Cavanaugh Justice: The Strong Silent Type Part 5

"Thanks again."

He paused, then nodded. If not for her quick action, their positions might have been reversed right now. He wasn't about to forget that soon. "Yeah, me, too."

Turning away, Teri smiled as she let herself into the house. With an annoyingly wobbly, uncertain gait, she headed straight for the stairs and to her room. Any excess strength she had faded the moment she saw her bed. Falling onto it, she was out within three minutes.

It didn't even occur to her until later that day that she hadn't seen her father's white car parked in the driveway.

The last person he expected to see walking into the office the following morning came breezing in a few minutes before nine. Hawk put down the statements he'd taken from the victim late yesterday afternoon. Frowning, he was on his feet in less time than it took her to cross the threshold.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

Ah, she thought, the dulcet sounds of harmonious camaraderie.

"I work here, remember?" Teri looked to the far end where her desk was b.u.t.ted up against his. "Or did you give my desk away already?"

Why did he expect normal behavior from someone who wasn't normal? "You were shot. You're supposed to take a few days off to rest."

Masking the toll the effort took, she moved past Hawk at a good clip. Her side was hurting today worse than it had yesterday, but she needed to get her mind off the pain and do something other than watch television. Tomorrow, she promised herself, would be better. All she had to do was get past today.

"It's a cinch you've never been to my house. You can't rest when you have a fifty-five-year-old man fussing over you." Reaching her desk, she deliberately didn't sink down in her chair. She refused to display any signs of weakness in front of Hawk. He'd only use it against her. "This morning, he was coming up with alternate law enforcement careers that would keep me behind a desk."

"What were they?"

He sounded far too interested and she knew he wasn't thinking of himself. She waved away his question. "Never mind. I love what I do and I'm here." She nodded as Mulrooney got up from his chair and crossed to her.

"Welcome back." He gave her a bear hug. "You okay to be here?"

"Never better." She managed to get the remark out without gritting her teeth together. She looked from one man to the other. "Did we get anything out of those guys we caught yesterday?"

Disgust covered Dan Mulrooney's broad, florid face. "They clammed up and demanded to talk to a lawyer."

She made the natural a.s.sumption. "Public defender?" The men looked like two-bit thugs.

"No, some pricey guy." She could see that Mulrooney had been as surprised by the piece of information as she was. "Your cousin Janelle was by. Said she'd heard of him."

"Where do two-bit burglars get the money for a pricey lawyer?" Teri wanted to know.

It was a rhetorical question. She didn't expect to get an answer. But Hawk had been chewing on the same question all evening. "Maybe they're not working alone but for someone."

She caught his wavelength and was off and running, charging her words with all the enthusiasm he lacked. "Someone who can afford it." Her eyes were positively glowing. She loved when one thing hooked up to another. "Someone big." She grinned at Hawk. "You know, you don't talk much, but when you do, it's worth listening to."

"Unlike some people," he said under his breath. He was angry about her being back so soon. Angry that she was risking her health. And angry that what she did got under his skin the way it did.

She was back, Teri thought, finally lowering herself into her chair.

And it felt good.

Chapter Five.

T eri stopped dead.

Behind her, the ladies' room door she'd just come through lightly tapped her as it swung back into place, nudging her out of her trance. Feeling a little woozy, she'd gone in for a couple of minutes respite without several sets of male eyes watching her, most notably Hawk's. She'd had the feeling all day that he'd been waiting for her to pa.s.s out, or visibly droop.

Which was a great incentive to keep pus.h.i.+ng.

But she hadn't expected to be waylaid by the sudden appearance of her father walking along on what she deemed now to be her turf.

"Dad, what are you doing here?"

Her eyes narrowed as she crossed to him. Granted, this whole building had once been her father's domain and she knew he had to miss being here, had to miss being the chief of what had become a d.a.m.n fine police force. But the first reason that occurred to her for his presence had nothing to do with his having a bout of nostalgia, or meeting up with old friends. It was far more personal than that. And very typical. Since Rose Cavanaugh had disappeared out of their lives, he had transformed from a parent to both mother and father to all of them.

"You're not checking up on me, are you?"

So engrossed in thought, Andrew had all but walked into his daughter. If anything, he knew he had to look more surprised to see her than she him.

Forcing a smile to his lips, he shook his head. "h.e.l.l, no. I know better than that." And then he deadpanned with a wink. "I've got my spies doing that for me."

With her father, it wasn't always easy to know when he was kidding. And she wouldn't put it past him to have one of his old friends look in on her and then call in with a report. He was like that, letting them independently go their own way and fly high. All the while he secretly held up a net to catch them in case they should fall.

She scrutinized his face. At least the worried frown wasn't there anymore, the way it had been yesterday when her father had come home to find her there ahead of him. He'd tried every argument in the book to get her to take a sick day today and rest, but the more he pushed, the more she'd dug in. She supposed that maybe she did possess a little of that superhero complex that Hawk had accused her of having, but that wasn't anything she was willing to own up to out loud.

She hooked her arm through her father's, taking comfort in his strength. Not a day went by when she wasn't proud to be Andrew Cavanaugh's daughter.

"So, what does bring you here?" she asked cheerfully. "Catching up on stories with the guys?"

He didn't like lying, especially to his children, but agreeing to the scenario Teri had just provided him with was a lot easier than going into an explanation of what he was really doing here. He'd come to bring to the crime lab the spoon he'd lifted from the diner. He wanted the head tech to match the fingerprints on it against the prints he knew had to be all over the well-worn, much-read copy of Rose's favorite book, Gone with the Wind. How many times had he teased her that she cared more for Rhett Butler than she did for him? Her answer had always been the same. That until the day that Rhett did come along, he'd do just fine.

The argument the day she had driven out of his life was that he was afraid that "Rhett" had come-in the guise of his brother Mike. It had been a stupid, stupid argument, and one of the very few times he'd allowed jealousy to get the better of him. And he'd been paying for that stupidity for the past fifteen years of his life.

He knew how his children felt about his ongoing search for their mother. They thought he was knocking his head against a stone wall. He'd noticed the look of pity in their eyes every time they saw him opening up the folders and spreading them out on his desk.

"Give it up, Dad," even Rayne, his youngest, had begged him. Rayne, who had taken her mother's disappearance the hardest and who, after all these years, had finally come around and accepted the fact that her mother was gone, the way the rest of them had.

Except that he knew his wife wasn't gone. He'd seen her, talked to her. And now he needed proof.

"Something like that," he allowed, making his decision.

Had he said the words to Callie, he knew that she'd be all over him, examining his tone, his inflection, the look on his face as he said what he said. His oldest daughter was part mind reader. But Teri was his fire-cracker. Hardly one thought fully formed in her mind before she was on to another.

He figured he was safe.

Andrew looked at his daughter more closely as they walked slowly to the squad room. She still looked too pale. But she was twenty-seven and he couldn't very well lock her in her room. "So, how's your day going?"

"Not too well." She struggled to bank down her growing frustration. They were close, so close. "We can't get anything out of the suspects' we caught yesterday. They've lawyered up. But the M.O. is an exact duplicate of the other four home invasions that've gone down in the past month. The burglars got in using a key. The people are all upscale, but other than that, they have nothing in common except that they were targeted by these creeps."

"Keep at it, Teri. You'll find the answer. You always do." Afraid she might redirect the conversation back to him, Andrew drew his arm away from hers and glanced at his watch. "Well, don't let me keep you from your work. And try to get home at a decent hour tonight."

It was her turn to wink at him. "That all depends on what you mean by decent." Moving away, she began to disappear around the corner.

Teri was his night owl, given to partying almost as hard as she was to devoting herself to police work. "Sometime before dawn," he called after her.

Her voice came floating back. "You got it."

Shaking his head, Andrew hurried off to the stairwell. It was the safest route right now. He didn't want to take a chance on running into another one of his children. All five worked here, not to mention his four nephews. Even Janelle, Brian's girl, was wont to pop up here, working with the detectives in her capacity as a.s.sistant district attorney.

And although his late brother, Mike's daughter Patience had opted for a different path by becoming a veterinarian, her services were frequently used in providing medical care for the force's K-9 squad. That meant he could run into her, too. He didn't feel like having to field questions from her, either, although of the lot of them, Patience was the most una.s.suming and laid-back.

The stairwell was definitely the way to go until he was ready to share whatever findings Claude Wilkins came up with at the lab. Wilkins owed him more than a few favors, not the least of which was his present position as head of the crime lab. He'd promised to get the results to him as quickly as possible.

Until then, he'd keep his own counsel. There was no use in stirring everyone up if there was no match.

But in his heart, he knew there would be.

His footsteps echoed as he went down the metal steps.

"Hey, Cavanaugh, I saw your dad here earlier." Mulrooney sat down at his desk, momentarily tearing his attention away from the slightly squished package of Ding Dongs that he'd ransomed out of the vending machine. It was his third such venture today. He claimed that chocolate made him think more clearly.

Teri didn't look up from the notes she was studying. So far, the flow chart she'd put together of all the victims had yielded nothing even vaguely enlightening. "Yeah, me, too," she muttered.

"What's your dad doing hanging around the crime lab?"

Mulrooney's innocent question, uttered as he sank his teeth into the plastic wrapper and yanked, speared through her thoughts. Her head jerked up in his direction as he got her full attention.

"The crime lab?"

"Yeah." The older detective shook his bounty out of its plastic confines onto a sheet of white paper on his desk. "Saw him giving something to Wilkins. A spoon and a book of some kind." Using a plastic knife he kept in his desk, he meticulously divided the dessert into halves. "He doing consulting work for the department or something these days? I mean, the man was d.a.m.n good when he worked here." There was a fond note in his voice. "Everything ran like a well-oiled machine and crimes were down while number of cases solved were up." Picking up the first half of the treat, he prepared to pop the whole thing into his mouth. "Maybe you can have him wander in and solve this case for us. You know, lay hands on the files and come up with an answer." The suggestion was followed by a chuckle.

Teri chewed on her lip, thinking. Her father hadn't mentioned anything about stopping at the crime lab when she'd run into him. Now that she thought about it, he looked unwilling to talk about being here at all. And why would he be giving Wilkins a spoon and a book? Something was definitely up.

More than anything else, she hated not knowing what was going on.

She reached for the telephone on her desk, intending to call home and get to the bottom of this. But before she could dial, Hawk was standing next to her, putting several sheets on her desk.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Found another home invasion, sloppier than the others. Timeline puts it first." Suddenly aware that there didn't seem to be enough s.p.a.ce between them, Hawk took a step back. "Maybe there was a learning curve for our guys."

Teri scanned the papers he'd printed up. "What do you mean?"

Their desks were b.u.t.ted up against one another, head to head. He sat down behind his, allowing her to absorb what he was saying. Finding himself getting more and more in tune to her, he noticed she looked a little distracted. "The crime lab boys found prints on the scene that didn't belong to any of the family members or friends."

Adrenaline surged through her. "Did the prints match anyone in the system?"

His expression never changed. But then, Teri had a feeling he could have discovered gold on his property and never bat an eyelash. "No, but neither suspect' has any priors."

At least this was possible progress. "Okay-" she pushed back from her desk and stood "-then let's go and see if we can get ourselves a match."

There was no match.

The prints that were on file from the Del Torro case didn't match the prints of either of the two men who had been captured invading the Wong apartment the day before.

"Only means that there's probably more people involved than the ones we've got cooling their heels in lockup," Teri theorized with a deep sigh. "But then we already figured this operation has to be bigger than Tweedledum and Tweedledee."

Still, it irritated her to move forward only to slide back again like this. She wanted that burst, the lead that finally brought all the pieces together.

She paused, holding the results that had just been spit out of the machine. Another question nagged at her. Maybe she could at least get the answer and put it to rest. "Claude, what did my father give you earlier today?"

Already at the door, Hawk turned slowly around to listen to the head technician's reply. When she glanced in her partner's direction, he was watching her, not Wilkins. She shut him out.

Wilkins, a bewhiskered man in his fifties, measured his words out as slowly as he did the evidence he examined. "He wanted a favor."

"What kind of a favor?"

To her frustration, Wilkins shook his head as he turned back to his work. "Look, Teri, I'm not comfortable talking about it. If you want to know, why don't you ask him yourself?"

"I will." Banking down her annoyance, she turned on her heel and walked out.

Hawk matched his stride to hers. For a small woman, she could cover a lot of ground when she put her mind to it.

"We're working on a case, Cavanaugh."

So now he was her conscience as well as her partner? "I know," she snapped, pus.h.i.+ng the down b.u.t.ton on the elevator pad. "I don't need you to tell me that."

Her tone didn't put him off. His own was infuriatingly mild as he continued. "Don't you think that should be your first priority?"

The elevator arrived and she stomped in, punching the b.u.t.ton for the floor she wanted before she trusted herself to answer. "My family's my first priority. My job's a close second."

He stood beside her, the six-foot-two voice of reason she didn't want to hear right now. "Seems to me if your father wanted you to know, he would have told you when you ran into him."

So he'd overheard Mulrooney earlier. She resented him taking this high-handed att.i.tude about her life. "What are you, an authority on father-daughter relations.h.i.+ps all of a sudden?"

His shoulders rose and fell in a seemingly disinterested shrug. "Just making an observation."

"Well, don't."

Arriving on their floor, she got out ahead of him. But two steps toward the squad room, she got a renewed hold over her emotions. Since yesterday, they seemed to be all over the place. Maybe getting shot had affected her more than she realized. She definitely had to get a grip.

"Sorry," she apologized. "I didn't mean to get so testy. It's just that-"

"You have to know everything."

Mentally, she counted to ten. She couldn't follow an apology with an explosion. "Not everything, just what's going on with my family. With my father," she underscored. Because without him, there would have been no family. Andrew Cavanaugh was the glue that held all of them together.