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  Jackson turned to look at the detective quizzically. “Do I know you?” But the man just continued walking to the other side of the squad room.

  “Nobody asked for your input, Ronan,” Brianna called out. “I don’t need you spooking my partner.”

  “I take it that you know him,” Jackson assumed as they walked out of the squad room.

  “Only vaguely,” Brianna answered, then after a beat, added, “He’s my oldest brother.”

  “So why aren’t you working this case with him?” Jackson asked. It didn’t make sense to have him brought in from another department.

  “I just told you why. Because he’s my oldest brother.” She flashed Jackson a smile. “The trouble with older brothers is that they still see you as being five years old—even if you’re a homicide detective with an excellent track record,” she added before Jackson could say anything further.

  “You have another brother here, too, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Two more, actually,” she answered. “And a sister. And before you ask, I have about a thousand cousins in the police department, too,” she told him as she got on the elevator.

  “Damn, this really is a family business, isn’t it?” Jackson commented, less than comfortable with what that suggested.

  The magnitude of what he had just said hadn’t fully hit him until just now. Jackson had always been vaguely aware, ever since he had transferred from Oakland and joined the Aurora police force, that there were Cavanaughs in practically every department. However, just how many Cavanaughs there were had never really sunk in before.

  “Just keeping the city we love safe,” Brianna told him.

  Jackson surprised her by asking her a question that no one else had ever raised. “Having all those relatives around, watching you, doesn’t that make you afraid of messing up?”

  “You mean because I’m a Cavanaugh?” she questioned. “No. But because I’m a cop, yes,” she said. When he looked puzzled, she explained, “It doesn’t matter that I’m related to them. What matters is that cops aren’t supposed to mess up. We’re supposed to make things right.”

  Unbelievable, Jackson thought, shaking his head as they went outside. “Damn, I didn’t know that I was working with Dudley Do-Right.”

  Unlike his last out-of-the-blue comment about Hardy and Laurel or whoever, this was a reference she was familiar with.

  “Dudley didn’t have curves,” she countered, recalling watching the less-than-stellar antics of the cartoon Mountie.

  “I never watched the cartoon that closely,” Jackson replied drily.

  “Obviously. By the way,” she said as they approached the rear parking lot, “you can drive us to the morgue—unless you’d rather I did,” she told him.

  She was kidding, right? Given a choice, he would always opt to be behind the wheel. The truth was, he didn’t trust anyone else’s driving but his own. “I’ll drive.”

  “Thought you might say that,” Brianna commented with a smile.

  Chapter 7

  Brianna felt almost overwhelmed the moment she and Jackson stepped into the city’s morgue.

  Admittedly, Brianna didn’t come here very often. And when she did, it was usually when Kristin was on duty. Her main reason for dropping by then was to see if her cousin’s wife wanted to grab some lunch.

  But she could not recall a single instance when the morgue had ever looked even half this busy.

  Ordinarily there was only one medical examiner on duty. On occasion, there might be an aide on the premises to help assist the ME. This time, however, there were three medical examiners, counting Kristin, all carefully working over bits and pieces of remains that bore more resemblance to scattered chicken bones than to actual human bodies.

  Brianna looked more closely. Not only were the medical examiners working to reconstruct badly decomposed remains, but there seemed to be more than the usual number of gurneys spread all throughout the morgue. Ten in all. And all the gurneys had greater or lesser piles of bones spread out on them waiting to be put together like macabre jigsaw puzzles.

  She and Jackson had already walked across the large, temperature-controlled room and were almost at her elbow when Dr. Kristin Alberghetti-Cavanaugh, dressed in scrubs like the rest of her team, sensed their presence and looked up.

  “Hi. Pull up a gurney and try your luck,” Kristin invited, referring to matching up the body pieces. She was only half kidding.

  “Speaking of luck,” Brianna said, “have you or anyone on your team had any figuring out approximately when these victims were killed?” She assumed that they had to have met with some sort of foul play—there were just too many bodies for this to be anything else.

  “Funny you should ask,” Kristin responded. Pausing for a second, she looked closer at the man who had come in with Brianna. “New partner?” she asked Brianna.

  “Just temporary,” Jackson responded.

  “Well, Just Temporary,” Kristin said, a smile curving her mouth, “welcome to the morgue. It’s not usually this crowded or this challenging here,” the chief medical examiner told him.

  Brianna decided to get the introductions out of the way so they could get back to the real reason they were here. She gestured toward Kristin first. “Dr. Kristin Alberghetti-Cavanaugh, meet Detective Jackson Muldare. He’s on loan from major crimes.” Kristin smiled a greeting and Jackson nodded in return. “Okay, back to what you started to say,” Brianna finished.

  For a second, between the piecemeal bodies and the new detective in her morgue, Kristin momentarily lost the thread of her previous thought. “Which was?”

  “When I asked if you’d had any luck with these bodies, you said, and I quote, ‘Funny you should ask.’ What did you mean by that?”

  Kristin remembered now. “All right, now bear in mind that this is all just preliminary and other factors might have to be taken into account down the line that could change the results—”

  “Spit it out already, Kris,” Brianna interrupted.

  “Classy,” Jackson commented under his breath.

  Brianna shot the other detective a disapproving look even as she ignored the sarcasm—or attempted to. “The preliminary findings?” she asked impatiently.

  “Very preliminary,” Kristin emphasized. “So far, it looks as if we might have bodies from two different eras.”

  “Two different eras?” Jackson questioned, a look of confusion furrowing his brow.

  Kristin stopped to remove her mask so that they could hear her better. Drawing them over to a gurney parked to the far right, she told the two detectives, “For instance, the body on this gurney—or as much of the body as we could put together so far,” she qualified, because it clearly was not an entire cadaver, “has been dead for about forty years, give or take a couple of years. As has that one—” she pointed to another gurney that contained three-quarters of a skeleton “—and that one.” Kristin gestured toward a gurney holding only enough parts to re-create half a body.

  Brianna tried to piece together what the other woman was telling them. “So what you’re saying is that we’re looking for a killer who isn’t killing people anymore.”

  But Kristin shook her head. “No. Unfortunately, I’m not saying that.”

  Jackson held up his hand, symbolically calling for a time-out. “But you just said that the bodies have been dead for about forty years or so.”

  “Those have,” Kristin agreed, then crossed over to a gurney she had just moved aside. “But she hasn’t.”

  Now that they looked more closely, it was obvious that the body on this gurney was far less decomposed than the others Kristin had just pointed out to them.

  “Is it possible that this one doesn’t belong with the others?” Jackson asked. “You know, someone killed her and just needed a convenient, out-of-the-way place to leave the body, so they dumped her in the abandoned ho
tel, thinking no one would be the wiser?”

  “It’s possible,” Kristin said. “But then how do you explain that one? And that one?” Each time she asked, the medical examiner pointed to another body on a different gurney. “They’ve all been killed in the last year or so.”

  This was getting complicated, Brianna thought, frustrated. “Are we talking about a killer who stopped killing, then decided to get back in the game a full generation later?” she asked Kristin.

  Kristin sighed. “Frankly, I don’t know what we’re talking about,” she admitted.

  Jackson surveyed the ten gurneys. “Is this all of them?” he asked.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Jim Henderson, another one of the MEs, responded.

  Jackson and Brianna turned to look at Kristin.

  “There’s more?” Jackson asked.

  “There’s more,” Kristin answered wearily. “We’ve got them laid out on gurneys in the next room.”

  Jackson was almost afraid to ask the medical examiner. “How many?”

  “Hard to say,” Kristin answered. “We’ve got a lot of mismatched pieces on the gurneys, but it looks like there’re three to five more bodies. Plus the CSI team still hasn’t finished sifting through all the rubble,” she informed them. “There were bodies hidden in a number of what looked to be the foundation walls.”

  The chief medical examiner’s eyes swept over the gurneys that were in the main room with them and she sighed wearily.

  “I am going to need a very long shower after this is over. I might even start a brand-new water shortage,” she speculated.

  “No one could blame you,” Brianna told her with conviction. She shook her head as she looked at the gurneys. What kind of a loathsome monster did this kind of thing and went on breathing? “Well, keep us posted,” she told Kristin.

  “Don’t worry, I will,” Kristin promised. And then, before she got back to work, she added, “You and everybody else who keeps checking up on our progress.” She moved in a little closer to the detectives, lowering her voice. “Between you and me, I’ve never had so many people breathing down my neck in such a short amount of time.”

  Brianna smiled sympathetically at her cousin’s wife. “I’d offer to help,” she said, looking around at the various gurneys again, “but I was never any good at jigsaw puzzles.”

  Kristin laughed shortly. “Neither was I until I came here. It’s amazing what you find you can do when you have to.”

  “What’s your ratio?” Jackson asked. When both the ME and Brianna looked at him with confusion, he explained, “Old bodies to new. How many are there?”

  “So far, three new, seven old. But like I said, there are more bodies in the next room. And most likely there are even more on the way,” Kristin added with a grim expression.

  “Something to live for,” Jackson murmured cryptically.

  As he said that, his cell phone began to vibrate again. He was sorely tempted to shut off his phone, but he knew that he couldn’t do that. Not because he was on the job. He was certain if his superiors wanted to reach him and couldn’t, they’d simply call O’Bannon.

  The reason he couldn’t shut off his phone was the off chance that his father or someone at Happy Pines might be trying to get in touch with him. His father had already had one stroke fairly recently. He’d recovered from it and was still fully functional as far as mobility went. But the next time around, Ethan might not be that lucky.

  However, one glance at his phone’s screen told Jackson that the persistent caller had nothing to do with his father’s health.

  He ignored the vibrating phone and looked at Brianna. “We done here for now?”

  Rather than answer him, Brianna turned toward Kristin. “You should have seen what he was like before I sent him to charm school. Yes,” she said, turning back to Jackson, “we’re done here. Call me if you have anything new to add,” she stressed again, glancing at Kristin. “Night or day, doesn’t matter when. Call me.”

  “You got it,” Kristin answered. “Nice meeting you, Jackson,” she called after the departing detective, raising her voice.

  Jackson paused before the morgue’s threshold for a second. “Yeah, you too,” he replied in a surprisingly sociable tone.

  “Nice effort,” Brianna commented quietly just after they left the morgue.

  “If I were in her place,” Jackson responded as they made their way to the elevator, “knee-deep in decomposing body parts, I would have been snapping everybody’s head off who came within ten feet of me. She was being nice. Least I could do was be civil. After all,” he said, getting into the elevator and pressing the button for the first floor, “I can’t let those charm-school lessons go to waste.”

  It was hard to miss the sarcasm. “You think I went too far,” Brianna guessed.

  “You?” The elevator door opened and Jackson held it in place as she exited first. He followed her. “Never.”

  Brianna nodded. “Point taken.” Leaving the square building, they returned to the parking lot. “If I hurt your feelings, I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t bother to look at her. “I have no feelings,” Jackson informed her with a dismissive shrug of his shoulders.

  They’d parked his vehicle close to the building’s entrance and crossed the lot to it now.

  “There was a time I would have agreed with you, but I’m not totally sure about that anymore,” Brianna admitted.

  Getting into his vehicle, she buckled up, then looked at her watch as Jackson started the car. “It’s getting kind of late, and I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really hungry. We haven’t stopped to eat all day. What do you say we grab something at Malone’s and call it a day? A few more hours isn’t going to make a difference. We can get a fresh start tomorrow, tracking down those old hotel guests to see if any of them can shed some light on what was going on in that hotel all those years.”

  They were on the main thoroughfare now. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “Take your pick. Whatever’ll get us to Malone’s faster has my vote. And if it helps to clear things up for you,” she added, “I am lead on this, but we are partners and I’ve never been the type who throws her weight around.”

  “So you wouldn’t mind if I said no?” Jackson asked, his expression totally unreadable.

  Brianna smiled. “I didn’t say that.”

  He nodded. That was what he thought. “Then I guess I’d better not say no.”

  Her smile widened. “Good choice, Muldare. Drop me off at the precinct. I need to stop off in the squad room and check with Del Campo to see if there’s anything new and pressing that came up. If we’re in the clear for the night, I’ll meet you at Malone’s.”

  “About that,” he said, his voice trailing off as he took a right turn toward the police station.

  She knew what he was going to say. “You don’t want to go to Malone’s. Okay, I’m not unreasonable. I’m open for someplace else.”

  “That’s not the point,” Jackson told her. Obviously, he didn’t want to go anywhere for drinks or for food. He just wanted to be left alone.

  But Brianna had no intentions of letting her temporary partner wiggle out of at least having drinks with her. She had already made up her mind that the man needed socializing, and Malone’s was the place where police officers and detectives alike threw back a drink and threw off the heavy shackles of depression that the job sometimes snapped on them.

  “Look, Muldare, I know for a fact that you do eat on occasion and I’m fairly sure that your cupboard probably rivals Old Mother Hubbard’s—” Brianna began, about to launch into what she hoped was a persuasive argument.

  Jackson pulled his vehicle into the rear parking lot, coming to a stop near her car. He glared at her, confused. “Who?”

  “It’s a nursery rhyme,” she prompted. “You know, ‘Old Mother Hubbard went
to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone—’” She stopped when she saw that her reference and the recitation was going right over his head. “Guess you’re not the only one who can come up with obscure references. My point was that you probably don’t have anything edible in your refrigerator or pantry, which is why I’m saying we should grab something to eat once we leave here.”

  “Have you always had this smothering-mothering attitude, or is that something I just seem to bring out in you?” he asked, doing his best not to tell her what she could do with those mothering instincts surfacing.

  “Let me put it to you this way,” she told him patiently. “Right now you’re my partner, which means you’re supposed to have my six. You can’t do that if you wind up passing out from malnutrition.”

  Jackson sighed as he waited for the bossiest woman he knew to get out of his car. “I guess you’ll meet me at Malone’s, then,” he said.

  Brianna slid out, then paused for a second to look into the car. She smiled at Jackson. “See how easy that was?”

  “Not hardly” was his response. The moment she closed the door, Jackson took off.

  She stood for a moment, watching as Jackson retraced his path. He drove out of the parking lot and then onto the street that went parallel to the police station. Within a minute, she had lost track of him.

  The odds were fifty-fifty that he wouldn’t be at Malone’s when she got there.

  Brianna went up the back stairs to the station’s rear entrance. The line about leading a horse to water but not being able to make him drink ran through her mind. It seemed oddly appropriate in this case.

  Well, Muldare might not show up tonight. But that didn’t mean she would give up. Her mother had taught her a long time ago, by word and example, that nothing was impossible as long as you didn’t give up.

  And she wasn’t about to.

  Chapter 8

  Brianna spent less than ten minutes in the squad room. She checked in with Del Campo for any updates regarding the hotel’s previous guests. At this time, there weren’t any. The squad room was almost empty, and her regular partner was just on his way out as well.