Cavanaugh Stakeout. Marie Ferrarella

a severe blow to his head,” he told the family gathered around him. “I’m sure none of you want any unpleasant surprises suddenly coming up if he goes home too soon.”

      “Do what you need to do, Doc,” Andrew told the emergency physician, speaking on behalf of the entire family. “We want to be sure to keep that annoying old man around for a lot more years to come.”

      Dr. Logan seemed to take Andrew’s words seriously. “Well, barring any more unforeseen incidents like this one, I’d say that you should probably get your wish. Except for being banged around and getting a number of cuts and bruises, your father appears to have a very strong constitution.”

      Andrew blew out a breath. “That’s definitely reassuring. When can we see him?” the former chief of police asked.

      While hearing everything that Dr. Logan had just said was definitely making him feel more hopeful, Andrew still felt a very strong need to see his father with his own eyes before he could begin to rest easy.

      “Tomorrow morning,” Dr. Logan replied automatically.

      As the ER physician turned on his heel to leave, Rose quickly moved directly into the man’s path.

      “Doctor, please,” she said, then looked toward her husband.

      Logan read between the lines. The woman’s meaning was clear. “All right. But just one of you,” he asserted, raising his voice so that it carried in order for everyone to hear. “And just for five minutes, is that clear? If Mr. Cavanaugh should come to, I don’t want him getting any more agitated.”

      “Understood,” Andrew responded solemnly.

      Logan nodded. “All right then. You’ll find him in the third bed.” Since all the beds were hidden behind individual curtains, the ER physician offered, “I’ll take you to him.”

      Andrew hesitated, looking back at his two younger brothers, silently asking if either of them wanted to go in his place.

      But no one contested the decision. “You’re the head of the family,” Brian told him.

      “Go on in before the doctor changes his mind,” Sean urged.

      With a grateful nod, Andrew quickly followed Dr. Logan out of the area.

      They went down a long corridor and then the doctor abruptly stopped.

      “He’s right in here,” Logan said, parting the curtain just enough to give Andrew a glimpse inside the interior. “Remember, five minutes,” the doctor cautioned again and then left in order to give Andrew some privacy with his father.

      Drawing closer, Andrew very gently took his father’s hand in his. For the very first time that he could remember, his father’s ordinarily strong hands somehow looked and felt almost fragile. They weren’t the powerful hands he recalled, that seemed capable of lifting up and holding anything.

      Hands that seemed almost inconceivably strong and incredibly capable.

      Andrew squeezed his father’s hand, but Seamus didn’t squeeze back.

      When he thought of what might have happened, Andrew felt tears spring to his eyes. He blinked hard to keep them from falling. This wasn’t the time to fall apart, he thought.

      “You gave us one hell of a scare, old man,” Andrew whispered thickly to the unconscious man in the hospital bed. The sight of a bandage wrapped around his father’s head, all but covering his right eye, hurt to look at. What if the damage had been worse? “What did those lowlifes do to you?” Andrew asked, trying to control his mounting anger. “And why were you even there at this time of night? You have people for that,” he insisted almost angrily. This didn’t make sense and it didn’t have to happen. “Young people,” Andrew stressed. “Haven’t you learned how to delegate yet?”

      Andrew sighed, answering his own question. “Of course you haven’t. You’re a Cavanaugh and you feel you have something to prove—to yourself if not to the rest of us.”

      There was no answer forthcoming from his father even though Andrew would have given anything to have heard his father’s voice as the older man attempted to explain his actions.

      But he just continued being unconscious.

      “I sure hope you can tell us who did this when you come to, because you know that you’ve got every single member of the family dying to make that person pay for hurting you.”

      For a second, he could have sworn he saw his father’s eyes flutter. But then they were still and his father continued sleeping.

      “Chief?” Logan said respectfully, peering in between the curtains.

      Andrew knew that his time was up. “I’ve got to go, Dad.” He leaned over his father’s bed and pressed a kiss to the older man’s forehead. “I’m happy you’re still with us. Happier than you’ll probably ever know.”

      Andrew went to retrieve his father’s cell phone from the plastic bag where his clothes and possessions had been placed. Finding it, the former chief of police stepped away from the hospital bed and reentered the corridor.

      Despite the fact that his father was unconscious and couldn’t help provide any leads, it was time to get this investigation started. In his experience, there was always someone, whether they knew it or not, who had seen something.

      The trick was to find that someone.

      With renewed purpose, Andrew went back out to where the rest of his family was waiting. He looked around for Brenda, one of Brian’s daughters-in-law. Brenda was the head of the IT section in the crime-scene investigation lab. He needed the young woman’s expertise at the moment.

      Spotting her next to her husband, Dax, Andrew headed over to them. Brenda and Dax were instantly alert the second he approached them.

      “How is he?” Dax asked before his wife could.

      “Still unconscious. He looks pretty banged-up,” Andrew admitted. “But he’s a tough old bird. He’ll be issuing orders by morning,” Andrew said confidently.

      Murmurs of “That’s great” and “Thank God” echoed throughout the area.

      Andrew held out the phone he had taken to Brenda. “This is my father’s phone,” he told her. “Pull whatever you can off it so we can retrace his steps before he was attacked.”

      Brenda immediately took possession of the cell phone, wrapping it in her handkerchief to avoid smudging any possible fingerprints that might be on it and didn’t belong to anyone in the family.

      “Right away, sir,” she promised.

      “Once the chief of police, always the chief of police,” Brian commented to his older brother with a smile.

      “Look,” Andrew began, “I know that technically I don’t have the authority to ask anyone to do anything, but—”

      “Sure you do,” Shaw, the current chief of police and Andrew’s son, said, interrupting his father. “Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll find the SOB who did this to Grandpa,” he promised. “There’ll be so many of us out there combing the area, we’re going to wind up tripping over one another. But we’ll find him.”

      Andrew looked over toward Finley, who had been keeping silent, but Andrew could guess what was going on in the young man’s mind.

      “Finn was the one who was first on the scene,” he reminded the others. “That makes him the lead detective on this.”

      “Once I realized who the victim was, I knew that there would be no shortage of help with the investigation.” Moving toward the center of the group, the tall, good-looking, dark-haired young man’s green eyes swept over the people standing closest to him.

      Finley Cavanaugh belonged to the other branch of the family, the branch that Andrew had uncovered when he went to search for Seamus’s younger brother, Murdoch. Murdoch and