Cavanaugh Cold Case (3 page)

His reputation had preceded him.

“Of course you are,” she replied, turning her attention back to her work.

“And you are?” he asked after several seconds went by and she still didn't volunteer her name, even though he had given her his.

“Busy,” Kristin answered crisply without looking up. “And you're in my light,” she added rather impatiently.

“Funny, I would have thought that you cast enough light on your own to brighten up anything you needed to look at,” Malloy observed.

The blonde looked up again, her expression telling him that the remark—and his charm—left her more than just merely cold.

“Sorry, no,” she replied. Ice chips formed around each word. “Would you mind stepping to the side? I got the impression that the owner of this nursery wanted me to be done before I even got here, so if you move out of the light, I can try to accommodate him.”

“Sorry,” Malloy apologized, following her request. “My bad.”

“I imagine you probably say that a lot,” Kristin commented, sounding as if she were addressing the observation to herself instead of to him.

Feisty, Malloy thought. Ordinarily, he probably would have backed away. This was, after all, a case, and he wasn't the type to waste too much time trying to break through a woman's barriers. For one thing, life was too short. For another, he was being paid to be a detective, not a lover. And there were a great many willing women out there to choose from.

But, on the other hand, there was a certain appeal to the concept of “feisty,” especially when it was coupled with someone who looked the way this woman did.

Exactly who was she?

What was her official position in the department, and how did he get her to open up to him?

“You're new,” he said, hoping to initiate a conversation.

Kristin spared him just the minutest of glances before she went back to her work. “Actually, I'm not,” she told him.

“I haven't seen you around,” he told her. “And I always notice beautiful women.”

“Well, I guess you missed one this time,” she responded, carefully separating two bones that looked as if they had been fused together by grit and time.

Rather than annoying him, the flippant way she'd answered what was clearly a line—he hadn't been trying to be subtle—seemed to oddly attract him to an even greater extent.

Crouching down beside the woman, he said, “Let's start over.”

The look she gave him would have withered a lesser man.

“Maybe later. I'm working now.” Her expression turned impatient. “And you're in my light again.”

“Right.”

To accommodate her, Malloy rose to his feet, taking care to allow the sunlight to stream over and bathe the bones laid out before her.

This one, he told himself, was going to be a tough nut to crack.

And he couldn't wait to get started.

Chapter 2

B
ut for now, as tantalizing as the woman kneeling over the boneyard was, Malloy knew he had to place his private plans on the back burner.

A really distant back burner.

For now, he had a crime to begin to unravel and, from the looks of it, a number of dead people to identify.

Growing up, Malloy had always loved puzzles, both the mental kind and the kind that came inside boxes that were labeled with intentionally daunting numbers like “1000 pieces.”

The older he got, the higher the number of pieces stuffed into the box became. But back then, no matter how many parts the puzzle came in, with enough tenacity on his part, they always wound up fitting into one another to form a unified whole.

He had come to learn years ago that life didn't always imitate art. If he were being honest with himself, “hardly ever” was more the case. But each of these bones now spread out on the cloth went into forming a whole person. All he needed to do was find out who that whole person was, so that he or she could be laid to rest.

All he needed to do
.

The words echoed in his head, mocking him. There was no “all” about this job, unless the word referred strictly to the number of bones that were even now piling up next to the medical examiner.

As he watched, the pile just kept growing.

It was like trying to look away from a train wreck. Horrific though it was, he couldn't tear his eyes away. Not because he didn't want to, but because identifying the deceased was his job.

So he watched as the CSI team members continued to find more and more body parts, carefully laying each part on the long, unfurled rectangular cloth beside the somber medical examiner. From all appearances—at least to his limited range of expertise in this particular field—time had been the butcher rather than some overzealous serial killer trying to bolster his sagging self-esteem by hacking apart people.

Rather than walk away and get back to the owner as he'd intended, Malloy retraced his steps to the medical examiner.

“Any chance that those overly observant construction workers ogling you over there might have stumbled across some old Native American burial ground while plowing up the ground with their bulldozer?” he asked her.

Kristin looked up to see if the cocky detective was joking. But the expression on his face, while exceedingly friendly, was apparently serious.

She turned back to her work. “If that were the case, Detective, it was a pretty exclusive burial ground. So exclusive that I highly doubt it existed.”

“Again, please,” Malloy requested. “In English this time.”

Impatient, Kristin rocked back on her heels. In order to be able to look at him, she shaded her eyes. “The bodies that have been dug up so far all belonged to women. While there were some tribes that were predominantly matriarchal in nature, I've never heard of any of them segregating their dead.” And then she shrugged as she added a coda. “Anyway, these bodies aren't really that old.”

Malloy's eyes swept over the various piles of bones. They looked dried and, in some cases, splintered. “Could have fooled me,” he murmured.

“I'm sure a good many things could fool you, Detective, but I don't have time to discuss that,” she said, getting back to work. “I'd like to finish up here before the turn of the next century.”

Rather than take offense, Malloy merely shook his head. “That was cold, Doc,” he told her.

Kristin felt herself bristling. She didn't like the note of familiarity in his voice. “That was accurate, Detective Cavanaugh.”

He didn't back off, the way she's hoped. Instead, he said, “Call me Malloy. All beautiful women do.”

At a loss as to how to respond or how to put this man in his place, Kristin retreated. Sighing deeply, she went back to ignoring him. She turned her attention to tagging body parts.

“Are you
sure
they didn't unearth some kind of a cemetery when they broke ground over here?” Malloy pressed. There seemed to be just too many body parts for anything
but
a cemetery.

Kristin raised her eyes to look up at him just for a moment. She didn't bother hiding her disdain. “You have trouble understanding the word ‘no,' Detective? Or is it that you're just not accustomed to hearing it?”

He didn't answer her.

He didn't have to.

The grin that found its way to his lips did it for him.

Kristin bit off a few choice words that rose to her own lips. This wasn't the time to get distracted or get embroiled in a verbal exchange that wasn't going to lead anywhere. Especially when what she had before her could very well be the defining moment of her entire career. She didn't have time to get sidetracked by a sweet-talking, sinfully good-looking, dark-haired detective who obviously thought that all he had to do was glance at a woman with those bone-melting, seductive green eyes of his and she automatically became his.

Her bone-melting days were definitely in the past.

Long in the past.

So rather than tell this man what she thought of him, Kristin restrained herself and asked what to her seemed to be an entirely logical question.

“Don't you have work to do, Detective? Or has the department taken to paying its detectives to stand around like obtrusive lead statues that do nothing but get in the way?”

“Is there a problem here?” Sean Cavanaugh asked, coming up behind the unit's newest—and in his estimation, brightest—medical examiner.

He'd interviewed and hired her himself after Jacobs, the department's last medical examiner, felt compelled to accept a better position in the private industry. Outside of proposing to his second wife, he felt it was one of the best decisions he'd ever made.

“Just asking the doc here some general questions pertaining to this boneyard that's being unearthed even as we speak.” He flashed a wide grin in her direction. “She's giving me the benefit of her rather droll point of view.”

Sean looked from his nephew to the young woman he felt was capable of great things. He knew all about Malloy's reputation. He'd raised several sons like that himself and knew firsthand that it took a while for the kinks to work themselves out. Malloy was a good cop and ultimately an even better human being. The name of the game was patience.

Sean, in turn, smiled at the young woman between his nephew and him. “I'm sure that Dr. Alberghetti will let us all know when she's had time to formulate a scientific opinion regarding this unfortunate treasure trove of death that the construction crew stumbled across.”

Easygoing almost to a fault, Brian Cavanaugh's somewhat slightly older brother had just finished his sentence as a teeth-jarring, crowing sound pierced the air again.

The closest thing to a dirty look passed over Sean's face as he glanced over his shoulder. “Doesn't that blasted bird ever just stop making noise and go to sleep? That's the third time he's crowed since we got here. Isn't he supposed to be tuned in to some inner clock or something?”

“I don't know about an inner clock, but it's too bad that he can't talk,” Malloy commented, his eyes sweeping over the immediate area, then taking in the weather-battered trailer in the distance, as well. He had to be getting back to the unfriendly owner. “Maybe then he could give us some insight on what happened here.”

“He wouldn't be able to,” Kristin said flatly, not bothering to look up. “Roosters live about ten years. Fifteen at most. These bodies all appear to be older than that.”

Taken aback, Malloy looked at her quizzically. “You actually know how long roosters live?” He raised his eyes to meet his uncle's. “Wow, she's just a regular font of miscellaneous information, isn't she?”

Sean smiled in response. “She reads a lot in her downtime,” he told his nephew. “Although there isn't going to be very much downtime in her immediate future, I'm afraid.”

“She also has excellent hearing,” Kristin interjected without pausing what she was doing.

“My apologies, Kristin,” Sean told her, willingly taking the blame. “That was rude.”

This time Kristin did stop what she was doing. When she spoke, her words were addressed only to the older man, who she considered to be her mentor despite the fact that he had no medical degree.

“You could never be rude, sir. He, however,” she went on, casting one dismissive glance in Malloy's direction, “is an entirely different story.”

“Ouch.” Malloy pretended to wince. “Moving right along—”

“Please, do,” Kristin murmured just audibly enough to be overheard.

Roy Harrison picked that moment to approach the trio, a dark, impatient scowl all but embedded on his long, thin face. “Hey, when is she going to be finished?” he demanded, irritably waving his hand at Kristin.

Kristin was about to speak up and put the sour-looking man in his place when she heard someone else doing it for her.

“When she's done,” Malloy informed the disgruntled new owner of the nursery in no uncertain terms, his tone far removed from his usual friendly cadence.

Kristin looked at the detective in surprise. She hadn't expected him to come to her defense. Part of her waited for Malloy to add, “Just kidding,” but he didn't.

“Is she going to keep on digging straight down to the other side of the world until she turns up all the bones from here to there?” Harrison retorted.

“Nope, just the ones that are buried along the perimeter of your property,” Sean told him pleasantly. His words didn't match the chief's expression.

Apparently, Malloy thought, sarcasm was wasted on the nursery's new owner, because he took the head of the CSI unit seriously.

“My bulldozer can go a lot faster,” Harrison told them.

It didn't take a brain surgeon to realize that the man's only interest in the matter was speed, and that he couldn't care less about any sort of resolution as far as solving the crime went. The abrupt cessation of work was costing him a considerable amount of money for each minute that went by, and not only was money the bottom line, apparently as far as Harrison was concerned it was the
only
line.

“Your bulldozer can also crush a lot of those bones beyond recognition,” Malloy told him before Kristin could speak up.

In his estimation, Harrison was clearly a Neanderthal type, and anything that the medical examiner had to say, Malloy knew, wouldn't carry any weight. There was no point in having her hit her head against a brick wall.

“It's not like they're exactly a pretty sight right now,” the frustrated nursery owner snapped.

“Mr. Harrison, the less time you spend standing here, talking and tying us up, the faster this'll go and the faster you'll be able to get back to building up your nursery,” Malloy pointed out. “Now, if you really want to talk, that's great,” he continued cheerfully. “I have plenty of questions I'd like to ask you.”

At this point, the scowl on Harrison's face was going clear down to the bone. Second-guessing the detective's question, he snapped, “No, I didn't kill anybody.”

The smile that flashed across Malloy's lips was entirely superficial and empty. “That's very reassuring to know, Mr. Harrison, but that wasn't going to be my question.”

“Oh.” Harrison looked somewhat taken aback. “Well, what was it, then?” the nursery owner asked, trying not to look flustered.

To get out of the medical examiner's way—and possibly on her good side—Malloy began to inch his way up the incline, leading the nursery owner back toward the uninviting trailer. “How did you come to be the owner of this property?”

Following the detective, Harrison looked at him as if he were simpleminded. “The usual way. I bought the damn thing.”

“From?” Malloy asked, attempting to coax more information out of him.

Harrison's expression grew even more condescending as he looked at the man asking him these questions. “The person selling it.”

Malloy blew out a breath, trying not to let his temper get the better of him. This wasn't anything new. He'd dealt with idiots before. “I need a name, Mr. Harrison. Who sold you the property?”

Harrison stopped walking. “My lawyer handled it. He dealt with some long-time employee who worked here. The guy was acting on behalf of the owner.”

The man was definitely a challenge to his patience, Malloy thought. “I still need a name, Mr. Harrison.”

“I don't have a name,” Harrison snapped irritably. “I already told you. My lawyer handled all that. He does all my transactions.”

“All right, then I'll need
his
name,” Malloy said, the calm timbre of his voice belying the way he really felt about this verbal square dance.

Part of him would have felt a certain amount of satisfaction if he could have discovered that Harrison was behind these murders. He made a mental note to investigate the man's background and his general whereabouts twenty years ago—although he would have been very young at the time.

“Fine,” Harrison bit off. “I've got his card in that tin can of an office up there.” He waved his hand contemptuously toward the trailer.

“Lead the way,” Malloy said amicably, fairly certain that Harrison wasn't aware that he was being led up to that trailer already.

Harrison frowned at the former owner's living accommodations. “First thing in the morning, I'm having that piece of junk hauled off and getting a real RV set up in its place until I can have a building erected.” He aimed a penetrating glare at the detective next to him. “Unless that's against the law, too.”

Malloy counted to ten in his head before he addressed the owner's contemptuous statement. “None of it's against the law, Mr. Harrison. There are just procedures that have to be followed.”

“Procedures be damned,” Harrison snorted. “I'm losing money here.”