Cavanaugh's Surrender. Marie Ferrarella
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There was no sound to correspond with the movement, no pills being disturbed and forced to rattle around the small container.
“So it’s empty,” he pointed out needlessly. “According to the date it was filled, there should be approximately twenty-five pills in here. There aren’t.” He looked at her. “What do you want to bet that toxicology is going to find that those pills are in your sister’s system? Her wrists didn’t need to be slashed,” he told her. “Your sister swallowed enough of these things to have killed a small horse.”
“Or was forced to swallow,” Destiny interjected. She wasn’t going to let him just forget about what his father had pointed out. Evidence that pointed to her sister being murdered.
“There’s no sign of a struggle, remember? Maybe, before the full effects of the pills kicked in, your sister actually did try to slash her wrists but she was so loopy from the pills that she did an awkward, botched job of it.”
Taking the vial from him, Destiny turned the container around so she could read the label. When she did, the name of the drug was vaguely familiar. Her sister was taking prescription sleeping pills, one of the newer ones on the market.
“Ever since we were little, my sister has had trouble sleeping. When these came on the market—” she nodded at the empty container “—and she tried them, she was overjoyed. She’d finally found something that worked. But she never took more than the prescribed dosage,” Destiny maintained firmly. “It wasn’t because she was a saint,” she added angrily, reading the skepticism in Logan’s eyes. “She just didn’t want to feel drugged in the morning. The idea of falling asleep behind the wheel while driving to work terrified her,” she emphasized.
Logan took back the container, intending on giving it to his father to send to toxicology.
“Still, over time, people develop a tolerance for medications. Maybe she found that one pill wasn’t enough for her anymore and she took two—and then more. Or maybe she just wanted to sleep forever because her boyfriend dumped her.”
He was back to that again. What was he, Johnny One-note? she thought angrily. How many ways did she have to say this before it finally sank into the thick skull of his?
“No,” Destiny insisted with feeling. “Paula wouldn’t have done that. Someone killed my sister,” she said, enunciating each word separately. “I don’t know who it was, but I do know that Paula didn’t do it herself—accidentally or otherwise,” Destiny added in case he was going to suggest that next.
“All right,” Logan relented.
His father’s lead assistant wasn’t about to come around to his side or even remotely entertain the idea that her sister had committed suicide. And since his father seemed to believe that someone else had delivered the slash marks to the young woman’s wrists, for the time being he’d go along with the popular theory.
Besides, he really didn’t enjoy upsetting her, considering that she was still dealing with the shock of finding her sister dead.
“We’ll approach it that way for now.” Leaving the bathroom, still holding the prescription container with his handkerchief wrapped around it, Logan handed it to his father.
“The pills are probably all in her stomach,” he told him not as his father, but as the head of the crime scene lab.
“You’re most likely right,” Sean agreed. “Whoever killed her probably slipped the pills into her drink. That way there’d be no resistance to what he was going to do next.” He lowered his voice so that only Logan could hear. “Poor thing never stood a chance.”
Logan nodded vaguely. He wasn’t doing anyone any good just standing here, he decided, and announced, “I’m going to canvass the floor, see if anyone heard or saw anything out of the ordinary.”
“But you don’t think so,” Destiny surmised.
“I didn’t say that,” Logan maintained. He didn’t like being second-guessed. For the most part, he liked to think that on the job he was unreadable. He prided himself on that.
Besides, he was always open to possibilities. This job consisted of equal parts skill and luck.
“Hey, you never know. Stranger things have happened. And not everyone works nine to five,” he added cavalierly. “So maybe someone did hear something.” Logan paused just next to his father as he began to head out the front door. “Maybe I’ll see you this Sunday.” It was as close as he allowed himself to get to making a commitment that involved his new family.
“Maybe,” Sean echoed with a faint nod.
“Sunday?” Destiny repeated, her smattering of curiosity getting the better of her when it came to this handsome, arrogant would-be crime fighter. “What’s this Sunday?”
Since he knew that this woman worked closely with his father—it had to be closely for his father to display this kind of regard for her, treating her as if she was another one of his daughters—he was surprised that she didn’t know.
“The former chief of police, my new uncle,” he added, amused by the whole concept of getting such a huge number of brand-new blood relatives at his age. “He likes to throw family get-togethers. Word has it that any of us can drop by his table to get a full breakfast any day of the week, but apparently he goes all out on Sundays.
“My father is settling into this new life and doing his best to show up every Sunday to prove how serious he is about being assimilated by the Cavanaughs—and making up for lost time.”
Destiny nodded. Though Sean Cavanaugh wasn’t an overly talkative man, he had shared some of this with her already. She had to admit that she rather liked the fact that he confided to her about this new venue of his private life.
It also made her realize how much she missed having a family of her own, people to talk to and use as sounding boards. People who cared how she felt and if she was getting enough sleep or running herself into the ground. After her mother had died, there’d been only Paula. And now even she was gone. That left only her, and it was true what they said. One is the loneliest number.
“Must be nice having more family than you know what to do with,” she commented, trying to sound offhanded.
He would have had to have been completely deaf to have missed the wistfulness in her voice. Although he wasn’t given to being touchy-feely and was rather careless at times about other people’s feelings, Logan upbraided himself now for not realizing that he was talking about family life to a woman who no longer had one.
He felt a genuine stab of guilt.
The next moment he heard himself trying to make amends. “Feel free to drop by on any morning or on Sunday,” he added. “The man goes all out then,” he repeated. When he saw her looking at him, obviously puzzled, he guessed at what was going through her mind. “Don’t worry, the chief won’t mind.”
“But you just said that he had family gatherings,” she pointed out. And right now, she was part of no one’s family.
“To the chief, anyone who’s part of the force is family.”
Okay, so maybe the handsome detective wasn’t just an empty vessel. He was being kind to her because she was alone. She got that. But she was no one’s charity case. Allowing a spasmodic smile to reach her lips, then go, she thanked him.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Logan knew a brush-off when he heard one, and ordinarily he’d just let it ride. But this woman was obviously someone special to his father, and initially he had been rather coarsely oblivious with her.
“No, really,” he emphasized. “I’m sure my father would like you to come, too. He seems to regard you as another daughter,” he said, trying to add weight to his invitation. He waited for that to sink in before saying anything more. Overkill was just as bad as neglecting to say anything at all.
At the