Did that mean she was divorced, or just trying to preserve her wedding ring?
Charley saw where the detective was looking and knew what he had to be wondering. “Long story,” she said, echoing his words back to him.
Except that her story wasn’t long. It was nonexistent.
She’d never been married to begin with, but the class of rookies she had attended the academy with were a particularly aggressive group with testosterone all but swirling to overflowing—and Declan had been the biggest offender, as she recalled. It was a great deal easier just saying she was married than coming up with excuses and perpetually fending off the class of would-be Romeos. She attended the academy to learn everything there was about police work. Going out with any one of a number of the rookies—especially Declan—would have only served to blur her focus.
So she opted to pretend she was already off the market and married. Only a handful had tried to change her mind about remaining faithful to her vows and they soon gave up when she showed no signs of coming around to their way of thinking.
“I like long stories,” he told her. “We’ll trade them.” Then, turning his attention to the reason he’d been called out to begin with, he nodded at the dead man. He would have had to have been deaf and blind to miss the distress in her voice and on her face and he was neither. “He a friend of yours?”
“We knew each other,” Charley answered, keeping her reply deliberately vague. If she admitted to Declan that Matt was her half brother, she knew that there wouldn’t be a chance in hell she would be allowed to work on his murder. And right now that was the most important thing in the world to her.
Declan took her answer in stride. “How did you happen to be here?” he asked.
Charley looked up sharply, recognizing the tone Declan was using. It was deliberately laid-back, conversational—and moving in for the kill because, as the person who called in the murder, she was suspect number one.
She told him the truth—as far as she was willing to take it.
“I heard Holt hadn’t shown up for his shift in the last couple of days and his lieutenant said he hadn’t called in, either. That wasn’t like Holt. I knew he was having a hard time because of a breakup he was going through, so I decided to stop by to check on him. It was on my way.” It hadn’t been, but Cavelli—or Cavanaugh—didn’t need to know that part, Charley thought.
“A breakup?” Declan echoed, looking at her thoughtfully. “With you?”
The question was so unexpected, it made her laugh. The laugh was devoid of any humor.
“Hardly. Her name was Melissa. They didn’t quite have the same goals and expectations. When Holt looked at her, he heard wedding bells ringing. When she looked at him, she heard the sound of a cash register going off.”
“Not a match made in heaven,” Declan agreed. He looked down at the man thoughtfully. “You think he killed himself?”
“He wasn’t the type.” He wouldn’t have done that to her, no matter how badly he’d been hurting. He wouldn’t have taken himself out of her life like that.
“Then you knew him pretty well,” Declan concluded.
She didn’t want Declan to go veering onto that path, but rather than deny it, she gave him another answer. “There was a note,” she began.
Declan eyed her, his interest escalated. “A suicide note?”
“No,” Charley snapped, the edge of her temper growing frayed at an increasingly faster pace. She knew she wasn’t being fair to Declan. It wasn’t his fault that Matt was dead.
It bothered her greatly that there were no defensive wounds on the body. That meant that Matt hadn’t fought back. Most likely, he’d been passed out when the killer had struck.
She hadn’t had time to do anything with the note except carefully remove it so that it wouldn’t get damaged when the paramedics worked over her brother. Taking her handkerchief out, she picked up the edge of the paper she’d placed out of the way and held it up for Declan to read.
“Just the beginning,” Declan repeated, and raised his eyes to her face. “You think it’s a budding serial killer making an announcement?”
“Could be,” she allowed, then told him the last detail. “It was stapled to his chest.”
That didn’t sound right. Was she getting muddled because the discovery of the body had hit her hard? “You mean to his shirt.”
“No,” she said, taking out her cell phone and selecting the photos app. “To his chest.”
She flipped through the photographs to the one she’d made herself take of Matt, knowing it was an important detail that just might help them solve Matt’s murder.
Finding the one she was looking for, she held it up for Declan. “There. See?”
“Wow.” The word just slipped out of its own volition. He took the smart phone from her—or tried to. “I won’t damage it,” he promised her.
She was really going to have to get a better grip on herself or she wasn’t going to be of any use to Matt, she upbraided herself.
“Sorry,” Charley responded, releasing her hold on the phone.
“That’s okay,” Declan said. And then he took a closer look at the photograph that she had queued up for his perusal. “You’re right, the note was stapled to his chest. Who does that kind of thing?” he marveled, more to himself than to her.
That was an easy one to answer. It was all the other questions that were going to be difficult. “Someone who’s crazy.”
“Any more? Photos?” he asked rather than just arbitrarily flip through her array of photographs. In what he saw as her present, rather fragile state, he wanted to make sure he avoided doing anything that might upset her any further than she already was.
“Not of the crime scene,” she told him. There were other photographs of Matt, both with her and without her, but those she didn’t want this detective to see. If the matter came up, she wouldn’t deny her connection to Matt, but until then, she wasn’t about to advertise the fact that he was her brother, either.
Declan leaned over the officer’s body, taking in all he could without actually touching the man or rolling him over. The bullet seemed to have entered in the region of his heart. He had no way of knowing if there was an exit wound until after the crime-scene investigator released the body. He wondered if his father had been called in for this one. Seeing as how it was a police officer who had been shot—possibly executed—he rather thought it was likely that his father would be on the scene since he was head of the day lab unit.
“Think he means it?” Declan asked, straightening up again.
The detective had asked the question completely out of the blue. She stared at him, unclear what he was referring to. “Who?”
“The killer,” Declan told her patiently. “Do you think there’ll be more? That he really intends to kill other people?”
Charley shrugged, at a loss to form any real opinion. “That’s what his note says,” she replied, her voice eerily removed.
Declan nodded as he conducted a perimeter examination of the area where the body had been discovered. “Well, thanks for the input,” he told her. “I’ll keep you in the loop if I can.”
Charley didn’t budge as she gave him a glare that would have made Medusa shiver. “‘In the loop’?” she echoed incredulously. “I’m not going to be in any ‘loop,’ Cavelli or Cavanaugh or whatever name you want to go by,” she informed him. “I’m going to work this case.”
“What