Cavanaugh's Surrender Read Online Free Page B

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