LITMIR.BIZ

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and shook his head. “It’s going to be another long night,” he anticipated, addressing his words to no one in particular.

      “C’mon, don’t just stand there and make it any longer,” the other man prodded.

      Pushing the gurney before them, they entered the next room.

      Once they were gone, Sean turned to Destiny. “I should be the one who’s saying he’s sorry,” he said to her, continuing what he was saying before the two assistants from the M.E.’s office had entered the apartment. “And I am. I am deeply sorry for your loss,” he emphasized. “And we will find the person responsible for this, Destiny,” he said. “I give you my word.”

      Destiny blinked back her tears. It felt as if she’d been fighting them all along. Her supervisor wasn’t making things any easier for her.

      “I believe you,” she murmured, her voice hardly above a whisper. Any louder and she knew she would risk breaking down entirely.

      Again.

      To the best of Logan’s knowledge, it was the first time he’d ever heard his father make a promise that he wasn’t a hundred percent certain ahead of time that he could back up.

      This assistant had to mean a lot to him, he concluded, then couldn’t help wondering why.

       Chapter 3

      “Were you two on the outs?” Logan asked Destiny as his father continued processing the rest of the small apartment.

      Why did he keep coming back to that?

      “No. She was my only family. We were close—as close as two people who lived two different, busy lives could be,” she qualified, emphasizing the word busy. “We didn’t get together as much as I would have liked, but that couldn’t have been helped.” Her eyes narrowed slightly as she regarded Logan, looking for some kind of an indication as to what was really on his mind. She began to suspect that he wasn’t the typical vapid, shallow pretty boy. There was substance, a trait she’d always found far sexier than looks.

      But right now, she was in a place where things like that didn’t matter.

      “Why are you asking?” she asked.

      He answered her question with a question. “Is there any reason you can think of why she wouldn’t have told you who she was seeing?”

      Logan was still having a lot of trouble swallowing the scenario the woman’s sister had given him. All three of his sisters not only knew everything there was to know about each other’s boyfriends, or, in Bridget’s case, her fiancé, they were also aware of their friends’ current dates. He couldn’t fathom a woman who was willingly oblivious to that sort of information—and actually content to remain that way.

      Suppressing a sigh, she said, “Probably to avoid hearing me tell her to go slow and to be careful.” She saw the question in the detective’s eyes. Under another set of circumstances, they might have even been intriguing eyes. Right now, they were just annoyingly probing. “My sister doesn’t—didn’t,” she corrected herself, hating the fact that she had to, “have the greatest track record when it came to picking men. They were all very good-looking on the outside. On the inside, not so much.”

      Holding her hand out, she waffled it to indicate just how much each of the previous men in her sister’s life had deviated from the straight-and-narrow path. There hadn’t been a decent one in the lot.

      “So in other words, she didn’t give you any details about who she was seeing because she didn’t want you to be judgmental,” Logan concluded succinctly.

      She nodded, wishing with all her heart that she hadn’t come down as hard on Paula over the last one as she had. Not that he didn’t deserve every insulting adjective she had hurled at his memory. Slick, charming, with a Southern drawl, Bo Wilkins had managed to deplete half of Paula’s bank account—granted, that didn’t exactly amount to a king’s ransom, but it was still Paula’s money—before just vanishing off the face of the earth.

      She’d begged Paula to let her know the next time she gave away her heart, because she’d said she intended to run a check on whomever the next Romeo was. If no prior arrests came up, then at least her sister would have a fighting chance of keeping the fillings in her teeth.

      Paula hadn’t found that funny, she recalled. And she deliberately hadn’t said anything about meeting someone new—until she’d been pinned down.

      That was when Paula had told her that she didn’t want to say anything yet because she didn’t want to jinx the relationship. And, if it became serious, then she would say something.

      Given that, Destiny had seen no reason to push.

      But apparently, it had been serious. Which meant that Paula had lied to her, Destiny realized with a sharp pang. It obviously had to have been serious if Paula had been despondent enough to text that message to her.

      If she texted that message, a little voice in Destiny’s head whispered.

      Her eyes widened as the thought sank in.

      What if Paula hadn’t even been the one to text that message? What if her killer had? The same killer who had botched the appearance of a suicide by slashing her wrists upside down.

      Trying not to get ahead of herself, she turned toward Sean. “We have to process her cell phone for any fingerprints on the keypad that aren’t hers. The guy probably wore gloves, but maybe he got careless….”

      Destiny’s voice trailed off as she made eye contact with her supervisor. He wasn’t saying anything, just letting her talk, but she could see by the expression on his face that he was already way ahead of her. He always seemed to be two steps ahead of everyone.

      “You already thought of that,” she said, nodding her head.

      “We’re on the same page,” Sean told her kindly. “Same page that Logan’s on,” he said, nodding toward his son.

      Feeling anxious and yet dull-witted at the same time, an area she had never inhabited before, Destiny turned toward the detective, curious why he wasn’t saying anything.

      The answer to that was simple. Because he wasn’t standing there anymore.

      “Cavanaugh?” she called, raising her voice.

      “In here,” Logan answered, his voice floating back to her from the back of the apartment.

      Apparently a thought had occurred to him and he’d gone back into the bedroom to look at something, or for something.

      Actually, the man had gone back to the bathroom, Destiny realized as she followed the sound of the detective’s deep voice.

      As she entered the bedroom, she had to shift to one side. The medical examiner’s team had slipped Paula’s body into that one-size-fits-all black body bag and was now wheeling her sister back out. Once outside the building, they’d put her into the coroner’s van they’d driven over here.

      Paula didn’t like the color black, Destiny recalled with a pang. It was the only color missing from her meticulously arranged wardrobe.

       “Black is the color of death, Destiny. I don’t want it anywhere near me.”

      It is now, pumpkin. It is now, Destiny thought, feeling her heart twist inside of her.

      Walking into the bathroom, painfully aware that her sister was no longer here—no longer anywhere—she found Logan standing before the medicine cabinet. The door was open and the detective was peering at the shelves. He was obviously taking inventory of what was inside. She didn’t exactly care for the thoughtful frown she saw on his face.

       Now what?

      Bracing herself, thinking that she would have to defend her sister again, Destiny forced herself to ask, “What?”

      Logan

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