of the investigating detectives, Duncan Cavanaugh, had prevailed on his younger sister to do a little virtual research and she had been the one who had uncovered the insurance fraud.
“I’m glad I could help, sir,” Valri murmured, wondering where all this was going.
She had already met the man sitting behind the oak desk a number of times at her granduncle Andrew’s house. Tall, distinguished with a touch of gray at his temples, the man inspired loyalty and respect. She knew that he was always ready to listen, but she wouldn’t have dreamed of being informal with him in his office. This was the job. It required that she be a consummate professional in every way. The last thing she would have wanted was for the chief of Ds to think she was trying to cash in on the fact that she was a Cavanaugh and related to him.
Suddenly finding out that there was a large branch of the family in Aurora had motivated her to apply for the police department here instead of remaining where she was, on the force in Shady Canyon, the city she had grown up in. But she hadn’t done that with the idea of advancement foremost in her mind.
She’d also come here because she wanted to get to know her relatives better. After all, it wasn’t every day that a person discovered there was a whole cache of relatives less than fifty miles away whose paths had never crossed their own.
“CSI Cavanaugh tells me that you’re quick and extremely good at what you do,” Brian went on, referring to his daughter-in-law. Brian watched the young officer closely as he spoke.
She didn’t preen in response to the praise, which was in her favor, he thought.
“She was being kind,” Valri told him.
While she loved being appreciated and complimented, those were the very things that also caused Valri to fidget somewhat. She never knew quite what to say when she was on the receiving end of merited praise.
“Yes, CSI Cavanaugh is kind,” Brian agreed. “But at the same time, she makes a point of being very accurate. Being in a league of her own, she is not impressed easily. And you, Officer Cavanaugh, impressed her, which is enough for me.”
“Enough, sir?” Valri clearly didn’t understand what the chief meant by that.
“Hunter Rogers was found dead in his apartment this morning,” Brian told her, then asked, “Is that name familiar to you?”
She knew the name and the man. There’d been a time when her sphere of interest had been completely different from what it was now. Now her life was all about law enforcement and family. Then it had been the captivating and addictive world of gaming. In leaving that world behind, Valri felt she had definitely traded upward.
“He’s a gamer, sir. Rogers makes—made,” she corrected, taking what the chief had just said into account, “his living taking on challengers in competitions around the country. He was always the one to beat,” she added. “In the last year, he more or less disappeared off the grid. He’s dead?” she questioned, surprised. She would have expected the man to have turned up playing in some tournament, not this.
Brian nodded. “He was murdered.” The case, only a few hours old, had come to his attention rather quickly. Moreover, his gut told him that there was more to this than just possibly an argument that had gone wrong. “Turns out that he might have been a little bit more than just a gamer.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Valri asked.
Brian noticed that the young officer was no longer clutching the armrests, nor was she perched on the edge of her seat, ready to take off. Her whole body appeared to be focused on what he was telling her.
“Rogers was shot from behind and whoever did it also smashed his laptop.”
Now her interest was really aroused. Uncooperative computers had a way of igniting tempers like nothing else could. She’d known people who’d lost their tempers with computers to such an extent that they’d punched the keyboard or thrown their laptop on the floor, but this sounded as if there had been more involved than a flash of temper.
“Smashed, sir?” she asked, hoping he would dole out a few more details describing what had been involved in this murder/machine-icide he was informing her about.
Brian sat back in his chair, telling the young woman he’d summoned the details he’d been given so far.
“The detective on the scene said it looked as if a sledgehammer had been taken to it. Someone apparently wanted to get rid of whatever was on that computer. The quickest way would have probably been to take the laptop with them and then wipe out the hard drive, but I’m guessing whoever did it didn’t want to take a chance on being caught with Rogers’s computer.” Brian watched her expression as he gave Valri his theory. “And I’d assume that taking a sledgehammer to a laptop pretty much renders it a total loss.”
“Not every time,” she told the chief, choosing her words carefully. It wasn’t something she was accustomed to doing. For the most part, she talked to coworkers and friends, not superiors, and while she didn’t babble, there was always an unbridled enthusiasm to her tone. One that she was consciously restraining.
Brian looked at her with interest. “Oh? So the information on the hard drive wasn’t completely destroyed?”
“There might still be data that can be lifted,” she told him. She didn’t want to raise the chief’s hopes too high, but at the same time, there was a very small chance that all was not lost. “It depends on how hard the hammer came down on the laptop, the angle it hit, things like that.”
It was a whole new world out there than when he had been this officer’s age, Brian thought, silently marveling at what he was hearing. “You mean that the data might be retrievable?”
“Not all of it,” she was quick to qualify, again not to raise his hopes too high. “But it’s conceivable that a little here and there might have been spared and could still be gathered—but it won’t be easy,” she warned.
“Nothing worthwhile ever is,” Brian said, more of an aside than as a direct comment. “If I gave you the laptop to look over, do you think that you might be able to extract the data—provided that it can be extracted?” he added.
Brian wanted the young officer to know that there was no pressure attached to the directive. He didn’t expect miracles. But if there was one to be had, from what he had been told, he felt that she was the one to pull it off.
Valri took in a deep breath before answering. “I’d do my best, sir,” she told him.
“Can’t ask for anything more than that,” he told her. “Officer Cavanaugh, I’m going to pull you off your present assignment and set you up with a desk and a computer in Homicide.”
“Homicide?” she repeated, surprised. She had just assumed that if the chief wanted her to do tech work, that her desk would be down in the computer lab, where the rest of the CSI unit was located along with all of its specialized equipment.
“That’s where the case initially landed. The man is dead,” Brian reminded her.
“Right.” For a second, focusing on what the chief was saying about the laptop, the homicide had slipped her mind. Valri cleared her throat, which drew the chief’s attention to her. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” she interjected.
“Ask any question you want, Officer Cavanaugh,” he told her. “This is the time to clear things up.”
She knew that he really didn’t have to answer this. Law enforcement agents had the luxury of deflecting questions by saying that the answer would compromise an ongoing investigation. It was an all-purpose excuse that cast shadows on any beams of light that might be attempting to squeeze their way out.
But she knew she at least had to make the attempt to find out the basics here.
“What is it about this gamer, about Hunter Rogers, that makes his laptop important enough for you to try to get it resurrected?” It had to involve something other than his