Cavanaugh Justice: The Strong Silent Type Part 11

"Yes." He looked at each and every one of them before saying, "The prints match."

"So what are we waiting for?" Shaw was on his feet, ready to jump into his car and drive to wherever his mother was. "Why don't we go up there and get her? Why isn't she here already?"

Rayne's voice cut him off. "Because she doesn't remember us." She looked at her brothers and sisters, anguish in her eyes. "She looked right at me and didn't know who I was." Rayne's eyes s.h.i.+fted to her father's face. "That's it. Isn't it, Dad? She doesn't remember any of us, does she?"

"So? We'll make her remember," Clay said.

Callie shook her head, always the most practical one. "You can't force this kind of thing."

"So what?" Clay demanded. "We're just going to let her stay up there?"

"No," Andrew's voice quelled the rising tension. "We're going to give her time. I talked to her," he told his children. "Showed her photographs of all of you. Of our life."

"And?" Shaw wanted to know.

He held nothing back. "She seemed afraid. Afraid to try to remember." Each word wounded him, but he couldn't dwell on that now. He had to think positively. "I'll go back up there in a few days and try again."

Clay blew out an impatient breath. "Dad-"

"Let him handle it," Teri ordered, cutting off her twin. The words came out a little more forcefully than she'd intended, fueled by the emotions that ricocheted everywhere inside of her. "He knows what's best." It hurt to be here, to speculate. In its own way, this was almost as bad as not knowing if her mother was alive or dead. She rose from the table. "Look, Dad, I've got to go." Feeling like someone in a trance, she crossed to her father and brushed a kiss against his cheek. "It's going to be all right," she whispered against his ear.

Andrew smiled into her eyes, knowing exactly what she was going through. Because he was going through it himself. "Funny, I was going to say the same thing to you."

She hardly remembered saying goodbye to the others before she left.

Her mother was alive.

Alive.

But if she didn't remember them, was it really her mother or just her empty sh.e.l.l?

What if she never remembered, never wanted to come back? What then?

Teri pressed her lips together to keep back the sob that suddenly rose in her throat. She didn't know what to do with it, what to do with what her father had just told them or with what she was feeling right now. So she just pushed it all aside until she could deal with it, clamping down a giant lid on it all.

She wasn't talking.

For once, the car wasn't filled with her endless, ebullient rhetoric. The car was silent, except for occasional static from the scanner.

Hawk frowned.

Cavanaugh had been like this since he'd first seen her this morning. Atypically quiet, withdrawn into herself the way he'd never seen her.

And it was driving him crazy.

It surprised him that he didn't find comfort in the silence. He'd always liked silence. But having it all but surrounded him except for an occasional word seemed almost unnatural. Not to mention disturbing.

They'd been on the road all day, going from one burglary victim on their list to another, asking them to try to remember their habits from five or four years back. Some had been more than a little surprised to be contacted after all this time. A few took it to mean that at least some of their things had been recovered. All had seemed irritated by what they obviously deemed irrelevant questions.

He'd left the smoothing out of ruffled feathers and sympathy up to Cavanaugh. She always handled that kind of thing well, a h.e.l.l of a lot better than he could have. But as he watched her, as he listened, he had the definite impression that she was just going through the motions. That she was really somewhere else even as she mouthed the right words.

It didn't quite click into place the way it normally did.

As he began to listen more closely, Hawk thought he detected something in her voice, in her manner. It should have bothered him a great deal that he found himself so in tune to a person he was trying to keep at arm's length. But he told himself he was just being a good detective and noticing things like that was all part of the job.

If the excuse was somewhat thin, he pretended not to notice.

As the day progressed, it only got worse, not better. Cavanaugh hardly said a word over the quick sandwiches they grabbed at a take-out window. There was no annoying chatter the way there usually was, no using him as a sounding board. Nothing. She sat and ate her lunch, her eyes a million miles away.

And now, on their way back to the precinct, she made no comment that they had discovered each and every one of the victims they had visited had used a valet service to park their car within a month of the burglaries. Ordinarily, she would have been hooting over that. After all, it was her theory they'd just substantiated.

"You seem a little off today," he finally said. "Something wrong?"

She looked at him, stunned, despite her mental stupor. She didn't think there was much that Hawk could do to surprise her, but she was wrong. This definitely came under that heading. She would have bet that she could have come to work naked and as long as it didn't have any bearing on the case they were working, he wouldn't have noticed.

"No." She could feel him looking at her, as if he knew she wasn't telling him the truth. As if he expected her to own up. She wouldn't have thought that he'd cared one way or another.

"Some people are born liars." He looked back at the street. "You're not one of them."

She stared straight ahead at the darkened road. "What makes you think there's something wrong?"

He laughed at the absurdity of the question. Anyone who had ever met her would have known there was something wrong. "Well, for one thing, you're not talking a mile a minute. You're not talking at all."

More surprises. If she hadn't known better, she would have said he sounded annoyed. "I thought that was what you wanted."

He wished she'd stop blocking him like this. "Not when it means there's something wrong."

She turned to look at him, resentment coming out of nowhere and taking hold of her. "Since when do you care if there's something wrong or not?"

"Since you're my partner. As my partner, you're supposed to have my back and I have yours. That's not going to go according to plan if your head's somewhere else."

"My head's right here," she snapped at him.

If he hadn't thought something was wrong before, he would have now. "I thought you were the poster girl for sharing."

Why was he doing this to her, pretending as if he cared? "I thought you burned posters like that."

Never a patient man, he seemed to have an incredibly small supply of patience available to him at the moment. It went up in smoke. "You don't want to tell me, fine. But work out whatever's bothering you fast because right now you're deadweight."

She set her mouth hard. What else could she have expected from him? "Very compa.s.sionate of you."

That did it. Hawk pulled the car over to the side and threw it into park. He turned to face her. "I asked. You wouldn't tell. What the h.e.l.l do you want from me, Cavanaugh?"

The temptation to haul off and hit him came galloping out of nowhere and it took everything she had not to act on it. What she wanted was for the world to stop tilting on its axis and straighten up again. What she wanted was to have her world back in order.

What was going on inside of her now felt just like it had when she'd heard that her mother had died. Except now the woman had been resurrected.

But not completely.

Afraid she was going to explode, Teri suddenly undid her seat belt and bolted out of the car. She went running down the block, no clue as to where she was going, only that she wanted to get away from him. From everything.

Stunned, Hawk couldn't believe what he was seeing. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing? Where are you going?" he called after her.

When she didn't answer, didn't even turn around, Hawk jumped out of the car and followed her. He was concerned-more than he realized he could be. It wasn't difficult catching up to her. For one thing, his legs were a lot longer. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he spun her around to face him.

About to shout at her, he felt the words dying in his throat. There were tears s.h.i.+mmering in her eyes. The woman just didn't play fair.

But then, he had a feeling she wasn't playing at all. His grip on her shoulders lessened. "What's going on, Teri?" he asked in a voice that was a lot softer than what he'd just used.

She didn't want to tell him. Didn't want to tell anyone. Because this wasn't the answer to a prayer. This was an extension of a nightmare. She'd lost her mother once, and now it looked as if she was still losing her.

The words came out in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. "My father found my mother."

So that was it. He felt something strange, a protectiveness uncurling inside of him. "He found her body?" he asked softly.

She shook her head. The tears she was valiantly trying to hold back spilled. "No, he found her. She's alive."

He didn't understand. Everyone knew about what had happened to the chief's wife. Her car had been fished out from the bottom of the river. Enough time had pa.s.sed to declare her legally dead twice over. "I thought she was dead."

Teri swallowed. The ache wouldn't leave, not from her throat, not from her stomach. "I thought so, too. I didn't want to, but I finally did."

He didn't understand why she wasn't jumping up and down for joy. "Where did he find her?"

"In some diner upstate someplace. She works there, I think."

"Is he sure?"

"He's sure."

Very gently, he turned her around and started to usher her back to the car. She offered no resistance. He'd seen people suffering from shock. Now that he thought of it, she had a great many of the signs. But why? "I don't get it. If he found her, why are you like this? Why aren't you happy?"

She stopped walking just shy of the car. "She doesn't know us. Doesn't know him." There was confusion tempered with anguish in her eyes as she looked at him. "I don't know how to feel."

Now it was beginning to make sense. "Numb," he told her. He knew that would be the way he'd react if something like this had hit him.

Maybe it would be better that way, Teri thought. Better if she did just shut everything down until she could go and see her mother for herself. There was no way she was going to just leave this in abeyance, even if that was what her father wanted. It wasn't what she wanted.

What she wanted was to have her mother back. Whole.

He saw the look in her eyes. It was a look he'd once felt in his own soul. It'd been so long ago, it was almost hard to remember. But he did. It was a feeling of being so lost he'd felt that no one could ever find him. After a while, it had ceased to matter if someone would.

He held the car door open for her, waiting for Teri to get in. When she did, he closed the door and then got in on his side.

He paused for a moment, weighing his words before he made a decision. "Look, we're done for the day. Why don't we clock out and go somewhere for a drink?"

She shook her head. She didn't want to go to the Shannon, wasn't up to trying to pretend that everything was fine.

"Thanks, but I'll take a rain check."

That was really not like her, and he was starting to get worried. For all the reasons he'd cited to her and more. "Dinner, then."

She blinked, looking at him. She couldn't have heard him right. "What?"

It took effort, but he couldn't just leave her like this. "Come have dinner with me. We can talk."

The offer coaxed out the first smile he'd seen on her lips all day. "I'd like to see some ID please. My partner doesn't do dinner."

"He does when his back's on the line. Now shut up and don't argue. You're having dinner with me. And we'll talk."

"Meaning you want me to talk."

"Yeah." Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw her c.o.c.k her head. "What are you doing?"

"Listening for the sounds of h.e.l.l freezing over."

He figured he was on the right trail. The light had just appeared at the end of the tunnel.

Hawk smiled.

Chapter Ten.

I t was too early for the late crowd, too late for the early crowd. As a result, the small Mexican restaurant Hawk had brought her to was thinly populated. Only a third of their tables were in use.

She'd ordered a quesadilla. Because food was of no consequence to him one way or another, he'd ordered the same. He wasn't here to eat, but to listen.

Except that there was nothing to listen to, beyond the mild buzz of the conversation from the other tables.

Hawk gave her the first ten minutes, then said, "Okay, talk to me."

The smile that blossomed on her face stirred something within him. It was like seeing the sun come out after a long storm. She was a very pretty woman, but when she smiled, she was the closest thing to beautiful that he had ever seen. Not the kind of model-perfect beautiful that could be found on the covers of popular magazines, but a kick-in-your-gut kind of beautiful.

It took him a beat to come around. "Did I say something funny?" he asked.

"Yeah, you did." Her smile widened as she looked at him. The man was full of surprises today. "I just never thought I'd hear you say that to anyone besides a suspect-least of all me."

He shrugged, turning his attention to the cheese that oozed out from around the outer edges of the quesadilla. It was a lot safer right now than looking into her blue-gray eyes.

"Some people need to talk or they explode. You're one of them."

"Very perceptive of you." And ordinarily, he'd be right. She did feel like something was exploding inside of her, but she hadn't a clue as to how to put it into words, or even explain what she was feeling. She didn't grasp it enough to reduce it to a succinct description.

"It's called a survival mechanism." He paused, taking a bite, before continuing. "I don't want you exploding all over me."