Cavanaugh's Bodyguard (11 page)

“Brenda said that Andrew—
Uncle
Andrew,” Bridget amended since the man
was
family, “got a call from his father in Florida. Seems that the patriarch of the family is flying home for the express purpose of meeting this lost branch of the family that has suddenly surfaced and Andrew is spreading the word that he wants everyone to gather together for the old man.”

“And the lost branch of the family, that would be you?” Josh guessed.

“Not me specifically,” she protested. “It means my whole family.”

“Of which you’re a part.” He was stating the obvious and he knew it, Bridget thought. She’d forgotten how irritating he could be at times. “By the way,” Josh continued and she braced herself, “I heard you identify yourself as Bridget Cavanaugh. Does that mean you’ve made your decision about which last name you want to use?”

It hadn’t really been her decision to make, she thought. It had actually been a foregone conclusion from the get-go.

“That means,” she told him, “I can’t fight City Hall, and if my father was born a Cavanaugh, I guess that makes me one, too.”

He found her resigned tone amusing. “It’s not exactly a death sentence. you know.”

“I know. It just feels weird, that’s all.” She searched for a way to make him see her point. “It’s like all your life, you think of yourself as a duck and suddenly, you find out that you’re actually a goose. It takes some getting used to.”

He laughed quietly to himself and then told her, “Swan.”

She didn’t understand. “What?”

“Don’t think of yourself as a goose,” he told her. “Think of yourself as a swan. It might make the transition easier for you.”

Just what was he reading into her words? “I’m not vain—” she protested.

He cut her off before she could get going. “Never said that.”

“Besides, swans have bad dispositions.” She looked at him pointedly.

Josh shrugged innocently. “Just trying to help,” he told her.

“You want to help?” She turned his hand so that he could see his palm with the writing on it. “Drive here,” she instructed and then, belatedly, let go of his hand so that he could use it to drive with.

Josh grinned. “Your wish is my command.”

“If only,” she muttered under her breath. But he heard.

His grin grew wider.

* * *

“SexyDude” turned out to be the email name used by George Hammond. Hammond, a rather nondescript, stoop-shouldered man with a seriously receding hairline, worked as a tax form preparer for one of the larger tax consultant firms. They found him with a client and extracted him in order to have “a few words” with him.

Bewildered, Hammond became rather hostile when he realized he was being questioned about the way he’d spent his previous evening. He became even more so when Diana Kellogg’s name was brought up.

“I’ll tell you how I spent my evening with her,” he said angrily. “I didn’t. She never showed. I went to that expensive club she picked out—they had a damn cover charge,” he complained. “I sat there for two hours, nursing one watered-down drink and watching the door, waiting for her to walk in. But she never showed up.” A little of his anger subsided as he looked from one detective to the other. “Why are you asking me about her? Has she done something?” He seemed almost eager to hear something bad in connection with the woman who had stepped on his ego.

“No, not intentionally,” Bridget replied solemnly.

“Then what?” Hammond demanded.

“Diana Kellogg was murdered last night,” Josh told him. Both he and Bridget watched the man’s face.

“Murdered?” Hammond echoed incredulously. Then, rather than display any sense of horror or outrage that someone should wantonly snuff out a life like this, Hammond actually seemed to be smiling. “Well, I guess that if she was murdered, she wasn’t really standing me up.”

For two cents, she would have wrung the jerk’s neck, Bridget thought.

As if reading her mind, Josh placed his hand on her shoulder, anchoring her to her spot. “No, your reputation as a SexyDude is still intact,” Josh told the man.

George looked pleased by that.

Idiot!
“We might be in touch,” Bridget told him. “Don’t leave town.”

“Can’t,” Hammond responded, looking at her as if she was simple-minded. “We’re heading into my busy season.”

* * *

“He wasn’t affected by her death at all, just relieved that she hadn’t actually stood him up. What a jerk.” She glanced at Josh as they walked out of the building that housed Hammond’s company. “Did you get it?” she asked.

Josh held up his cell phone. It was set to “camera mode.” “Got his chinless profile right here,” he assured her.

She nodded. “Let’s go back and show it to the bartender.”

“If he can tear his eyes away from you long enough to look at it,” Josh commented.

“You can convince him,” she said, giving his shoulder a pat.

Chapter 8

“Y
ou guys again?”

It was obvious that the dark-haired bartender at The Hideaway was less than thrilled to see Josh and Bridget making their way over to the bar, especially since it was now during the club’s core hours of operation.

“I can see why you have so much repeat business here, what with that winning, outgoing personality of yours and all,” Josh commented as they reached the bar. “Excuse us,” he said pointedly to two of the patrons as he elbowed them out of the way so that he and Bridget could get closer to the bartender.

“Don’t recall you bringing any business the first time around,” Raul retorted.

“Now, Raul, play nice,” Bridget advised, offering the man a big, bright smile. “We just want to see if you recognize someone.” She glanced toward her partner. “Show him the picture, Josh.”

Annoyed, Raul reminded her, “I already told you, she wasn’t—” And then he curtailed his protest as he saw that the photo on Josh’s cell phone wasn’t of the dead woman he’d already disavowed. Squinting, Raul took a closer look, then nodded. “Yeah, him I saw.”

Straightening, he pointed over to a table on the far side of the bar. “He sat at one of the side tables, holding on to the same damn glass of beer for like two or three hours. He was staring at the door the entire time, like he was expecting someone really fantastic to come through. Could have heard the nerd sighing all the way over here each time the door opened and whoever walked in wasn’t who he was waiting for.”

“
Did
anyone come over to him?” Josh asked him.

“Nope.” Raul shook his head to underscore his point. “It was obvious right away that he’d been stood up. He started to creep out some of the regulars, sitting and staring like that. I was going to go over to talk to him, tell him to go home, when he saved me the trouble. He just got up and left all of a sudden.”

“Do you recall what time that was?” Bridget asked, mentally crossing her fingers.

Taking an order from one of the people at the bar, Raul picked up a colorful bottle and poured the drink, then pushed the glass toward the patron.

“I think about eleven,” he finally answered. “Why? Does it make a difference?”

She uncrossed her fingers. “Yeah, it makes a difference. It gives him an alibi,” Bridget answered, trying to hide her disappointment. She’d really thought they’d found Diana’s killer. She should have realized that would have been too easy. With a nod, she stepped away from the bar. “Thanks for your help.”

Raul’s attention was already elsewhere as orders came flying at him from along the crowded bar.

“He could be lying,” Josh told her as they wove their way over to the front door.

“Why would he?” she asked.

Josh laughed shortly and shrugged. Taking out his keys, he pointed them toward the vehicle. “I haven’t worked that part out yet.”

“There might not be anything
to
work out,” she pointed out.

As the car’s security system was disarmed, she heard the locks popping up. Bridget opened the passenger door and dropped into her seat. It felt as if all the energy had been temporarily drained out of her.

“We’re back to square one, aren’t we?” she murmured, dejected.

“Looks that way—unless one of the other detectives came up with the name of a likely candidate from that stack of academy washouts they were going through when we left.”

And that, they both knew, would be an exceptionally tall order. Despite the fact that it had been her idea, Bridget didn’t hold out much hope that there was anything to be found there.

“It’s got to be someone who looks good for all the murders,” Bridget reminded him.

She sighed again. Right now, she was feeling pretty damn hopeless about being able to find
anything
worthwhile.

Josh took his cue from the tone of her voice. “It’s getting late. What d’you say we knock off for the night and get an early start in the morning?”

That seemed to snap her out of it, despite the fact that, just for a second, it did sound tempting.

“I say no,” she answered flatly. “I mean, you can do whatever you want to, but I’m going back to the squad room.”

Damn but the woman could be stubborn. “And what?” he asked. “Beat your head against the bulletin board?”

Maybe he didn’t get how determined she was to bring down this psychopath. “If I thought it would help, yeah. But since it probably won’t, I thought maybe I’d go back to the first case. This investigation wasn’t ours back then,” she reminded Josh. Two other detectives had been on the case the first year. One of them had become so frustrated, he’d taken early retirement several months later.

“Maybe we reviewed it too fast,” she went on, “missed something the first time around. We were too focused on the latest murders at the time to do justice to number one. Number one would have been where all the mistakes were made,” she said, thinking out loud. “The one that was the original crime of passion.”

Josh mulled over what she’d said. “If it really was number one.”

Did he know something that she didn’t? Bridget wondered. “What do you mean?”

Josh was working out his theory as he went along. “Maybe the Lady Killer hid his first murder for exactly the reasons you just mentioned. After he got even with the woman for standing him up, or ditching him, or maybe even not noticing him—whatever he thought her sin was—he discovered, quite by accident, that he
liked
killing. He realized that he got off on the power of it all or maybe it made him feel like some kind of king of the world, or, better yet, a god.”

The more he talked, the more he felt his theory was plausible. His voice took on conviction as he continued.

“Whatever the reason, our killer had to have his fix again. Especially when February rolled around. The month just made him feel too miserable, too hopeless and he needed to find a way to crawl out of that hole. His way turned out to be killing his ‘lost love’ again. And again.” Finished, he studied Bridget’s face to gauge her reaction and if she agreed. “Is any of this making any sense to you?”

“Yes, actually it does,” she admitted. “You realize this means that we’re going to have to start digging through old,
unsolved
homicides.” She emphasized the word “unsolved” because if the case had been solved, the serial killer wouldn’t still be out there.

The proposition sounded daunting, but she didn’t see any way around it. Otherwise, they had nothing to work with.

New theory or not, Josh still thought it was a good idea if they went home tonight. “How about I buy you dinner, then we call it a night and come back fresh in the morning?” he suggested. “You look dead on your feet, Bridget,” he observed. “Falling asleep at your desk isn’t going to help solve this thing.”

She wanted at least to get started tonight. That wouldn’t happen if Josh didn’t start the car, she thought, impatiently. “I’d work on my flattering skills if I were you or you definitely will have trouble landing a woman once this thing is behind us.”

“Don’t worry about me ‘landing a woman,’” Josh told her. “Never had any trouble yet.” He inserted his key into the ignition, then left it for a moment as he continued talking. “Besides, in a pinch, I can always turn to you for some female companionship.”

He couldn’t have surprised her more if he’d tried. “Me?”

He grinned at the look on her face. In a way, he found the trace of innocent surprise enticing. “Yeah, last I checked, you were a female, right?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Just how closely did you check?” she asked.

“I’ve got eyes, Detective. And you’ve got a figure that would really look bad on a guy,” he informed her, deliberately sounding matter-of-fact. “So, what sounds good to you?”

He did, Bridget found herself thinking. “I don’t know,” she responded, then added in a whisper as she looked at him, “surprise me.”

They had been in and out of the car countless times in the last two days, spending most of them in close proximity, not to mention close quarters whenever they were on the road in the vehicle. As she uttered her last words to him, Josh realized that having her so close stirred him in ways that surprised him. He wasn’t quite prepared to deal with it.

His resistance was, admittedly, drastically low. Plus that damn scent she was wearing had been haunting him all day.

That was what he ultimately blamed for what he did next. He wasn’t being himself. But whoever he was, he discovered in the seconds that followed that he was
really
enjoying himself in a way he’d never believed possible.

At least, heaven knew, not with Bridget.

Instead of starting up the vehicle and driving to one of the myriad take-out places that catered to those caught up in Aurora’s fast pace, he leaned in toward Bridget, framed her face between his hands and kissed her.

And stopped time.

Half a heartbeat before his lips came down on hers, she was about to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. But then he was doing it and there was no real reason to ask because she
knew
what he thought he was doing.

Unless he’d suddenly been possessed by an alien life form, Joshua Youngblood knew
exactly
what he was doing—and so did she.