“Sorry,” she murmured, placing the file in front of him on the desk.
“Nothing to be sorry about, Detective.” Opening the file, Handel skimmed through it quickly then looked up at her again. “Everything seems to be in order, Detective. I take it that you already know you’ll be partnering up with Cavanaugh here.”
Scottie didn’t pretend to smile at the prospect. “Yes, sir—um, Loo. But I thought I should mention that I work better alone.”
Mentally, Scottie crossed her fingers even though she had a feeling that it was hopeless.
Just as she’d guessed, her statement had less than no effect on her new commanding officer.
“Superman works alone. The rest of us work in pairs. Except for me. I work with all of you. Trust me,” Handel went on, “in this department, you’ll need all the help that you can get. Stupid criminals exist mostly in amusing anecdotes in Reader’s Digest. Today’s breed of thief is smarter, quicker and way sharper than the thief from your father’s generation.”
Scottie was still standing at military attention. “I’ll keep that in mind, si—Loo.”
Handel laughed, clearly tickled by her struggle to address him correctly.
“Work on that, Detective. You’ll get the hang of it.” And then Handel turned to look at Bryce. “Why don’t you help the new kid here catch up on what you and some of the others have been working on?” he suggested.
“You got it, Loo,” Bryce answered, more than ready to accommodate his superior. He and Scottie turned, beginning to leave the small inner office.
“Oh, Scott,” Handel suddenly called out.
Scottie turned and glanced at the man, wondering if he was having second thoughts about her transfer or if there was something else that was wrong. She had learned, long ago, never to expect smooth sailing even if the surface of the lake was as smooth as glass.
“Yes, Loo?”
Because she hadn’t stuttered and stumbled over his name, Handel smiled his approval then told her what he’d wanted to say. “Welcome aboard.”
“Thank you,” she murmured.
She followed her new partner out.
“He takes a little getting used to,” Bryce confided as if he could read her thoughts. As do you, probably, Bryce added silently.
“No more than anyone else,” she replied with a vague shrug. “Everybody’s got their rules and quirks.”
“What are yours?” he asked as they got back to their desks.
“I’ve just got two,” she told him simply. “Rules, not quirks,” she clarified. “Do a good job and never mix work with home. Can we get to work now?” she asked, signaling an end to any exchange he thought they might be making.
“Absolutely. I take it that you’re aware of the series of break-ins that have been going on these last few weeks,” Bryce said, pulling his chair up a little closer to her desk as he lowered his voice just a shade.
She’d been the one to request they get to work, yet the question he’d just led with seemed almost out of the blue. So much so that it almost appeared he was asking her personally rather than just as a general introduction to the case she would be working.
Ever mindful of the possibility that Ethan was involved in these break-ins, her main concern was that, somehow, the connection would be made and once it was known that she was Ethan’s sister—even his half sister—she wouldn’t be allowed to work to clear his name.
“Why?” she responded uneasily, watching Bryce’s every move.
Bryce studied his new partner. Suddenly she appeared rather jumpy. Was that because she was the new kid on the block or was there something else going on that he needed to look into? Something he needed to know about before things went any further, both in the investigation and besides that?
After a moment he chalked up her momentary display of nerves to her wanting to do well on her first assignment in the new division. He couldn’t exactly blame her for that.
“Because it’s all over the news these days, for one thing,” he explained, still covertly studying her reaction to this whole scenario.
“Oh, right. Sorry,” she apologized. And then she knew just how to play this—survival in all sorts of situations had taught her that. “I had too much coffee this morning and I guess I just want to carry my weight right off the bat. Didn’t mean to sound jumpy.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to carry your own weight—and mine, too,” he added with a chuckle. “I’ve got a list of people who’ve come home to find that they’ve been paid a little visit by our local friendly break-in artists. It’s here somewhere.” As he spoke, he began searching through the various files on his desk.
The files looked as if they’d been dropped on his desk by a passing hurricane. Nothing seemed to be organized.
In her opinion Cavanaugh had an awful lot of unnecessary papers scattered over on his desk. It became abundantly clear that the papers were stuck into files in no particular order, either. Finding just one specific thing would be like going on a wild-goose chase.
Finally she couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. “Wouldn’t you have more luck if you had all that on the computer?” she asked.
He countered her suggestion with a list of reasons why he hadn’t had anyone input the material into files on the computer. He was computer literate, but he had never become a fanatic about it.
“Paper files don’t suffer glitches or suddenly become unavailable because of power outages. Besides,” he said, sparing her a grin before going back to the hunt, “this way’s easier.”
Her eyes swept over the haphazard piles of files. “If you say so,” she murmured.
Eventually, Bryce laid his hands on everything he was looking for. He in turn handed them all over to his new partner.
For her part, Scottie spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon going through the various files that Bryce, his former partner and a couple of other detectives in the squad room had compiled.
There had been eight break-ins in this latest wave of home robberies. All the robberies had taken place in Aurora’s more exclusive, upper-end neighborhoods. That was the one thing all the incidents had in common. The only other thing they had in common—for now—was that there had been no one home at the time of the break-ins.
But beyond that, nothing seemed similar to her. The people who’d had their space violated had no common thread running through all their lives. They didn’t attend the same church, didn’t shop in the same stores and they didn’t send their children to the same schools. Two of the victims were single men, while the other five were families.
At first glance the break-ins seemed to all be just random invasions, haphazardly picked, but Scottie knew better than that. There had to be a common thread running through them, something that had drawn the thief’s attention in the first place, like a theme, or a memory, or payback for something.
She just prayed that the common thread running through all these home invasions wasn’t Ethan.
For the umpteenth time Scottie slipped her phone out of her pocket and swiped the screen, bringing it to life. She checked her texts and then her voice messages.
Nothing.
Ethan hadn’t called her back, hadn’t texted. Something was wrong, she knew it.
The old Ethan, the one she’d had to bail out of jail on more than one occasion before he’d finally come to his senses, wouldn’t have called her back. He would have carelessly ignored