Cavanaugh or Death Read online

  The blond stranger was off and running after the duo in less time than it took for her words to form in her head.

  Dusting herself off, Moira stared after the stranger’s departing figure, no longer able to see the two he was chasing and trying to overtake. They’d had too much of a head start on him.

  It seemed as if everyone was in top physical form, she thought grudgingly. The next moment the chivalrous, silent stranger disappeared from her view.

  Moira sighed. Maybe all this was just a figment of her bored imagination, but somehow she strongly doubted it.

  At this point dawn was laying the finishing touches for its dramatic entrance, turning up the light around the edges of the visible world and then multiplying that light and spreading it around the surrounding area.

  Moira turned and looked at the entrance to the cemetery. It no longer appeared like the scene of countless ghost stories waiting to be told—or lived—just a place where people brought their loved ones so the latter could have a final resting place.

  Moira regarded the cemetery thoughtfully.

  Just what was the big deal in the cemetery at this hour of the morning, anyway? The duo that had run right over her certainly seemed as if they could belong to a cult, but that wasn’t true of the man who had helped her to her feet then taken off before she could thank him.

  Could he have been the night watchman or maybe the groundskeeper?

  Curious, Moira glanced at her watch. If she ran at her best top speed to her condo, she could make it in twelve minutes. That left her about five to investigate whatever had been going on in the cemetery—if there actually had been something going on.

  She regarded the grounds beyond the arched entrance.

  That was an awful lot of territory to cover in five minutes. Still, mysteries of any kind had always intrigued her. She couldn’t resist.

  Running in and moving fast, Moira managed to take in close to a quarter of the area. Scanning it, nothing caught her attention.

  Maybe the duo had been just kids dressed in black to blend into the night as they explored the cemetery. Maybe they were doing it on a dare.

  A lot of stupid things were done in the name of a dare.

  If the blond stranger was a security guard—or a groundskeeper—then he’d been chasing them off.

  She turned to leave the cemetery when something caught her eye. Aware of the seconds ticking by, Moira still felt compelled to investigate. It was in her DNA, not just because she was a Cavanaugh, but because she was part of the police department’s understaffed robbery division.

  Moving closer, she realized what it was that had set off her alarm.

  One of the headstones in the vicinity looked as if it had been knocked over and then righted again—but not all that well. The stone was tilted.

  Stepping even closer, Moira read the writing on the headstone. “‘Emily Jenkins, beloved wife of Hal Jenkins.’” It also gave the year of her birth and her death. Whoever Emily Jenkins was, she had been buried a couple of months more than twenty years.

  Moira regarded the list of the headstone. Maybe it was just due to regular shifting of the earth. After all, this was California. Some areas moved more than others. If there had been regular minor tremors or just simple shifting, that could have made the headstone move and lean as if it had had one too many.

  Reaching out, Moira touched the headstone. She immediately saw that it was not only listing, it was downright loose. That took effort.

  Human effort.

  Could the people who had knocked her down been grave robbers?

  Grave robbers? Moira, this is Aurora. Nobody even touches a headstone if they can help it.

  Yet what other explanation could there be? This needed further examination—but not at this moment, Moira sternly reminded herself. She had someplace to be.

  Taking off from the cemetery to avoid being late to work, Moira made herself a promise to come back as soon as she could today to investigate the scene thoroughly.

  Emily Jenkins had been violated—or at least her grave had.

  What she needed to find out was why.

  * * *

  Moira made it back to her home in what amounted to a new record, at least for her. Her lungs were near bursting as she shed her clothes all the way to the shower, littering the floor with them.

  Jumping into the glass enclosure, she turned on the water before she had even securely locked the shower door. Five very swift minutes later she was toweling herself dry, leaving tiny pools of water to mark her path to her closet.

  She had no time for breakfast or the life-affirming coffee she usually swore by. Instead, dressed, Moira was back out on the pavement less than twelve minutes after she had first inserted her key into her condo’s front door.

  She hoped she could find something edible and at least vaguely nutritious in the vending machines at the station. She had her doubts.

  Pulling into the station’s rear parking lot, Moira could have sworn she saw someone who vaguely reminded her of the dark-blond stranger who had helped her to her feet.

  At least, he resembled the man from the rear, which was the only view she had at the moment. Tall, dark blond and broad shoulders, he could have been the stranger from the cemetery.

  Or, more likely, just another private citizen coming to the station to lodge a complaint or to respond to a call from one of the many police detectives inhabiting the building.

  Her curiosity still on high alert, Moira quickened her pace in an attempt to catch up with the blond stranger.

  He entered the building before she did. Moira stepped up her pace again.

  As she got into the building, she discovered that not only should she have quickened her pace, she should have increased it to a sprint. The stranger she was trying so hard to get a better look at was nowhere to be seen.

  “Must have caught an elevator,” she told herself under her breath.

  It was either that or accept the explanation that the stranger had vanished into thin air. She preferred the elevator.

  “You know, they say the mind’s the first to go for some police detectives. Of course, that’s assuming that they have a mind to lose, which, in your case, the jury is still out about.”

  Moira didn’t have to turn around to know who was talking to her. But she’d learned a long time ago that ignoring her brother and pretending he wasn’t there didn’t make him go away. If anything, it just made Malloy up his ante.

  With a sigh, she turned around to face him. “I see that someone woke up on the right side of the bed this morning.” The smile she forced to her lips looked deliberately phony by all accounts.

  The grin on the tall, handsome detective’s face was, according to more than half the female population, incredibly enticing.

  “Actually, little sister,” he told her with a wicked wink, “it was on the right side of the lovely Patricia Morgan, but why quibble over words?”

  “Why indeed?” Moira asked crisply, striding toward the elevator quickly.

  She knew there was no losing her brother, but for the sake of the game, she had to look as if she at least tried.

  “Hey, you okay?” Malloy asked, catching her by the shoulder to take a closer look at her face. “You look like someone rode you hard and put you away wet,” he observed seriously.

  Moira pulled away from him, although her expression never changed. “Ah, you’re as golden-tongued as always, big brother. I can see why all the ladies find you so terribly charming. You obviously have to beat them off with a stick.”

  “Seriously, Moira, you all right?” Malloy asked. “The back of your head is partially damp. Are you trying for some sort of a new style, or did they turn off your electricity while you were in the middle of blow-drying your hair?”

  This time Moira frowned. She hate
d when he started being too observant when it came to her. “You’re the detective, you tell me.”

  Malloy arched a bemused eyebrow. “Since when has anyone ever been able to tell you anything?” he called after her as Moira walked into the elevator.

  “I always listen to someone who makes sense,” she replied innocently, then added, “I guess that leaves you out, doesn’t it?” just as the elevator doors closed, taking her away from his view.

  Only when the doors were securely closed did Moira reach behind her head and touch the back of her hair—and frowned.

  Damn, she thought, annoyance nibbling away at her. Malloy was right. For some reason, in her hurry to get to the precinct on time, she had somehow neglected to dry the length of hair right in the middle.

  She briefly thought about going into the bathroom and making unorthodox use of the hand-dryer, but shrugged away the idea.

  With luck, no one would look in her direction until that section of her hair air-dried itself.

  Right now she had something more important on her mind, Moira reminded herself as she reached her floor. She wanted to tell her lieutenant about the suspicious scene she’d stumbled across at the cemetery.

  Much as she hated being restrained, she knew that she needed his blessings before she could begin to investigate.

  Chapter 2

  Before getting down to the business at hand, Moira paused in the break room long enough to get a cup of what passed for coffee in the precinct. It was universally agreed that the quality was poor, but at least the coffee was hot. In addition, it was also extremely bitter. The combination definitely revved up her engine and put her in a fast-forward mode.

  Fortified and sufficiently jolted into a keenly alert state, Moira placed what was left of the black swill on her desk and marched herself into her superior’s small, glass-enclosed office.

  Legend had it that Lieutenant Jacob Carver had once been a passably decent-looking man. Years on the force had etched themselves into his jowl-lined face, giving him what appeared to be a permanent hangdog frown, accented by scowling, bushy eyebrows that came close to meeting over the bridge of his patrician nose; all of which looked more than mildly intimidating to most newly minted detectives assigned to his squad.

  Although Moira didn’t welcome interaction with the less-than-jovial man, she wasn’t intimidated by him, either. Growing up in a family of seven, most of which had excelled in rowdiness before they had reached the age of three, had given her a spine of steel and a sense of self that served Moira quite well in her chosen field. She was polite, and deferred to higher authority when she had to, but she was never intimidated.

  The door to Carver’s office was closed. He wasn’t—and never had been—an open-door kind of superior. If a subordinate wanted an audience with the man, they had to follow a number of rules—the first of which was knocking before entering. The second of which was to be invited in before entering.

  Moira paused to knock and then, not waiting for an invitation, she opened the lieutenant’s door. “Got a minute, Lieutenant?”

  “Got sixty of them in every hour,” he responded without looking up from the report he was currently writing.

  Since Carver hadn’t said no, Moira took that as an invitation by default and proceeded to enter the man’s inner sanctum.

  “I’d like to run something past you,” she told the man, closing the door behind her.

  Ordinarily she would have just left it open, but she knew that Carver was incredibly secretive about every conversation he had with anyone, especially any of his people. It didn’t matter about what. He liked maintaining an air of secrecy.

  Carver ignored her for a moment, undoubtedly with the hope that she would simply go away. But everyone in the precinct had come to realize that the name Cavanaugh was synonymous with stubbornness and, though it irritated him, he’d learned that the one assigned to his division was no exception.

  So when Moira remained inside the room, he sighed, put down his pen—a holdout of a bygone era, Carver still liked to use pen and paper rather than keyboard and mouse—and looked up.

  “And what is it that you want to run past me, Cavanaugh?” he asked wearily.

  Moira had long since decided not to take offense at the way Carver uttered her surname. There were Cavanaughs in every department of the precinct and, while most of the police personnel were on friendly terms with them, there were others who were not. The resentful ones believed that the Cavanaugh name instantly bought those who wore it a certain amount of leeway and gave them access to shortcuts that other officers and detectives were not privy to.

  Carver was on the fence when it came to buying into that philosophy.

  She could, however, detect the resentment in her lieutenant’s voice whenever he said her last name in a tone that sounded as if he was partially taunting her. Such as now.

  “When I was out for my run this morning—” Moira started.

  As she began to answer his question, Carver reached for a powdered-sugar-dusted cruller, one of two that he always picked up every morning on his way to the precinct. He paused for a moment, giving her a dark look as if she’d thrown the line in to mock him and the pear-like shape his body had taken on over the years.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot. You’re big on health, aren’t you?”

  The look in Carver’s brown eyes challenged her as he bit into his cruller with a vengeance. Powdered sugar rained down on the page he’d been writing on, but he seemed not to notice.

  “It wakes me up,” Moira replied matter-of-factly. She wasn’t about to get sucked into a debate about the pros and cons of what she did in her private life. “Anyway, as I passed by St. Joseph’s Cemetery entrance—”

  Carver stopped eating. “You run past the cemetery?” he asked incredulously. “Maybe you should transfer to Homicide if you like dead people so much.”

  Moira had no idea how the man managed to make the leap from what she was telling him by way of background information to what he’d just said, but again, she detected the antagonistic note in his voice and didn’t rise to the bait.

  “I like being on this squad just fine, sir,” she replied. “Anyway, these two figures—”

  “Figures?” he questioned skeptically. “You mean, like, zombies?” It was clear that he was mocking her and not about to take anything she said seriously unless she forced him to acknowledge it in that light.

  “No. Like, robbers, sir,” Moira corrected matter-of-factly, doing her best to get to her point and not be sidetracked by his interjections. “They were dressed in black and wearing ski masks. One of them ran right into me and just kept going—”

  Carver dusted off his hands and reached for the crumpled napkin in the bag that contained the crullers. “I’m guessing there’s a point to this ghost story, Detective.”

  “There is, sir. I went into the cemetery to find out why the two figures were fleeing—”

  He eyed her impatiently. “Let me guess, Dracula was after them.”

  She hadn’t wanted to mention this until she’d gotten Carver to agree to let her investigate the tampered-with gravesite. “No, as a matter of fact, there was some blond guy running after them—”

  “Ah, the plot thickens,” Carver mocked. “Does this ‘blond guy’ have a name?”

  “I’m sure he does, sir, but he ran by too fast for me to ask him,” she said, now impatiently trying to get to her point.

  “Too bad, this sounded like it might have gotten interesting.” Carver looked wistfully at the second cruller but apparently decided to wait until he was alone again before having it. “Is there a point to this haunting little tale, Cavanaugh?”

  “I went into the cemetery and saw that one of the headstones had been disturbed. I think—as strange as it might sound—that they were trying to rob a grave.”

  C
arver stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. Certainly she’d lost his interest, mild as it had been to begin with. “And you want to do what about that?”

  Moira squared her shoulders defensively a little bit as she said, “I’d like permission to investigate the site so I can see if they were trying to dig something up.”

  Carver’s frown deepened. To his way of thinking, he had likely indulged the detective way too long. It was obvious that he wanted her out of his office and out of his thinning hair. “In case it has escaped your attention, Cavanaugh, this is the robbery division.”

  “I know that, sir,” Moira answered evenly, painfully aware that shouting at the man would get her nowhere except reprimanded—if not suspended. “Grave robbing would fall under that heading.”

  “Grave robbing,” he repeated, clearly stunned.

  This wasn’t going well but Carver, despite all his foibles, was, at bottom, a decent detective, or had been before he’d assumed command of Robbery. That was the part of him she was attempting to reach.

  “Yes, sir.”

  His eyes narrowed as he pinned her in place. “Who complained?”

  Moira wasn’t sure what he was getting at. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Who complained?” he repeated evenly before spelling it out for her. “In order to go out and investigate this so-called ‘headstone disturbance’ we need to have someone file a complaint.”

  The lieutenant was crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s. He only did that when it served his purpose—or he didn’t want to okay something. She knew for a fact the man bent rules when he wanted to.

  Playing along, she said, “Okay, I’ll file.”

  Carver sighed dramatically. “Didn’t anyone in that family of yours teach you anything, Cavanaugh? You can’t be the one to file a complaint. In this case, as you’ve laid it out, you’re a jogger, not an interested party.”

  “But I’m very interested,” she persisted, picking up on the word he’d used. “What if there’s a cult of grave robbers out there?”