with her.
And then Matt fell for Melissa. Hard. Like the proverbial ton of bricks. When he did, she had psyched herself up to accept second place in her brother’s life, thrilled that he had found someone to love. That he was finally going to have time to do all the normal things: get married, have kids, buy a house and experience the wonderfully mundane life they’d never had while growing up.
Except, Charley now thought bitterly, that the woman her brother had fallen for so terribly hard had an icicle in place of a heart. Once the novelty of their relationship had worn off for her, Melissa thought nothing of stepping out on Matt.
She took everything he had to offer her—gifts, money as well as his undying love—and then broke off their relationship, grinding his feelings into the dust as if they were no more than bothersome gnats.
Matt never knew what hit him, never knew what he had done wrong. And even though she kept trying to make her brother see that the fault was not with him but with Melissa, nothing she could do or say could help her get through to him.
That was when the drinking started.
And apparently, it still hadn’t stopped even though he’d promised her that it had, that he had taken his last drink, wasted his last hour mourning the loss of Melissa.
“I won’t let that little two-bit ruin you,” Charley declared fiercely, her voice echoing back within the white sedan she drove. “You’re too good for her and you know it!” she cried, all but shouting the words into the cell phone that was mounted on her dashboard.
A second later, she was finally pulling into the driveway of the modest two-story house Matt had bought in hopes of bringing Melissa here and starting a family with her.
To Charley’s way of thinking, the house had dodged a bullet—and so had Matt. Now all she had to do was make her brother see it. She could be extremely persuasive when she had to be but this, she knew, was going to take every single trick she had in the proverbial book—and maybe even more than that.
Putting the sedan into Park, Charley ended her call, tucked the cell into her pocket and got out of the car. She pressed her lips together as she surveyed the front of the house.
“I swear I don’t know what I’ll do if I find you on the floor, sleeping off a bender,” she muttered to both herself and the brother who wasn’t there.
Charley fished out the spare key that Matt had given her but found that she had no need of it. Not only was the front door unlocked, it was standing slightly ajar, as well.
“Well, this is a new low in carelessness for you. Are you daring the neighborhood thief to come in and ransack the place—or think he can do it only to have you get the drop on him? Are you really that hard up for entertainment?” she asked.
Charley lightly made contact with the door and pushed it a fraction at a time until the door was open all the way off to one side.
“Matt?” she called out hesitantly. “Are you in there? Matt, it’s me, Charley. I elected myself to drag your sorry butt in to work before your lieutenant gets it into his head to fire you and you decide you have no choice but to move in with me. You know you’ll just wind up cramping my style.”
Not that she had anything that would have remotely passed for something as structured as a “style.” Charley was far too busy these days trying to work her way up the ladder, trying to make something of herself within the department.
Trying to, she secretly admitted, to make Matt proud of her.
Because they were both part of the police force, someone might have thought that Matt and she were in competition with one another, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Matt and she had always been a team, a smooth-running, entirely supportive team. If there were shots to be called, she always let Matt call them.
Quite simply, unlike most brothers and sisters, Charley adored the ground Matt walked on and she knew the reverse was true as well, even if he never said as much. He didn’t have to. His actions spoke louder than any words.
Matt was her rock.
Which was why seeing him this way, consumed with sorrow because of a woman so unequal to even the dirt beneath his fingernails was just killing her. She didn’t know how to snap him out of it. She only knew she had to—because he’d obviously had a relapse.
“Matt?” she called out again, feeling her heart constrict when she didn’t receive an answer. “Are you here? You’d better be, otherwise leaving this door unlocked was a really stupid move, you know that, right? And if there’s one thing Matthew Michael Holt isn’t, it’s stupid. Except whenever you’re around ‘Fluffy,’” she said, referring to Melissa by the less-than-flattering nickname she’d given the woman. “Then you have the brainpower of an amoeba on drugs.
“Matt, come out, come out wherever you—”
That was when she saw him.
And that was when she stifled the scream that rose up to her throat, a scream that came from Charley, Matt’s sister, not Charley Randolph, police detective.
Stunned, frightened and in a complete daze, she dropped to her knees beside the body.
This was a dream, a nightmare, right? This wasn’t happening. It wasn’t!
“Matt, Matt, what has she done to you? Matt, talk to me,” she pleaded even as she felt his throat for his pulse.
And found none.
Somewhere in her horror-stricken haze, Charley managed to pull out her cell phone and press a key that was preset and quickly connected her to the necessary emergency number.
Her voice trembled as she spoke. “This is Detective Charlotte Randolph.” She rattled off her badge number. “I need a bus. Officer down, I repeat, officer down. At 4832 Wayne Avenue. Hurry,” she begged.
She’d requested an ambulance rather than the coroner’s wagon because maybe she was too numb to find the pulse, maybe he was still alive, his pulse reduced to a reedy whisper of a beat, hardly detectable at all.
The pulse Charley was praying that she had somehow missed.
* * *
Detective First Class Declan Cavanaugh turned in his swivel chair as he both listened to and watched his about-to-be-ex-partner Hollis Spenser give him the big news. Two years his senior, Hollis was leaving. Leaving the partnership, the department, the force. Leaving Aurora, California, for greener pastures.
“You’re kidding.”
Hollis moved the thatch of blond hair out of his eyes. “Nope. My new father-in-law thinks his daughter deserves a husband who comes home at night still breathing.”
Cavanaugh frowned, regarding the man. “You look like you’re breathing to me.”
“You know what I mean.” Hollis futilely pushed the hair out of his eyes, subconsciously knowing it would be back to position one in seconds. “Detectives who work in the private sector don’t get shot at.”
“Usually,” Declan corrected. They all knew exceptions to that rule.
“Better
