Cavanaugh's Surrender by Marie Ferrarella Page B

it with such feeling that just for a split second, she believed him. “What fun would that be?”
    Was that how he viewed his job? This investigation? As fun? Was he that irreverent?
    “I wasn’t aware that we were supposed to be having fun,” she said cynically.
    “You create little pockets of it along the way,” he told her, and she had the feeling that despite the easygoing smile on his lips, Logan was absolutely serious. “Otherwise, this job’ll eat you alive.”
    For now, she let that go. “How did you get here ahead of me?” she asked. “I drove away with you still standing in the parking lot, watching me leave.”
    “I took a shortcut,” he told her. “Besides, I have the car with the pretty little dancing lights and the siren I can turn on whenever I’m stuck in traffic.”
    “What would you have done if I hadn’t come here?” she challenged.
    “Oh, but you did, and I figured it was a pretty safe bet from where I was standing. So,” he said, getting down to business, “what is it that we’re going to be looking for?”
    For a second, the private part, the part that had always been protective of Paula and their mother before that, wanted to defiantly dig in. But what was the point? Protecting Paula no longer really mattered. What mattered was not letting whoever had done this to her sister get away with it. And if that person was the serial killer the way she believed him to be, well, then finding him and making him pay for all this as well as keeping him from killing anyone else would at least in some minor way give some sort of meaning to Paula’s death.
    She shrugged her shoulders in answer to his question. “Something. Anything.”
    “Well, that’s really pinning it down.” He laughed shortly. “In other words, we’ll ‘know’ it when we see it.”
    “Yes.” And then, as he began to head toward Paula’s bedroom to conduct a second, more thorough search through her closet and bureau drawers, Destiny recalled something. She addressed his back. “When we were kids, Paula used to keep a diary. I don’t know if she still does—still did,” Destiny corrected herself, still struggling with the fact that she had to use the past tense. “But it’s worth looking for.”
    The first wave of crime scene investigators had taken the laptop they’d found—presumably Paula’s—back to the precinct. The technician who had gone over it—Brenda Cavanaugh—the chief of D’s daughter-in-law—was exceptionally thorough.
    “They didn’t find anything besides her daily schedule on her computer,” Logan told her.
    That was no surprise. “They wouldn’t have,” Destiny told him, beginning her search in the kitchen. “In some ways, Paula was kind of old-fashioned. She liked the thought of writing personal things down using a pen and paper.” Her mouth curved just a little as she remembered her sister’s words. “Paula said she thought it was more ‘romantic’ that way.”
    Logan paused and glanced in her direction. “Sounds like she was a really unique person.”
    Destiny suppressed the heartfelt sigh that rose in her throat.
    God, but she was going to miss Paula. Even though they hadn’t gotten together all that much and Paula had her own set of friends, friends that she gathered she, Destiny, didn’t have all that much in common with, she would miss the idea of Paula, the comforting feeling that Paula was somewhere in the world with her. Now she had to accept the cold, hard fact that she would never see Paula again no matter how much she wanted it or how hard she wished for it.
    Her baby sister was gone, and she couldn’t do anything about it.
    But the next best thing would be finding Paula’s killer and making him pay for this. It was all she had to cling to.
    “Yeah, she was,” Destiny agreed in a small, strained voice.
    With that, she turned back to the kitchen and began opening all the drawers, checking all the shelves, including the refrigerator and the freezer. Paula