Cavanaugh's Bodyguard by Marie Ferrarella Page A

nodded toward the drive-through he was approaching. Because it was still the early part of the lunch hour, there were five cars already queued up ahead of them.
    “Why don’t we just go in and order?” she suggested. She didn’t relish the idea of being stuck in a line, idling. “It’ll probably be a lot faster and it’ll waste less gas.”
    “Sensible,” he agreed. He’d never admit it to her, but it was one of the things he admired about his partner. She didn’t just go with the easy answers; she liked to think things through. “How is it that no one’s snapped you up yet, Bridget?” he teased.
    “Just lucky I guess,” she countered dryly as he pulled into an empty parking spot. He put the car into “park” and then turned off the ignition.
    “No sense in the two of us going in.” Josh opened the door on his side. “I’ll go,” he volunteered, then paused before getting out. “What do you want?”
    “For the Lady Killer to come down with a quick, terminal disease and die before Valentine’s Day. But I’ll settle for a beef burrito and a diet cola,” she concluded philosophically.
    “Amen to the first part,” Josh responded glibly. “I’ll be right back with lunch.” With that he got out and shut the door behind him.
    Bridget tried to relax for a moment. She leaned the back of her head against the headrest, willing the tension out of her body.
    Without realizing it, she watched her partner as he walked toward the restaurant’s entrance and mused—not for the first time—that Josh had a really cute butt for someone who could, at times, be a real pain in the exact same area.
    One of life’s mysteries, she supposed.
    * * *
    Their long afternoon, spent talking to Karen’s coworkers at The Times of Your Life, turned out to be as fruitless as their morning had been before it. They returned to the squad room with nothing more to go on than they already had when they first left. The victim, everyone had sworn, was someone who no one would have wanted to hurt.
    Until someone had.
    Bridget sat back and stared at her handiwork. The bulletin board was filled with the photographs and names of all of the Lady Killer’s previous unfortunate victims. And now Karen Anderson had unwillingly joined their ranks.
    What were they missing?
    Ten red-haired young women in their twenties all stared back at her, their smiles frozen in time, all silently begging to be avenged and to have their killer stopped and brought to justice.
    Who the hell is he and how can he possibly sleep at night? she asked herself.
    In the next breath, she silently mocked herself for even asking the question. The Lady Killer undoubtedly slept just fine because he did not operate by the same set of rules that the rest of them did.
    As normal people did.
    Because he wasn’t normal.
    That was the big thing she had to remember. The Lady Killer thought and reacted on a far different plane from that of either she or Josh.
    “He got started early this time,” Bridget realized, thinking out loud. She could feel Josh watching her, so she elaborated for his benefit. “This is February second. Most likely he killed Karen last night, which was the first day of the month. Last year we didn’t find a body until the eighth.”
    He remembered. The maimed body behind the gas station store. The girl had just turned twenty the week before.
    “Didn’t mean that there wasn’t one,” he pointed out grimly.
    She didn’t agree. “No, this guy likes to show off his handiwork. It’s like he’s bragging, telling us we can’t catch him. That he’s smarter than we are.” She turned away from the bulletin board and looked at Josh. “Maybe it’s someone who washed out from the academy?”
    Josh tried to follow her line of thinking. “So he’s showing us that he can get away with murder to make us pay for not hiring him?” Saying it out loud made it seem really far-fetched.
    She didn’t want to let go of the new angle just yet, but it belonged in