fledgling detective, and he didn’t have any more time to waste on her.
Patrick took out a pair of rubber gloves from his jacket pocket and pulled them on. He nodded toward the vehicle that had been fished out. “What have you learned so far?”
“The victim seems to be in her early twenties, on her way to or from a party.”
“How do you know?” The question came at her like a gunshot.
“Look at what she’s wearing. A slinky, short black dress.”
His glance was quick, concise, all-inclusive before reverting to Maggi. “Professional?”
Maggi paused. The panic on the victim’s face made it difficult to see anything else. “A hooker? Maybe, but not cheap. A call girl maybe. The dress is subtle, subdued yet stylish.”
He looked further into the vehicle. “Any ID?”
Maggi shook her head. “No purse. Might have been washed away, although I doubt it.”
He looked at her sharply. Even a broken clock was right twice a day. “Why?”
She’d already been over the interior of the car and found nothing. “Because there’s no registration inside the glove compartment. The glove compartment was completely empty. Not even a manual. Nobody keeps a glove compartment that clean.”
If it was an attempt to hide identity, he thought, it was a futile one. “Ownership’s easy enough to find out.”
Maggi nodded. She gave him her thoughts on the subject. “It’s a stalling tactic. Maybe whoever did this to her needed the extra time to try to fabricate an alibi.”
His eyes made her feel like squirming when they penetrated that way. The man had to be hell on wheels in the interrogation room. “So you think this is a homicide, not an accident.”
“That’s the way the department’s treating it or we wouldn’t be here.” She gave him an expression of sheer innocence.
He crossed his arms before him, looking down at her again. “Okay, Mary Margaret, what do you think the approximate time of death was?”
“Eleven twenty-three. Approximately,” she said. He was trying to get her to lose her cool. Even if this wasn’t about something bigger, she wasn’t about to let him have the satisfaction.
“Woman’s intuition?”
“Woman’s vision,” she corrected. “Twenty-twenty.” Before he could ask her what she was talking about, Maggi reached over the body and held up the victim’s right hand. The young woman was wearing an old-fashioned analog watch. The crystal wasn’t broken, but it was obviously not water-resistant. It had stopped at precisely 11:23.
The CSI team arrived, equipped with their steel cases and apparatus intended to take the mystery out of death. Patrick stepped out of their way as they took possession of the vehicle and the victim within.
Maggi looked at him. “Want me to brief them?”
Something that could have passed for amusement flickered over him. “Asking for permission?”
She served his words back to him. “Trying not to get in your way.”
Too late for that, he thought. Now they had to concentrate on getting her out of his way. Patrick gestured toward the head crime scene investigator. “Go ahead. That’s Jack Urban.”
Stepping around to the back of the vehicle, Patrick took out his notepad and carefully wrote down the license plate number before crossing to the nearest policeman. He handed the notepad to the man.
“See if these plates were run yet,” he instructed. “Find out who the car belongs to. See if it was reported missing or stolen in the past twenty-four hours.”
The policeman took the notepad without comment, retreating to his squad car.
The soft, light laugh that floated to him had Patrick looking back toward the crime scene. His so-called partner was talking to the head of the CSI team. Whatever she said had the man smiling like some living brain donor. Patrick shook his head. Obviously not everyone found his new partner as irritating as he did.
“I need to make a stop at the bank.”
Patrick spared the woman sitting beside him in the front seat a look. It was cold outside and he had the windows of his car rolled up. He hadn’t counted on the fact that along with the added warmth he’d be trapping the scent of her perfume within the vehicle.
Citing that they were partners until the captain tore them asunder, something Patrick was counting on happening in the very immediate future, the woman had hitched a ride back into town with him. When he’d asked her how she’d come to the crime scene in the first place, she’d told him that she’d caught a ride with one of the patrol cars.
The officers were still back at the scene, protecting it from contamination as best they could. With them out of the picture, Patrick’d had no choice but to agree to let her come with him.
He didn’t particularly like being agreeable.
He liked the idea of being a chauffeur even less.
“Why don’t you do that after hours?” he bit off tersely.
She shifted in her seat. Again. The woman was nothing if not unharnessed energy, exuding enough for two people. She could have been her own partner, and should have been. Anything but his.
Maggi pointed to the building in the middle of the tree-lined block. “C’mon, Pat, we’re passing it right now. It’ll only take a minute.”
She slid a glance in his direction. If looks could kill, she knew she would have been dead on the spot.
“All right, as long as you promise never to call me ‘Pat’ again.”
“Deal.” Like it or not, she was going to have to spend some time with him. She wanted it to be as stress free as she could make it. “So, what do you like being called?”
“I don’t like being called at all.”
No one said the assignments were going to be easy. “In the event that I have to get your attention,” Maggi began gamely, “do you prefer ‘hey you,’ or shall I just throw sunflower seeds at you until I get you to turn around?”
He could see her doing it, too. She had that kind of bulldog quality about her. “Cavanaugh’ll do.”
“Not even Patrick?”
He slowed down. There was a parking spot almost directly across the street from the bank. Patrick guided the car into it, then pulled up the hand brake. Only then did he turn to look at her.
“Let’s get something straight, McKenna. We’re not friends, we’re partners. We’re not even going to be that for very long, so quit coming on like some Girl Scout and stop trying to sound like you’re going to be my lifelong buddy.”
She sat there quietly for a long moment, trying to get a handle on this man. “Losing
