Cavanaugh Stakeout. Marie Ferrarella

He’d been on the ground, unconscious, deathly pale, with the gash in his head bleeding profusely.

      “I’d say that it looks like she passed the ‘running’ part and is now smack-dab embedded in a very specific kind of ‘trouble.’ Where is she?” Finn asked.

      “I have no idea,” Nik answered honestly. “I’m trying to track her down.”

      He didn’t believe her. “You could be charged with obstructing an investigation, not to mention vehicular theft after the fact.”

      Rather than having intimidated her, Finn was surprised to hear the woman laugh. He hadn’t said anything remotely funny. When he looked at her, puzzled, she said, “I bet you say that to all the girls, Detective.”

      As far as he was concerned, this was not a laughing matter. “Only the ones I arrest,” he responded darkly. “I want you to know that if you’re withholding evidence, you’re on very thin ice—”

      She stopped him right there. “The only ‘evidence’ I have is her name, which you already know,” she reminded him. “And I’m in the process of trying to find out the name of this ‘mystery’ bad influence her mother is worried about, if her mother got that part right—and there is still a very real possibility that she didn’t.”

      “Ms. Ko-val-ski—” Finn began again, his patience running really short.

      “Nik,” she corrected again.

      “Why are you here?” he demanded, his voice rising along with his temper.

      “Well, the simple answer is I thought we could pool our resources and work together since we’re both looking for Marilyn, albeit for different reasons,” she answered.

      “Pool our resources,” Finn repeated in somewhat stunned disbelief.

      “Uh-huh.” Because he was looking at her as if he expected her to clarify what she meant by that, she said, “You tell me what you know and I’ll tell you what I know. It seems more efficient that way.”

      He was not about to work with an amateur, gorgeous or not. If she had anything he could use in his investigation, he intended to hear her out, but he wasn’t about to give her any information. As far as he was concerned, she was in the same class as the press and he made it a rule to always stay clear of the press.

      “All right,” Finn replied, tilting his head. “You first.”

      She wanted to tell him that she wanted him to go first, but she had a feeling that he would just dig in his heels. She could tell that he wasn’t the type to be receptive to that kind of a suggestion. She supposed that she needed to get this serious, distant man to trust her. The only way to do that was to be agreeable to his terms.

      “From what I’ve been told, Marilyn has always been a good girl,” she began, only to abruptly stop. “You don’t need to roll your eyes like that, Detective. There are still good kids left in the world.”

      In his experience, that was the sort of thing people said when the exact opposite was true. But for now, he let it ride.

      “Go on,” Finn said, doing his best to put a lid on his skepticism, at least for the moment. Anything to hurry this along, although he was losing his patience at what felt like the speed of light.

      “According to her mother,” Nik continued, “Marilyn has been acting strangely lately. My friend—Kim—thinks that her daughter has run off with this guy who she feels is a bad influence on her.”

      “You already said that,” he reminded her flatly. “This ‘bad influence,’ does he have a name?”

      She didn’t care for his condescending manner, but for now she went along with it. “Everyone has a name, Detective,” Nik responded with a smile.

      “Then let me rephrase that,” Finn said evenly. “Does this bad influence have a name that you’re familiar with?”

      “Not yet, but I’m trying to locate her friends, who don’t seem to be around, either,” she said.

      How convenient, he thought sarcastically. “All right, do you have a description of this so-called bad influence?”

      “No,” she told him. She hated being unable to answer his questions. As he indicated he was going to leave the squad room, she quickly said, “But I’m working on it.” Even as she said the words, she knew how lame that sounded.

      Finn nodded shortly, dismissing her. “Come back when you have something substantial.”

      The truth was he could probably get the description himself if this “bad influence” was in Seamus’s car with her as she drove away. Valri was already reviewing all the traffic-cam videos in the immediate area of the mugging, trying to spot Seamus’s car in all the recorded footage. Added to that, he had several members of his team collecting any and all surveillance videos caught on the cameras that were recording activity in the industrial center at what he approximated was the time of the mugging. However, giving the woman an assignment seemed the best way to get her to leave, he thought.

      However, as he began to walk away, she placed herself directly in his path and announced, “Your turn!”

      “My turn what?” Finn asked. There was an edge in his voice.

      “Well, I told you what I know and you agreed to pool our resources, so now it’s your turn to tell me what you know,” she explained in a cheerful voice, which he found exceedingly irritating.

      “You agreed,” he pointed out, his voice as dark as hers was light. He saw a fire enter her eyes that, under different circumstances, he might have even found intriguing.

      But these weren’t different circumstances. This was about finding who had done this to his grandfather’s brother, and until he accomplished that, nothing else was going to take center stage for him.

      “But,” he said evenly, “in the spirit of ‘sharing,’ I’ll tell you that Seamus Cavanaugh was mugged and left to die in the North Tustin Industrial parking lot while the person who did this to him drove away in Seamus’s vehicle.”

      When he said that, the words tasted incredibly bitter in his mouth. The idea of someone doing something like that to an old man, let alone a member of his family, galled him beyond words.

      “I already know that,” Nik pointed out. Finn wasn’t about to share anything, she realized.

      “Well, then I guess you’re all caught up,” Finn told her. He looked toward the doorway and began walking. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

      To his annoyed surprise, she fell into step with him. When he glared at her, she responded, “Where are we going?”

      “I’m going down to the crime lab,” he growled. “I don’t know where you’re going.”

      “That’s simple,” Nik answered, still keeping her voice light. “I’m going with you.”

      Okay, time to put an end to this. He stopped dead in his tracks. Looking down at her, he told her sternly, “Oh, no, you’re not.”

      The man was very uptight and extremely territorial, she thought. Nik decided to rephrase her words to sound less objectionable to him. “I thought I’d throw my lot in with you—temporarily, of course.”

      This woman was harder to get rid of than a strip of paper covered in superglue, he thought. “There is no ‘of course,’ Ms. Kowalski,” he informed her.

      “Ko-val-ski,” Nik corrected, resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going to get him to use her first name. At least not yet.

      Finn threw up his hands. “Whatever.” And then he fixed her with a penetrating look. “Let me make this perfectly clear for you. We are not ‘working’ together,” he told her. “I’m a professional and you’re not.”

      Undaunted,