LITMIR.BIZ

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mind over matter for you, is that it?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      The lieutenant surprised her with a quick, spasmodic smile as he nodded his approval. “Good. Oh, and one more thing.”

      So near and yet so far, she thought, all set to escape only to be pulled back. “Yes, sir?”

      “That laptop that was found near the body, you really think you can get something off it?” There was genuine interest in his voice rather than any condescending note, tendering the notion that she was going to fail.

      She tried to read the man in an effort to know what kind of answer he expected from her. If she said yes right off the bat, he’d undoubtedly think she was bragging and high on herself. So she couched her answer carefully. “I know I’d like to try.”

      “Yes or no, Cavanaugh. I don’t have any time for your modesty or your aw-shucks routine. Give it to me straight. Can you do this?”

      “Yes—probably,” she tacked on. There were always problems that could crop up and she didn’t want him berating her, or reminding her that she’d misrepresented herself and her abilities.

      Latimore surprised her again by laughing in response. “I guess that’ll just have to be good enough for now. Brody tends to like to work alone, so you’re going to have to stay sharp in order to keep up and not get left behind.”

      Latimore made it sound as if Brody had never worked with anyone before. “But he had a partner,” she protested.

      “Montgomery usually handled the paperwork part of it—or mishandled it,” the lieutenant tacked on, clearly not pleased with Montgomery’s work ethic.

      “I gathered that much,” Valri said, unaware that her comment elicited a muffled laugh from the lieutenant that the man managed to hide.

      “The one time they went into the field together, Montgomery wound up in the hospital,” Latimore told her. “That made Brody more convinced than ever that he worked better alone. You’re going to change that.” It wasn’t a comment, or a prediction, it was an order.

      Was that her actual assignment? she couldn’t help wondering. To get the detective to come around and get back into the swing of working with a partner? She supposed that she could do that.

      “I’ll give it a try, sir,” Valri told the lieutenant.

      “I don’t want you to ‘try,’ I want you to ‘do,’” he ordered in a no-nonsense voice. “Do I make myself clear, Cavanaugh?”

      She squared her shoulders, every inch the consummate professional. “Crystal, sir.”

      Latimore nodded, satisfied—for now. “Good talk, Cavanaugh.” He waved her out of the chair and out of the room. “Close the door on your way out.”

      He didn’t have to tell her twice. Valri lost no time leaving.

      When she got back to what was now her desk, Brody was still picking up the fallen files and haphazardly dumping them into a large rectangular box. The box had held a six-month supply of paper for the printer ten minutes ago. The reams of paper were now stacked in a corner.

      Without a word, Valri began picking up Montgomery’s documents and depositing them into the box. Two could make the job go faster.

      Alex raised his eyes for a moment. “So?” he asked as he got back to clearing the floor. He didn’t bother organizing the papers. That was a job for Montgomery, not a man who valued his sanity.

      Valri took a guess as to what her new partner was asking her. “The lieutenant wanted to officially welcome me into the office.”

      Alex stopped dumping pages for a moment and looked at her. The expression on his face told Valri that he didn’t believe her.

      What he said next confirmed it. “That man wouldn’t ‘officially welcome’ the Three Wise Men if they came into the office.” He frowned slightly as he got back to picking up papers. He tried not to notice that her close proximity was undermining his ability to concentrate. But then he’d always been an admirer of shapely limbs and a killer smile. It was nothing personal, he silently insisted. “We’re not going to work well together if you lie to me, Cavanaugh.”

      She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to level with him. After all, she hadn’t done anything to merit the lieutenant’s strange question to begin with. “He wanted to know if I got sick looking at dead bodies.”

      Alex laughed, nodding to himself. “Now that sounds like Latimore. Do you?” he asked her as a sidebar.

      “I don’t know.” He glanced at her again, this time raising a skeptical eyebrow. She could see the question in his eyes. “It’s what I told the lieutenant, too. I’ve never seen a dead body before.”

      There were times that he wished he could say that. “All the more reason for you to stay here, working on the smashed laptop, while I go and try to find some of the late Hunter Rogers’s friends.” Picking up the last of the papers, he tossed them into the box, which was now close to overflowing. “Speaking of which, do gamers even have friends?” he asked her out of sheer curiosity. To the best of his knowledge—having never had any interest in spending endless hours competing against people he didn’t know—gamers were all a bunch of socially awkward, highly intellectual, obsessed-with-winning geeks.

      “In a manner of speaking,” Valri told him, then thought to expand her response. “I guess it all depends on your definition of friends.”

      That was easy. “Someone who knows all your secrets and still likes you.”

      The words had come to him automatically. It was something his father had once said to him.

      By that definition, he himself had no friends, Alex thought. Because he had secrets he felt he couldn’t—and thus didn’t—share with anyone. Secrets that would create chasms between himself and the people he knew.

      “If that’s your criteria,” Valri countered, “I guess what it comes down to is you actually define the word likes.”

      Alex blew out a breath. He was right. This world was a dog-eat-dog existence. “The gaming world doesn’t sound very warm and friendly,” he quipped.

      “Well, that might be because it’s not,” she told him with an amused laugh. “It’s all about competing and winning and coming up with a better game or, barring that, a better strategy.”

      “And you’re part of all that?” he asked her.

      Alex liked to think that he was a fair judge of people, and she didn’t seem the type to enjoy that sort of bloodless, cutthroat competition. Nor did she seem the kind of person who liked spending time locked away, focused on a screen and annihilating the two-dimensional “enemy.”

      “I was,” Valri acknowledged. “A long, long time ago, in another lifetime,” she told him. “My horizons have become broadened since then, but I do like to keep my hand in the game every so often, just for practice,” she admitted without any qualms, then added, “Keeps me on my toes.”

      “So would a pair of six-inch stilettos,” he commented. Enough talk. He had to hit the streets and get cracking. “Okay, I’ll have one of the uniforms sign out the smashed laptop from the evidence lockup and you see if you can resurrect the dead while I go back to Rogers’s apartment and see if I can find something that’ll lead me to one of his buddies—if he had any.”

      It hit her like a bolt out of the blue. “Randolph Wills,” she called out to her partner’s back as he was about to leave the squad room.

      That stopped him in his tracks. Alex turned to look at her. He appeared somewhat skeptical at this sudden revelation. “What?”

      “You said you wanted the name of one of Hunter’s ‘buddies.’ Randolph Wills hung around him a lot, trying to absorb his technique as well as his expertise. He’s kind of a leech, but his heart’s

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