A Cavanaugh Christmas (11 page)

“Yeah,” she agreed, lengthening her stride to keep up with the detective again. “I’ve already wasted too much precious time.”

She fervently prayed that this play for time wouldn’t cost Megan her life—or have her disappear out of sight forever.

As they approached the elevator, Tom looked at the intense detective, and he could almost read her thoughts. He
had
to find a way to get her to lighten up. Otherwise she would self-combust on him.

“Do you always beat yourself up this much?” he asked.

He could see that his question had ticked her off. That wouldn’t have been his first choice for a reaction, but he’d take it. Being annoyed at him restored her fighting spirit, which was what he was trying to accomplish in the first place.

“Where is this lab?” she asked.

The elevator arrived just then and he waited for her to get in before getting on himself. When he did, he pushed the button labeled B.

“Guess,” he said. A smile played on his lips as he said it. One that she could only describe as seductively mischievous.

Too bad she was immune to that sort of thing, she thought.

“The basement,” she answered with impatient annoyance. Why was he playing games? And why was that smile of his causing this odd sensation to sprout and grow in the pit of her stomach?

“Very good.” As they rode down, Tom inclined his head as if he was bowing to her superior intellect. “You got it on the first guess.”

Kait instantly resented his frivolous tone. A little girl’s life was at stake. Didn’t he get that? Or didn’t he care? She wasn’t sure which was a worse offense, stupidity or indifference.

“Why aren’t you taking this seriously?” she demanded heatedly.

He could see where this was going, and he didn’t care for it. He wasn’t just a fairly decent detective, he was a damn good one. That meant he cared. More than he actually should at times.

“I am.”

Kait laughed shortly. “By making lame jokes?” she challenged.

Tom debated just letting the accusation hang in the air without answering it. To the undiscerning eye, he might appear laid-back, but he didn’t like having to explain himself and he certainly didn’t like to justify his actions. Especially not to his partner. A partner was supposed to have your back even if it was a matter of blind faith.

And, for better or for worse—and for the duration of this case—this woman was his partner. He might need her to have his back. Especially if they wound up stumbling on a kidnapping ring. And if that did happen, then alienating her now wouldn’t be such a wise move.

So he told her the truth. He told her why, at times, especially when all else might fail, humor ended up being his weapon of choice.

“By not allowing my outrage, my sense of horror and my anger at the lowlife who would rip an innocent child from her family to get to me to the point that I am almost paralyzed and utterly useless when it comes to working a case.” And then he attempted to lighten the mood by adding, “And the jokes aren’t lame. They’re just not overly clever.”

No one had gotten on or off, so they had ridden the elevator straight to their destination. The elevator doors opened as the car arrived in a corner of the basement.

“They’re lame,” Kait insisted, but this time, he saw that there was just a hint of a smile on her lips, as well as one that he could just make out distantly in Kait’s voice.

Tom silently congratulated himself. However minor, he was making headway.

Chapter 8

E
ver since the bombshell had dropped into his world that he was not the son of the late Martha and Anthony Cavelli but was actually born into what had slowly transformed into the Cavanaugh dynasty, Sean Cavelli/Cavanaugh was forced to wrestle with a number of issues, including the so-called “simple” act of selecting which surname he was legally supposed to be using.

For more than five decades, he’d thought of himself as Sean Cavelli, a man whose relatives on both sides of the family had their roots in Italy. Never mind that he didn’t resemble either of his parents or any of his three siblings.

Currently, he could truthfully admit that he wasn’t quite comfortable with either last name.

Still, as Thomas, his oldest son, had pointed out to him the first time they’d discussed this unexpected twist in their lives, he was still the same person he’d been before the discovery had been unceremoniously dropped on all of them. He still had the same abilities and insights, still had the background and training for the profession he both loved and did so well. Just because the letters of his last name had changed—and not even his initials, he thought, amused—that didn’t diminish his previous accomplishments or minimize anything he would do from here on in.

He was still the same person, and whether that person was Italian or Scottish or some other ethnic nationality would not ultimately change anything.

Sean carefully separated the fragments of a shredded garment he’d been given to work with this morning in the hopes that he would be able to extract some DNA from the fibers. He worked slowly, methodically, the way he always did.

Sometimes wisdom didn’t come with age, he thought with a smile. Sometimes it was there all along, as in Thomas’s case. Unlike some of the others, this revelation about the hospital’s mix-up didn’t seem to faze his oldest son in the least.

“Speak of the devil,” Sean said as he looked up and saw his son and a woman he didn’t recognize walking into the lab.

Tom looked around. For once the lab appeared to be empty, except for his father, who headed up the crime-scene-investigation day unit. It had been his father’s recent transfer from a neighboring forensic lab that had started the whole identity-discovery process in the first place.

“There’s no one here. Just who were you speaking of the devil to?” Tom asked, amused.

“Just thinking out loud,” Sean answered dismissively. “Never mind that, what did you bring me?” As he asked, Sean looked at the attractive, very serious-looking redhead behind his firstborn.

Tom stepped to the side and gestured toward the detective with him. “This is Detective Kaitlyn Two Feathers. The case she was working on in New Mexico led her to Aurora, so here she is.” He held up the copy of the driver’s license photo they’d lifted out of the rental car agency’s files. “Do you think you can run this photograph through the facial-recognition program and find a name for us?”

Sean looked at the reproduced photograph dubiously. He noticed that, as with all state licenses, there was a name and address next to the photograph. “The one on here isn’t good enough?” he asked.

“It’s a fake,” Tom told him. “And so is the address.”

“And he has such an honest face, too,” Sean bemoaned wryly. He studied the reproduction and frowned. The picture was fuzzy at best. “This is the clearest photo you have of him?”

“It’s the
only
one we have of him,” Kait answered before Tom could. Sean gathered that the detective from New Mexico was not happy about that.

Sean took the information in stride. In general, he tended to be optimistic, even when the outlook was bleak. “Well, something is always better than nothing. I’ll see what I can do with this and give you a call later. Sooner if something comes up,” he promised. He began to put the sheet at the bottom of his considerable pile of work. “What’s he done?” he asked, mildly curious about a case that would have a detective crossing state lines.

There was restrained anger in Kait’s voice as she answered. “He abducted a little girl from in front of her house while she was playing with her friends.”

Sean didn’t comment on the information. He pulled the copy back out from the bottom of the pile and then placed it on top. Cases involving children always got his immediate attention. Someone had to champion the innocent.

“I’ll be in touch,” he promised with feeling.

“You’ve got all the numbers,” Tom replied as he turned away and left the lab.

“Think he’ll actually get to that today?” Kait asked, glancing over her shoulder back at the lab.

“Yeah, I do,” Tom assured her as they walked down the less than brightly lit hallway back toward the elevator. “My father has a personal vendetta against anyone who harms a kid.”

Kait stopped dead and looked at him as his words sank in. “Wait. That tall man in the white lab coat, that was your father back there?”

“He’s my father out here, too,” Tom teased. He could see that his quip had eluded her. She was preoccupied, so he sobered slightly as he repeated, “Yeah, that’s my father.”

“Why didn’t he say something? Why didn’t
you
say something?” Kait wasn’t sure exactly why, but she felt like an idiot who’d been shut out and wound up standing awkwardly on the outside of a joke.

“For the same reason Dad’s not sure what last name he wants to use from here on in, Cavelli or Cavanaugh. He believes in being professional, in relying on not who he knows but
what
he knows. That’s why, when we’re here, I’m not his son, I’m the detective from Missing Persons. And he’s not my father, he’s the head of the CSI lab, day shift.

“As it is,” Tom continued as he resumed walking to the elevator, “a lot of the Cavanaughs are always being accused of nepotism, either in the way they got a promotion or in the way someone in their family got one. It’s very important to Dad that he—and the rest of us working at the precinct—rely on merit and not connections.” Stopping in front of the elevator, Tom pushed a button for the car. “Dad’s integrity means a lot to him. He doesn’t want anyone to think that he got to be head of the lab because the chief of Ds is his long-lost brother. He actually became the head of the lab before any of us even knew there
was
a mix-up.”

“Hold it—back up,” Kait said. “
What
mix-up?”

He’d gotten so used to everyone knowing the story that he’d forgotten that some people didn’t. “Seems that when my dad was born, there was another little boy in the same hospital on the same day. Somehow the names accidentally got mixed up and my dad was taken home by the Cavelli family, while his real family, the Cavanaughs, took home the baby they thought was theirs. That baby died, and my father thrived. The mix-up only came to light a few months ago. We’ve all been adjusting to it since then.”

“Wow.” It was the only word that seemed to fit there.

“Yeah. Wow,” he agreed.

Kait couldn’t help wondering if there were other babies out there who had gotten accidentally switched. In her case, it wasn’t even something she could remotely hope for. She’d been born behind bars, when her mother was serving time. From her limited information, there had been no one to get switched with. The last baby in the prison hospital had been born six months before her.

The elevator arrived and they got on. Tom pressed the button corresponding to their floor.

“How long have you known about this mix-up?” she asked him.

In a way it felt as if he’d just found out yesterday. In another, it was as if he’d known about this forever. The truth was found somewhere in between.

“Just a few months,” he admitted. “Four, if you want a number.”

For just a moment, Kait tried to put herself in the other detective’s position. What if she suddenly discovered that her parents had been important people in the community instead of a dead, small-time thief and his junkie girlfriend? Most likely, she’d probably feel excited—and cheated at the same time. Cheated because she’d been passed around as a child and had missed out on being treated like a human being.

But Ronald did his best to make that all up to you, remember? And the minute he could adopt you, he did. If you’d had a normal background, you might never have met Ronald. And you would have been poorer for it.

She realized that Tom was watching her because she’d suddenly grown so silent. She didn’t want him asking her any questions, so she asked him one instead. “How do you feel about being a Cavanaugh?”

“Not sure yet,” he admitted honestly. “They cast long shadows and there’s a lot to live up to.”

“Afraid you can’t?” she asked. He didn’t strike her as the insecure type.

“Blunt,” he acknowledged. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“What’s the point?” she challenged. “You don’t find things out that way and what happens is that you get left with a lot of unanswered questions.”

“All right, to answer your question.” Tom obliged. “No, I’m not afraid that I won’t be able to live up to their reputation. I do pretty good work and I’m comfortable in my own skin.”

He certainly seemed that, she thought. “That puts you up on a lot of people.”

He looked at her for a long moment and then asked, “On you?”

She laughed shortly. “Now who’s being blunt?”

Reaching their floor, the elevator stopped and its doors opened. He gestured toward her, giving her the credit as he said, “I learn from the best.”

Smooth, she thought. “And who taught you how to flatter like that?”

“I came by that naturally,” he told her.

He’d probably be surprised that she took his words to heart as a warning. Because he had a way about him, she’d already learned that. A way of being able to extract information out of her, of having her tell him things she’d had no intentions of owning up to. By working his black magic, he’d learned more about her in a little less than two days than most people she worked with on the force back in New Mexico had in the six years she’d been there.

But that was because she kept to herself for the most part. That wasn’t as easy to do here around Cavelli/Cavanaugh or whatever he wanted to call himself.

She walked back to her temporary desk, promising herself she was going to be more vigilant. And silent.

The rest of the day was spent going around in circles. At least that was how it felt when she was about to call it a night and leave the precinct. The reprint of the fake driver’s license hadn’t yielded a match so far from the databases that Sean had accessed.

A call to the clerk back at the car-rental agency had proved to be equally fruitless. The van hadn’t been returned. The contact number that had been left in the file got them nowhere, as well.