Cavanaugh's Surrender

Most likely, the guy was married, Logan thought, and when he’d decided to go back to his wife, the victim had killed herself.

“And you don’t think that this is a suicide?” Logan asked again. It was obvious from his tone that he felt that the evidence they’d reviewed so far clearly pointed in that direction.

“No,” Destiny said with feeling. “If this ‘important’ bastard had left her, she wouldn’t have killed herself. Paula was the type to have gone upside his head, to have raised a stink, not taken the breakup docilely, given up all hope and killed herself.” She raised her chin defiantly as she added, “I know my sister. That’s just not like her.”

Did anyone really know anyone else? Logan wondered. Of late, since the big revelation that had jolted his family down to their roots, he’d faced that question more than once.

“That’s what you think,” Logan pointed out. And, as far as he was concerned, there was an entire world of difference between prejudiced perception and actual fact.

“No,” Destiny said flatly. “That’s what I know. My sister believed in revenge,” she was quick to add, seeing the suspicious light coming into the detective’s all-but-magnetic green eyes. “And by that, I mean she would have dolled herself up, found the first good-looking male she could and deliberately shown up somewhere where she knew that ‘Mr. Special’ would most likely be. Then she would have flaunted the fact that she was having an exceptionally good time with someone new and gorgeous. Paula was not the kind to just give up,” she insisted. “She was stubborn that way.”

How long was it going to take to get used to referring to Paula in the past tense? Destiny wondered, her heart aching in her chest.

“I take it stubbornness runs in the family?” Logan surmised, watching her. There was just a hint of an appreciative smile on his lips.

Her blue eyes narrowed into slits. “Damn straight it does.”

“You might be right,” Sean interjected as if there was no other conversation taking place. Having completed his preliminary examination of the dead woman, he straightened up.

“About which part?” Logan asked, just taking it for granted that his father was talking to him and not to the sexy, headstrong woman before him.

Instead of answering his son immediately, Sean focused his attention on the person in the room who needed him the most.

“Was your sister right-handed?” he asked Destiny.

She shook her head. “No, Paula was left-handed. Why?” Had he found something to substantiate her gut feeling that her sister hadn’t taken her own life? Without realizing it, Destiny began to pray.

“Just trying to get my facts straight,” Sean said thoughtfully, never one to give away anything too soon. Pausing a moment longer, he then said, “I don’t believe she killed herself.”

Yes!

The relief that flooded through her limbs just about took Destiny’s breath away. At least she wasn’t going to have to fight everyone tooth and nail about this. If the head of the crime lab backed her up, the battle over that at least was over. Now the major one began: finding Paula’s killer.

“Thank you,” she said to Sean. The words came out on a nearly breathless sigh.

While he knew that his father wouldn’t just say something like that to put his assistant at ease, Logan still wanted proof.

“What makes you say that?” he asked his father.

“When a person slashes their wrists, depending on whether they’re right-handed or left-handed, the cut is deeper on the opposite wrist since they’re using their good hand.”

If the person followed regular procedure, Logan thought. Maybe this one hadn’t. “She might have slashed her right wrist first,” Logan suggested. “That would have made her right hand weaker when she was delivering the final cut.”

“True,” Sean allowed.

Concerned, Destiny immediately asked, “Then you’re changing your mind?”

Again, rather than answering directly, Sean turned toward his son, opting for a demonstration. “If you were to slash your wrists, how would you go about it?” he asked.

Logan firmly believed that there wasn’t anything in the world that would cause him to give up all hope and just apathetically end his life.

“I wouldn’t,” Logan said flatly.

“Good to know,” his father murmured. “But if you did, if you put yourself in the place of someone who’d lost all hope and given up wanting to live,” Sean proposed, “how would you slash your wrists?”

Logan honestly didn’t know what his father was getting at. “The usual way,” he answered with a careless shrug.

“Show me,” Sean urged. Taking a pen out of his breast pocket, he handed it to Logan. “Pretend this is a knife. Show me how you’d go about ‘slashing’ your wrists if you were committing suicide.”

With another, somewhat more pronounced shrug, Logan took the pen from his father and then, holding it in his right hand, traced a slightly slanted line from left to right across his left wrist. And then, changing hands, he took the pen into his left hand and reversed the process, “slashing” his right wrist from right to left with the imaginary knife. Both times the lines he created were slightly slanted, going from higher to lower.

“Okay, consider them slashed,” Logan said, handing the pen back to his father. His curiosity had been piqued. “Now what?”

“Now you’d bleed out,” Sean said matter-of-factly. “All right, keeping your methodical procedure in mind, I want you to take a look at Paula’s wrists,” he told both his son and his assistant. “What do you see?”

Each wrist had a long, deep cut going across it. “Slashes,” Logan answered.

Destiny narrowed her eyes, distancing herself from the actual person in the bathtub and focusing only on the victim’s wrists. She looked intently at the cuts that had caused her sister to die.

After scrutinizing the two cuts, she felt no more enlightened than she had been at the outset.

Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t—”

“Look carefully,” Sean repeated, cutting her off.

“I did,” she protested.

And then she saw it, saw what Sean was trying to point out without actually physically doing it. Her eyes widened and she looked at him.

“The slashes are both going in the same direction!” But there was more than just that, she realized. “And they’re both upside down.”

Instead of slanting slightly at the top and then dipping down as it reached the opposite side, each cut seemed to go from the bottom to the top, left to right, on both wrists.

“This is too awkward,” Destiny concluded, her excitement growing. And then she repeated what she had been maintaining all along. “Paula couldn’t have done this to herself. Someone else had to have done it to her.”

He could see his father trying to spare his assistant and make her feel better, but there were other matters to consider, Logan thought.

“There’s no sign of a struggle,” he pointed out, then continued, “There’s no huge amount of water along the perimeter of the old-fashioned tub, leaving the actual tub low, as if there’d been a wild, last-minute struggle. There are no outstanding bruises visible on the victim’s body, and her long, salon-applied nails all seem to be intact. They wouldn’t have been if she was fighting for her life.”

“There wouldn’t be any struggle if the victim was drugged,” Sean told his son, his voice as mild as if he were discussing the garden section of the Sunday paper. Turning, Sean pointed to the wine goblet he had already photographed and that now stood, bagged, on the bathroom floor exactly where he had found it. “A simple analysis can tell us about that.”

Logan still didn’t see that as proof. “A lot of suicides build up their courage with a drink first. Maybe the victim wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t experience a last-minute surge of regret that might cause her to stop what she was doing.” He looked at his father. “Despondence can do that to you.”

“Maybe to you,” Destiny fired back. “But not to Paula. She did not kill herself. I’d stake my badge on it,” she insisted.

“Besides,” Sean interjected, “there are the cuts to her wrists. Our killer obviously slipped up there.” Returning the items he’d taken out previously, as well as packing up the samples he’d taken into his case, Sean glanced at Destiny. “Are you absolutely sure your sister never mentioned this man’s name? Dropped a hint, used initials? Something like that?”

To each suggestion, Destiny could only shake her head no. Each time she did so, she felt her frustration growing larger and larger.