Cavanaugh Cold Case Read online

  Yes, he did, but not about hip replacements. He would have preferred a far more intimate subject to be up for discussion.

  “No, you’ve convinced me,” he told her. “Did you happen to write down the number of that prosthetic?”

  “No, I thought that I’d transmit it to you by mental telepathy,” she answered dryly, reaching for a piece of paper she’d placed on the next table. “Here.”

  He glanced at the numbers she’d written down as she handed the lined paper to him.

  “Too bad. I was looking forward to our minds melding.” When she said nothing, he felt the need to explain the comment. “That’s a term out of—”

  “Star Trek, yes,” Kristin said, cutting him off before he went on needlessly. “I know.”

  Her response stunned him, and he looked at her with renewed respect. “You’re familiar with Star Trek?” Before she could answer him, Malloy laughed, obviously tickled by this newest piece of information he’d learned about her. “First, jigsaw puzzles, now, Star Trek. It’s like we were separated at birth.”

  Photographing another segment of the body she was beginning to reconstruct, she shook her head, doing her best to maintain an emotional distance between them—which was becoming harder to do.

  “A lot of people like jigsaw puzzles and are familiar with Star Trek, Detective,” she replied. “Don’t get carried away.”

  Despite her best efforts to block it, there was something boyishly appealing about the expression on his face as he told her, “I’ve brought you food after hours. Call me Malloy. And, trust me,” he added with a wink, “you’ll know when I get carried away.”

  That grin of his was going to be her downfall if she wasn’t careful, Kristin silently warned herself. She forced herself to talk facts, keeping a tight rein on her thoughts.

  “Those numbers are all cataloged in a database, along with the physician’s name and the patient’s name,” she told him crisply.

  She wanted to get him moving and on his way out of the morgue. The space in the area was definitely growing smaller somehow.

  “You may just have found our first genuine break in this case, Doc,” Malloy declared with enthusiasm.

  “You’re welcome,” Kristin murmured as she lowered her eyes back to the partially reconstructed skeleton on the table before her.

  Which was why she failed to be prepared for what came next. By the time she realized what was happening, it was too late.

  Caught up in the moment, Malloy bracketed her shoulders between his hands and delivered a very enthusiastic and yet innocent kiss to her cheek.

  The next second, he had released her and quickly crossed the floor, getting halfway to the door.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he promised half a second before he was gone.

  Kristin stared at the open door, stunned. Half of her was hoping that he would live up to his promise—and half of her really hoped that he wouldn’t.

  And both sides were for her best interests.

  * * *

  “I’m not any good at this,” Malloy confessed in what came across as his attempt at refreshing honesty.

  He was standing in the computer lab, pleading his case in person to his youngest sister. Detective Valri Cavanaugh split her time between the division where she usually worked and crime scene investigations’ computer lab.

  Usually she filled in if they were shorthanded. But along with this access she’d gained to the police department’s intranet, she’d also acquired miscellaneous requests from her siblings whenever they needed to avail themselves to her expertise and her considerable computer wizardry.

  “I’m fine with the everyday, routine stuff and plodding through things that I can find in the department’s regular database,” Malloy went on to tell her, laying out his case, “but this special stuff, hell, I don’t even know where to begin. Help me out here, Val,” he asked, putting on his most contrite face. “I just can’t work magic with computers.”

  The inference was that she could. But Valri saw through her brother’s flowing rhetoric and his golden tongue.

  “No, that’s a talent you work with women. I’m not one of those women,” she pointed out. “I’m your sister, which makes me immune to all the golden words that come out of your mouth.”

  “Val, I have no idea how you come up with these fanciful thoughts,” he said, pretending to be grievously hurt. “I just need my little sister’s help.”

  Valri laughed, turning away from the computer monitor to look at him. “You’re slipping, Malloy. You need to do a little brushing up on your acting.”

  “I’ll brush up on anything you want if you just help me out here,” he told her. Then, his expression lighting up, he added, “I brought food,” before she had a chance to put him off. To prove his point, he shook the bag he held in front of her so that its contents made a noise. “Hear that? It’s calling to you.”

  “Donuts do not call. They make noise hitting the sides of a paper bag as their glaze flakes off, but they definitely do not call.”

  Opening the bag, Malloy looked inside it as if he was checking out the contents. “I’d say those crumbs have your name on them.”

  “And I say you’re pushing it. You know, between you and Kelly and Moira, not to mention Duncan, it’s a wonder I ever get anything done for the department at all.”

  He pretended to lower his voice so he could whisper in her ear. “Don’t look now, baby sister, but Kelly, Moira, Duncan and I are part of the department, so technically, your complaint doesn’t hold any water.”

  She raised her eyes to his. “You want me to find that database or not?”

  “Your complaint holds lots of water,” he told her with feeling, backtracking quickly.

  “Better,” she approved, nodding her head. Looking at the numbers that he had handed her from the medical examiner, she paused, thinking. “Give me a minute—this was for a hip prosthetic, right?” she asked, double-checking that he’d given her the correct information so that she logged on to the right database.

  “Right,” he answered. With that, he turned his back to her and stared at the opposite wall.

  The redhead at the next desk saw him and smiled right at Malloy. But for once, Malloy’s attention was not captured. It was focused on getting the information he needed from Valri.

  Looking at his back, Valri asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Letting you work,” he said, still looking at the opposite wall. “The medical examiner told me that a watched pot never boils.”

  “Since when did you start thinking of me as a pot?” Valri asked.

  The sound of her fingers flying across her keyboard, making the keys click, brought a satisfied smile to Malloy’s lips.

  “I don’t,” he assured her. “I’m just trying my best to be accommodating and unobtrusive.”

  “Well, stop it,” she told him sharply. “You’re frightening me. The Malloy I grew up with was not accommodating or unobtrusive.”

  “Sure I was,” he insisted good-naturedly. “You’re probably confusing me with one of the other brothers you have. You know, the ones who were always dragging their knuckles on the ground and playing pranks on you.”

  He heard her announce, “Done,” with a flourish as the sound of the portable printer beside her computer coming to life underscored the word.

  “You remembered which brother you confused me with?” Malloy asked innocently as he turned back around to face her.

  Valri held out the information she had printed for him. “No, I was referring to having found the number you were looking for in the database. And I didn’t confuse you with anyone. That was definitely you. You, Malloy, have always been one of a kind.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Malloy told his sister, accepting the paper from her.

  “
No comment,” Valri replied prudently, her expression giving nothing away.

  Malloy glanced down at the page. He had a name and information, which in turn might lead to more identifications.

  “You’re the best, Val—and if that fiancé of yours doesn’t treat you like the queen that you clearly are, tell him he’ll have me to answer to. He makes you so much as frown, I’ll beat him to a pulp,” he promised.

  It was no secret that she was all but walking on air these days. “Alex makes me very happy and you know it.”

  “Well, just in case,” Malloy told her, doing his best to maintain a dead serious expression. “You know where to come.”

  “Uh-huh.” She was already back to the search she had been conducting when Malloy had walked in with his request.

  “And thanks for this!” he called out, raising the sheet she’d handed him in the air on his way out.

  “Just go!” Valri ordered her brother. “I have work to do.”

  “Like I said, you’re the best!” Malloy told her just before he crossed the threshold.

  “Glad you finally figured that out,” Valri answered, talking half to herself under her breath. “Certainly took you long enough.”

  * * *

  He lost no time getting back to Kristin with the victim’s name.

  “Doesn’t your phone work at all?” she asked him when he came bursting into the morgue. She silently upbraided herself for not being more annoyed to see him invading her space again.

  The problem was, she wasn’t really annoyed at all—and that sincerely worried her.

  “Sure,” he told her, crossing over to her. “You called me on it earlier, remember?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That was a rhetorical question, Detective.”

  “Malloy,” he prompted. “We agreed that you’d call me Malloy, remember?”

  She needed to hold on to her bearings at all times, because the man had the ability to completely bury her in rhetoric. “Technically, you agreed. I didn’t agree to anything.”

  He flashed her that same smile she was positive had undone many a woman and was steadily getting to her, as well.

  “I figured you were just being shy, Doc.” And then he got back to the reason he’d hurried back so quickly. “This is the kind of thing I figured you’d want to hear in person. We’ve got a name,” he told her, taking the paper Valri had given him and holding it out to Kristin. “A name to go with that prosthetic you discovered.”

  She surprised him by not immediately reaching for it. Instead, she said quietly, “The first person to transition from ‘Jane Doe’ to an actual person.”

  He caught the note of sadness in Kristin’s voice. So, she wasn’t as removed from all this as she was trying to appear.

  “Makes it more real somehow, doesn’t it?”

  “You do surprise me, Detective—Malloy,” Kristin corrected herself. She felt that since he had brought this back to share with her rather than just running off and claiming the breakthrough as his own, she owed him that much.

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re insightful as well as sensitive.” She was getting carried away. Kristin admonished herself and walked her comment back a little. “Both very good traits for a Boy Scout.”

  Malloy laughed and shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Didn’t make the grade?” she guessed. He must have been one hell of a handful as a boy. Tom Sawyer on steroids. No scout master in his right mind would have taken him on.

  “Didn’t bother to apply,” he told her simply. “So, do you want to know her name,” he asked, once again offering her the printed paper, “or just go on thinking of her as Jane Doe number seven?”

  He was right. Knowing the woman’s name took the victim out of the realm of the anonymous and brought her into the real world. Once she had a name, there was a very good possibility that the broken-up skeleton on her table became someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, sister, lover, mother, a person who had once had a life that had been cut terribly short by some maniacal monster who fancied himself a god with the power of life and death over some unfortunate victim.

  It was a lot to take in. But it had to be done.

  “Her name, please,” Kristin requested.

  He glanced down on the paper in his hand. “The hip belonged to an Abby Sullivan, and you were right. She was seventeen when she had the operation. The last known address her doctor had for her, according to this, was in San Francisco.” He planned to verify that himself right after he left the morgue.

  “San Francisco,” Kristin echoed. “That’s a bit of a ways from here.”

  “She might have just been living there at the time and moved on after she was back on her feet.” His words echoed back to him. “Forgive the pun.”

  Kristin gave him a knowing look. “The pun is probably the least you have to be forgiven for.”

  He placed his hand over his heart. “You wound me, Doc.”

  Her smile was quick and fleeting. “I try my best,” she commented. “Now what?”

  He regarded the sheet of paper that she had handed back to him. “Now I see if I can track down Abby’s family and explain to them why she hasn’t been home for dinner for the last two decades or so.”

  “After you track their address down...” she began just as he started to leave.

  Malloy stopped and looked at her, waiting for the rest of her sentence. “Yes?”

  “Let me know,” Kristin told him. “I want to go with you.”

  Chapter 7

  Malloy eyed her uncertainly. He was too young for his hearing to be going. Kristin couldn’t have said what he thought she had.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I don’t think I heard you correctly. You didn’t just say—”

  “Yes, I did,” she told him. “I want to go with you when you notify the family that Abby Sullivan’s body was found.”

  That didn’t make any sense to him. Why would she actually want to be there? He didn’t want to be there, but it was part of his job to deliver the notification once the victim was identified. To a person, this was deemed to be everyone’s least favorite part of being a detective on the police force.

  “Don’t you have enough work to do?” he asked after a moment had gone by and he was able to subdue his surprise over her request.

  Kristin sighed as she looked back at the tables littered with bones. “Oh, more than enough.”

  Malloy was still waiting for this to make some sort of sense to him. “Then why...?”

  He saw the medical examiner raise her chin at the same time that she clenched her jaw. She looked as if she was bracing herself for an argument. He didn’t want to argue with her, he just wanted to understand her reasons.

  “Because,” she answered, “something like this, notifying a family about the death of a loved one, needs to be conveyed by someone with a sympathetic heart.”

  “And I don’t have a sympathetic heart?” Malloy questioned, then said in all seriousness, “No offense, Doc, but you really have no idea what my ‘heart’ is like.”

  “Okay,” Kristin relented, backtracking. “Maybe I used the wrong word. Something like this needs to be conveyed by someone with an empathetic heart,” she corrected. “In other words, someone who’s been through it, been on the receiving end of possibly the worst news they have ever heard and most likely the worst news they will ever hear in their lives.

  “There is no ‘right’ way to do it,” she allowed. “But there are so many wrong ways to break that kind of news, it’s frightening. And, if it is done wrong, it can wind up scarring someone, if not forever, then for a very long, long time.”

  He regarded her thoughtfully, reading between the lines. “This isn’t just an abstract theory that you’re spinning, is it?”

  Her
demeanor became impatient. “Do I have to give you a lengthy explanation for everything that comes out of my mouth?”

  “Not lengthy, but a few succinct words that drive the point home wouldn’t be unwelcomed.” He didn’t think what he was saying was unreasonable. “Work with me here, Doc. I’m not a bad guy. I’m on your side, but I can’t just take you on as a sidekick for this house call for no good reason. I do have people I have to answer to.”

  Her expression was nothing short of skeptical. “I really doubt you answer to anyone if you don’t want to.” He kept watching her, obviously waiting for something more. Kristin blew out an impatient breath. “Okay, you want a reason? I’ll give you a reason. The person who notified my mother and me that my father wasn’t going to be coming home to us anymore, that he had died on the job, did it so matter-of-factly, so badly that it took my mother an entire year to crawl out of the depression she had sunk into.

  “There were times that I thought she was never coming back to me and that I had lost not one parent but two that day, one to the ravages of a fire and one to the aftermath of that fire.”

  As she spoke, it was hard for Kristin not to relive the absolute horror of that day. The only thing that had kept her from folding up herself was that she knew her mother needed her. Granted, there were her aunts, her uncle and, of course, her grandmother, who was stronger than the lot of them put together, but Kristin had felt, at least back then, that she and her mother had a special connection and that it was up to her to bring her mother around.

  “A fire,” Malloy repeated. “Then your father was a—”

  She filled in the word for him. “A firefighter, yes. It was that summer that felt as if the whole state was on fire. His company was called in to help battle a fire that some pyromaniac started in the Los Angeles Forest. Three of my dad’s friends got trapped while fighting the worst of that blaze, and my dad, being my dad,” she said with a touch of unconscious pride, “tried to save them. He died trying.”