Cavanaugh's Bodyguard (6 page)

“Why would you think that?” Bridget asked. It seemed to her rather an odd thing for the victim’s boyfriend to think, especially since they hadn’t told him anything yet. Just what sort of a relationship did King and the dead woman have?

“I dunno. Maybe she thinks sending over two pretend cops might get me to find a job faster. Well, it can’t. I already told her, there’s nothing out there. I’ve been looking my butt off and I can’t find anything decent to even apply for,” he answered angrily.

Bridget didn’t bother pointing out that they weren’t “pretend cops.” He would realize they were real soon enough. “You didn’t go out with her last night.”

She didn’t make it sound like a question, but he answered it anyway. “We had a fight.”

“About what?” Josh asked.

“Aren’t you paying attention?” King demanded, clearly annoyed at the interrogation. “About me not working. She hates it,” he complained. “Karen earns a boatload of money at that place she works, but she wants me to be paying all the bills. She thinks that’s what a ‘real man’ is supposed to do.” He sneered at the very thought. “Well, the hell with that and the hell with her!”

Josh continued asking questions. He kept his voice mild, as if they were just having a harmless conversation instead of King just possibly painting himself into a corner. “Just how heated did the argument get between you two yesterday?”

King shrugged, as if this was nothing new. “We got a little loud, she threw a few things at me, missed, then stormed out.” And then King narrowed his eyes, asking a little uneasily, “Why? Where is Karen?”

“Didn’t you wonder that before now?” Bridget asked, curious.

King’s temper flared. He was the kind of man who didn’t like to be questioned about his behavior. “I thought she crashed at one of her girlfriends’ places. Frankly, I liked the peace and quiet for a change.”

What a bastard,
Bridget thought. This was why she steered clear of relationships. It was all sweetness and fun in the beginning. And then the gloves came off and people started to be themselves—people she could very well live without. Or at least that’s the way it had been with the few relationships she’d had. Most of the time, the guys either wanted her to stop being a cop—or they wanted to handcuff her with her own cuffs. Which was why she was currently taking a break from dating altogether.

“That’s good,” she told him coolly, “because that’s something you’re going to have to get used to.”
Unless the county decides you killed her and then you’ll be getting a whole bunch of new roommates.

“What are you saying?” King demanded, letting his temper flare. “Where is she? Where’s Karen? Something happen to Karen?” he asked, the tone of his voice taking on an unsteady lilt.

Bridget exchanged looks with Josh.

One of them would have to tell the annoying man the woman he’d just been ranting about was dead. She decided to spare Josh since he’d just made her realize that it brought back such harsh memories for him of the time he and his mother had been on the receiving end of those awful words.

“Mr. King, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but your girlfriend was found dead this morning in the alley behind The Warehouse Crowd,” Bridget told him. She assumed the victim’s boyfriend was familiar with the club that was predominantly frequented by an under-thirty crowd.

King looked utterly stunned as he stared at her. “Dead?” He repeated the word as if he didn’t quite understand what it meant. His breathing grew noticeably more shallow and faster as he asked, “You mean like in a homicide?”

“Exactly like in a homicide,” Josh confirmed for King.

Dark brown eyes went from one to the other like marbles pushed to and fro by the wind. King still appeared dazed, but anger began to etch its way into his features.

“Who did it?” he asked. “Do you know who did it?” This time, it was a demand.

“Not yet, but that’s what we’re trying to figure out by piecing things together,” Bridget told him, doing her best to sound sympathetic even as she was still trying to make up her mind about King. “Do you know if Karen had any enemies, any old boyfriends who didn’t take kindly to being dumped by her?”

“We’ve been together for three years. There
are
no boyfriends,” King said vehemently. “And she didn’t have any enemies. Karen could be a pain in the butt sometimes, but then she’d turn around and be this sweet, amazingly thoughtful woman who made you feel glad just to be alive and around her. Everyone liked Karen,” he insisted. King suddenly looked stricken, as if what he’d been told was finally sinking in. His voice became audibly quieter as he asked, “She’s not coming home?”

Bridget shook her head as sympathy flooded through her. “I’m afraid not.”

His knees giving way, King sank down on the cream-colored sofa. He dragged his hands through his hair, distraught. “Last thing I said to her was I didn’t want her coming back,” he confessed brokenly.

“We can’t ever know that the last thing we say to someone is going to be the last thing we ever say to that person,” Josh told him. Maybe if people had the ability to have that sort of insight, they’d be a whole lot nicer to one another, he thought.

“Is there anyone you want us to call for you?” Bridget asked him.

King shook his head, struggling to pull himself together and save face. “No, I can call.” And then his voice broke again as he asked, “Did she suffer?”

“ME said it was quick,” Bridget was fast to assure him. “Can you tell us where Karen worked? We’d like to ask her coworkers some questions.”

He gave them the name and address of a firm that handled event planning for the rich and famous called The Times of Your Life. Thanking him, Bridget gave him one of her business cards and asked him to call if he could think of anything else.

“The ME hasn’t seen her yet, remember?” Josh said as they left the apartment and walked back to the car. “You said so yourself.”

“Yeah, I know,” she responded with a dismissive sigh. “But I didn’t see the point in burning the image of the killer carving out her heart while she was still alive into his head. Knowing the bloodthirsty media, King’ll find out about that soon enough.”

Josh looked at her just before he got into the vehicle. “So you believe him?”

She hedged for a moment, wanting to get his take on it first. “Don’t you?”

“Actually, yeah, I do. But you’re usually the overly suspicious one,” Josh reminded her. He found that unusual. In his experience, the softer sex tended to be more trusting. But then, he’d come to learn that there were a lot of amazing, unique things about his partner. She was a woman of substance. “You should have been the one named Thomas in your family, not your brother. As in Doubting Thomas.”

Bridget rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m familiar with that term, thank you,” she said briskly. “King looked genuinely broken up when I told him that his girlfriend was dead,” she explained as she got in on the passenger side.

Josh didn’t know how King had actually felt about the victim in the long run, but he could see why the man had been initially overwhelmed. “It’s always harder when the last words you’ve had with someone were angry or deliberately hurtful.”

“You sound like you speak from experience.”

“Me?” Her comment caught him off guard. “No,” he said with feeling. “That’s why I believe in amiable breakups.” He started up the car. “Always leaving ’em smiling is my motto.”

Leaving being the key word there. The man had trouble written all over him, she thought, not for the first time.

Bridget noted the wide grin on his face as he told her his “motto.” Knowing Youngblood, there was only one way to read that. She tried not to dwell on the image of him that raised in her mind. “That’s a little bit too much information, Youngblood.”

He laughed heartily. “Why, Detective, you have a dirty mind.”

“Three years partnered with you will do that to a person,” she assured him.

“Can’t plant a seed and have it grow where there is no dirt,” Josh countered glibly.

“Dirt being the operative word here,” Bridget said pointedly.

Josh glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was getting close to noon. “You want to pass through a drive-through and grab some lunch on the way to this events-planning place?” he asked.

Looking at the dashboard clock herself, Bridget sighed. It was now or who knew when? “What I’d like is to stop someplace and eat lunch slowly at a table like a normal person, but, since that’s impossible and in the interest of time, your way’s probably better.”

“My way’s always better,” Josh cracked. He gave Bridget a choice of several places that were close by and she picked one. Nodding amiably, he began to drive in that direction. “Why do you think he does it?” he asked as he merged into the left-hand lane. He needed to make a left turn at the next light.

When he plucked conversations out of the air like that, he managed to completely lose her. She could feel her temper growing short.

“Who?” she asked

“The Lady Killer,” Josh elaborated. “What do you think his driving force is? Why February? Is he making some kind of a macabre statement about Valentine’s Day, or does the guy just hate a really short month?” he ended wryly.

“You mean is he killing women to make some kind of a protest against commercialism?” she asked incredulously.

“I think if that were the case, he could have found a more subtle way to get his point across,” she told Josh. “My guess is that someone jilted him, and I mean royally, and unlike a lot of people, he couldn’t handle the embarrassment of it.” Her mind raced as she fleshed out her theory, trying to find the pieces that fit. “Maybe he’s this invisible guy and he got tired of no one really seeing him. This is his way of getting even with the woman.”

“And every woman who reminds him of her,” Josh speculated.

Bridget nodded, agreeing. But there was a slight problem with that theory. “But why just in February?” she asked Josh. “Why isn’t he killing women all year round, every time he sees someone who looks like the woman who broke his heart?”

Josh laughed shortly. The caseload would be absolutely impossible if that were the case. “Whose side are you on?”

“Ours,” she told him with feeling. “I’m just trying to get into the guy’s head and figure out what motivates him. That way, we can finally get him.” She couldn’t think of anything she wanted more for Valentine’s Day than to get this psycho off the streets of her city.

As he drove to their destination, Josh reviewed what she’d just said when she started using him as a sounding board. Something she’d just thrown out had stuck. “My guess would be that he’s doing it in February because that was when she rejected him, during all the hype and commercialism leading up to the ‘big day.’ Department stores, restaurants, greeting card companies, they’re making a big deal of Valentine’s Day these days. Subtly or blatantly they make a person feel like there’s something wrong with them if they don’t have someone special by their side on that day.”

He seemed to have a pretty good lock on all the hoopla surrounding the day, Bridget thought. That had her entertaining other questions about her partner. She told herself that she was only being curious about a friend, but even she knew that there was more to it than that. But exactly what she was not about to go into or explore. That would be asking for trouble.

“Speaking of which,” she began on a much lighter note, “who’s going to be by your side on Valentine’s Day? Since your cell phone hasn’t rung in, oh, the last two hours, I’m assuming that you and—Linda, was it?—are now officially history.” That was the way he operated. Hot and heavy for a few days and then he’d start craving the sweet taste of freedom. She felt truly sorry for any woman who really fell in love with Josh. Luckily that wouldn’t be her.

“Don’t worry about who I’m going to be with,” he told her, flashing his thousand watt-smile. “And you know damn well her name was Linda.”

Was. I was right,
Bridget thought with a quick flare of satisfaction.

“I’m not worried,” she informed him, “just curious. And as for my reaching for a name to your last current squeeze, there’ve been so many women in and out of your life these last three years that it’s hard for me to keep track of their names.”

He looked at her pointedly, “No one asked you to keep track.”

“You’re my partner,” she answered matter-of-factly. “If someone finds you strangled and naked in your bed bright and early one morning, I want to know who to go looking for.”

Stopping at a light, he took the opportunity to turn toward her and study her for a moment. “You think of me that way a lot?”

“What, strangled?”

He grinned. He knew that
she
knew he wasn’t referring to that. “No, naked and in bed.”

“No, but I do I think of you strangled a lot.” Changing the subject quickly before the color of her complexion changed and gave him something else to tease her about, Bridget nodded toward the drive-through he was approaching. Because it was still the early part of the lunch hour, there were five cars already queued up ahead of them.

“Why don’t we just go in and order?” she suggested. She didn’t relish the idea of being stuck in a line, idling. “It’ll probably be a lot faster and it’ll waste less gas.”

“Sensible,” he agreed. He’d never admit it to her, but it was one of the things he admired about his partner. She didn’t just go with the easy answers; she liked to think things through. “How is it that no one’s snapped you up yet, Bridget?” he teased.

“Just lucky I guess,” she countered dryly as he pulled into an empty parking spot. He put the car into “park” and then turned off the ignition.

“No sense in the two of us going in.” Josh opened the door on his side. “I’ll go,” he volunteered, then paused before getting out. “What do you want?”

“For the Lady Killer to come down with a quick, terminal disease and die before Valentine’s Day. But I’ll settle for a beef burrito and a diet cola,” she concluded philosophically.

“Amen to the first part,” Josh responded glibly. “I’ll be right back with lunch.” With that he got out and shut the door behind him.