Cavanaugh Hero Read Online Free PDF

robotlike. “I was the one who called it in.”
    Sean unlocked his case and lifted the lid. “Well, Charlotte—”
    “Charley,” she corrected him, forcing a faint smile to her lips. “People call me Charley.”
    Matt had called her Charley when she was a little girl and the name had stuck, she thought now. Damn it, she couldn’t tear up, she couldn’t, Charley ordered herself, digging her nails into her palms.
    Think of something else. Think of anything else.
    Sean looked at the woman, quietly studying her. This wasn’t just a casual acquaintance of the victim. His death was affecting her.
    “Well, Charley,” Sean amended. “How did you happen to be here?” he asked gently.
    “I already asked her that,” Declan interjected.
    “Yes, but I didn’t,” his father pointed out calmly. Both his voice and his expression were sympathetic as he continued to regard the young woman.
    Behind him, two more members of his investigative team came in, both well entrenched in what their particular duties were at a scene like this. They got to work quickly and quietly, moving as smoothly as the timing belt on a well-oiled engine.
    Charley took a breath before reciting her answer. “I heard he hadn’t shown up for work for a couple of days and that he hadn’t even bothered calling in. I knew that wasn’t like him, but I also knew that he was going through a rough patch—”
    “What kind of a rough patch?” Sean asked.
    “He’d just broken up with a woman he was certain was ‘the one.’” Someone should have strangled Melissa a long time ago, she thought angrily. Before the witch ever came into Matt’s life.
    Guided by her tone, Sean made the only logical assumption. “But she wasn’t ‘the one,’ was she?”
    “Not unless we were talking about barracudas, sir,” Charley replied, deliberately staring straight ahead, past the CSI chief’s head.
    “No need to call me sir,” Sean said. That sort of thing created a formal atmosphere and right now, he was striving for the exact opposite. Nodding his head to indicate Declan, he added, “He never does.”
    “I do, too. You just don’t listen,” Declan told his father.
    “All too well, Declan,” Sean said, glancing at his son knowingly. “All too well. All right, if you two want to stand over there and wait until I finish processing the crime scene, it shouldn’t be all that long.” He glanced at the opened bottles of vodka and Kahlua on the coffee table. “A little early in the day to be getting into that right now. Was that his drink of choice?” he asked. “A black Russian?”
    It hadn’t been, initially. All Matt ever drank—if he drank at all—was a beer, maybe on rare occasions, two. He hadn’t been very big on anything that allowed him to lose the tight rein he had over his control.
    “It was a habit he picked up from Melissa,” Charley told him.
    Declan scanned the room as if that could somehow answer his questions by the very nature of the vibrations that had been left behind. “Then maybe she was here, too,” he suggested.
    “Only one glass,” Charley pointed out. “It was the first thing I checked for.” Once she could bring herself to leave Matt where he lay, she added silently. “Besides, there’s no lipstick on the glass.”
    “Big on makeup, was she?” Declan asked, curious. This detective seemed to know a lot about the woman in question. Why?
    “It helped to cover up her physical flaws,” she explained.
    He laughed at the way she worded her answer. “Not a big fan of the woman in question, I take it.”
    Charley saw no reason to deny or cover up how she felt about the woman who had deliberately broken her brother’s heart. What did it matter? Matt was gone and his feelings were the only ones that had ever mattered to her anyway. If she’d held her tongue before about Melissa, it was only to spare him.
    In hindsight, maybe if she had said something, he wouldn’t have gotten to this point. Maybe he might have even