Becoming a Cavanaugh

Spouse number two wasn’t out of the country, she was in her apartment. Once Kyle identified himself and his partner and told the woman the reason they were there, Alison Barrett, a slightly overweight brunette with scarlet nails and a mouth that formed a wide frown, became livid.

‘That bastard!” she shrieked. With a swing of her hand, she knocked over a statue of Cupid that had been perched on a pedestal. It hit the marble floor, shattering. In her fury, she appeared not to notice. “He finally found a way to get around paying me alimony.”

Jaren glanced at Kyle to see his reaction to this display of unbridled temper. “With all due respect, Mrs. Barrett,” she said, “I don’t think that death by wooden stake would have been his first choice to avoid making payments to you.”

“You didn’t know Richard,” she fumed, pacing. “Life with him was hell and I thought that now, at long last, I’d be compensated for it.” Her eyes flashed with unsuppressed fury. “But he found a way to wiggle out of it.”

“Your grief is touching,” Kyle commented.

Her eyes blazed. “You want grief, Detective? Grief was being married to him and being treated as if I was some sub-intelligent species. He thought he was God and should have been worshipped accordingly.”

“If you felt that way about him, why did you marry him in the first place?” Jaren wanted to know.

Alison sighed, frustrated. “Because Richard could be very charming when he wanted. The problem was, once we were married, he didn’t want to be. He was out all day, out all night. Like some damn werewolf.”

Jaren’s eyes met Kyle’s. The exchange was not missed by the victim’s ex-wife. She quickly backpedaled.

“Not that I thought he was one,” she assured them. “Or a vampire,” she added for good measure. “What he was—and everyone who knew him knew this—was a self-centered bastard.”

That made the opinion unanimous, Kyle thought. He had a feeling that they were going to have their hands full with suspects.

“Just for the record, Mrs. Barrett, where were you this afternoon?”

“Where I am every afternoon,” she replied haughtily. “Shopping. It’s one of my few pleasures.”

“Anyone see you shopping?”

She blew out an angry breath, as if this was a huge inconvenience. “I went with friends. I have receipts,” she volunteered. “I didn’t want to see him dead, Detective. I wanted to have him pay through the nose.”

“Thank you for your time,” Kyle told the woman once she produced the time-stamped sales receipts to back her up. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

As they left the opulent apartment, they could hear Alison Barrett heaping curses on her ex-husband’s dead head.

“Woman makes a good case for the single life,” Kyle commented more to himself than to Jaren as they closed the door behind them.

So do you, Jaren thought, but she decided to keep her observation to herself.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_c0a3323a-9130-5e6c-9809-d2935f3e1f88)

Kyle glanced at his watch after he buckled his seat belt. He’d more or less promised to be somewhere. His exact words, when he’d received the invitation, were, “We’ll see.” The look on Andrew Cavanaugh’s face had told him that he was going to wind up coming. He supposed it wouldn’t do any harm to give this family thing a try.

“It’s after five,” Kyle announced, addressing his words more to the windshield than to the woman next to him. “Why don’t we call it a day and get a fresh start in the morning?”

The suggestion surprised her. She would have thought that O’Brien would have wanted to push both of them to the point of exhaustion—probably just to see what she was made of.

She was relieved to find out that she was wrong. “Sounds good to me.”

Like all first days on the job, this one had felt endless, going on much longer than eight hours. It would feel good to go home and unwind, she thought, even though home right now was an apartment filled with boxes waiting to be unpacked. Towers of boxes that made maneuvering around the premises a challenge.

But at least she’d get the chance to chill out for a few hours.

Despite a minor traffic snarl due to a two-car collision on the next block, they got back to the precinct in a fairly short amount of time. Getting out on her side, Jaren paused. The ride back had consisted of her talking in between the silences. O’Brien’s contributions to the conversation had been limited to occasional grunts, and even those she had to prod out of him.

Still, Jaren thought it might be worth a try to ask. The worst that could happen would be another grunt. “You know anywhere around here where I could get a decent meal? I’d prefer take-out, but if I have to sit at a restaurant, that’s okay, too.”

Kyle peered at her over the top of the car for a long moment, debating. And then, because he knew he hadn’t been a joy to work with and the days that were ahead probably wouldn’t be any better, he made an impulsive decision, something he didn’t ordinarily do.

“Yeah,” he finally said, “I do.”

Maybe he got more human at the end of the day, she thought. “Really?”

Kyle frowned. “You sound surprised.”

“Well, I guess I am,” she confessed. What surprised her even more was that he seemed to actually be willing to tell her about the place. She’d half expected him to snap out a no.

“If you didn’t think I knew of a place, why did you ask?”

One slim shoulder rose and fell in a gesture that he found, if he were being honest, oddly appealing. Kyle forced himself to focus on her face instead.

“There was always an outside chance,” Jaren replied. “And to be honest, after dragging almost every word out of you today, what I’m really surprised about is that you’re willing to share the information.”

He didn’t make it an outright invitation. Instead, what he said was, “Best meals in town are at Andrew Cavanaugh’s house.”

“Andrew Cavanaugh,” Jaren repeated, processing the name. It seemed to her that every third law enforcement officer at the precinct was named Cavanaugh. It took her a second to place this one. “Isn’t that the name of the old chief of police?”

To her delight, she heard Kyle laugh. It was a short, quick sound, but it was a laugh nonetheless. “Don’t let him catch you calling him old.”

“I didn’t mean old as in old,” she explained quickly. “I meant old as in former. Anyway, he’s a person, I’m looking for a restaurant.”

He knew Andrew’s philosophy. The more, the merrier. He’d thought it was a myth—before he ever had a blood connection to the man—that Cavanaugh had what amounted to a bottomless refrigerator. The myth was that Andrew never ran out of food no matter how many people showed up at his table. Now that he’d been witness to it several times, Kyle knew this was actually a fact, as incredible as it seemed.

Having Rosetti come along with him would provide no hardship for Cavanaugh. The opposite would probably be true. “I thought maybe you were looking for a memorable meal.”

At this point, she’d settle for something that didn’t repeat endlessly on her throughout the night. “Well, yes, but—”

His voice had a disinterested ring to it as he told her, “Doesn’t get any better than what Andrew Cavanaugh can whip up. Even his throwaways are better than most restaurants’ featured specials of the day.”

He really did think she was pushy, didn’t he? “That might be, but even if I did know where the man lived, I couldn’t just go barging in and show up for dinner.” He surprised her by laughing in response. She looked at him in confusion. Was he pulling her leg? “Did I say something funny?”

“From what I’ve gathered—and I’ve only interacted with the man a handful of times—that’s exactly what you can do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The chief likes to cook and he really seems to like having his family around him. In his opinion, the best way he can get them to keep coming back is to keep feeding them.”

O’Brien had missed one very important point, she thought. “I’m not family.”

The glimmer of a smile intrigued her. Or was that a sneer? With him it was hard to tell.