Cavanaugh Cold Case Page 9

  She thought they’d already gone through this. Obviously not to Malloy’s satisfaction. His question reminded her of her mother’s oh-so-frequently voiced lament. “Now you’re beginning to sound like my mother again.”

  “Then I guess it’s a lucky thing for you that we’re back,” he announced, pulling up into the precinct’s rear parking lot.

  Kristin got out of the car while the engine was still running. To her surprise, it continued running. When she looked back into the car, she saw that Malloy hadn’t unbuckled his seat belt.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “I thought I’d take your advice and take a ride to UCA,” he told her, referring to the local university. Abby Sullivan had attended the Aurora branch of the University of California. “Maybe I can find a few answers that might lead us to her killer—and if we’re really lucky, to the killer of all those other young women. I’ll check in with you later to see if you’ve managed to identify any of the other victims,” he said, putting the car into reverse.

  “Something to live for,” Kristin cracked, stepping away from the car.

  The window on his side of the vehicle was rolled down. Malloy craned his neck in order for her to hear him through the open window on the passenger side.

  “It could be,” he told her, underscoring his sentence with that same smile that was beginning to twist into the recesses of her mind like a swiftly boring corkscrew, unsettling it.

  In order to negate the effect, she waved a hand at the detective without even bothering to turn around as she headed to the stairs and away from the parking lot.

  And away from Malloy.

  She could have sworn she heard him laugh as he drove away, but maybe that was just the sound of the wind. At least she could hope it was.

  * * *

  Malloy had always had an easy time of getting whatever he needed by managing to effortlessly utilize his charm. Thus, what might have taken another, more abrupt detective several hours, if not days, to get his hands on, took Malloy next to no time at all.

  After just a minimum of well-selected words on his part had been exchanged with Elizabeth Reid, the dour-looking administrative assistant who had put in more than thirty years in the registrar’s office, she was only too happy to track down Abby Sullivan’s classes and the names of the professors who had taught them. The fact that the schedule was twenty years old didn’t seem to be daunting to her.

  “I’m afraid more than half those educators have either retired or moved on,” the woman told him after she had returned from the archives. Elizabeth Reid had disappeared for a full half hour and had emerged with the former student’s schedules for the two semesters that she had attended the university.

  She held up the fruits of her labor. Two photocopied sheets, one for each semester she had attended the university. “I’ve taken the liberty of checking off the ones who are still teaching here.”

  Taking the schedules from her, Malloy smiled appreciatively at the older woman. “You are a real lifesaver, Ms. Reid.”

  The woman seemed almost lighthearted as she responded, “Elizabeth, please.” And then her smile wavered for a moment as she obviously thought about the reason behind the request. “Anything to help find that poor girl’s killer. I know that these kinds of things happen all the time, but you’d like to think that it will never touch your life,” she said with all sincerity.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury to think that way,” Malloy told her, taking the two sheets of paper she’d put together.

  “No, of course not.” Elizabeth was quick to agree. “It must be very hard for you to deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis,” she speculated. “How do you stand it?”

  Malloy had never dwelt on that part of it. If anything, he always thought himself past the ordeal.

  “It comes under the heading of ‘protect and serve,’” he answered. He glanced at the two pages that the administrative assistant had handed him. “If I could bother you with just one more question—”

  Elizabeth stifled what sounded suspiciously like a giggle. “You’re not bothering me at all, Detective,” she assured him with an encouraging smile.

  His eyes indicated the names on the schedules. “Could you tell me where I could find the teachers that you’ve checked off?”

  “Of course, of course,” she instantly agreed. The next moment she was writing in the information beside each of the marked names. Handing the pages back to him, the woman said, “If you need anything else, please, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “I won’t,” he told her with feeling. When he took her hand, it was as much to caress it as it was to shake it. “And thank you.”

  “My pleasure, Detective Cavanaugh,” the woman said, addressing his back with a heartfelt sigh. “My pleasure entirely.”

  * * *

  The name Abby Sullivan rang no bells for the teachers he subsequently questioned. None of the five instructors he spoke with could remember anything outstanding about the young woman. They were all equally dismayed when they were told why he was questioning them about a run-of-the-mill undergraduate who had left no impression to mark her passage.

  In an attempt to jolt their memories, Malloy showed each of them a photograph he had gotten from the victim’s father.

  Only one of the teachers, Roman Ward, a professor of English lit, recalled her at all.

  “Yes, I think I do remember her,” Ward said, after studying the photograph on Malloy’s smartphone. “She had a nice smile. The kind that was both shy and managed to pull you in at the same time.” He handed the smartphone back to Malloy. “You say she was killed?” he asked in subdued disbelief.

  “Yes.” Malloy tucked away his phone. “Sometime in the fall of ’95,” he added, studying the professor’s expression for any telltale reaction that might give something away.

  There was none.

  But Malloy noted down the man’s name just in case. Not everything was black and white.

  So far, the professor was the only one who even recognized Abby Sullivan.

  * * *

  “Could mean absolutely nothing,” Malloy allowed. “And then again, he could have said he remembered her to hide the fact that he had reacted when I showed him Abby’s photograph,” he told Kristin when he got back from the college campus.

  It was after five, and the morgue seemed eerier somehow the closer it was to nighttime.

  “So in other words, you’re telling me you have nothing to tell me,” Kristin concluded, putting down the small digital recorder she had been talking into just before Malloy’s unannounced arrival at the morgue.

  She was becoming oddly accustomed to having him just pop up, and this disturbed Kristin to no end.

  “More or less, yes,” Malloy agreed. He was about to add a playful coda that he just couldn’t make himself stay away, but decided to table that for the time being. With someone like Kristin, unless he was mistaken, less was more.

  “Well, lucky for you,” she told him with some self-satisfied pride—an emotion she wasn’t accustomed to having, “I’ve had a more productive afternoon.”

  “Regale me,” he told her, happy that at least one of them was getting somewhere with this.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” she countered, not quite sure where Malloy wanted to go with his invitation. “But I did verify my hypothesis.”

  “Which is?” he asked, trying to remember. Since nothing occurred to him immediately, he requested, “Refresh my memory.”

  For once, Kristin obliged without prefacing it with a cryptic comment. “I told you that all those bodies we found were killed when they were between the ages of around eighteen to thirty.”

  “And now you’re sure?” he guessed. It wasn’t exactly much of a stretch, given her lead-in.

  “As I can be forensically,�
� she replied.

  “And that verification came in the form of—”

  “Their teeth,” she told him. It was obvious that she was very pleased with this turn of events.

  She might have been pleased, but Malloy had no problem making it known to her that he didn’t understand the process.

  “But wouldn’t you have to have someone’s dental records to attempt a match?” he asked.

  “Yes, I would,” she agreed. “If it was for a specific ID. However, figuring out a person’s age at the time of death in general depends on the development of the enamel on the person’s teeth. Technically it’s called a C-14 analysis and when conducted on people who were born in the last fifty years—”

  Malloy held up his hands in blatant surrender. “You don’t have to go into the particulars, Doc. I believe you.”

  He paused to look around at the various exam tables, not to mention any available flat surfaces, that were covered with the disjointed but fairly neatly arranged skeletal remains that had been dug up.

  “So on the surface,” he theorized, “it looks like we’re dealing with a serial killer who had a thing for females between the ages of eighteen—and Abby Sullivan was nineteen—and thirty, during a killing spree that ended, what? Twenty years ago, right?”

  Kristin nodded.

  There was still that one sticking point that nagged at him. “That doesn’t explain the presence of the lone male skeleton that was dug up.”

  She reminded him of what she’d said the other day. “Like I said, he could have been a transvestite and our serial killer did away with him in a rage when he found out he’d been duped. His limbs weren’t hacked, so this killing doesn’t appear to have been thought out like the rest of the murders. It was spur of the moment,” she added. “Or,” she went on, thinking out loud, “the male victim could have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Malloy saw what she was getting at. “You mean he could have witnessed the killer in action, doing away with one of the girls, and got killed himself so that he wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Yes,” Kristin agreed with enthusiasm. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  Malloy rolled the thought over in his head. “Could explain why the male victim was buried near the others,” he said.

  “Not near,” Kristin corrected. “On top of.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Come again?”

  “I asked O’Shea for details on how he had found the victim, and he said that all the other bodies were in separate graves, but they found the male skeleton on top of one of the female skeletons.”

  “Well, that’s definitely something to think about,” Malloy said, rolling this new piece of information over in his head. “Anything else that you think I should know?” he asked.

  “That’s it for now,” she said.

  He thought he detected a note of weariness in the medical examiner’s voice. The woman had definitely put in a long day.

  “It’s after hours,” he pointed out. “Why don’t you knock off for the night? I’ll buy you a drink to celebrate.”

  Kristin’s guard was immediately up. “Celebrate what?”

  Malloy shrugged. “Making progress on the case. The end of the day. Whatever you like.”

  “What I’d like,” Kristin told him evenly, “would be for you to stop hitting on me.”

  If she was annoyed, her voice gave him no indication. He had the feeling she was saying this just out of habit, for form’s sake.

  “This isn’t me hitting on you,” he told her. “This is me, offering to buy a colleague a drink.”

  “Well, ‘colleague,’ I’ve still got a few loose ends I’d like to tie up before I leave. But thanks for the offer. Maybe some other time.”

  “Maybe,” he allowed, letting it go at that.

  For now.

  Baby steps, Malloy told himself. Some things have to be reached using baby steps. And she hadn’t told him to get lost or to hold his breath. She hadn’t really said no at all and that, in his book, was progress.

  “See you tomorrow, Doc,” he said as he walked out her door.

  “Same time, same place,” he thought he heard her mutter to herself.

  Malloy grinned to himself as he went down the hall to the elevator.

  Chapter 9

  Before leaving for the night, Malloy stopped off at his desk. He wanted to get copies of several of the missing persons flyers he’d pulled off the database earlier. If he wasn’t going to be taking the lovely medical examiner out for a drink, he reasoned, then he might as well be doing something useful. He had to admit, this case had him more intrigued than most of the cases he had handled in the past year.

  Gathering together the papers he wanted, Malloy folded them in half, slipped them into the pocket of his jacket and locked his desk.

  Just as he did, he heard what was the unmistakable crack of thunder. It sounded as if it was close by. This was not the time of year for rain, at least, in his experience, not here in this part of California. While the rest of the country was familiar with the clichéd rhyme about the relationship between April showers bringing May flowers, there were no April showers in Aurora.

  At least, hardly ever, he amended.

  But obviously, whoever was in charge of the weather out here hadn’t familiarized themselves with the area’s bylaws recently. Rain was supposed to be relegated to falling between November and March, with the concentration of rain happening in the middle of that range.

  However, it seemed that all bets were off.

  By the time Malloy reached the first floor and walked through the precinct’s rear glass doors, rain had definitely arrived.

  With a vengeance.

  Malloy owned an umbrella, but as to even its general location, well, he hadn’t a clue. So, raising his jacket up over his head, he made a run for it to the rear parking lot.

  Most of the cars in this part of the lot had cleared out, so there was no momentary hesitation as he tried to find his car. It was right out in plain sight.

  Hitting the security button on his key ring, he heard the familiar squawk that told him the car had unlocked and was waiting for him to get in.

  He did the latter posthaste.

  Brushing the stray drops of rain from his hair and his clothes, Malloy allowed himself a moment to bless CSI’s efficiency. The perimeter of the nursery had been swept in its entirety, and all the data that was data had been tagged, collected and brought to the lab. The heavy rainfall wouldn’t be interfering with his case or washing out what could have been a possible crime scene. That was an immense relief.

  Buckling up, Malloy put his key in the ignition and turned on the lights at the same time. Time to go home and see if there was anything he could scrounge up in his refrigerator. He knew he could swing by Andrew’s house and find a meal waiting for him. The man always had something ready to put on the table, no matter what time of day or night someone arrived on his doorstep.

  But as tempting as that was at the moment, Malloy knew it would be taking advantage of a very good thing, and he really didn’t want to be seen in that light. He genuinely liked the spur of the moment—as well as the planned—get-togethers that his newly acquired grand-uncle held, and the last thing he wanted to do was show his appreciation by becoming a moocher.

  Rain suddenly began lashing at his windshield, as if to somehow make up for all the time that had been lost this past year.

  Too much rain was as bad as not enough. No one wanted to find themselves caught up in a flash flood without warning, or to have—

  Malloy’s thoughts suddenly evaporated as he squinted at something that was smack out in the middle of the front lot. Drawing closer, he saw that it was a stalled car. A stalled car with a very wet driver, despite the umbrella the driver was juggling in on
e hand. The wind had decided to whip up the rain, and it was falling not just down, but sideways, as well.

  The umbrella was just two steps away from being totally useless.

  The driver was circling the trunk and taking out what appeared to be a jack.

  What a time to get a flat tire, he couldn’t help thinking.

  Even as the thought—and sympathy—crossed his mind, he began slowing down. Malloy was close enough to the scene now to see that the person dealing with the flat tire was a woman.

  No sooner had he noted that than he realized that he was slowly driving by Kristin’s car. He’d already intended to stop and help the driver, but this really cinched it. The next moment, Malloy came to a dead stop right beside Kristin’s two-door compact.

  Rolling down the window on the passenger side, he leaned over so she could hear him more clearly and asked, “Need help?”

  Kristin would have loved nothing better than to say “No,” that she had it covered and then to wave him on his way. But as much as she loathed to admit it, she did need help. She’d never changed a flat tire before.

  Not only that, but just standing out here had made her look as if she was the first cousin of a drowned rat—despite the umbrella she was holding.

  To stay dry, she would either need the wind to cooperate—or to be encased in a bubble.

  The distress Kristin felt was because she’d never been in a situation like this before, and because she had to admit that she’d never been in a situation like this before. She didn’t like not being in control. She liked being perceived that way even less.

  “Yes,” she was forced to admit. Then after a beat, she added an almost unwilling, “Please.”

  Malloy grinned when he heard the inclusion of the second word. Rolling his window back up, he turned off the engine—leaving the car exactly where he’d stopped it—and got out. Kristin immediately shifted over to him, holding her umbrella aloft just enough to cover both of them.

  “Lucky for you that I was looking for a damsel in distress to save,” he told her, then indicated the front seat of her vehicle. “Why don’t you get into the car and I’ll take care of this?”