Cavanaugh Cold Case Page 2

  Then again, he didn’t understand why anyone would pay more than the cover price of a so-called rare comic book, either.

  It took all kinds, Malloy told himself.

  Taking a turn down yet another obscure road whose sign he had almost missed, Malloy breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently, he was almost at journey’s end. There was a sign posted up ahead just before a newly installed chain-link fence.

  The sign proclaimed Rainbow Gardens. The sign looked new, as well.

  According to what he’d been told, the old nursery, which had gone by—to his way of thinking—the far more accurate name of Prickly Gardens, had been sold a little over a month ago. The present owner had come in with new ideas, the first of which had included expansion of the nursery so that even more plants could be properly showcased.

  Sorry, no expanding yet, Malloy thought. There’s the little matter of some bodies to clear up.

  Malloy pulled his car right up to the gate. The latter was closed.

  There was another sign, an older, weather-beaten one, which told whatever traveler approached it that visitors were admitted “By appointment only.” It went on to say that if the visitor did have an appointment, to “Please, honk.”

  There was what appeared to be a trailer standing some distance away, perched just above a row of several small greenhouses. Surrounding those greenhouses were a great many succulents and cacti planted in the ground and growing at a very prodigious rate.

  Malloy assumed that honking was for the benefit of whoever was inside the trailer.

  With his engine running as his car stood before the gate’s fence, Malloy paused to drain half the coffee in the container he’d brought. Only then did he do as the sign advised.

  He honked his car’s horn.

  When there was no immediate response, Malloy did it again, this time leaning on his horn until he saw movement from the trailer.

  A man wearing gray dress slacks and a crisp, long-sleeved, button-down blue shirt approached the gates. He appeared totally out of place in the rural-looking, overgrown nursery.

  He also looked extremely agitated.

  Unlocking the gate, the man greeted Malloy by announcing, “Finally!” as he pulled the gate back.

  Malloy drove down the slope and into the nursery, pulling his vehicle over to the first available parking area. The entire space was meant, he assumed, to accommodate several vehicles, but it looked barely wide enough to house three very compact cars. Planning was obviously not someone’s strong suit.

  Deliberately taking his time—he didn’t care for the man’s attitude—Malloy stepped out of his car almost in slow motion, his shoes carefully making contact with the sun-cracked dirt as if he could feel the heat through the bottom.

  Looking at the man who made no secret of sizing him up, Malloy said, “Excuse me?”

  “I said, ‘finally,’” the man bit off sharply. “Maybe now that you’re here, you can move this so-called ‘investigation’ to its conclusion.” It wasn’t a question but a strongly worded order. Angry, the man contemptuously indicated the four idle fellows standing in the distance. “That construction crew is being paid by the hour to stand around and watch that woman bend over.”

  Okay, maybe he’d had less than the minimum hours of sleep to be sufficiently operational, Malloy thought, but he had just had a really good jolt to his system, thanks to the coffee he’d imbibed a minute ago, and the scowling man in front of him still wasn’t making any sense.

  “You want to run that by me again?” Malloy requested. “Starting with your name.”

  “I’m Roy Harrison,” the guy grudgingly bit off. “And I just had my lawyer buy this property for me.”

  There was practically steam coming out of Harrison’s rather large ears. In his position, Malloy supposed he wouldn’t exactly be thrilled, either.

  “I take it congratulations are not in order,” he commented.

  “Damn straight they’re not,” Harrison snapped. “I paid for a cacti and succulent nursery, lock, stock and barrel. I didn’t pay for some freaking boneyard,” he bit off in complete disgust. “Can’t you and that dour-faced former cheerleader take these damn bones and do whatever it is you have to do with them somewhere else? I’ve got a nursery to get ready to open,” the man complained unnecessarily.

  “I’m afraid nothing’s happening on that end until all the evidence is bagged and tagged, and we can determine whether or not this was the actual scene of the crime—or if the victims were killed somewhere else.”

  Though he kept his expression deliberately neutral, Malloy had to admit that he rather enjoyed putting a pin in the man’s balloon. He’d never cared for people who were filled with their own sense of importance—especially if they felt that gave them a reason to throw their weight around.

  His answer did not sit well with the new nursery owner. Harrison’s scowl became almost fierce as he waved a hand angrily in Sean Cavanaugh’s general direction. The latter was standing in the distance, working alongside his team.

  “I overheard that old guy say that these bones have been in the ground for maybe two decades. What the hell difference can it make now where you look at them?” Harrison demanded. “They’re old.”

  “It makes a great deal of difference,” Malloy told the new owner, his voice deceptively calm. “And that ‘old guy’ you just referred to happens to be the head of the crime scene investigation lab—and my uncle,” he added crisply. “So maybe you could find it in your heart to show a little respect for the man and his considerable knowledge. Who knows?” Malloy added “pleasantly,” his obvious contempt for the owner beginning to show through. “You play your cards right and the chief actually might find a way to shorten the time.”

  Harrison already looked infuriated to find himself stymied in this manner, not to mention that he highly resented being rebuked by someone he obviously felt was beneath him.

  The next moment, Harrison took out his wallet, his implication clear as he tugged on a larger bill, having it peer over the top of his credit cards. “What can I do to make this go faster?”

  “Not bribing me would be a good start.” Malloy flashed a completely phony smile at the offensive nursery owner. “Hang tight, Harrison. I’m going to have some questions to ask you in a few minutes.” But before that happened, he needed to check in with the CSI team first. “Now, about that ‘former cheerleader’ you mentioned—”

  A barely veiled sneer curved Harrison’s thin lips. “Let me guess, another relative?”

  Malloy had just spotted the woman the new owner had to be referring to. She was the only female in the area, and, from what he could see at this distance, whoever she was, the slender blonde was nothing short of a breathtaking knockout.

  All memory of Bunny, the woman he’d spent his extremely energized weekend with, completely vanished.

  “Lord, I hope not,” Malloy commented under his breath. “I’ll get back to you,” he added without sparing the owner another look.

  “Who can I call to make this go away?” Harrison asked.

  “You don’t,” Malloy answered with finality, tossing the words over his shoulder.

  Putting the abrasive owner temporarily out of his thoughts, Malloy made his way toward what was the only center of activity within the area—if he didn’t count a neighbor’s rooster.

  The lone fowl was housed in an opened coop facing the northern perimeter.

  Flapping his wings and moving about in what could only be called an agitated manner, the rooster crowed intermittently despite the fact that the sun had long since been up and the current hour was quickly approaching noon.

  Obviously the rooster’s inner clock needed some adjusting, Malloy absently thought.

  For the moment, his attention was not on roosters, or the dead bodies. It was strictly and exclusively on the attrac
tive woman with the killer figure. Despite her appreciative male audience standing a few feet away, watching her every move, the woman appeared to be absorbed by the bones she and two of the CSI agents were digging up out of the ground and arranging on a long, extended roll of burlap.

  The annoying owner had been right, Malloy noted, scanning the immediate area. The construction crew Harrison had hired really were, for all intents and purposes, immobilized, no doubt ordered to remain that way by his uncle.

  But the crew definitely didn’t appear to be suffering any discomfort because of that edict.

  Instead, the idle four men looked to be quite entertained as they took in every nuance, every movement made by the young woman studying the various excavated bones.

  Malloy approached the young woman and placed himself between her and the sunlight that had, until that moment, been highlighting the collection of bones she had been assembling.

  “Hi, I’m Malloy,” he told her.

  The voice and sudden distracting shift of light caught her attention. After a couple beats, Kristin finally looked up.

  If the exceedingly handsome, exceptionally confident-looking man with the sexy grin momentarily threw her off her game, Kristin Alberghetti gave no indication of that reaction.

  Instead, her eyes met his, and she silently waited for him to explain why he was here blocking her light.

  The name he offered nudged at something in the back of her mind. After a moment, recognition set in.

  Malloy Cavanaugh. One of the Cavanaughs.

  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

  But 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.