Cavanaugh on Duty by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online Page A

because he’d asked her to do something and she wanted him to know that she always delivered on her commitments.
    This was the first thing he’d actually asked her to do, and she’d failed.
    Granted, it was still early. The workday had barely started, but all that translated to was more time in which to feel like a colossal failure.
    She’d arrived at the precinct almost an hour earlier than she was supposed to, anticipating Fernandez’s arrival. For her, the minutes had already stretched themselves out as thin as thread, each inching by as she waited for Fernandez to walk into the office.
    It promised to be a very long day from where she was sitting.
    “New guy not here yet?”
    Startled, it took Kari a second to collect herself before she turned around to look at the man who had somehow managed to come up behind her without making a single sound.
    The question had come from Lieutenant Tim Morrow, a rumpled, unimpressive-looking former vice detective with yellowish-white hair and a waist that was slowly becoming wider than the breadth of his shoulders. Morrow had worked his way diligently through the ranks.
    At the moment, the lieutenant was looking at the empty chair opposite her own, but his expectant manner, as well as his question, was directed toward her.
    She wondered if Morrow knew about her visit to the Chief of Detectives yesterday.
    Of course he did, she upbraided herself the next moment. If Fernandez was supposedly going to be working for the department, Morrow would have been notified of everything pertaining to the former undercover detective.
    Had she and Fernandez already had some sort of working relationship, she would have been quick to attempt to cover for him, giving Morrow some sort of plausible excuse as to why the other man wasn’t anywhere within eyeshot. Loyalty was something that was inbred in her, thanks to her father.
    But since she didn’t know if Fernandez was even going to bother showing 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