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  “Wonder if this is going to turn out to be a wild-goose chase,” Duncan speculated, whispering to his partner.

  “Well, at least we’ve got a wild goose to chase. That’s more than we had a few minutes ago,” she pointed out.

  He glanced at her, a grin she couldn’t begin to interpret on his lips. “O’Banyon, you surprise me. Under all that darkness, you really are an optimist, aren’t you?”

  “I just like keeping my options open, that’s all,” she told him.

  Anything he might have to say to counter or comment on that had to wait. Johnson reappeared in the doorway and brightly announced, “Okay, got my shoes on. All set. Let’s go.”

  “You heard the man,” Noelle said to her partner. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 11

  “You’re just going to draw her head?” Jonas Johnson asked incredulously more than an hour later as the sketch artist turned the monitor toward him, displaying a completed version of the woman Johnson had described as the one who had talked his neighbor into buying a life insurance policy. All the specific nuances that the fussy old man had recalled had been taken into account.

  However, it was apparent that Johnson felt her most important feature was being ignored.

  “Yes,” Alan Kwan replied. Chosen for this particular position not just because of his ability to conceptualize random features and descriptions, turning them into realistic renditions of a whole, but for his inordinate patience, as well, Alan looked at the man who had become a definite challenge to the latter quality. “What’s wrong? Doesn’t it look like her?”

  “Well, yeah,” Johnson allowed, shrugging his sloping shoulders haplessly, “but you’re not showing her best features. Trust me, if you expect people to recognize her, you should at least draw some more of her.”

  “More?” Noelle asked, coming over to check on the progress that had been made. She glimpsed the exasperated look on Alan’s face before he looked her way. She felt for the man.

  Johnson, sitting in the chair beside Alan’s desk, turned now to face her.

  “Well, yeah,” he answered as if any fool could see what he was talking about. “The woman had a chest that could make you just fall to your knees because they got so weak. Well, maybe not you,” he amended.

  “Thank you for that,” she murmured under her breath. “Sketches are usually of just the person’s head,” she told Teasdale’s neighbor.

  Johnson shook his head adamantly. “But if you’re gonna show that around, I guarantee that the guys who’ll remember her ain’t gonna remember her face, not without that—other part of her in the sketch.” He chose his words more carefully because he was talking to a woman.

  “Thanks. We’ll keep that in mind,” Noelle told him. She’d overheard what Johnson had said to the sketch artist and there was no way she was going to pass around a sketch of a woman with a pronounced glandular problem. Someone had to recognize her face. “Alan, would you mind getting one of the uniforms to bring Mr. Johnson back to his apartment again?”

  Alan seemed more than ready to have the whiny old man taken off his hands. “You got it,” he agreed, a genuine, wide smile on his face.

  “I don’t have to go right away,” Johnson protested. “I thought I could hang around here for a while, until you brought that woman in. You know, do a personal ID, that kind of stuff.”

  “I’m afraid that that sort of thing might take a while, Mr. Johnson. I have your number. We can give you a call if we need you,” she assured him, then turned toward the sketch artist. “Alan, that ride...?” She let her voice trail off, thinking that the hopeful note in it was enough to tip the man off that he wasn’t the only one who really wanted Johnson taken home ASAP.

  “Right.” Alan tucked his arm through Johnson’s, gently but firmly urging the man to his feet. “C’mon, Mr. Johnson, let’s see if we can get you home.”

  Johnson’s head all but did a one-eighty as he tried to keep her in view. “You sure?” he asked, the sorrowful look on his face making him appear every bit like a lost puppy hoping to be adopted.

  “We’re sure, Mr. Johnson,” Noelle replied firmly.

  A huge sigh filled the squad room as Johnson reluctantly allowed himself to be led away.

  “You have a groupie?” Duncan asked, coming over to the sketch artist’s area to find out what was keeping her. He’d been just in time to catch the end of the exchange between Johnson and his partner.

  She watched as Alan, holding firmly on to Johnson, disappeared outside the hallway. “What I have,” she told Duncan as she turned around to face him, “is a pain in the neck.”

  He glanced toward the sketch on the monitor before giving his attention to Noelle. “There are remedies for that,” he teased, his mouth curving just the slightest bit.

  Noelle deliberately avoided his eyes, looking at the sketch instead. “Thanks, but I’ll tough it out,” she said.

  Somehow, to her irritation, her partner seemed to fill the entire area around her, despite the fact that there were other people in the squad room with at least half a dozen conversations going back and forth at any given time.

  “Nothing wrong with being soft once in a while,” Duncan commented easily, his voice annoyingly low and, if she didn’t know any better, sensual.

  “Sure there is,” she said with conviction. “If you’re ‘soft,’ you get stepped on and trampled all the time.”

  He was not about to get sucked into an argument about that. Instead, he pointed out what he felt was the obvious. “That was before you had me watching your back.

  She looked at him for a long-drawn-out moment. “It’s usually the person closest to you who is in the best position to do the trampling.” Okay, enough, time to get back to business, she told herself. Noelle gestured toward the monitor. “Let’s get copies of this passed around. Maybe we’ll get lucky and somebody’ll recognize this woman.”

  Noelle frowned without realizing it as she examined the sketch. Maybe it was her imagination, but just for a moment, the woman looked vaguely familiar. She was sure that a lot of people would probably think the same thing. The woman had that sort of a face.

  Even if someone did recognize the woman, it could just lead them to another dead end. This was a long shot at best, but at the moment, they didn’t have anything else.

  Duncan took a closer look at the sketch on the monitor. “Nothing very remarkable about her to set her apart,” he commented, then predicted, “this is going to be an uphill battle.” He saw his partner’s lips curve a little. “What?”

  “I’m told she has a remarkable set of...breathing apparatuses,” she replied.

  Duncan laughed. The sound seemed to ripple right through her. “Might make an interesting footnote to work into the description,” he mused.

  Something he said triggered a thought. Rather than share it with him, Noelle turned on her heel and hurried back to her desk without a word.

  Seeing her dash off like that aroused his curiosity and he followed her back to their desks. “Hey, was it something I said?”

  The question was without a trace of humor in it, but with Duncan, she was beginning to realize it was hard to tell when he was being serious and when he was kidding. She decided to treat it as if it was the former.

  Which was why she surprised him by looking over her shoulder and saying, “Yes.”

  Although he had no idea what he might have said to suddenly get the wheels in her head turning and have her all but fly across the squad room to her desk—more specifically, to her computer—he did smile to himself as a feeling of satisfaction took hold. Whatever else was going on around them and between them, he and O’Banyon were beginning to gel as a team. The kind that eventually finished each other’s sentences as well as each other’s thoughts.

  The kind, he added silently, who solved crimes.

>   The only other time he’d encountered that sort of thing—from the outside—was between two people in a relationship. The kind that eventually heated up and either burned the people involved—or warmed them. He had an itch to find out which they would wind up being.

  But that would be after this case was over, not now, he told himself.

  The problem was, he really wasn’t listening to his own words of so-called wisdom.

  “What is it that’s going through your head?” he asked when he reached his desk. For the time being, he remained standing, just in case she wanted him looking over her shoulder—literally—at something.

  “Obituaries,” she said without looking up.

  Okay, he’d bite. “Why obituaries? You’re kind of young to be obsessing about the obituary page, don’t you think?” he asked.

  “Not obsessed,” she said, sparing him a glance to help underscore the difference, “just homing in.”

  He wasn’t about to drop the subject until she gave him an answer he could work with. “On?”

  Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she pulled up issues of the largest local paper in the county. This was her starting point, she decided. There was always time to expand to other newspapers.

  Duncan and his questions were almost a distraction right now. “On how many people, say fifty and older, were not survived by any loved ones.”

  Since she had obviously connected the dots, he put the question to her rather than trying to puzzle it out for himself. He saw no advantage to coming to his own conclusion instead of just using hers. Most likely, it would be the same. “Just where are you going with this, O’Banyon?”

  “Just a hunch,” she told him, typing. “More like a thought, really.” She scrolled down a screen that appeared, and then another. “Or—”

  “O’Banyon, stop looking for adjectives and just spit it out.”

  She stopped typing. “What if this is the tip of the iceberg?”

  “What kind of iceberg?” he asked.

  There were so many ways this could be bad for the victims involved, she wasn’t sure just where to begin.

  “A deadly scam,” she finally said. “What if someone’s getting older people to buy life insurance polices, paying them to take out the policies on themselves, plus putting up the money for the premiums—”

  So far, he thought, she was just rephrasing what Johnson had told them about Teasdale. Before he could say so, she added what had her worried.

  “—and then, when enough time has passed, they terminate the old person in order to collect on their policies sooner than later. Think about it,” she said, growing excited as the idea took on form for her. “If these people have no next of kin, or anyone they’re close to, who’s to get suspicious if they suddenly pass away? Old people die, it’s just the way things are, just like you said,” she concluded matter-of-factly. “So nobody looks into it.”

  “You’re thinking of Lucy’s friends, aren’t you? Sally and Henry,” he supplied.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to check it out,” Noelle said.

  “It never hurts to check things out,” he agreed, “but didn’t you say that Lucy told you the money went to some foundation or charity?”

  “Yes, but how do we know these organizations are legitimate? Doesn’t take much to set up shop and declare yourself a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting fireflies from extinction by natural predators.”

  Hell of a mouthful, he thought.

  Hell of a mouth.

  The thought came out of nowhere, both surprising him and maybe unsettling him slightly, as well. He liked to be on top of things, initiate them, not find himself being dragged in by a stray thought or feeling. That sort of thing took control out of his hands. And he had always been about control. This woman, though, this petite, driven firecracker, by her sheer existence in his life, was changing all the rules on him. And damn, but he was letting it happen.

  That wasn’t like him.

  Duncan sought refuge in humor until he could sort things out a little.

  “Now that you mention it, there are no fireflies out here,” he deadpanned.

  She shot him an impatient glance. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I do,” he said with a laugh before growing serious again. “And you might have a point,” he agreed. “Or,” he felt obligated to mention, “this could all be just one giant coincidence and despite some popular beliefs to the contrary, sometimes coincidences actually do happen.”

  “But what if it’s not?” she challenged. “What if it’s not a coincidence? Maybe it started out innocent enough, but whoever’s behind this decided that the old people weren’t dying fast enough to supply them with the money they needed? What if there’s someone out there, or more than just one someone, capitalizing on the fact that most people are trusting and doing away with old people for their own gain?”

  Duncan sat down at his own desk and turned his attention to his computer, pulling up the obituary section of another county newspaper. “Then I guess we’d better get busy,” he murmured.

  * * *

  By the end of what was left that day, they had come up with six obituaries that filled the basic requirements Noelle had thought of. Six senior citizens in or around Aurora who had died in the past six months and whose obituaries omitted mentioning any surviving family members.

  She saw the frown on Duncan’s face. Was he just tired, or had he thought of something? Incredibly tired herself, rather than frame a question, Noelle merely asked him, “What?”

  Duncan raised his eyes to hers. “If there are no surviving family members and the deceased isn’t some person important to the company or community, then who’s the obituary for?” he asked.

  That hadn’t occurred to her. “Good question,” Noelle acknowledged, thinking. “Maybe it’s some sort of signal to let another person in on this scam know that they’re cashing in on another policy.”

  He nodded. That was one explanation. “Or maybe it’s just more proof to the insurance company that’s going to be paying out on this policy that the person died.”

  “There still has to be a death certificate produced in order to get the policy benefit,” she told him.

  “Yeah, but just think of the obituary as being the bow on a package.”

  Noelle let that go for now. She found the whole thing immensely disturbing, especially since the victims she was looking at were listed as being all around her grandmother’s age.

  “So how do you think they do it,” she asked him, “these people who are getting these senior citizens to buy policies?”

  “They bribe them, like Johnson said that woman bribed Teasdale into getting a policy.”

  She wasn’t talking about the mechanics, she was referring to the actual murders. “No, I mean how do you think these people are eliminating the victims? With poison, or—?”

  “Hell, there are lots of way to kill someone,” he said. As a Cavanaugh, with as many members of his family on the police force as there were, he’d heard scores of unusual, disturbing stories. “Accidents happen all the time. Heart attacks can be simulated. A lot of times they say that a person died in his or her sleep from natural causes.” He looked at her. “Maybe those causes weren’t really so natural.”

  “We need an autopsy,” she concluded. An autopsy would give them proof if drugs were used to cause these people’s hearts to stop. “Speaking of which, when are we going to hear the result of Teasdale’s autopsy?”

  Duncan laughed shortly. He didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm, but she needed to be aware of the truth. “Not for a while, I’m guessing. Contrary to what they show you on all those crime shows on TV, it takes a while to get any kind of real results to the tests that have to be performed.”

  “Why?”

  “Most of the time, the m
edical examiner is backed up. He doesn’t just handle Aurora but the surrounding cities, as well. We have to wait our turn,” he told her, then added, “and I’ve got this feeling that the coroner is going to take his sweet time getting Teasdale’s body transported. And who knows how many bodies the M.E. has right now that are ahead of ours, so—”

  She stopped him before he could continue. “Can’t you do something about it?”

  The question caught him off guard. “I’m afraid I never got a do-it-yourself autopsy kit for Christmas as a kid, so no, much as I might want to, I can’t do something about it.”

  She frowned at Cavanaugh. The man knew perfectly well what she was referring to. She spelled it out for him. “I mean, can’t you use your influence? Like throw your weight around as a Cavanaugh to get them to speed things up, something like that?”

  If anything, he would have bet money that she was a straight arrow who always played by the rules as they were written. This was an intriguing side to her he hadn’t expected. “What?”

  “You did it with the coroner—” Noelle reminded him.

  “That was a one-time thing,” he explained, “and I did it mainly because I didn’t like the way the coroner was talking down to you. I wanted to put him in his place because he deserved it. However, around my house, it was always kind of an unspoken rule that we didn’t throw our weight around.”

  So he did have principles. Who knew? “Sorry, didn’t mean to cross any lines,” she apologized. Her frustration was getting the better of her, she realized. If she’d been thinking clearly, she wouldn’t have suggested that.

  This was more like her, he thought. Right now, he wasn’t altogether sure which Noelle he found more appealing, the straight arrow or the one who liked having the rules bent.

  “That’s okay... Of course,” he went on, thinking out loud, “there’s no law that I can’t talk to Uncle Sean—the head of the CSI day shift—” he tossed in, in case she wasn’t aware of that “—to maybe talk to the M.E. and see if things can’t be nudged along.” Even as he said it, he was picking up the phone on his desk.