Cavanaugh in the Rough Read online

  But she couldn’t tell Sean this.

  So she shrugged. “It’s part of the job.”

  Sean laughed as he walked away. “I’m going to ask Brian if there’s any money to be found in the budget so I can have you cloned.”

  Brian Cavanaugh was his brother and Aurora’s chief of detectives. As such he was far more into the budget end of the police department than Sean was.

  “Until then, I’ll just work faster,” Suzie promised, getting back to the report again.

  Sean stopped just short of the doorway. “Don’t you dare. There’s such a thing as working yourself to death and you’ll do none of us any good—least of all yourself—if you do that. I’m serious, Suzie,” he told her, his voice dropping an octave. “I want you to go home at least at a regular time if not earlier today.”

  Suzie made a noise in response that told him she had heard his voice, but hadn’t heard the words or the gist of what he was saying.

  This wasn’t over, Sean promised himself. And then he laughed under his breath. He knew a lot of managers who would love being in his place, love having an employee who never seemed to get enough of work and always seemed to be tirelessly on the job.

  But as a father, he just didn’t think that kind of behavior was healthy. If nothing else, Suzie was too tunnel-visioned. Suzie Quinn needed to have balance in her life. She was far too young to be strictly all about work, especially since she gave him the impression that she wasn’t doing it to get ahead. If he had to make a guess, he would have said she was doing it for the sake of justice.

  It made him wonder if Suzie was hiding from something. Or more to the point, if there was something she was running from.

  If things continued this way, Sean told himself as he walked into his office, he would have to do a little digging.

  *

  Suzie listened for the sound of a door closing. When she heard it, she released the breath she’d been holding and relaxed a little. She knew that her boss meant well when he tried to urge her to go home early, but he just didn’t understand. There was no reason for her to do so because there was no one and nothing waiting for her. No anticipated mail in her mailbox, no long-awaited email on her computer, no texts or messages of any sort from anyone she wanted to hear from.

  Suzie heard from her brother, Lane, only on the occasional holiday—and not always then. Her mother was no longer among the living, but her father still was. However, she had absolutely no desire to hear from the senior member of her now defunct family. So there was nothing and no one to fill her off-hours.

  Oh, a sense of curiosity mixed with desperation had made her actually give in and attempt to do something outside work, but that experiment, undertaken yesterday, had fallen rather flat, so there was no point in revisiting it.

  All it had accomplished was making her come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t cut out for anything beyond work. She just wished that everyone else would come to the same conclusion and allow her to get on with her life the way she saw fit.

  The immediate problem was that right now there was no case to occupy her mind or her skills, which was why, to fill the time, Suzie was doing the paperwork she had put off. It wasn’t that she was more conscientious than most of the people who worked in the crime lab. She just didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. At least not yet. Not until she learned how to herd them all into a cage and keep them there, away from the day-to-day fabric of her life.

  Aurora’s criminal element, such as it was, wasn’t cooperating. Although she would have been the first to admit that a crime-free city was a wonderful thing, Suzie couldn’t help hoping that something would come up by the time she put the last of the stack of paperwork to bed.

  More than anything, she really didn’t want to be left to her own devices.

  *

  It wasn’t all that long ago that Chris had been the exact same age as the boys he’d just cornered. What he couldn’t remember, though, was ever being as scared as they appeared to be.

  At the moment, he was having a difficult time getting either one to be coherent, even after they had recovered their breaths and voices. Now the problem seemed to be that they were both talking over one another. The end result was an annoying cacophony that left him as unenlightened as he had been when he’d first cornered them.

  Straining to follow both disjointed monologues, Chris finally gave up trying to make heads or tails out of the dissonance. He drew in a breath, whistled long and loud, until both teenagers finally stopped talking at the speed of a runaway freight train.

  Stunned, they stared at the man who had pulled them over.

  “Don’t you want to hear what happened?” they cried in unison. It was the first time since they’d come flying out of the building that they were both intelligible.

  “More than you can possibly know,” Chris assured them, “but I won’t find anything out if you keep on talking over one another like two screech owls in a barnyard competition. You,” he said, randomly picking the taller of the two. “What’s your name?”

  “Bill,” the teen answered nervously, apparently worried that he was being singled out. “Bill Peterson.”

  “And I’m—” The other teenager began to give his name, but Chris held up his hand.

  “You’ll have your turn. Okay, Bill Peterson,” he said, addressing the first teenager. “Why were you and your friend here flying out of the old Kresky building like the devil himself was after you?”

  The question had the teenagers turning ghostly pale again. Bill cleared his throat before speaking. “You’re not going to believe me.”

  “Try me,” Chris said patiently, giving the impression that he wasn’t about to go anywhere until he got the truth out of them.

  The two teenagers exchanged looks.

  “Look at me, Bill,” he ordered. “Look at me when you answer.”

  Bill flushed. “Maybe we better show you,” he muttered.

  Instead of urging them on, Chris glanced from one to the other. He figured it was time to get the second teen’s name just in case the two got it into their heads to take off again. If they went in different directions, he could go after only one. Having both their names—if they weren’t lying—at least gave him a fighting chance of bringing the teenagers in.

  He had a feeling this wasn’t just some prank. Something definitely was going on.

  “And your name is?” His no-nonsense stare seemed to glue the second teen’s feet to the ground.

  “Allen, sir.” The youth actually swallowed. Any second, Chris expected to see his Adam’s apple dance. “Allen Kott.”

  “Okay, Allen Kott, why don’t you and Bill here show me what got the two of you looking paler than Snow White.” When the duo looked as if they intended to walk back into the building behind him, Chris gestured that they were to lead the way. He wanted to keep an eye on them the whole time.

  The teens complied.

  “How did you two happen to be in the building?” Chris asked casually as they crossed to the abandoned department store. “It’s supposed to be locked up.”

  Bill laughed nervously. “Yeah, supposed to be.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Chris assumed. This was prime real estate. Most of the strip malls and stores in the city were. He couldn’t see the building being left haphazardly opened so that anyone could have access to it. A great deal of destruction could be done in a minimum of time. That could generate a costly problem for anyone who’d just bought the property. “Did you break in?”

  “No, it was already open,” Allen told him. “I swear,” he quickly added.

  Chris was still having a hard time buying that. “How did you know?” he asked. “Or did you just keep trying different doors until you got lucky?”

  “We figured we’d find it open because this was where the big bash was last night,” Allen told him matter-of-factly.

  “What big bash?” Chris asked.

  Were they pulling his leg, after all? But there was no mistaking the lo
ok of fear he’d seen. That had been very real and there had to be a cause behind it. How did it connect to this so-called “big bash” they were talking about?

  “The big one.” When Chris gave no indication that he was any clearer on the subject than he had been a moment ago, Allen stressed, “The floating one.”

  “A floating big bash,” Chris repeated. It still wasn’t making any sense to him.

  “Yeah, man,” Bill said almost impatiently. “These rich guys, they find these big, empty venues to hold these big, flashy parties. Lots of food, lots of dancing, lots of really gorgeous women in expensive clothes with expensive jewelry. None of this fake stuff, you know?” he asked, as if trying to make himself clear. “Everything about these women is super-real.”

  Chris stopped walking, his suspicions aroused. “And you know this how?”

  “We’ve seen them,” Bill said. Allen hit him in the ribs with his elbow. “What’s that for?” he demanded.

  The answer to that was evident by the way Chris looked at the teens. “You’ve been to these parties?”

  “Not exactly,” Bill said, with far less bravado. “We kinda hid out and watched them all go in.”

  Chris looked from one teen to the other, waiting. “Go on.”

  Allen picked up the thread as they began walking again. “When it was over and everyone left, we thought we’d go in and, you know, scout around. See if anybody left anything behind, like maybe dropped some money or some jewelry we could sell.” He looked to see if the detective understood what he was saying. “We weren’t stealing or nothing.”

  Chris used a more descriptive word. “You were scavenging.”

  “We were hunters,” Bill said, with just a touch of indignation, attempting to glide right over the fact that they were both trespassing on what was at bottom private property.

  For now, Chris went along with the euphemism. “Okay, and exactly what was it that you two big game hunters found?”

  The teens’ bravado was gone again, vanishing like the first blush of spring beneath a sun grown too hot too fast.

  And then Chris saw why.

  They were inside the deserted department store now, and rather than finding the debris that was usually left behind after a building was all but gutted, Chris saw glitter strewn across the floor like the confetti left after a parade.

  And over in the corner, hidden behind a long table that had been brought in to accommodate food or a VJ or something along those lines, was the unclad body of a young woman whose color had been drained out of her less than a day ago.

  Chapter 2

  Taking out his flashlight, Chris crossed over to the body quickly. While there was some light coming in through the store windows, they were far enough away to make visibility around the body rather dim.

  Chris panned around the area slowly. The dead woman appeared to be a blonde in her midtwenties. There was nothing to distinguish her from any of the hundreds of other hopeful, beautiful blondes who flocked to Southern California each year, their heads full of dreams, searching for fame and fortune.

  This blonde’s search had been traumatically and permanently terminated, Chris thought, wondering who she was and how many lives were going to be affected by her death.

  He squatted down to get a closer look at the immediate crime scene, searching for anything that could give him a glimmer of insight as to why she’d been killed and why she’d been left like this.

  Behind him, the two teenagers who had led him here were becoming antsy. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure they weren’t getting ready to flee.

  “She was like that when we found her, honest,” Allen cried the second Chris made eye contact with him.

  Bill added his agitated voice to his friend’s testimony. “We didn’t do anything to her!”

  Because of the lack of blood in the immediate area, Chris assumed that the woman had been killed somewhere else and then moved.

  The question now was who moved her, the killer or these agitated teenagers. Turning off his flashlight, Chris got back up to his feet and faced them. “Did either one of you touch her?” he asked.

  “You mean, like when she was dead?” Allen cried, his brown eyes widening. The idea clearly horrified him. “Hell, no!” he declared emphatically. “She’s dead.”

  Chris turned to the other teen, waiting for his answer. Bill looked as if he was in danger of swallowing his own tongue—or throwing up. He shook his head vigorously. When he finally regained his ability to talk, he said, “We got out of here as soon as we saw her. We’re not freaks.” Stunned by the suggestion Chris had made, he cried, “Hey, man, what kind of people do you know?”

  “Not the kind that you would invite to a party,” Chris murmured. Taking out his phone, he started to put in a call to his precinct. But he stopped when he saw that the teens were about to leave. “Where do you think you two are going?”

  Bill and Allen exchanged looks. “We got class,” Bill told him, as if that was their get-out-of-jail-free card.

  His call temporarily put on hold, Chris moved to block their exit. “Not right now, you don’t.”

  Allen appeared distressed. “But I’ve got a second-period test,” the teen complained, then all but wailed, “I can’t miss it.”

  “I’ll write you a note,” Chris told him dismissively. “Stay put or I’ll have to cuff you.” He didn’t trust them to obey. “Now stand over there where I can watch you,” he instructed, indicating the wall right behind the dead woman who had sent them running.

  The teens regarded the body nervously.

  “Could we stand over here instead, not so close to her?” Allen asked, pointing to an area in the opposite direction.

  “Death isn’t catching,” Chris informed him in a no-nonsense voice. “Unless, of course, you and your friend try to run.”

  Pinning them with a look that all but nailed the two teens to the spot, Chris completed his call to the precinct and started the ball rolling.

  *

  Dispatched by Sean Cavanaugh, Dirk Bogart peered into the lab, looking for the woman he’d been told by his boss to fetch.

  Spotting her at the far end of the room, Bogart smiled as he called out, “Put your papers aside, Suzie Q. We’ve got a live one. Or rather,” he corrected with a grin that went from ear to ear, “a dead one. Boss man says to tell you that you’re up. I’ll drive.”

  The words came out like rapid gunfire, one after another, barely allowing Suzie to absorb one sentence before Bogart had already moved on to the third.

  Replaying the words a beat or so behind their actual lightning-fast delivery, Suzie nodded and grabbed the gear she personally packed and then repacked after each trip to a crime scene. Experience had taught her that anything else would already be in the car and ready to go.

  Because she liked being in control of any situation she found herself in, Suzie preferred driving to the crime scene and she preferred to do that driving alone. But she knew that making waves, even little waves, put people off, and in this case she had to admit it really wasn’t worth it. She was careful to pick her battles and fought only those that really needed to be fought.

  This was not one of them.

  Although, she thought several minutes into the drive, she would have done a lot better on her own. If there was anything that Dirk liked better than the sound of his own voice, Suzie had a feeling it hadn’t been discovered yet.

  The two-year CSI vet talked the entire way to the crime scene. He talked about the weather, the state of the country and how he was a thrill junky, which was why, he went on to tell her, he’d taken this job in the first place.

  For the most part, Suzie managed to tune him out, and made appropriate noises that might have been taken as agreement only when it sounded as if he was ready to challenge her if she didn’t concur with his many stated opinions.

  When Bogart finally brought the vehicle to a stop at what was clearly a roped-off area, Suzie was quick to get out of the car, clutching her crime scene ca
se to her. She was glad to see that Sean was already on the scene.

  Spotting him, she made a beeline for the man.

  “I see we managed to get you away from your paperwork,” Sean observed pleasantly.

  “Could we get me away from Bogart now, as well?”

  The words just slipped out, surprising her as much as they obviously did Sean. Ordinarily, she wasn’t given to complaining and she could see that her request immediately registered with the man.

  He laughed, an understanding look on his face. “Couldn’t stop talking, could he?”

  Following her superior into the abandoned department store, Suzie shook her head. “Not for a second. I didn’t know a human being was capable of saying that many words a minute.”

  Sean walked toward the taped-off area. “I thought that maybe being in your company, he’d pick up a few tips on how to be silent. Guess not,” he concluded philosophically. “Next time, you can ride with me.”

  “I think I’d really like that.” She tried to sound neutral about it, but didn’t quite succeed. She heard the older man laugh again.

  “He’ll hit his stride, given enough time,” Sean told her.

  “What if that is his stride?” Suzie asked, far from comfortable with that thought.

  “People transfer out of the department on occasion,” Sean answered, as if that was something that might give her hope. “The crime scene is right over there.” He pointed ahead of them.

  Relieved that Bogart hadn’t caught up to them with the rest of the equipment yet, Suzie hurried closer to Sean.

  “Do we know anything yet?” she asked, assuming that whoever had called the crime into their division had given a few details.

  “Only that apparently Aurora has a whole nightlife I know nothing about,” said a man who walked up behind them. “According to the two kids who found the body, there are supposedly decadent ‘floating’ parties being thrown in abandoned, high-end buildings all through Southern California.”

  Sean nodded, taking the scene in. “Anything else, Chris?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” the newcomer replied. That was when his voice finally struck a familiar chord for her and Suzie turned around.