Cavanaugh on Duty - By Marie Ferrarella Page 0,15

up at all, she felt no allegiance...no urgent need to cover for him.

“’Fraid not,” she replied to the Lieutenant’s question.

Although it was obvious that Fernandez wasn’t there, it was clearly not the answer that Morrow wanted to hear. He frowned, turning toward her. “You two are up,” he told her.

For the first time, she saw the paper the lieutenant was holding in his hand.

Since this was the department that dealt with homicides and questionable deaths, she assumed that a call had come in and that the lieutenant had written down the address and a few scattered details on the notepaper he was holding.

“I can go alone,” Kari volunteered, already on her feet. “Won’t be the first time,” she added needlessly to the man who had been in charge of training her when she’d first walked in through the precinct doors.

The story went that when Morrow had first arrived from the academy, Andrew Cavanaugh, who had gone on to become the chief of police before eventually retiring early to focus on raising his kids and searching for his missing wife, had trained the then-rookie cop.

What goes around comes around, she thought.

Pulling on her jacket, Kari put out her hand for the address.

“I’d rather there were two of you,” Morrow said even as he surrendered the sheet of paper. “But since you’re initially just checking out a bad smell—”

“A bad smell?” Kari repeated, puzzled. Since when had the police department started concerning itself with garbage detail?

“Yeah. Manager at a storage facility said one of the renters came to him complaining that there was a, quote, ‘really bad smell’ coming from the unit located right next to his.” His far from narrow shoulders rose and fell in a resigned shrug. “Could just be some food someone was stupid enough to stash away. Or an animal that had the bad luck to crawl into the unit when the door was open and became trapped inside, eventually expiring. Or—”

She noted that the lieutenant only awarded the dignity of death to people. Everything else “expired,” like a container of milk going sour, or a warranty on a product.

“Or a body someone had stashed in the unit while they tried to figure out how to make it disappear without calling attention to themselves,” she concluded for her boss.

Morrow nodded, his unruly, longer-than-regulation hair falling into his squinty, deep-set brown eyes. “Exactly.”

“Mind if I hope it’s fruit until I find out otherwise?” she asked.

The weather was turning unseasonably warmer. That meant that a body hidden in a storage unit was bound to decompose more quickly than usual. This was not an assignment she was looking forward to.

“It’s a free country,” the lieutenant replied magnanimously.

Kari glanced at the address before tucking it into her pocket. The storage facility wasn’t located far from the precinct, she noted.

Securing her weapon, she was just about to leave the office when she saw the look of surprise that fleetingly passed over the lieutenant’s craggy face. Since the man was facing the outer door that led to the hallway, she turned around to see what had caught his attention.

No wonder he looked surprised, she caught herself thinking. Esteban Fernandez created quite an imposing impression at first sight.

And even second and third, she mused.

To be honest, at first glance he didn’t even look like the man she’d spoken with last night. That man had been scruffy and raw. This one fell under the category of “tall, dark and handsome.” But there was still a dangerous edge to him despite his clean-shaven face. An enticing, dangerous edge.

But then, last night he was still embracing his other persona, the undercover cop he’d been—a role he’d played for the past three years, if the rumors were correct. And, at this point, that was all she really had to go on. Rumors. Law enforcement detectives involved in the undercover world did not exactly have readily accessible data that the regular force could easily refer to. Whatever they did was not supposed to ever see the light of day or be acknowledged—good or bad.

She made a mental note to take another crack at the Cavanaugh pipeline. So many of the Cavanaughs were involved with the various departments at the precinct, it only stood to reason that someone had to know something viable, something she could use when dealing with the man she assumed was going to be her new partner.

However long that association lasted, she did not want to be in the dark or at a disadvantage when it came