Cavanaugh in the Rough Read online

  Consequently, interviewing the handful of people who had been identified on the two somewhat brief, grainy cell phone videos that had been taken of the partygoers proved to be every bit as fruitless as Suzie had predicted.

  It wasn’t that Chris minded her being right. He was just disappointed that it had to be about something as vital as this.

  To make matters worse, each of the people they eventually interviewed had been difficult to track down. And once this handful of possible witnesses were cornered one by one, they proved to be unwilling to even admit that they had attended the so-called secret bash. When they did, reluctantly, own up to having been there “briefly,” not one would admit that they saw Bethany Miller there.

  “Take a closer look,” Chris urged a stockbroker named Jonah Hayes. Hayes definitely did not appear happy to have two members of the Aurora Police Department in his office, questioning him.

  If Hayes actually looked at the photograph placed on his desk, his glance had to have been quicker than the speed of light, Suzie judged.

  “No,” he insisted, turning his head away. “I said no, I’ve never seen this woman.”

  Suzie moved the photograph so that it was in his line of vision again. “Picture her alive,” she prompted in a steely voice. “With color in her face.”

  “No,” the broker said adamantly. “I don’t know her.” Hayes squared his rather sloping shoulders. “Now please leave or I’ll be forced to call Security.” To underscore his threat, he reached for the phone on his desk.

  Unfazed, Chris asked him, “Does your boss know that you like to attend floating bashes in abandoned buildings?”

  Hayes left the phone receiver where it was. Even so, he gave it one more try. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I think you do,” Chris told him. “We have you on video. Your boss might enjoy seeing it.”

  He instantly went on the defensive. “What’s on it?” the broker asked, looking rather spooked about the existence of a video.

  “What are you afraid is on it?” Suzie asked, boxing him in. “Maybe you were doing something you shouldn’t have been?” she suggested.

  Seeing that Hayes was rattled, Chris was quick to press their advantage. “You do realize that you were trespassing,” he assumed. “That means you were there illegally.”

  Hayes really seemed nervous now. “Nobody said anything about illegal,” he cried. “Besides, the people who were running this bash, they were all big shots. Men who are on the boards of at least a dozen charitable organizations. Men who don’t worry about minor rules being bent.” Hayes was throwing up reasons like hurdles in an Olympic race.

  “Minor rules,” Chris echoed. “You mean like murder?” he asked, bending over the man’s chair, talking into his face.

  Obviously frightened, Hayes cowered. “Nobody was murdered,” he cried.

  “Then how do you explain her?” Suzie asked, pushing the photograph back in front of him.

  “I don’t,” Hayes answered helplessly. “Look, you’ve got to believe me.” He was pleading now. “I never saw her.”

  “Why do we have to believe you?” Chris demanded.

  Hayes was coming apart. “Because it’s true! Look, a lot of other people were there besides me. Why don’t you talk to some of them? Maybe they saw her—but I didn’t. I swear I didn’t!”

  “All right,” Chris said, playing along, “give us some names. Who else was at this thing?”

  Hayes abruptly stopped talking. Several seconds passed as he looked from the detective to the crime scene investigator, not volunteering anyone’s name.

  “I see you’re having a lapse of memory,” Chris observed. “Maybe a trip to the station and a few hours in a holding cell might jar that for you,” he told the broker gamely.

  Panic entered the stockbroker’s dark eyes. “All right, all right, I’ll give you names. But you can’t tell them I told you.”

  Chris gave him a boy scout salute. “Your secret’s safe with us,” he promised.

  “But if any of these people say they remember seeing you with this woman, we’re coming back for you,” Suzie told the broker.

  Hayes rattled off the names, swearing again that he had never seen Bethany Miller, alive or dead.

  *

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m bushed,” Chris said to Suzie some ten hours later. The time had been filled with more spinning wheels, and they had gotten no further than where they’d been when they began. “I never saw so many people with such short-term memories in my life,” he complained.

  Suzie had grown even quieter than usual in the last hour. She’d been working on a theory. “There is another explanation.”

  Chris had all but collapsed in the driver’s seat. Starting the car took effort. He felt as if his limbs were filled with lead. “What, they’re all in collusion?”

  “No,” she replied. “Our victim was never at the bash in the first place.” Chris looked at her sharply. Suzie continued. “Just because Bethany was found on the premises doesn’t mean that she was there while the party was in progress.”

  Chris began to speak, but Suzie held her hand up, as if to physically hold back his words. “We’ve already established that she was killed elsewhere. Maybe Bethany started out ‘elsewhere’ and never got a chance to actually attend this bash.”

  She could see that O’Bannon was skeptical, so she pressed on. “Think about it,” she urged. “Yes, Bethany looks like a lot of other beautiful blondes in California—it’s practically a prerequisite in order to live here,” she cracked, aware that she was a blonde herself. “But you have to admit that even among beautiful blondes, she was still pretty outstanding. One of those people we talked to today would have had to remember seeing her—if she’d been there to be seen.”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” Chris said, rolling the idea over in his mind. “But then, if she hadn’t been there to begin with, why leave her at the site of the bash?”

  Suzie didn’t have an answer for that—yet. “Hey, I came up with most of the explanation. You can come up with that part.”

  “Oh, yeah, the easy part,” Chris acknowledged with a touch of sarcasm.

  She shrugged innocently. “Can’t do all your work for you, O’Bannon.”

  *

  When they got back to the precinct, Chris looked down at the list of attendees on his desk. It was comprised of the people Valri and Brenda had wound up identifying on the videos, plus the names they had gotten from Hayes. The people they had talked to today had either given them the same names, or had been, in their words, “too wasted to notice anybody.”

  They’d gotten only halfway through it, and right now, the list looked daunting.

  “What do you say to calling it a night and going through the rest of this—” Chris nodded toward the sheet “—first thing tomorrow?”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Suzie agreed. For once she was too tired to argue with him.

  Chris was already up on his feet. “C’mon, I’ll walk you out.”

  Even tired, she still balked. “This is a police building. I don’t need an escort.”

  Why did everything turn into an argument with this woman? Did she even know how not to argue? he wondered. “Maybe I do,” he replied.

  She sighed. “C’mon.” She beckoned for him to follow her as she headed for the door. “Does your family know how weird you are?”

  “They have their suspicions,” he told her with a smile.

  Crossing the threshold into the hall, she murmured, “Remind me to send your mother flowers.”

  “She’d like that,” he said cheerfully.

  Suzie just shook her head.

  *

  The next day proved to be just as unproductive as the first.

  On the third day, they reached the end of the list, with no breakthroughs, major or otherwise.

  “Got an idea,” Chris announced.

  “Are you asking me or telling me?” Suzie retorted.

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nbsp; “Telling you, but if you’ve got one, I’m open to it,” he said.

  “I’ve got nothing,” she admitted rather ruefully, far from happy to be coming up empty.

  “Let’s try something else, then,” he suggested. “Let’s revisit those nine murder victims with similar MOs that we uncovered the other day.”

  “Revisit how, specifically?” she asked.

  “We’ll talk to the investigating detective assigned to each case,” he said, for the time being unable to think of any other course of action to take. “See how many similarities we can come up with. Unless you’ve got a better idea,” he qualified.

  She wondered if he was as generous as he came across, or if there was some other reason behind his being seemingly open to anything she had to contribute. Was he just trying to get her off guard? And if so, why? Was the man up to something?

  “No, that seems like a very good idea to me,” she told him.

  *

  Some of the detectives they wound up talking to were grateful for any new input they might have on their case, and were intrigued that the working theory now was that the murders might be the work of a serial killer.

  Other detectives blatantly resented the intrusion from a different police department.

  Still others had declared the investigation they’d once handled to be a cold case. Which meant they had just walked away from the murder as if it had never happened.

  For the most part, dishearteningly, Chris and Suzie found dead ends. But in a few instances there were glaring similarities beyond the dead women’s once breathtaking looks.

  “You know, now that you mention it, there was talk about this ‘unofficial’ bash taking place the night of the murder,” Detective Jack Webster, an old-timer a hairbreadth away from retirement, told them when they asked him about a cold case he had handled. “I remember a couple of people I interviewed bragging that more than a thousand people attended the bash and that it went on for over two days.”

  “Where?” Chris asked. “Do you remember where they said it took place?”

  The sloped shoulders rose and fell beneath a checkered sport coat. “Only place that could hold that many people would be the Eldridge Center.”

  “Come again?” Chris asked, then reminded the detective, “We’re not from around here.”

  “It’s a performance venue,” Webster explained. “Around the time that this girl’s body was found, there were rumors that the center, which was being renovated at the time... Ownership had just changed hands,” he added as a sidebar. “Anyway, there were rumors that there was some big bash being held there. We only found out about it after the fact. Couldn’t find all that many people who would actually admit to being there. It was like this big, inside secret. You know, like a frat party—except that the men there were a lot older than your average frat boy,” he told them with a sigh. It was obvious that the case had frustrated him in its time.

  “The girl—did her family come forward to claim her?” Suzie asked.

  “Another sad story,” Webster admitted. “The victim had no ID on her. Her fingerprints weren’t on file in the system and DNA testing was in its infancy, so the whole thing just died there.”

  “You think that maybe you could run a test now?” Chris suggested.

  Webster shook his head, his expression rueful. “I’m afraid that money’s kind of tight around here.”

  “We could do it,” Suzie volunteered, surprising her partner. “We’ll take chain of custody of the evidence—anything you had by way of her DNA—and do the test in our lab in Aurora.”

  “That’s kind of unorthodox,” Chris began, attempting to talk her out of her offer.

  But Suzie wasn’t going to be dissuaded. “If there’s a problem, I can pay for it out of my own pocket,” she told Chris.

  That was good enough for Webster, who they could see was anticipating another closed case being added to his final tally. It would be viewed as a nice send-off.

  “Sure, I’ll have Evidence sign it over to you,” the detective told them.

  *

  “Why is this case so important to you?” Chris asked her when they were finally back in his vehicle and returning from Oakridge to Aurora.

  “Someone could still be waiting for that girl to walk through the door,” Suzie told him, adding with feeling, “They deserve answers.”

  There was more to it than that and they both knew it, Chris thought. For a moment, he debated letting it go, just as he had a number of times before. But he found that he couldn’t.

  “Suzie, what happened to you?” he asked her. There was sympathy as well as curiosity in his voice.

  Walls instantly went up. “What do you mean?” she asked stiffly.

  He called it the way he saw it, without sugarcoating it. “You’re almost obsessed with finding the killer—over and above the usual zeal for solving a case. Is this personal for you?”

  There was anger in her eyes when she looked at him. “Young women are being slaughtered by a monster. He could be eyeing his next victim right now. It should be personal to everyone.”

  She wasn’t going to tell him. There was no point in agitating her any further. She didn’t trust him enough, he decided.

  “Uncle,” he cried.

  Suzie stared at him, confused. “What?”

  “I give up,” he explained. “You know, ‘uncle.’”

  Suzie sighed. She wasn’t into word games. They weren’t part of her makeup or background. “Why don’t you just say that I’m right instead of resorting to code words?”

  The only way he was going to get anywhere with her was by saying “You’re right.” And then he paused. In her zeal, a very pertinent point seemed to have escaped Suzie. “You also know that in order for the lab to get anywhere with making an ID using the girl’s DNA, they’re going have to have something to compare that DNA to, right?”

  He was talking down to her again, she thought. “I know that. I’m not an idiot, O’Bannon.”

  “Never crossed my mind,” he told her. “So what’s the plan?”

  She knew what he was asking her. The answer was simple. The execution was not. “We pull up any missing person’s reports that were filed nine years ago.”

  He could just see someone in Accounting getting ready to do battle with the petite firebrand in the passenger seat. “This might turn out to be pricey.”

  She shrugged. “I have a bank account and nothing to spend it on.”

  She had to be kidding, he thought. One look at her face told him she wasn’t. “I could come up with some suggestions,” he told her.

  “I’m sure you could,” she replied, “but I’m not interested in them.”

  “Cold, Suzie Q,” he pronounced. “Cold.”

  “Drive faster,” she instructed. They were on the open road and he was going just under the speed limit. “We need to get back to the precinct so I can get started finding those missing person’s reports.”

  “Not to throw cold water on your plans,” he said, knowing he was doing just that, “but there might not be one for the victim.”

  She recalled that her father had made a point of eliminating young women who had no families to look for them or mourn for them. It was one of the “perks” of being a volunteer at the homeless shelter. Suzie was well aware that the murder victim might not have had anyone file a missing person’s report on her, but nevertheless, she could still hope.

  “Right now, I’d rather you didn’t rain on my parade, O’Bannon.”

  He grinned at her. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Chris said.

  *

  “By the way,” he began, after they’d driven in silence for a good twenty minutes or so, “the family’s having a get-together this Saturday.”

  That was out of left field, she thought. “What family?”

  “My family.”

  “Oh.” She supposed it made sense, his talking about his family. “Okay. Have fun.”

  “That’s not the point.”

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p; That didn’t make any sense to her. “Then why get together?”

  “No, I mean that’s not the point of why I’m telling you this.” Before she could ask what was, he said, “You’re invited.”

  That gave her pause for a moment and then she said, “Thank you.”

  Her response sounded oddly stilted to his ear, so he asked, “Then you’ll come?”

  She couldn’t very well say she was coming when she knew she wasn’t. She’d had more than her fill of lies in her lifetime.

  “No.”

  “Then what are you thanking me for?”

  “The invitation,” she told him. “It’s always nice to be invited to something.”

  If that was her reasoning, then why wouldn’t she come? “But not to go?”

  She shrugged. “Why spoil things?”

  He was completely and utterly lost—and not embarrassed to tell her so. “I have no idea what goes through that mind of yours, but I think a family get-together might really do you some good.”

  How could he even think that? “Your family, not mine, remember?”

  He was open to things, as he knew his uncle Andrew was. The man thrived on hospitality. “Then bring your family.”

  “I don’t have a family.”

  Even saying the words hurt. She saw an expression she took to be pity entering the detective’s eyes. Her back went up immediately.

  “I mean, I have a brother,” she amended, “but he’s on the East Coast.” Not that they were close anymore, she thought. That had gone out the window when the scandal surrounding their father had broken. She kept holding out hope that there was some mistake. Her brother had turned on their father the moment the local police came to arrest him.

  “All the more reason to come this Saturday,” Chris urged. “I promise you won’t regret it,” he told her warmly.

  “We’ll see,” she said, thinking that should get him to stop. It was the politest way she knew to put Chris off.

  “Okay, we will,” he agreed, sparing her a glance before he turned back to watching the open road. It sounded more like a promise than a throwaway phrase.