years ago and hadn’t taken any drugs since then. Kris had been clean for years,” Frankie emphasized.
The detective she was talking to nodded slowly and appeared to be listening. Frankie couldn’t escape the feeling that he was examining every single word that was coming out of her mouth—as well as studying her as if she were a slide mounted under a microscope.
“When did all this happen?” he finally asked, after a prolonged pause that admittedly made her uneasy.
He didn’t believe her, Frankie thought. Determined, she pushed on. “The roommate came back from a three-day weekend and found the victim, unresponsive, on the living room floor this morning. After trying to revive her for several minutes, the roommate began to panic, at which time she called me.”
Frankie noted the skeptical expression on O’Bannon’s face. “If you’re friends with this woman,” he asked, “why do you keep calling her the roommate?”
Frankie never missed a beat. “I’m just trying to keep the details simple for you. And, for the record, we’re not friends.” She corrected the detective. “We’re acquaintances. I already told you that.”
Luke pretended to glance down at his notes. “So you did.” He raised his eyes to meet her magnetic blue ones. “Where’s the body now?”
The body.
It was hard for her to think of Kristin that way. She had always been so full of life, so ready to always laugh. Kris had a very infectious laugh that left no one untouched.
“Detective?” Luke prodded when he thought the woman had drifted off.
Frankie roused herself and flushed for the momentary lapse on her part. “Sorry. I called the ME. He told me he’d be doing her autopsy right away, which, with any luck, means today.”
“You know the ME?” Luke asked her, curious.
“Some of them,” she answered, wondering if he was trying to trip her up. The department had three medical examiners, one of whom they tended to share with several of the other, smaller cities in the county.
“Well, you’ve covered all the bases,” Luke told her. “Tell you what, pending the lieutenant’s approval of all this, we’ll call your find victim number seven.”
Frankie frowned. “She has a name,” she told O’Bannon stiffly.
“They all have names,” he replied mildly. “What they no longer have are lives. Those were stolen from them and it’s up to us to make that up to them by catching the bastard who’s responsible for cutting those lives short.”
She couldn’t make up her mind whether he was being a crusader or a wiseguy. Either way, she nodded and quietly told him, “Sounds good to me.”
“Oh, there’s just one more thing,” Luke said as she began to walk out of the squad room. She had yet to clear this temporary move with her own lieutenant, wanting to make sure that she could convince O’Bannon to take on this case first.
Frankie braced herself and slowly turned back to face him. Deep in her soul, she felt she was going to regret coming to this man. She knew all about him. Lukkas Cavanaugh O’Bannon was oil and she was water and there was no way that they were ever going to find a way to mix.
But for Kristin’s sake, she would do her damnedest to try to work with this man until such time as the scum who was robbing all these young women of their lives could be found and put down.
Taking a deep breath, Frankie kept her expression unreadable as she said, “Yes?”
Luke’s lethal smile unfurled slowly. He knew the kind of effect it had on women. This one, though, seemed to be immune to it. She would definitely be a challenge, he thought. The idea spurred him on. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
Ignoring the smile that had been the undoing of more than a score of women—or so the legend went—Frankie kept her eyes on his. “I thought you knew everything,” she said crisply.
“Close,” Luke agreed, not rising to the bait she’d cast. “But in this case, close isn’t good enough. So, what is it?” he asked. “Your name,” Luke prodded when the brunette with the attitude didn’t volunteer the information immediately. “Unless you want me to refer to you as ‘Hey You’ while we’re working together,” he said, giving her a less than desirable option.
If she had her way, Frankie wouldn’t have wanted O’Bannon to refer to her as anything at all, but that wasn’t being reasonable. The man was smug and annoying from the get-go, but at bottom, she knew that her prickly attitude was because she was still devastated over her cousin’s death. Not only had she been close to Kristin, but Kristin was also the last family that she had. With her cousin murdered, she had no one left. Both her parents were gone, as were Kristin’s.
She was alone.
Stop it, damn it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. That isn’t going to bring Kris back and it sure as hell isn’t going to help you solve her murder. Get a grip.
She saw that O’Bannon was still waiting for an answer. If they were going to work together, she had to attempt to be civil to the detective—no matter how annoying she found him.
“My name is Detective Francesca DeMarco,” Frankie informed him. “And, as I told you, I’m from Major Crimes.”
The major crime here, Luke thought, was that he had never noticed her before. The building wasn’t that big. He made up his mind to make up for lost time when the opportunity arose.
“The detective part was a given,” he acknowledged. “Francesca, huh?” Luke rolled the name over on his tongue as if he was tasting the first slice of a rich, homemade chocolate cream pie—his favorite. “Pretty,” he commented, and she couldn’t tell if he was referring to her name—or, given his reputation, to her. “You don’t seem like a Francesca.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
“Just an observation,” he responded mildly. “Francesca belongs to a lady in some ivory tower. You look more like you’re a go-getter. A Frannie or a Fran or—”
She winced at both names, names she’d been taunted with as a child.
“Frankie,” she told him, unwilling to listen to a further litany of possible nicknames he could come up with carving up her formal name. “People call me Frankie.”
The moment she said it, bells went off in his head. He’d heard some of the detectives referring to a Frankie—except that he’d thought the name belonged to one of the guys. This, he thought, regarding her again, was not one of the guys.
“That wouldn’t have been my third guess,” Luke admitted glibly, and then he shrugged, “But if you like that name—”
“I like it better than Fran or Frannie,” she informed him coolly.
Luke nodded. The first rule of working with another detective, as far as he was concerned, was getting along with them, and if that meant calling an out-and-out knockout by the unlikely name of Frankie, then so be it. He wasn’t about to argue the point and create tension. It wasn’t worth it.
“You’re right. You don’t look like a Frannie. Okay, Frankie it is,” he told her agreeably, with a smile that definitely lit up his entire chiseled face.
Looking at him, Frankie experienced a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. She couldn’t help thinking that by asking to work on this case with O’Bannon, she had just voluntarily sold her soul to the devil.
“Looks like you get to talk to the head guy himself after all,” Luke said to her the next moment.
Frankie looked at him, confused and not sure where he