he said, nodding at the terrier. Then his eyes shifted toward her. “Where were you before you came into work?”
Her eyes met his. She refused to look away. Only guilty people avoided eye contact. “Home.” She said the word almost defiantly.
“Can anyone verify that?” he asked.
There hadn’t been anyone to verify anything about her since she was four. For most of her life, until she’d turned eighteen, she had just blended into the woodwork or been invisible to the people around her.
“I’ve got two dogs, but they tend not to talk too much to strangers.” And then her flippant tone evaporated as she demanded, “Do you seriously think I had something to do with this?”
From where he stood, it wasn’t all that far-fetched, and until he had more details or knew otherwise, the woman made for a pretty decent suspect.
“A lot of times,” he told her, “the first one on the scene turns out to be the perp.”
Oh, come on, puh-lease! “What is that?” she asked. “A direct quote from Murder for Dummies?”
He did not care for her sarcastic tone. “You’ve got a smart mouth on you, you know that?” he challenged.
“Goes with the rest of me,” she replied with a careless shrug, as if to shrug off his entire statement and whatever off-the-wall theory he was spinning. Shifting the terrier to her other side, much like a mother would shift the toddler she was holding, Ashley asked him, “Are you really a Homicide detective?”
“I’m from the Major Crimes Division,” he revealed. “When you called Dispatch, you asked for backup and a bus,” he reminded her.
“That was because I wasn’t sure what was going on, and she was still breathing.” Seemed to her that they had already gone over this and established it.
“Which was why you moved the body,” he concluded.
This again, she thought, exasperated. What was this detective’s problem? “I just turned her so she was on her back. I found her facedown on the floor between the kitchen and the living room. I didn’t think to take a photo before I tried to find a way to save her life.”
A key phrase in her statement stuck out for him, and Shane commented on it. “Apparently you didn’t think at all.” Before she could retort, he asked another question. “When you got here, was the door opened?”
“No,” she told him, reciting the words stoically, “it was locked.”
He looked around for another person besides the precinct personnel, but there was no civilian in the apartment. “Then the landlord let you in.” It was an assumption on his part.
The next moment, the assumption was shot down as she answered, “No, he didn’t.”
His eyes narrowed. This wasn’t adding up—unless she was the perpetrator. “Then how did you get in?” he asked.
Hadn’t he noticed the pane of glass on the ground under the kitchen window? “I jimmied the kitchen window until I got a pane off.”
He was going to give her every chance—before she hung herself. “Why would you—?”
Anticipating his question, Ashley had her answer ready. “I heard the dog barking, and I looked in through the window. That was when I saw the victim lying facedown on the floor. I called it in and went to get the guy in the leasing office, but the office was empty. Whoever was on duty was out, showing a potential tenant one of the apartments.”
“So you jimmied the window and let yourself in.”
He sounded as if he was accusing her. He couldn’t be serious—could he?
“Yes, I jimmied the window and let myself in.” She was truly annoyed. “Tell me, Detective, what would you have done?” she demanded angrily.
Chapter 3
For a moment the detective said nothing and Ashley thought he was going to give her hell for talking to him that way. She braced herself for a dressing down. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had one. Because there was no one else for her to turn to, she’d learned how to be her own person and to follow both her instincts and her conscience.
But when the detective finally did say something, he surprised her.
“I would’ve kicked in the door.” Seeing the stunned look on her face, Shane smiled and explained, “I’m too big to fit in through that window.”
It was the first time since he’d arrived that she’d seen even a hint of a smile on his lips. Until now, he’d been scowling at her. When he smiled, the detective looked, she thought, like a completely different person. He looked approachable, not to mention rather good-looking.
Not that what the man looked like really mattered one way or another, Ashley told herself—except for the fact that it was the good-looking ones who were usually also the pompous ones.
“Then it’s lucky for you that she got here first. Those doors don’t kick in as easily as you might think, Detective Cavanaugh. That’s a fire door, and they’re pretty damn sturdy. They only get ‘kicked down’ in movies and TV shows,” a deep voice coming from directly behind her said amicably.
Ashley turned to see a tall, handsome older man walking in. He was carrying a rather formidable leather case with him. The letters CSI were embossed across the side of it.
Apparently seeing that she was looking at his case, the newcomer told her, “I’m with the crime lab.” Ashley found it rather unusual that the investigator would tell her that rather than the detective, then realized that most likely, the detective had already been acquainted with the crime scene investigator.
Extending his hand to her, the man introduced himself. “I’m Sean Cavanaugh.”
She flashed a smile at him, grateful to be treated as a person. A great many people on the force acted as if she was part of the scenery—inconsequential scenery, at that. That went along with the fact that there were those in the police department who viewed the people in her division as being no more than just glorified dog catchers.
She had a feeling, judging by the look on the detective’s face when he’d first talked to her, that he thought the same.
But not this man, Ashley decided.
“Officer Ashley St. James,” she responded, shaking his hand.
The man smiled at her. When he did, it occurred to her that he seemed to have the same kind of smile as the detective. Odd.
“Nice to meet you, Officer St. James.” Placing his case on the coffee table, he opened it and took out his camera. He raised an eyebrow as he appeared to study her for a moment. “This your first murder?”
“Yes, sir, it is.” And then she relaxed just a touch and asked, “It shows, huh?”
The reply he gave wasn’t one she was expecting.
“As a matter of fact, it doesn’t.” Sean began to snap pictures of anything in the room that might fit under the heading of possible evidence. “That’s why I asked. You seem remarkably composed for someone who’s seen something this gruesome.” He looked over his shoulder at the detective. “Doesn’t she, Shane?”
Shane had no idea why his father would attempt to get a three-way conversation going in the middle of something so horrendous as this murder—unless it was his way of helping the little officer cope with what she’d stumbled across.
Now that he thought about it, that sounded exactly like something his father would do. He was always in there, the voice of calm and reason, trying to help people through a rough patch.
His father was probably the finest man he knew, Shane thought, not for the first time.
“Yeah, composed,”