Cavanaugh in the Rough Read online

  “That means before we go and try to rope ourselves a couple of billionaires who are on the board of practically every nonprofit foundation and organization in the state, we go and talk to Bethany’s former roommate,” he told Suzie.

  “And ask her what?” she inquired, thinking that every minute they pursued this line of questioning was a minute more that the killer could be snuffing out another life, or at least making plans to do that.

  She couldn’t have forgotten what they’d talked about last night. “Remember those theories about a possible jealous boyfriend or a stalker we spoke about over fried rice? Well, her ex-roommate might be the one who could tell us about that. She might also know if Bethany was seeing some over-the-top rich guy she couldn’t talk about.” And then, before Suzie had a chance to bring up the obvious, he beat her to it. “And in my experience, roommates always talk about the rich guy their roommates can’t talk about.”

  Suzie frowned, wading through the detective’s sea of rhetoric. Why couldn’t O’Bannon be stoic, like a normal man? Why did he feel compelled to talk until she felt as if she was drowning in words? She found it really annoying.

  Most of all, she found the way he seemed to get under her skin really annoying.

  “All right, we’ll do it your way,” she told Chris grudgingly, resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t be able to take part in the investigation the way she wanted to until she jumped through the hoops he was holding up.

  “You sure that my uncle is all right with you working with me on this?” he asked.

  Sean Cavanaugh was as easygoing as they came. It didn’t take much interaction with him to know that, but everyone had their idiosyncrasy, the one thing that might set them off. Chris didn’t want to inadvertently be a party to something that might cause waves between his uncle and Suzie. However, he was perfectly willing to talk to him about this temporary arrangement if that was necessary.

  “I’m sure it will be.”

  “Will be,” he repeated, immediately picking up on the future tense. He knew what that meant. “In other words, you haven’t asked yet.”

  “I wanted to feel you out first,” Susie told him honestly.

  It wasn’t the spirit of honesty that kept Chris from echoing the statement back at her—with possibly a substitution for the word out. Rather, it was the spirit of survival that kept him from making a comment about his willingness to be “felt” by her.

  “Okay, you’ve done that. Maybe I should be the one to talk to Sean about you lending a hand in the field with this investigation.”

  She didn’t think of Chris as being diplomatic. Neither did she think of him as the best person to convince Sean that she felt it was really necessary for her to get involved, from an investigative standpoint.

  “No,” she responded, “that’s all right. I’ll just give him a call about it from the road.”

  Chris looked at her uncertainly. “The road?”

  She stood up, ready to go. “While you’re driving. To get this interview with the ex-roommate over with,” she prompted, when O’Bannon didn’t immediately pick up on her meaning.

  “Sounds good to me,” he told her as they left the squad room.

  The way he said that made Suzie wonder if perhaps she had just suggested something she was going to live to regret.

  Chapter 7

  The apartment that Bethany Miller had lived in until just recently was located in a fifteen-story high-rise that was barely eight years old. The building itself was in an upscale area of Aurora that was growing only more so.

  Chris drove into the underground parking structure and then he and Suzie rode up to the seventh floor.

  “Looks like a place to aspire to, not move out of,” he commented as they got out of the elevator.

  “Maybe someone told her she could do better,” Suzie guessed. She felt that at twenty-four, which was how old Bethany was, the young woman could have been easily manipulated and talked into anything. It wouldn’t take much.

  “The roommate’s name is Shelley West and she’s in apartment 7D,” Chris announced, looking to either side of him to check the letters. “This way,” he said the next moment, turning to his left.

  Apartment 7D was tucked into a corner, with a lavish painting of blue orchids hanging on the wall not far from the door.

  Chris rang the doorbell and waited. Then rang again. When there was still no answer, he knocked.

  “Maybe she’s not home,” Suzie speculated, five seconds before the door finally opened. Not all the way, just a crack.

  “Sorry, whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any,” the rather statuesque, annoyed looking blonde in the doorway said just before she began to close the door again.

  The slim opening was all Chris needed. He quickly stuck his foot in to keep the woman from closing the door again.

  “We’re not selling anything,” he informed her. “I’m Detective O’Bannon and this is CSI Quinn. We’re with the Aurora Police Department and we’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  The woman seemed to soften slightly as she took another look at Chris. It was obvious to Suzie that the blonde liked what she saw.

  “Now isn’t a good time, but if you come back tonight,” Bethany’s former roommate suggested warmly, addressing only Chris, “maybe we could talk then.”

  “This won’t take long, Ms. West,” Chris promised. “We’d just like to ask you a few questions about your former roommate, Bethany Miller.”

  The smile on Shelley’s face disappeared, and she became all business. “Like I said, now isn’t a good time.”

  “She’s dead,” Suzie said, when it looked as if the woman was going to try to push her way past them to get to the elevator.

  That brought Shelley to a dead stop. Obviously stunned, she glanced from Suzie to the detective. “What?”

  Chris gave her a little more information, watching her expression as he spoke. “Someone killed her Sunday night,” he stated.

  A small gasp of horror escaped her lips and she immediately cried, “Was it Justin?” She looked from one of them to the other. “Did that bastard kill her?” she demanded.

  They had a possible suspect, Chris thought, pleased.

  “Why don’t we step inside your apartment and talk about it?”

  He took the woman’s elbow and guided her back into her apartment, since she appeared to be momentarily unaware of her surroundings or what she was doing.

  “Did she suffer?” Shelley asked him, concerned. “Bethany, did she suffer?”

  “No,” Suzie answered quickly and decisively, before Chris had a chance to say anything. The roommate might have seemed unwilling to talk about Bethany to begin with, but the news of her murder obviously changed the situation. Suzie felt for her. “She died instantly.”

  Chris glared at her. They hadn’t gotten the ME’s report back yet, so there was no way of knowing any of the details involved in the young blonde’s death. What Suzie was saying was pure conjecture. Why was she telling Shelley that?

  “You mentioned a Justin,” he prodded, once the stunned woman sat on the sofa. “Was that the name of Bethany’s boyfriend?”

  “Ex-boyfriend,” she corrected. She was sitting on the edge of the cushion, as if ready to jump to her feet at any second. Shock? Or was there another reason she looked like that? Chris wondered. “She dumped him around the same time that she moved out. Said she wanted more out of life than a boyfriend who was going nowhere and a seventh floor apartment she had to share with a roommate. Bethany said she had plans. Big plans.” The words sounded bitter as Shelley repeated them.

  “Did Bethany share any of those plans with you?” Suzie asked her.

  But the other woman shook her head. “All she said was that her life was about to explode.”

  “Apparently,” Suzie murmured under her breath. Chris shot her a warning look, but Bethany’s former roommate didn’t appear to have heard.

  “How did Justin feel about all this?” Chris asked.
<
br />   “How do you think he felt?” Shelley cried. “He was angry. I heard them arguing about it just before she moved out. He was yelling that he wasn’t going to give up until he talked some sense into her.”

  “Maybe his definition of ‘sense’ is different than ours,” Suzie speculated. “Do you know this Justin’s last name?”

  Shelley paused for a minute, clearly thinking. “Sellers,” she told them. “That’s it. Justin Sellers.”

  Suzie saw the detective inputting something into his phone. She assumed it was the boyfriend’s last name. “Would you happen to know where he lives?”

  Shelley shook her head. “Bethany never mentioned it. Just that it wasn’t up to her standards. But I know he got a job as a barista at one of those coffee shops in the new mall. You know, the one they opened up across from the Main Place movie theaters.”

  “How did she die?” she asked, almost timidly in comparison to the anger she’d displayed when she’d opened the door. “Bethany was always afraid of drowning, because she couldn’t swim.” She looked from the detective to the woman with him. “She wasn’t drowned, was she?”

  “She was strangled,” Chris answered, watching the young woman’s face closely.

  Shelley shivered. “Just like Rosemary,” she whispered.

  It was Suzie who was instantly alert. “Who’s Rosemary?” she asked.

  “My last roommate.” The words were no sooner out of Shelley’s mouth than her eyes flew open in horror as she absorbed what she’d just said. “Oh my God, I’m jinxed.” The second she pronounced herself that, she sought to have her assumption invalidated. “You don’t think I’m really jinxed, do you?”

  She was almost begging one of them to tell her that she wasn’t.

  “You had another roommate who was strangled?” Chris asked incredulously. It seemed like a hell of a coincidence to him. Most people didn’t have one roommate who was killed, let alone two, the same way.

  This time, instead of remaining on the edge of her seat, Shelley collapsed back on the sofa, as if the weight of what she was thinking had gotten too heavy for her to bear.

  “When I was in college. She was my roommate at the dorm, actually.” Details came back to her in fragmented pieces as she spoke. “I hardly knew her, except that she loved to party. Say the word party and Rosemary was the first one there,” Shelley recalled.

  “Would you happen to have a picture of her?” Suzie asked.

  She saw O’Bannon watching her, but she didn’t want to take the time to explain what she was thinking. Not yet. Possibly not ever if she turned out to be wrong.

  “No,” Shelley answered, then thought again. “Wait. Maybe.” Taking out her cell phone, she went through the pictures she had stored there. Finding what she was looking for, she held it up for them to see. “Here, this was Rosemary.”

  After looking at the photo, Suzie passed the phone to the detective. By his expression, she could see that O’Bannon was thinking the same thing she was. Rosemary and Bethany could have passed for sisters.

  “Did they ever find whoever killed Rosemary?” Chris asked.

  Shelley shook her head. “They found Rosemary’s body the morning after the big fund-raiser.”

  “Fund-raiser?” Suzie repeated.

  “My senior year, a couple of years ago,” Shelley said. “The university’s donors threw this big fund-raiser right after our football team won the championship. Rosemary thought it would be the perfect time to make some connections. She said she intended to be somebody, and what better place to start than where all the money people were gathered?”

  It was obvious that now that the memory had surfaced, it was painful for Shelley to deal with.

  “Did you attend the fund-raiser?” Chris asked.

  Shelley shook her head. “I had midterms to study for. I’m not much on partying,” she confessed. “I’m beginning to think it’s safer that way.”

  “You might be right,” he agreed. “Why don’t you give me all the details that you can remember about Rosemary’s death—starting with her last name.”

  Suzie looked at the detective, surprised. So she wasn’t the only one who thought there might be a connection between the two deaths. She felt vindicated—and oddly unsettled at the same time.

  “Ames. Her last name was Ames,” Shelley was saying. “She had this little card made up that read Rosemary Ames to Please. I told her it sounded like a hooker’s card. She got mad.”

  “For the record,” Chris told her, “I think you were probably right.”

  Shelley’s eyes widened. “You think that’s why she wound up dead?” she asked, horrified.

  “Let’s just take this one step at a time,” he told her.

  Chris proceeded to take down the information that the young woman gave him. She couldn’t remember the name of the investigating detective, but she did know that the killer was never found. It was what had prompted her to move off campus, she confided.

  Nodding, Chris took more notes.

  *

  “You seemed to be listening awfully intently back there,” Chris noted as they got back into his car after they left Shelley West’s apartment. “Something strike you as off?”

  Suzie meted out her words carefully. She’d learned not to reveal too much until she was certain of both her facts and her audience. “I was just watching Shelley’s face when she was telling you about what happened to her college roommate.”

  “And?” He couldn’t help wondering why the words had to be all but dragged out of Suzie’s mouth. He wasn’t used to that. He’d grown up with sisters who never hesitated saying what was on their minds—whether he wanted to hear it or not. “Do you think she killed either of her roommates?”

  “No, I don’t,” Suzie told him. “I think she looked genuinely surprised and horrified that her roommates were strangled. I also think that she’ll probably go to bed with all the lights on tonight. Maybe for the next week—if not longer,” she commented, thinking of how wide the young woman’s eyes were when she was relaying the details about her college roommate.

  Chris nodded. “Probably. Right now I’m more interested in this boyfriend who didn’t want to take no for an answer.”

  Suzie still couldn’t shake the feeling that this was bigger than just a jealous possessive boyfriend. “That might explain Bethany’s murder, but what about Rosemary’s?”

  Their concern was Bethany’s murder. They hadn’t even heard about the other one before this morning. “Could be unrelated,” Chris pointed out, his expression giving nothing away.

  “Could be,” Suzie allowed. “But from Shelley’s description, the MO is the same.” And that was the sort of detail that always seemed to tie things up with a bow.

  “From Shelley’s description,” he repeated pointedly. The young woman could have gotten her facts confused, or remembered them wrong, he thought. “Let’s see if we can pull the report on that case, see if our ME thinks the same person killed both of them.” He paused as he came to a stop at a red light, then glanced in her direction. “Looks like you were right.”

  Suzie had learned to be on her guard almost constantly, even when it came to flattery. “About?”

  “We might be chasing a serial killer.” She sighed beside him. The light turned green, but he spared her another glance before putting his foot on the accelerator. “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be pleased about being right.”

  “Pleased?” she echoed in disbelief.

  He heard her voice go up at the end of the word. Chris realized he was treading on sensitive ground and he had no idea why.

  “Wrong word,” he told her. “Not pleased. But it has to be gratifying to be right.”

  “It would be more gratifying if I was wrong,” she told him, staring straight ahead at the road. “The last thing the world needs is another serial killer.”

  “Agreed.” He paused a second, trying to word this carefully, since his last statement seemed to have upset something. “Well, maybe by working
together, we can end his ‘spree’ before the count gets too high.”

  “If it hasn’t already,” she murmured under her breath.

  Chris had never been the kind to tiptoe around things and it obviously was getting him nowhere this time, either. The direct approach was called for here, he thought.

  “Is there something that you’re not telling me?” Chris asked. “Something you know that I don’t?”

  She squared her shoulders, still staring straight ahead. “Only that he has to be stopped.”

  “No argument there.”

  Suzie debated a second, then allowed just the tiniest piece of her past out, generalizing it. “And that he could be in plain sight,” she added, thinking of all the times the police had gone right by their house, never once stopping to question the scout leader that everyone trusted, the dedicated dad who’d palled around with the police force and remained above suspicion for so many years. It made her want to cry every time she thought about it.

  “He might be,” Chris allowed. “But if this is a serial killer, FBI profilers say that most of them are loners who have low-level jobs and in general just don’t fit in.”

  “Most,” she repeated, knowing she should leave it at that. But she couldn’t. “Most doesn’t mean all, though.”

  There was something Suzie wasn’t telling him, but Chris had no way of getting it out of her if she didn’t want to tell him. He tried another approach. “Where did you say you worked before you came here?” Sean had told him Arizona, but maybe that was incorrect.

  He noticed she shifted in her seat before answering. Why?

  “Arizona.”

  All right, she was giving him the same answer she’d given Sean. But Chris wanted more. “Where in Arizona?” he pressed, keeping his tone friendly.

  “Phoenix.” Suzie could feel herself getting defensive. Why was he asking her these questions? “My résumé’s on file,” she informed him.

  He merely smiled in response. “Looking you up would be too much like snooping. I’ve always liked the personal touch myself.”