Cavanaugh Or Death. Marie Ferrarella
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she remained right where she was, still blocking his way to the next floor.
“So who will I be talking to, Gilroy?” she asked.
She’d managed to catch him off guard—again—even though he did his best not to show it. “You mean right now?”
She noted the slight shift in his jaw muscles. Why had her question surprised him? “No time like the present. We don’t exactly have the luxury of time on our side.”
Moira realized that there were a lot of things about this detective she didn’t know. “What department are you with?”
“Major Crimes,” Davis answered. “But I thought we already settled that part. I told you I’d talk to the captain about this.”
At least, he had assumed that she’d agreed with him when he’d told her that he could talk to his captain about investigating the case. He was starting to think that assumption wasn’t a wise course when it came to Moira Cavanaugh.
Moira waved away the detective’s words. “I can sell this better than you can,” she told him. “I got my lieutenant’s okay to investigate and that wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Since he said yes, I figure he’d want me to use whatever resources I needed in order to bring this case to a swift close.”
Davis was starting to get an uneasy feeling about this. He wasn’t a rules-and-regulations kind of man, but neither did he appreciate an all-out rebel, either. He liked operating under the radar whenever possible. That wasn’t accomplished by pairing up with a rebel, no matter how short the duration of that coupling might be.
“And you see me as a resource?” he questioned.
“It’s a hunch,” she told the detective matter-of-factly. “The Cavanaughs are really big on hunches.”
This was just for forty-eight hours, he reminded himself. How bad could things get in forty-eight hours? And, who knew, maybe working together they’d stumble across something important.
“Then I guess we’d better turn around,” he told her. “Major Crimes is on the sixth floor.”
Moira looked up the length of the stairwell. “That’s three and a half flights up.”
Davis managed to keep the unexpected note of amusement he felt out of his voice. “That a problem, Cavanaugh?”
He was challenging her. She would have much rather ridden the elevator, but if he expected her to back off then he would be sorely disappointed.
“No, it’s not a problem. Lead the way,” Moira told him.
Turning sharply on the stairs, he began to lead the way to the sixth floor and Major Crimes.
Moira was determined to keep up with him. After all, she ran every morning just to keep in shape. But there was something very different about running in more or less a straight line compared to quickly climbing up the stairs at a speed Detective Gilroy had deliberately assumed.
She had stamina, but he had the advantage of longer legs. Plus she had the feeling that Gilroy did this sort of thing on a regular basis. Did that mean he was too impatient to wait for the sluggish elevator?
Impatience was often seen as a flaw by many and it gave her hope that the man she’d elected to partner up with wasn’t as much of a self-contained robot as he pretended to be.
Wanting to ask the detective a question, Moira saved her energy—and her breath—until they reached the sixth floor. Once out of the stairwell and into the corridor, she reinitiated the conversation, convinced that if she didn’t, Gilroy would be more than happy to remain silent until he was forced to speak.
She glanced down at his hand before beginning. There was no wedding ring on his third finger, no jewelry at all. Granted that not every married man wore a wedding ring, but she had a feeling that in Gilroy’s case it was because he had no reason to wear one. She highly doubted that any reasonable woman would have willingly resigned herself to a life dedicated to speaking as little as possible, like a Franciscan monk who’d taken a vow of silence.
Silence had never been her thing. Questions fairly burst out of her mouth on a regular basis. Now was no exception.
“What were you doing at the cemetery so early in the morning, anyway?” she asked, addressing her question to his back since he was still walking ahead of her.
Davis came to a dead stop.
She wasn’t prepared for the detective to stop walking so abruptly and she couldn’t prevent herself from slamming right up against his broad, hard back.
Davis swung around and glared at her. “I want to make something very clear, Cavanaugh.” He all but growled at her.
Moira put up her hand to stop his flow of words for a second. “You might have to wait until the stars stop swirling around my head,” she quipped.
If she meant the remark to loosen him up a little, it didn’t. Gilroy didn’t crack a smile or even seem to hear her.
“I’ll help you investigate whatever’s going on at the cemetery, but I’m not going to continue being on the receiving end of your idea of Twenty Questions,” he snapped.
“How about if we both play?” she suggested with a wide smile. “You answer my questions and I’ll answer yours.” It seemed only fair to her.
“I don’t have any questions,” he informed her tersely. The less he knew about her, the easier it would be to walk away when the forty-eight hours were finally up.
Moira stared at him. “You’re serious?” she asked incredulously. Had she stumbled across the one man in the state who had absolutely no curiosity?
The detective’s expression remained immobile. “Totally.”
She just couldn’t get herself to believe him. “You have no questions for me?”
“None,” he replied flatly.
Moira shook her head in complete disbelief. He really was a robot.
“Then you’d be the first,” she told him.
She glanced down the hall and saw the open door that had Major Crimes written across the opaque glass in black block letters. “This must be the place,” she declared cheerfully. Moira braced herself inwardly. Time to beard the lion in his den. “What did you say your captain’s name was?”
“I didn’t.”
Just when she assumed he was leaving it up to her to find out, Gilroy said, “Ryan. His name is Captain Ryan.”
She nodded, taking the information in. Walking inside the squad room, she immediately noted that the layout was the same as it was on the third floor. And, like her lieutenant, the superior officer here had a small, glass-enclosed space—whimsically called an office—to call his own.
From the look of it, Captain Ryan was currently in, and he was on the phone.
“Give me ten minutes,” she told Davis.
He gave her a skeptical look as she started to walk toward the other end of the room. “You don’t want me in there with you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of intruding on your space, Gilroy. Wait here,” she told him, nodding at the squad room. “If I find myself needing you for backup, I’ll wave at you,” she told him just before she proceeded to quickly stride toward the captain’s office.
Unlike Lieutenant Carver, the man who oversaw Major Crimes had his door open despite the fact that he was still on the phone.
It was like watching an accident waiting to happen, Davis thought, perched on the corner of his desk as he looked across the room and observed her.
He fully expected to hear Ryan’s voice come booming across the office once the almost annoyingly perky blonde began to state her case to ask for him on loan for the surreal purpose of looking