Internal Affair Read Online Free PDF Page A

brothers were lousy at using table cloths and coasters.
    Parker chased away his blues by picking up the mug and sipping at it while she pulled up some files on her netbook. Her eyelids drooped slightly in appreciation, and just that small indication of joy pleased him far better than it should. His reaction to her made him uncomfortable, too, given they were not only working, but he outranked her. Sexual harassment on the job was no joke. She had the right to be free from his drooling over her while visiting him at home to help on a case.
    After taking a few more sips of her tea, she put the mug down and gestured toward him. “Come over here, please, sir. I want to show you what I’ve cobbled together so far.” She sat down with the netbook in front of her.
    Daire hesitated a second before doing as she asked. Being next to her didn’t strike him as such a good idea. He couldn’t possibly come up with a plausible reason why not, however, so he slid into the seat next to her and peered at her computer screen. Mahurin’s official department picture loomed in vivid color. His gut twisted a moment before he forced himself to relax. Hating his father’s former partner, a man his father had called friend, didn’t help anything. The strong emotions would only clog up the part of his brain that wasn’t already focused on the subtle perfume and body heat of Parker Li. He needed to focus.
    “Okay,” he said with determination. “Mahurin I knew just about my whole life. My father and my uncle, Jack Malloy, counted him as a trusted friend. At least my uncle says he did, and I have no knowledge of my father suspecting Mahurin had turned dirty. I could be wrong about that. He didn’t confide his suspicions to me before he died.”
    And that little fact ate away at him and would do so for the rest of his life. Maybe he was being stupid, but he couldn’t help wonder whether his parents would still be alive if his father had trusted him with the truth. Even though he’d only been a rookie back then, he might have been able to help in some way. Those thoughts and regrets got him nowhere. He shook them off and concentrated on what Parker was saying.
    “From what I’ve been able to dig up, Mahurin went bad almost immediately.”
    Daire shook his head. “I can’t believe he hid it from my father for all those years.” When Parker shot him a look, he realized how that sounded. “I guess he was good at hiding his true self, and I know my father was too trusting to suspect a good friend without evidence.”
    Parker gave a non-committal nod and clicked her touch pad to bring up a new picture. This one was two side-by-side, actually. On the left, an angry young man sneered his way through his mug shot. On the right, the pallid face of a corpse lay with eyes closed.
    Daire knew who this guy was as well. Even if he hadn’t seen the official records of the recently deceased Seamus O’Malley, he’d seen other pictures in Ronan’s evidence stash of O’Malley at various ages handing off packages.
    “O’Malley,” he said simply. “My father’s snitch and a murder victim a few months ago.”
    Parker nodded again. “The prevailing wisdom, proffered by your brother and his partner, is that O’Malley had been paid off for something, maybe in connection with your parents’ murders, and then got killed as a lesson to others when he started blackmailing Mahurin.”
    “Or some of Mahurin’s friends. Ronan and Diego never found any evidence one way or another.” He winced inwardly at the partial lie. While the stash of potential evidence Diego had unearthed, which now sat tucked up in the crawl space of the house, held interesting possibilities, they still didn’t have a complete picture of what was going on, nothing to take to the D.A., anyway. “They closed the case with Mahurin as the murderer, but the evidence for that was circumstantial at best.”
    Parker nodded again before clicking to the next picture. “Everyone liked