Cavanaugh's Surrender (10 page)

“Mainly they had to do with her job.”

“Remind me what that was again,” he said.

She’d mentioned it in passing in her summary and for a couple of minutes there, he’d been so busy just
watching
Destiny speak that he had lost the thread of what she was saying. That was probably when she’d mentioned her sister’s job title.

“She was a fundraiser for the Children’s Hospital of Aurora,” Destiny told him again. Was he trying to trip her up? Bait her? Or what? “And she was very good at it. Even in these rough times, she knew just how to coax major corporations and wealthy CEOs into making sizable donations to the hospital.”

She knew that because other people had told her. Paula had never been one to sing her own praises, and she didn’t talk all that much about work whenever they did get together. Considering all that grief they’d gone through in the middle years, Paula had turned out well and she was proud of her.

Damn it, this shouldn’t have happened to you, Paula.

Keeping an angry wave of tears at bay, she said, “The hospital is breaking ground on an oncology wing, thanks to her efforts.”

Logan saw the way she was struggling to keep herself under control. To keep the grief at arm’s length. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. But he knew that saying so would be the last thing that she would want to hear. Instead, he said the only thing he knew would be welcome.

“Your sister sounds like she was a really good person.”

His remark surprised her. She felt a little salvo of pleasure spread from her stomach and radiate outward. A small smile curved her mouth.

“She was,” she acknowledged. “Just not an overly talkative one. At least, not to me.” Which really hurt because there’d been a time when they had shared
everything.
“I got the feeling she didn’t think I’d understand about the relationship she was hiding from me. Even when things got better between us, Paula would say that I was too straitlaced.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to tell you because the guy might have been married.” He studied her face to see her reaction to the suggestion.

Defensive of her sister, she began to deny the assumption.

“Paula wouldn’t have—” But then Destiny abruptly stopped her own protest. “Well, maybe she did,” she amended ruefully. She shook her head. “That would explain why she’d gotten so secretive.”

Damn it, Paula, married or not, you should have come to me anyway. Maybe that would have saved your life.

Logan nodded. It was beginning to make more sense. At least they had an avenue to explore. “Considering that she met a lot of powerful men in her line of work, we need to get a list of the hospital’s top donors.”

That, she knew, would go over like the proverbial lead balloon with Paula’s supervisor. “Looking for a killer in that group’ll certainly put a crimp into the hospital obtaining any more charitable donations,” Destiny prophesized.

“Not if we handle it diplomatically,” he replied. He saw the skeptical expression that came over the woman’s face. “What? You don’t think I can be diplomatic?” He guessed at what she was thinking. “Well, you’re wrong. I can be very diplomatic if the situation calls for it,” he assured her.

Destiny couldn’t picture the man sitting across from her monitoring every word he uttered. He just didn’t seem the type.

“If you say so,” she murmured.

“I do.” And with that, he rose to his feet. The next moment, Logan was heading toward the door. Destiny had no choice but to move fast if she wanted to catch up to him and not be left behind. “Decided to come along?” he asked innocently.

Destiny shot him a dirty look, but she kept quiet. She felt it was better that way. For both of them.

* * *

“Terrible, terrible thing,” Marcia Ruben lamented, shaking her head. A crumpled, damp handkerchief was balled up in one of her hands and she dabbed at her eyes periodically as tears insisted on sliding down the highly polished cheeks. Paula’s supervisor looked more than a little upset by the news of her death. Paula, she’d already stated twice, had been her very best mover and shaker.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her. She will be greatly missed by everyone.” She took another pass at her cheeks with her handkerchief. “She was the best fundraiser I ever had, and I’ve been here for a long time,” she said with a touch of melancholy. Whether it was for the dead woman or the fact that she had been here for years was anyone’s guess. “If there was any way to get another dime out of someone, Paula was the one to do it. Donations just doubled in the short time she worked at the hospital. Given a chance, I’m sure she would have eventually raised enough money to double the size of the hospital. She truly had a gift. It seemed like once Paula got rolling, no one could say no to her.”

“Someone obviously had.” Destiny wasn’t aware that she had said the bitter comment out loud until she heard it herself.

Mrs. Ruben pressed her lips together sadly. “Yes, of course,” the heavyset woman readily agreed. “But for the life of me, I cannot begin to imagine how someone could have done that to Paula. Or why.”

After telling the woman that Paula was found dead, Destiny had deliberately added that it was staged to look like a suicide. She’d said it to see the expression on Mrs. Ruben’s face. There was only horror and disbelief. Either the woman was a very good actress, or she was on the level. Destiny leaned toward the latter.

Pulling herself together, Mrs. Ruben looked from one to the other. “How is it I can help you?”

“We’d like to see a list of the people she approached for donations,” Logan told her politely but without any fanfare.

Nonetheless, the woman’s small brown eyes widened in stunned disbelief.

“You think that one of them had something to do with Paula’s murder? That’s impossible,” she protested with feeling. “These are people who move around in upper-class circles, who give to the less fortunate—”

She sounded as if she was winding herself up for a long speech. Destiny was quick to head her off.

“We’re just trying to follow up every possible avenue, Mrs. Ruben, in the hopes of stumbling onto something that might give us a clue to her killer’s identity.” She watched the woman’s face closely as she added, “We believe that Paula knew her killer.”

“How can you be sure?” Mrs. Ruben asked, bewildered.

“There was no sign of a struggle,” Logan explained. “Nothing was tossed around. There were no scratches on the vic—on Paula. And no signs of any skin under her nails. She didn’t get a chance to fight whoever did this to her. That’s because this man caught her off guard.”

The woman still appeared rather skeptical. “At the same time, I don’t want to insult any of these donors.”

“We won’t tell them that the list came from you,” Logan promised with a sensual smile that seemed to melt the older woman’s heart, not to mention her knees.

“Think of it as doing something for Paula,” Destiny urged, feeling as if she was moving in for the kill after Logan had softened the woman up.

Mrs. Ruben nodded vigorously. “Yes, of course. For Paula.” She wiped away more tears as she turned toward the computer on her desk. “I believe I have the latest list right here. Ah, yes, here it is.”

Pulling it up on her screen, the woman hit the print key on her keyboard. The grinding, somewhat labored sound of a machine coming to life was immediately heard from across the aisle. The old printer noisily spit out three pages of names, as well as the companies they were associated with and addresses to go with them.

Since she was the one standing closest to the printer, Destiny gathered together the pages and brought them over to Logan.

“Twenty-six names,” she said, looking at Mrs. Ruben. “Are these all the people she contacted in the last six months?”

“Yes.” She bobbed her head up and down, her short, straight hair moving back and forth against her jawline. “Please, tread lightly with these people,” she begged. “I don’t want them taking offense and withdrawing their pledges.” Her voice lowered after a moment’s hesitation and the woman said, “I’m afraid they can be very thin-skinned.”

“As far as they’ll be concerned,” Logan told her, “we’ll just be asking them if they thought that Paula seemed preoccupied lately, or if she behaved as if something was wrong.”

Mrs. Ruben sighed and shook her head. “They’ll probably say no. I know that I never saw her looking happier than these last few weeks. She looked as if she was harboring sunbeams.”

That, Destiny thought, was the perfect way to describe the Paula she knew and loved. As if she was keeping sunbeams inside of her.

Now it was up to her to find out who put those sunbeams out.

* * *

It seemed to Destiny over the course of the next five hours that she was hearing a mantra being repeated over and over again. Every person on the list whom they spoke to expressed shock and dismay at hearing that someone “so young and vital like Paula was murdered.” No one could imagine someone doing something so cold-blooded and cruel.

The tall, thin, angular CEO of Practical Engineering, Jacob Deering, asked, “Do you have any suspects in mind?”

“None yet,” Logan responded, fielding the question quickly because he was afraid that Destiny might be too honest in her answer.

None of the people they questioned were informed that she was the victim’s sister, and he wanted to keep it that way. Nor had they been informed that he and the other investigator thought that Paula’s lover might have been responsible for her death.

“Which is why we’re going down the list of all the major contributors she dealt with,” Logan continued. “Since she spent most of her time around people who could make a difference in building up the hospital’s resources, we were hoping that Paula might have said something to you that would send us looking in the right direction for her killer.”

The man shook his head. He appeared to be genuinely saddened by the news of her death. “I’m afraid I can’t be of any help there. But what I can do is make sure her memory is kept alive by making a personal donation to the hospital in her memory,” Deering told them, taking out his checkbook from the center drawer of his desk.

Logan saw the look in Destiny’s eyes. She was wondering the same thing he was. Was this donation being made out of a sense of guilt, or was he being honest in wanting to honor Paula’s memory?

It was impossible to tell.

Tearing off the check, the CEO of the engineering company who had been high on Paula’s list held it out to them. “If you could see that the hospital gets this money—”

“I’m afraid we don’t have the actual authority to—” Logan began to demur, but Destiny stepped in and accepted the check.

“We’ll be sure to bring it to Mrs. Ruben, her immediate superior,” she assured Deering. Then, looking at Logan, she deliberately added, “We did tell Mrs. Ruben that we were going to check in with her late this afternoon.”

This was the first he’d heard of it—most likely because she’d just made it up. But for the time being, she was his partner, and that meant backing up her play no matter what. So he did.

“Right. I forgot.” Logan kept the charade alive and waited until they were on their way out back to the elevator. “What the hell was that?” he asked once they were alone.

“Well, it’s hard to pass up a donation,” she told him with a careless shrug. And then her expression turned shrewd. “And this way, we have a sample of his handwriting—in case there’s anything in her apartment to match it to.” When he looked at her blankly, she spelled it out for him. “Like a love letter.”

Logan snorted. Was that it? “Men don’t write love letters these days,” he pointed out.

“Men like you who don’t want to put anything in writing don’t write love letters,” she readily agreed, getting on the elevator ahead of him. “But an old-fashioned man might.”

Where had that come from? “What makes you think we’re looking for an old-fashioned man?” he asked as they rode down.

“I don’t, but a lot of these men have held down their positions for a number of years, making them older, and there’s no sense in ruling that out yet, is there?” The way she asked, the question was rhetorical. “If we don’t know who we’re looking for, we have to take all the different options into consideration.”

He didn’t see anything to argue with. “You have a point,” he agreed.

“Yeah, well, I just wish I had an answer,” Destiny said, more to herself than to him. The doors opened on the ground floor and she all but charged out. “C’mon,” she tossed over her shoulder, “we’ve still got more names on this list.”

For someone who’d slept on her desk last night, she seemed to have an incredible amount of energy, Logan thought darkly as he followed in her wake.

* * *

“How about a drink?” he suggested. They’d finally talked to their last donor—with no luck—and it was the tail end of a very long, long day. Evening was flirting with the darkening sky, and he was ready to put down his shield for the night.

But Destiny shook her head in response to his offer. “I don’t drink,” she told him. “I find that it clouds the mind.”

“It also helps unclench your jaw,” he told her pointedly.

She instantly squared her shoulders. “My jaw’s not clenched,” she retorted.

“You don’t see it from my vantage point.” He held his hands up, knowing she would take offense. “Look, you can’t deny that if you were any stiffer, you could double as a landing field. Take a break. Relax. In the morning we’ll review our notes and maybe get a fresh perspective on things,” he told her. “But that’s not going to happen if you don’t go home and get some sleep.”

Maybe because she’d been left in charge so early in her life, but she had never liked being told what to do, and she balked at it now.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get some sleep,” she told him dismissively.

He wasn’t placated. “On a surface that doesn’t involve steel or wood,” he told her pointedly. And then he smiled a smile that she was certain someone must have told him was boyish and charming—and while it was both those things, she also found it annoying. “I personally recommend dinner, a drink and a hot shower.”

“Good, then you can eat, drink and wash,” she told him.