LITMIR.BIZ

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insecure little girl were still alive and well inside her. “I was a real ugly duckling as a kid,” she told him. “I absolutely hated Valentine’s Day back then. It always made me feel awkward, like everyone was looking at me and knew that I didn’t get a single card from anyone. I thought it was a horrible holiday.”

      “Maybe that’s it,” Josh said, closing the sparse report and watching her.

      Bridget looked at him, curious. She’d obviously missed something. “What’s ‘it’?”

      “Maybe the killer is some psycho getting even,” he suggested. As he spoke, it began to make more and more sense to him. “Our guy asked this redheaded goddess out on a date for Valentine’s Day and she turned him down, maybe even laughed at him for daring to ask her.” As he spoke, Josh’s voice grew louder and more resonant. “His pride wounded, he doesn’t step aside and lick his wounds like most guys, he gets even. Really gets even.

      “Now, every February, he’s relives that—or maybe relives what he wanted to do but didn’t at the time—and takes out his revenge on girls who look like the one who rejected him.”

      Bridget turned what Josh had just said over in her head, studying it. “So what are you telling me? That you think our killer is Charlie Brown?” she asked him, amused despite the gruesome details of the case.

      It seemed almost absurd—except for the fact that it did keep on happening. In the last two years, nine redheads, their hearts very neatly cut out, had been found in alleys throughout Aurora.

      Josh surprised her by explaining why her tongue-in-cheek theory didn’t hold. “No, Charlie Brown never got his nerve up to ask the little redheaded girl out, so she couldn’t reject him. She’s just his eternal dream.”

      His eternal dream. That was almost poetic, she thought.

      Bridget eyed her partner, amazed—and amused. Every time that she was about to write him off as being shallow, there’d be this glimmer of sensitivity that would just pull her back in.

      She supposed that was one of the reasons women always flocked to him. That, a small waist and a rock-solid body that showed off his active gym membership.

      “My God, Youngblood, I’m impressed,” she told him after a beat. “I had no idea that you were so sensitive.”

      Josh stared at her for a long moment. And then his smile, the one she’d dubbed his “bad boy” smile, which could melt the heart of a statue, curved the corners of his mouth. “There’re lot of things about me that you don’t know.”

      Now he was just trying to jockey for leverage and mess with her mind, Bridget thought. There was just one little flaw with his allegation.

      “I grew up with four brothers.” She loved all of them dearly, but at times, when she’d been growing up, the verbal fights had been brutal. “They’d more than held their own, but I really doubt that there’s very much about a living, breathing male that I can’t second-guess,” she told Josh with a smile.

      Before Josh could say anything in response, their acting lieutenant, Jack Howard, came out of his office, saw them and immediately came over. Howard, a rather self-centered man who enjoyed hearing the sound of his own voice, had been the one to hand Bridget the case this morning once he saw that she and Youngblood had worked on it a year ago.

      He looked from Bridget to Josh. “You two solve the case yet?” he asked in what appeared to be genuine seriousness.

      Bridget knew better than to think he was kidding when he asked the question, but she played along, uncertain where this was going. She had a gut feeling that wherever it was, neither she nor Josh were going to like it. There was something very pompous about the man. Added to that, she had a feeling that he resented the fact that she was related to the police department’s well-respected hierarchy.

      “No, sir, not yet,” she answered, allowing her voice to be neither submissive nor combative. She merely gave him the respect that his position was due. It had nothing to do with the man.

      She and Josh had originally heard about the case two years ago, after the second body had been discovered. None of the clues at the time had led the investigating detectives anywhere substantial. Four bodies had turned up and then the killer seemed to just vanish into thin air.

      Until last February when he surfaced again.

      This time, the case became theirs and the killer wound up leaving five women in his wake, five women who were all left in the same pose as this latest one. Hands neatly folded below where their hearts should have been. All in all, it made for a very gruesome picture.

      “Then why are you just sitting around?” Howard demanded, his voice no longer friendly. He turned on Bridget. “Just because you suddenly found out that your uncle’s the chief of detectives doesn’t give you any extra points in my book or cut you any extra slack. Do you understand Cavelli—Cavanaugh?” Flummoxed, he glared at her. “What the hell do you want me to call you?” Howard demanded.

      Bridget squared her shoulders like a soldier who had found herself under fire and was making the best of it. She didn’t like Howard, and his harping on her recent situation just underscored her negative feelings for the man.

      God, would this tempest in a teapot never be resolved? It was bad enough that Josh had teased her about it. But he at least didn’t seem jealous of this brand-new status she found herself struggling with, a status she’d never sought out or wanted in the first place.

      But here it was, anyway.

      Ever since the five-decades-old mix-up in the hospital had come to light, uncovering the fact that her father and some other infant male had accidentally been switched at birth and that her father—and so, consequently affecting all the rest of them—was not Sean Cavelli but Sean Cavanaugh, brother to both the former police chief and the current chief of detectives of the Aurora Police Department, she and her siblings had had no peace.

      They were assaulted with questions, innuendos and their share of jealous remarks on a regular basis. They were no longer judged on their own merits but on the fact that they were all part of what was considered by others to be the “royal family” of the police department.

      Now that she actually thought about it, it seemed as if there was at least one Cavanaugh in almost every branch of the department. Despite the fact that it was completely without a basis, nepotism and favoritism were words that were constantly being bandied about when it came to talk about their jobs and she for one was sick of it.

      She’d gotten here by her own merit long before she’d ever been made aware of her surprising connection to the Cavanaughs.

      It was enough to make a woman bitter, Bridget thought, eternally grateful that she at least had a large, thriving optimistic streak coupled with healthy dose of self-esteem—now.

      “‘Detective’ will do fine,” Bridget informed the lieutenant with a deliberate, wide smile that might have been called flirtatious under somewhat different circumstances.

      Josh wasn’t fooled. He knew she’d flashed the smile on purpose, to throw Howard off and confuse him. If he didn’t miss his guess, his partner would have rather eaten dirt than be even remotely coupled with the new lieutenant and the fact that Howard was married had nothing to do with it. He’d only been on the job for a day before it became apparent that Jack Howard had an ego the size of Pittsburgh.

      “Well, ‘Detective,’” the lieutenant said curtly, giving her a withering glance, “you and your sleepy-looking partner can get off your butts and do some honest police work and catch this son of a bitch before he louses up my record for cleared cases!” Howard snapped.

      With that, the lieutenant turned on the heel of his Italian leather, three-hundred-dollar shoes, and marched back into his office, confident that he had made a dramatic impact on not just the two detectives but the rest of the squad room as well.

      Josh glanced over toward Bridget and saw the way her hand closed over the stapler on her desk—like

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