maggi looked at him. “Want me to brief them?”

Something that could have passed for amusement flickered over him. “Asking for permission?”

She served his words back to him. “Trying not to get in your way.”

Too late for that, he thought. Now they had to concentrate on getting her out of his way. Patrick gestured toward the head crime scene investigator. “Go ahead. That’s Jack Urban.”

Stepping around to the back of the vehicle, Patrick took out his notepad and carefully wrote down the license plate number before crossing to the nearest policeman. He handed the notepad to the man.

“See if these plates were run yet,” he instructed. “Find out who the car belongs to. See if it was reported missing or stolen in the past twenty-four hours.”

The policeman took the notepad without comment, retreating to his squad car.

The soft, light laugh that floated to him had Patrick looking back toward the crime scene. His so-called partner was talking to the head of the CSI team. Whatever she said had the man smiling like some living brain donor. Patrick shook his head. Obviously not everyone found his new partner as irritating as he did.

“I need to make a stop at the bank.”

Patrick spared the woman sitting beside him in the front seat a look. It was cold outside and he had the windows of his car rolled up. He hadn’t counted on the fact that along with the added warmth he’d be trapping the scent of her perfume within the vehicle.