Finn’s somewhat surly, tersely worded statement left her speechless.
Almost.
“Wait,” Nik responded after a beat had passed by, “let me look outside my window and see if there are four horsemen riding up to my door.”
Finn blew out an annoyed breath. “What the hell are you talking about? What four horsemen?” he demanded. Was the woman still asleep, or was she just given to babbling nonsense?
“You know,” Nik answered him calmly, knowing that would probably irritate him even more. “Like the ones that are supposed to be approaching when the end of the world is coming.”
The biblical reference caught him off guard. His mind hadn’t been going in that direction. He’d been trying to make sense out of what she was saying.
“Very funny,” Finn retorted darkly. “Are you interested or not?” he demanded.
It was obvious to Nik that the detective was one second away from hanging up. She kept her voice cheerful as she backtracked.
“Oh, you had me at ‘because,’” she said. “I am definitely interested.” But he had also piqued her curiosity for another reason. “Am I allowed to ask you what caused this sudden change of heart?”
Finn knew that the insurance investigator would find out what had motivated him to call her once she got here, but every word he volunteered was uttered grudgingly. “A woman was found in a Dumpster last night.”
“Okay.” That didn’t really answer her question. Nik waited for more. When the detective didn’t enlighten her any further, she tried prompting him as she held her cell phone close to her. “And?” she asked as she pulled clothes out of the closet and quickly began to get dressed.
He knew why this was hard for him. He didn’t like asking for help, even if there was no way around it. Besides, he felt this somehow put her in the driver’s seat. “And they found a note in her hand.”
She felt as if she was pulling every word out of his throat. Calling her was his idea, not hers, but she refrained from pointing that out. She didn’t want him being any more defensive than he already was.
“What was in the note?” she asked.
Belatedly he realized that he hadn’t asked that question and thus had no answer for her. That was a grave oversight and one he wasn’t about to admit to. “That’s not the important part.”
“All right, what is the important part?” Nik queried. There had to be some sort of a connection for Cavanaugh to have called her.
“There was a partial thumbprint on the paper,” he said.
Nik finished pulling on her jeans and zipped them. “Let me guess. Marilyn’s?”
“Give the lady a cigar,” he said, imitating the voice of a game-show announcer. “You got it on the first try.”
Pulling her hair out from inside her sweater, she shook her head to let her hair fan out down her back. “Where are you?”
“Still at the scene of the crime,” Finn answered.
Getting information out of this man was definitely like pulling teeth—slowly. But at least she was getting it, she thought. That was something.
“And the scene of the crime is?” Nik asked, her voice going up at the end of the question.
“McFadden and Adams.”
She knew where that was. One of her favorite Mexican restaurants was located there.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she told him. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes. Finn did a quick calculation. If it took her twenty minutes to get here, that meant that she lived somewhere in his vicinity, he thought—unless she was coming from another direction, he amended. He supposed he could get Valri to find out where the annoying investigator lived—if he was really interested in finding out.
The next minute he decided that he would just be buying trouble if he went that route.
“All right, get a move on. I’ll wait,” he told the woman grudgingly.
Finn realized that he was saying the last part to a dead phone. The insurance investigator had terminated the call.
Saying a few choice words under his breath, Finn tucked away his cell phone.
Nik got to where the detective was waiting in just under seventeen minutes.
As she came to an abrupt stop, he stepped to the side and waited for her to get out of her car.
“How many lights did you go through?” Finn asked her the second Nik got out of her car.
“None.” Nik saw the skeptical look on Cavanaugh’s tanned, handsome face. “I learned how to time the lights,” she said. She could tell that he didn’t believe her, so she explained. “If you get the first one and keep going at a certain speed, you can catch a green light at all the intersections. I learned that from my dad.”
“Your dad,” Finn said.
He still sounded as if he thought she was making things up, she thought. “Yeah, my dad was part of the original work detail that put in the traffic lights back when Aurora was still in its planning stages.”
Finn didn’t really know how to respond to that. He certainly didn’t want to travel down memory lane with this woman, so instead he focused on the reason he’d called her in the first place.
“Let’s go. It’s this way,” he said.
Finn brought her to the location where the body had been discovered. They both looked over the area very carefully, although there really wasn’t anything to be found.
“I’m not really sure if this has any sort of a connection to the woman we’re looking for,” the detective admitted.
“You said there was a note,” she reminded him. That would mean a connection, Nik thought.
“Yes, and her thumbprint was on it, but for all we know, the dead woman might have just picked the piece of paper up and had it on her person when she was killed. I don’t know if it actually had anything to do with her murder.”
And she got the impression that he really didn’t know what was on the note, so there was no sense in asking him that again, Nik thought. She tried another tack. “How did the woman die?” Nik asked him.
That much he could tell her, even though the information was secondhand. “According to my partner, who called me, she was stabbed through the heart.”
Nik filled
