Cavanaugh's Surrender by Marie Ferrarella

thing—”
    There was always just “one more thing,” she thought. She could feel her shoulders stiffening as she braced herself. “And that is?”
    “The lieutenant wants this kept from the media for as long as possible. He said he doesn’t want single women to be afraid to go out in the evening.”
    “The serial killer doesn’t kill his victims in the street,” she pointed out, adding grimly, “He apparently kills his victims after he gets tired of them and dumps them.”
    “I kept that little detail from him,” Logan told her. “I’ve come to the conclusion that the less I share with the lieutenant, the more leeway I have to work on a case.”
    “As in bringing me in and not telling him my last name,” she surmised.
    He didn’t think that she was going to have any particular problem with that. “It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
    “Absolutely,” she told him with feeling. It was just that by not telling his lieutenant her name, she felt as if they were actually lying to the man. And that could come back and bite them. “Don’t think that I’m not grateful—” she began.
    He cut her off right there. “We’ll get to that later,” he promised her with a definite grin in his voice, instinctively knowing that was going to distract her and get under her skin. He had a feeling that messing with her and getting her annoyed with him would focus the woman on solving the case and not on her personal loss.
    “Okay, so how do you want to do this?” she asked.
    “Do what?”
    “Work together,” she underscored. She felt a warmth creeping up her cheeks when she realized that he might have thought she was making a reference to something personal. More than likely he was probably more accustomed to that sort of thing than to working with a woman professionally. “Do you want me to come upstairs to you, or do you want to come down to me?”
    He disliked having to rely on another computer, preferring to work on his own. Logan glanced toward Sully’s desk. That was as good a place as any. Actually, now that he looked around, there were a good many empty desks in the immediate area. This flu thing really was taking its toll.
    “A lot of detectives are out sick,” he told her again. “So there’s plenty of space up here.” The crime lab had always struck him as rather claustrophobic, not to mention subterranean. “Might do you good to work aboveground for a change.”
    “I’m not exactly a gopher,” she told him, picking up on his inference. “I go out in daylight on occasion.” She didn’t attempt to hide the note of sarcasm in her voice.
    “Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of a vampire, not a gopher.” When she made no response, he added, “You know, a creature of the night, that sort of thing.”
    “I know what a vampire is,” she told him shortly.
    Was this his attempt at humor? Or was he flirting in some strange, abstract way? Either way, he needed to stop it. This was a serious case they were working on. There was no time to waste on distractions. Her sister and a lot of other women were dead. They had to find the killer before he found another victim.
    She blew out a breath, told herself to calm down and focus, then said, “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
    “Looking forward to it,” he told her.
    In response he heard a loud “click” in his ear. She’d hung up. Logan smiled to himself. Mission accomplished. He’d gotten her annoyed, he congratulated himself, and right now, “annoyed” was a lot better than “sad,” which was what he’d picked up on in her voice earlier. And while the woman had every right to be sad, the emotion tended to paralyze a person. Annoyance, or its first cousin “anger,” on the other hand, tended to light a fire under a person, which at the moment would serve them both a lot better than her being sad.
    * * *
    “Any particular place you want me?” Destiny asked ten minutes later. She’d come up carrying a large cardboard box