Cavanaugh or Death Read online

  The groundskeeper was getting on her nerves. Moira turned to look at the gaunt man. “I thought you had a burial to prepare for.”

  “I do—just as soon as I get you people the hell off the cemetery’s property.” Now that nothing had apparently been found to be amiss, he had grown bolder in his attitude. “You got what you came for. You opened up that poor woman’s grave and disturbed her eternal rest. Now put her coffin back in, fill up her grave and leave,” he ordered. “Or this time, I will start legal proceedings against the police department—and you two in particular,” he snarled, glaring at both of them.

  “It is just me, or did his grammar just get better?” Moira asked her faux partner.

  Davis would have preferred to not take a side but, given the choice, he picked hers. Especially since she was right and the groundskeeper had gotten on his nerves right from the start.

  “Definitely better,” Davis agreed.

  “I’ve got the cemetery’s lawyer on speed dial,” Weaver announced, taking out his cell phone and holding it aloft as if it were some sort of detonation device he intended to use.

  “Good for you,” Davis said in a low, even voice that was definitely not friendly. “Now put that damn thing away before someone makes you swallow it.”

  Weaver grew paler than he already was and took a shaky step back from the tall detective he was obviously afraid of.

  “You can’t threaten me like that,” Weaver cried angrily.

  “He didn’t,” Moira pointed out. “Detective Gilroy said ‘someone,’ he didn’t specify who. Did you hear him specify who?” she asked, turning toward first Riley then Conrad.

  “Not us,” Riley denied for both of them as they worked carefully to lower the coffin into the grave without damaging it. “Didn’t hear him say a name. No. How about you, Conrad?”

  The more heavyset man shook his head. “Nope,” he answered.

  “Just put everything back the way you found it—and that means every shovelful of dirt!” Weaver instructed before he walked angrily away.

  “Well, that went well,” Moira muttered under her breath.

  Davis was looking down at the coffin that was being reburied.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, more to himself than with her. He sounded even less happy about the outcome than the woman he’d been thrown together with.

  Chapter 7

  Detective Davis Gilroy was a man who liked silence more than most people did. The absence of noise allowed him to clear his mind and to think more clearly. Occasionally he might put on the radio as he was driving, but for the most part, silence suited his purposes quite well.

  But as he drove them back to the precinct, the silence inside his car struck him as unnatural. Not because of the silence itself but because there was silence in his car while Moira Cavanaugh was in it.

  As each minute passed the effect of this silence only grew more discomforting.

  Finally, unable to endure the tortured absence of sound any longer, Davis glanced at the other occupant in his vehicle as he slowed at a red light.

  “So now what?”

  Moira leaned back against her seat and sighed. “Now I take this back to Carver and try to convince him to let me keep working on it. Technically, I still have more than twenty-four hours left.”

  “Work on what?” Davis asked. “That was the only grave that was disturbed and it looks like whoever disturbed it did so just for the hell of it.”

  Frustrated, Moira shrugged. Gilroy wasn’t helping, she thought. But she couldn’t deny that he was just asking questions that she knew Carver would ask. She needed an answer for the lieutenant, but what?

  “I don’t know,” she responded, irritated. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were missing something. “Stake the place out. Wait for something else suspicious to happen.”

  The expression on Gilroy’s face told her he thought she was really reaching now.

  “I don’t know about your department,” he told her, “but mine doesn’t exactly go around begging for work. We’ve got enough cases to keep all the people who work there busy.”

  Moira sighed. Much as she hated to admit it, he had a point. One she didn’t know how to discount, especially since she knew Carver would say the same thing. “Mine, too.”

  If she believed that, then what was the problem? “So what makes you think your boss—or mine—is going to sign off on more time devoted to this wild-goose chase?”

  Moira sighed again. He was right, and yet she just couldn’t let go of it. “Because at times, I still believe in Santa Claus—or want to at any rate.”

  There was something akin to pity as well as exasperation in Gilroy’s eyes as he told her, “You just go on believing, Cavanaugh. Me, the second your lieutenant says, ‘Case closed,’ I’m back in Major Crimes.”

  She knew he meant it. “Give me a chance to talk Carver into it,” Moira requested. “You never know, just maybe when...”

  But Davis had never been one to build castles in the sky. Not since just before he turned thirteen. “From what I hear about the man, I think the phrase you might be looking for is ‘when pigs fly.’”

  She looked at Gilroy, wondering what he’d been like as a child. Had he been born with that dour look on his face? “You never believed in Santa Claus at all, did you?”

  His expression never changed. He was not about to get pulled into a frivolous conversation. “Nope.”

  No surprise there—just sadness. “I kind of figured that,” she told him. “What you need, Gilroy, is magic in your life.”

  “What I need, Cavanaugh,” he countered, “is to get back to working cases on my own. Solo,” he emphasized for good measure in case she missed his point.

  “Don’t you ever get lonely?” she asked, momentarily forgetting her disappointment about the would-be case and turning her attention to the man driving to the precinct. Coming from the background she did, where six siblings wasn’t even considered a crowd, she found herself not just feeling sorry for Gilroy but feeling a growing urge to fix him.

  “I make it a point to never get lonely,” Davis answered. “There’re fewer complications that way.” His tone underscored his point.

  Okay, maybe she needed a more direct approach here.

  “Look,” she began, “why don’t you come to Uncle Andrew’s next—”

  “No,” he told her firmly. He didn’t have to hear her out. He could tell from her tone where she was going with this.

  Moira knew that Andrew wouldn’t mind. He loved his family, cooking and bringing wounded people around, the latter not necessarily referring to physical wounds. Besides, Blake had already mentioned the subject to him when he’d issued the exhumation order.

  Determined, Moira tried again. “You’ll—”

  “No,” Davis repeated more forcefully.

  The man was nothing short of infuriating, she thought, trying a third time. “But—”

  “No!”

  So much for the polite approach. “Are you trying to set some sort of record for how many times you can say no before we reach the precinct, Gilroy?”

  “If I have to,” he allowed. “But I’m kind of counting on you being a faster learner than that.”

  Moira bit her tongue and retreated.

  She told herself that there was a difference between retreating and giving up. Besides, right now, she needed to use whatever mental resources she had to try to convince her lieutenant that there was something going on at the cemetery and she just needed a little more time to uncover what that was.

  She had no proof to offer him, only a hunch that was currently eating away at her gut—and growing bigger by the moment.

  “Have it your way,” she told him, lapsing back into silence.

  Davis had a strong feeling this wasn’t the last he was
going to hear of it, no matter what Cavanaugh pretended to the contrary.

  * * *

  Arriving at the robbery squad room a short while later, Moira saw that the lieutenant was in and that his door was closed, as usual.

  She glanced at the detective who had returned to her squad room with her. “You want to come in with me?” she asked Gilroy.

  He stopped at her desk. “I think I’ll sit this one out,” he answered. “I’m pretty good at reading expressions and body language. I’ll figure out what’s going on,” he assured her.

  It was just as well, Moira supposed. She didn’t have a good feeling about this and she didn’t exactly welcome the idea of having someone watch her fall flat on her face. Carver wasn’t much for going outside the lines and taking a chance on something, so his response to her entreaty was all but a foregone conclusion.

  Still, she had to try.

  “Find something already?” Carver asked after he’d responded to her knock and told her to come in and shut the door behind her.

  “Actually, nothing seemed to be missing from the coffin.” Each word she uttered tasted almost bitter in her mouth.

  Carver’s deep-set eyes became almost large as he glared at her, her words obviously replaying themselves in his head.

  “You dug up the coffin?” he cried, startled. “You got permission from the deceased’s family to dig it up?”

  “No. Not that we didn’t try,” she interjected. “But there was no family that we could find.”

  Several shades of red took turns washing over the lieutenant’s face. “What!”

  “I had a court order,” she told him quickly, aware that the first thing Carver would jump on was that the department could very well be sued. That part, Moira gleaned from the fact that the parade of colors had not yet receded from the man’s face.

  “And you still found nothing,” Carver concluded angrily.

  “That I could see,” Moira qualified, ready to launch into myriad reasons why there still might be something to the case, something that hadn’t been immediately apparent.

  She never got the chance.

  “Well, that’s that,” Carver declared, brushing one hand against the other as if dusting something off his palms. “I just put a new case on Warner’s desk, but he’s out of the office on one of the other cases, so I guess it’s yours now,” he told her. The tone of his voice said that the subject was permanently closed. “Don’t slam the door on your way out,” he told her, waving her out of his office.

  Moira tried one last time to state her case. “But, sir, if I could just—”

  “Out, Cavanaugh,” Carver snapped. “I gave you a shot—more than most would do,” he pointed out, irritated. “Your ‘hunch’ didn’t pan out. Got lots of other things for you to do. So go do them,” he ordered, pointing her out of his office.

  “Yes, sir.” She closed the door behind her as she walked out of the glass office. It was all she could do not to yank it hard behind her. For the most part, she could keep her temper. But there were people who just brought it out of her with very little effort.

  Carver was one of those people.

  Frustrated, Moira crossed to her desk. She fully expected not to find Gilroy still there. He did not strike her as someone who would hang around for more than a couple of minutes and Carver had kept her in his office for almost ten.

  But, surprisingly, Gilroy was still there.

  Something fluttered in her stomach. Moira deliberately blocked it out.

  Perched on the corner of her desk, Davis rose the moment she approached.

  “He didn’t go for it, did he?” he asked.

  The question was just a formality. He could tell by the woman’s expression that she hadn’t convinced her lieutenant to give her another crack at what might or might not have been a case. Just as well, he thought, something akin to relief slipping through him.

  “No, he didn’t,” she answered, wondering if perhaps Gilroy had had a change of heart.

  His next words answered that question for her.

  “Figured he wouldn’t.” He turned to leave. “Well, see you around, Cavanaugh.”

  She looked at him, not bothering to disguise her exasperation. “Then you’re giving up, too?”

  “Nothing to give up,” Davis pointed out. “Nothing there to begin with.”

  She glanced at her watch out of habit. She knew what time it was. “We’ve still got thirty-two hours,” she noted.

  “Case closed, Cavanaugh,” Davis reminded her. With that, he proceeded to walk out of the squad room.

  Moira watched him go.

  Well, she wasn’t about to beg. She might have, if she thought she had a prayer of making Gilroy come around, but the major crimes detective looked about as flexible as a rock, so there was no point in humiliating herself and asking him to work the case with her off the books.

  Moira reached over to pick up the sheet of paper Carver had told her he’d deposited on Warner’s desk and then sank into the chair at her own desk.

  She glanced at the information on the paper. It was a standard Break and Enter, she concluded after reading only the first two lines. The victim listed several items that had been stolen, one of which was a twenty-five-year-old, nineteen-inch television set. She guessed that had most likely found its way into a Dumpster once the burglar had taken a second look and assessed its value.

  Moira wearily closed her eyes.

  This just wasn’t her day.

  * * *

  Because she had given her word, Moira called Blake Kincannon after she’d given herself a little time to pull herself together.

  “Judge, it’s Moira. I said I’d call you back.”

  The man on the other end paused as he quickly assessed her tone. “You didn’t find anything, did you?”

  “No, we didn’t,” she said truthfully.

  “And it’s still eating at you, isn’t it?”

  She hadn’t expected that. “How did you...?”

  She heard him laugh softly. “I’ve been married to Greer for a while,” Blake reminded her. “Even the least-astute husband picks up on things after a while.”

  “I wouldn’t categorize you as that, Judge,” Moira told him.

  “Well, let me know if I can be of any further help. I have a feeling this isn’t over yet. When your family gets hold of something, they rarely let go until it’s resolved to their satisfaction.”

  “Thank you, Judge,” she told him. “I appreciate you being in my corner.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” he told her with another soft laugh. “Greer would have my head.”

  * * *

  It felt odd not running. She’d been doing it faithfully for several years now, missing only six weeks in all that time when she’d had appendicitis.

  But there was no way she could stake out the cemetery and go for her morning jog, too. Her system needed the jog, but the judge had been right. Her mind just couldn’t let go of the fact that she was convinced something odd was happening at the cemetery.

  Disturbing a twenty-year-old grave for no reason made absolutely no sense. There had to be a reason, she told herself. She just needed to figure out what that reason was.

  And to do that, she needed to catch those two characters disturbing another grave so she could question them.

  Taking another sip from the large container of coffee she’d picked up at the local coffee shop on the way over, Moira tried to will herself to stay awake. Not exactly a good state to be in first thing in the morning, she thought, although she’d been at this for the past two and a half hours.

  This was her third day staking out the cemetery on her own time. If nothing happened by tomorrow, she was going to have to admit she’d been wrong and just forget about the whole—

&n
bsp; Moira closed her eyes and opened them again, trying to clear her vision to focus on a car pulling up on the opposite side of the street. It was parking at the curb just outside the cemetery.

  A car she was certain she recognized.

  Just as she recognized the driver emerging from the vehicle.

  Moira’s breath caught in her throat. Apparently she wasn’t the only one playing a hunch. It looked as if Detective Davis Gilroy had the same idea.

  At least, she assumed he had the same idea because he was here.

  Was he going in to walk around the grounds to check out some of the gravesites in the hope of finding at least one more that had been disturbed?

  She thought he was carrying something, but because of the lack of light right in front of the entrance and the angle, she couldn’t make out what it was or even if she was right.

  Gilroy entered the cemetery and turned a corner. Consumed with curiosity, Moira immediately jumped out of her car. The next second she was hurrying to the cemetery and after the detective.

  Moving swiftly passed the tall wrought-iron gates, Moira looked around and for a moment thought she’d lost Gilroy.

  And then she spotted him.

  Gilroy was walking down one of the paths in the cemetery. His gait told her the detective knew exactly where he was going.

  Could she have been wrong in her thinking right from the start? Had Gilroy been the one who had disturbed the grave in the first place and those two figures in black—most likely kids—had caught him in the act instead of the other way around?

  If that was the case, then maybe he’d been chasing after the duo because he’d wanted to make sure they were not going to say anything to expose what he was doing.

  Moira didn’t like where her thoughts were taking her, but what other explanation was there now that she saw Gilroy skulking around here at this hour?

  Once again, her breath caught in her throat. This time as she saw the detective come to a stop by a grave with an extra-large headstone.

  Although she’d tried to focus on it, she still couldn’t make out what Gilroy was carrying.