Cavanaugh Cold Case Page 13

  “The bodies have all been in the ground at least twenty years. You don’t think he’s stopped killing?”

  “There are a lot of reasons why he might have stopped for a period of time—for instance, he could have been in prison—or a mental hospital all this time. Or maybe he just went to another state to satisfy his bloodlust, and nobody’s made the connection. In either case, he’s been damn lucky and not gotten caught.”

  “So you do think he’s still alive?” she asked, trying to pin down his mind-set.

  “Let’s just say I don’t want to arbitrarily rule it out,” he told her. “And if he’s out there, I want to catch him.”

  “You really think, if he is alive, that he’ll show up?”

  The possibility filled her with horror, and yet, Malloy was right. If there was the tiniest chance that the man was alive and brazen enough to watch the funeral play out, he had to be apprehended.

  “Tiny chance,” Malloy admitted. “But even if he doesn’t show up for one reason or another, maybe one of the mourners might be able to tell me something that’ll lead to our next identification.” He glanced at his watch. He still had a couple of things to do first. “I have to get going if I’m going to be leaving on time.”

  “What time’s the funeral?” she asked.

  “One o’clock,” he answered, wondering why she’d want to know.

  Kristin nodded. There had been a shooting early this morning, and she had promised Sean Cavanaugh that she’d perform the autopsy as soon as she could. She was going to have to get cracking herself if she was going to finish up before she left.

  “Come by and get me at twelve fifteen. We’ll go together.”

  To him, funerals were something to be avoided if at all possible. He didn’t want her to feel obligated to attend just because he was going. “There’s no need for you to go, too.”

  “Cavanaugh, I’m the one who decides what I need or don’t need. Now, are you going to pick me up, or do I go by myself?”

  She really was the most stubborn woman he had ever encountered, Malloy thought.

  “I haven’t told you where it’s being held,” he reminded her, curious as to what she’d say.

  Kristin shrugged indifferently. “I can find out,” she replied.

  For a second, he leaned against the exam table that was between them, studying her. “Okay, got another question for you. Why would you want to go?”

  “Out of respect for Mr. Sullivan’s loss and his grief. The man waited over twenty years to find out what happened to his daughter. The way I see it, he can use as much emotional support as he can get. I don’t know if he has a large family or not, but I got the impression of loneliness when we were at his house.”

  “Good enough for me,” Malloy said with a shrug. “Okay, I’ll pick you up at twelve fifteen,” he told her. “As long as you clear it with Uncle Sean. Don’t want him thinking you’ve run off to play hooky with me,” he said teasingly.

  “Hooky?” Kristin echoed. “What are we, in high school circa 1960?” She laughed. And then she became serious. “Would you actually expect your uncle, my boss, to say no to my attending the funeral?” she asked incredulously. “Chief Cavanaugh has to be positively the sweetest, most understanding man on the face of the earth. He’d be the first one to appreciate why I’m attending. He might be surprised that I’m attending it with you,” she qualified, “but he’d definitely understand why I’m attending.”

  “Okay then,” Malloy agreed. “Twelve fifteen.” He glanced at the body on the next table. Unlike what had been on all her exam tables recently, this body was still a unified whole. “I’ll leave you to your work.”

  With that, he left the morgue.

  * * *

  True to his word, Malloy returned to the morgue at twelve fifteen. He was dressed exactly the same as when he’d left her, one of the advantages of coming to work every day wearing a suit, he thought as he entered the building on the north side. Forgoing the elevator, he took the stairs and went down to the basement, where both the morgue and part of the crime scene investigation lab were located.

  For once, Malloy knocked on the door before entering despite the fact that it was open. “Sure you want to do this?” he asked her as he crossed the room.

  “Go to a funeral?” she asked. “No. Comfort that poor man? Yes. This funeral is all going to bring it home to him, you know. Just in case he doesn’t have a friendly face in the crowd, he’s going to need one.” She realized that he was grinning broadly. “You’re laughing at me, why?”

  “Medical examiner by day, comforting angel of mercy by night. Has a nice ring to it,” he told her. “And I’m not laughing at you, Doc,” he contradicted. “I’m laughing with you.”

  “Which might make sense if I were laughing—but I’m not,” she pointed out. Shedding her lab coat, she placed it on the back of the leather office chair that was by her desk.

  “Give it time,” he told her significantly. “It’ll make sense to you.”

  “If you say so.” Grabbing her purse, she closed her desk drawer. “Ready,” she announced.

  His eyes met hers. “Me, too.”

  As she left with him, Kristin couldn’t shake the feeling that they were no longer talking about attending the funeral.

  * * *

  Abby Sullivan’s funeral had a small turnout. Malloy deliberately remained in the background, doing his best not to call any attention to himself as he attended first the service at the church, then the ceremony at the gravesite.

  Besides himself and Kristin, only a handful of people attended. The way they gathered around Henry Sullivan made Malloy think that the people at the services were either the man’s friends or his family. No one at either location looked to be a contemporary of the deceased woman.

  Apparently, Malloy thought, the woman who had called him, alerting him to Zoe Roberts, hadn’t known about the service or had chosen not to attend.

  Henry Sullivan remained standing beside his daughter’s freshly dug grave after the others who had attended the service had left the area. It was around that time the man noticed Malloy as well as the young woman who had come with him. By the look on his lined face, he recognized them both. It was also obvious that he was surprised to see them.

  The moment they came closer, he asked in a voice that was both eager and weary, “Did you come with any news, Detective? Did you find out who killed my little girl?”

  “Not yet, sir,” Malloy replied. “We just came to pay our respects.”

  A tired smile passed fleetingly over his thin lips. “Thank you for that. I know you have to be very busy.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather have the name of her killer than any words of respect.” Taking hold of Malloy’s arm, he added urgently, “I need to know who did it. And I need to know—if I can’t kill him with my bare hands—that he’s made to pay for what he did.”

  The way Sullivan said it, Malloy could see the man actually acting as the killer’s executioner.

  “As I told you, I won’t rest until I find him, Professor Sullivan,” Malloy said in a quiet, firm voice.

  There were tears in the man’s eyes as he shook Malloy’s hand again. “Thank you for that.” Sullivan shifted his cloudy brown eyes to the young woman standing beside the detective. “Thank you both,” Abby’s father said, his voice breaking as he took Kristin’s hand and shook it, as well.

  Being here had vividly brought back her father’s funeral to her. There had been a lot more people attending, but the pervasive feeling of sorrow was the same. In total empathy with the man, Kristin struggled not to let her own tears flow.

  “There’s nothing to thank us for yet, Professor Sullivan,” she told him.

  “You brought my girl back to me. Not the way I would have liked,” he added sadly, then had
to pause for a moment to keep his voice from breaking. “But at least I know where she is now.”

  Nodding his head as if completing some private conversation in his mind, Henry Sullivan slowly walked away.

  Malloy took one last look around the cemetery to see if perhaps someone was attempting to keep out of sight while viewing the proceedings. As far as he could ascertain, there was no one.

  “I’d better get you back to the morgue before someone notices that your toe tag is missing, along with the rest of you,” he quipped.

  The words sounded frivolous to her and hit Kristin the wrong way. She shook her head. “Just when I think that there’s actual hope for you, you start acting like an idiot, and I’m left wondering how I could possibly have given you any points at all.”

  “I’m on the point system?” Malloy asked, amusement curving his mouth. “How many points do I have to get in order to win?”

  “There aren’t that many points in the whole world,” she informed him, doing her best to sound distant and resurrect the crumbling barriers that just refused to remain up between them. There was something about the way he looked at her that kept creating fissures in those walls no matter how hard she tried to keep them in place. “At least, not where you’re concerned.”

  He was doing it again, watching her as if he could see her thoughts. Kristin couldn’t get away from the feeling that she was waiting for a shoe to suddenly and irrevocably drop.

  Although they were standing in the cemetery, alone for all intents and purposes, he still leaned in and whispered, “I do love a challenge, Kristin.”

  Kristin, he’d called her Kristin. Not “Doc” the way he usually did. Kristin couldn’t help feeling that somehow, she’d just been put on notice.

  The question still remained, notice of what? He’d had a perfect opportunity to take advantage of her rather emotionally vulnerable state earlier at the morgue. She’d actually thought that he was going to kiss her—and he hadn’t. He’d been the gentleman she didn’t think he was. Now, had he done that for an honorable reason—or because he was carefully laying the groundwork to completely disarm her and then do exactly what she’d thought him capable of doing all along?

  A couple of weeks ago, she would have never even wavered in her thoughts, but now she felt torn, leaning first this way, then that. And all the while, she felt herself being drawn closer and closer to this man whose reputation to “love ’em and leave ’em” was well-known throughout the entire precinct.

  Drawing on all the bravado she could pull together, she looked at Malloy and asked, “How do you feel about losing?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered after what seemed like a moment’s reflection. “It’s never happened.”

  She straightened her shoulders, drawing herself up to her full height and trying to appear just a wee bit taller and more formidable than she actually was. “Well, then, Detective Cavanaugh, brace yourself for a brand-new experience.”

  Damn, but she felt as if his eyes were totally undressing her as Malloy replied in a quiet voice, “I’m counting on it.”

  Kristin decided that it was wiser if she just said nothing further, not until she managed to sufficiently rearm her defenses against this silver-tongued devil in a suit.

  Chapter 13

  As soon as he got back to his desk, Malloy began searching for Zoe Roberts’s next of kin. It took some extensive digging, but because he’d managed to pick up a few computer tricks from Valri, he was finally able to learn that his second identified victim was a product of the social services system.

  According to what he uncovered, there had never been a father in the picture, and her mother had died of some unspecified disease when Zoe was eleven. With no other identifiable relatives to be found, Zoe Roberts was turned over to social services.

  Once absorbed into the system, she went from one foster home to another—he counted eight in total—until she finally aged out at eighteen. Throughout those turbulent seven years, she had somehow managed to keep her grades up and had, apparently through sheer determination, earned a full scholarship to UCA.

  Malloy closed the file and rocked back in his chair for a couple of moments. He stared at the blank screen, thinking.

  It just didn’t seem fair to him.

  “All that potential, just to wind up in an unmarked grave for the past twenty years,” he said to himself. “Who the hell did this to you, Zoe?”

  “So now you’re talking to yourself, Detective?”

  Malloy didn’t have to turn around to know who belonged to the melodic voice coming from behind him. He did, anyway.

  “What are you doing in my part of the building, Doc?” he asked.

  An odd restlessness as well as an unrelenting curiosity had brought Kristin here to the cold case squad room. She wasn’t the type to remain idle, especially when there was something to do.

  “Well, I sent the autopsy report in to be transcribed, and until you give me another name to match up to the remaining nine skulls, or homicide sends me another body, I really don’t have anything to do. By the way—” she dropped the stack of flyers he’d left with her on his desk “—for what it’s worth, I separated the blondes from the rest.”

  But Malloy’s attention was focused on something she’d just said. “Nine skulls?”

  “Yes.” Why was he questioning that? He knew how many had been dug up as well as she did.

  “We started out with twelve and identified two. Wouldn’t that leave ten?” he asked.

  “It would—but you’re trying to identify women, and if you recall, one of those skulls turned out to belong to a man.”

  “Right. I guess I lost sight of that.” Rocking back in his chair, he scrutinized Kristin for a moment. He had a feeling there was more, but he didn’t want to come right out and ask, so he led up to the subject and let her fill in the blank. “You didn’t have to come all the way up here to bring me the flyers. I would have picked them up. All you had to do was give me a call.”

  “I didn’t come here to bring you the flyers,” she clarified. “I came to find out if you managed to locate Zoe’s next of kin.”

  “She didn’t have any.” Even as he said it, it sounded so pitiful to him. Having grown up in what was tantamount to a crowd scene, he couldn’t begin to imagine how lonely Zoe Roberts’s upbringing had to have been. “She was an orphan long before she attended UCA.”

  If there was no next of kin, that left only one person to notify about finding Zoe’s remains. “Have you called her friend yet? The one who initially gave you Zoe’s name?”

  “Oh, you’re talking about the UCA professor. They weren’t really friends,” he reminded her. “According to Rachel McNeil, they were more or less acquaintances because they attended the same classes, and no, I haven’t called her yet. Why?”

  Kristin had to admit that even though she wasn’t supposed to get caught up in this aspect of her work, the mystery was beginning to consume her. “Well, she’s definitely had some time to think since she called you, and I just thought that she might remember something more about either Abby or Zoe that could help solve the case.”

  He’d been thinking along the same lines, but he was curious to hear just what Kristin’s exact thoughts were. “Like what?”

  Kristin shrugged. These were all vague thoughts that had been slipping in and out of her head. “Like the names of mutual friends Abby and Zoe had at the time, or maybe the names of boyfriends if either of them had any—or just anything unusual that might have been going on at school at the time Abby and Zoe disappeared. Something has got to lead to a breakthrough,” she insisted.

  Malloy read between the lines. “Feeling a little claustrophobic in the morgue?” he guessed.

  For a split second, Kristin’s back went up. “I am not claustro—” And then she relented. “At least I wasn’t un
til this case came along.” With a sigh, she came totally clean. “I’d like to help move the case along, and there’s no more insight to be gotten from those bones that were dug up. I’ve matched and assembled them as best I can, gleaned approximate height and weight from all twelve remains, and like I said, I’ve gotten caught up in this.”

  She saw Malloy opening his mouth, and she second-guessed what he was about to say. “And before you say anything, yes, I ran it past the chief. He’s always encouraging the team to exercise independent thinking, so if this helps wrap up this case somewhere down the line, he’s fine with my coming along with you.”

  “And you have no problem being my sidekick?”

  “I’m not your sidekick,” she corrected with just a touch of indignation. “You’re Cold Case, I represent the medical examiner’s office as well as the crime scene investigation unit.”

  “Well, that’s a mouthful,” Malloy commented. “Just for the record, I have no problem with you coming along—as a sidekick or as a representative of whatever you just said. But just so we’re clear, this is my case and my field, so you follow my lead.”

  “Do you want me walking two steps behind you, too?” Kristin couldn’t help asking.

  “Only if we happen to be on the side of a steep mountain road,” he quipped. He rose to his feet. “You ready to go?”

  She hadn’t sat down since she’d entered the squad room, looking for him. “Absolutely.”

  He grinned at the sound of that. “I’ll remind you of that later,” he said.

  His comment made her wonder at first, and then she decided that she was better off not knowing exactly what the detective had meant by that.

  * * *

  Having transferred her number from the phone on his desk to his cell, Malloy called Rachel McNeil from the road. He told her that he had some information for her and that he wanted to meet with her at the earliest opportunity.

  “I just taught my last class for the day and was about to go home,” the English professor told him. “Is this about Zoe?”