Mission: Cavanaugh Baby Read online

  Ashley willed herself to calm down. “Sorry, I guess that came off a little combative. I didn’t mean to sound as if I was spoiling for a fight. Certain things just set me off,” she admitted.

  “I take it you’re not on good terms with your parents,” he concluded.

  He himself couldn’t really imagine what that was like. But then, his parents had been unbelievably understanding, even during those couple of years when he’d thought he’d known everything and they’d known absolutely nothing. They’d waited him out until he’d realized that he was the reigning authority on very little.

  “Not particularly,” she answered, hoping that would shut him down. Taking out her house key, she inserted it into the lock.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  He sounded as if he meant that. It made her feel guiltier about her sudden flare of temper. So much so that she added, “Maybe I would be if they were still around, but they died when I was four—or so I was told.”

  Actually, the qualifying phrase was a lie. Not that she hadn’t been told. One of the dozens of social services women who had traipsed through her life had told her that she’d been found near the burning car. But that woman had had a bad temper and the emotional range of a lemon, so as soon as she could, Ashley had researched the incident for herself.

  She had wound up going through every single news story about a car accident taking two lives and leaving a toddler as the only survivor. It had taken her more than six months, but she’d finally come across a couple of lines in one paper, a few more in another. Working her way backward, she’d greedily absorbed every detail she could find. Even so, there hadn’t been all that much.

  She never had uncovered a name. Or the cause of the accident.

  Shane looked at her, not knowing what to say, only aware that he should say something. “Saying I’m really sorry sounds pretty trite, given the situation,” he finally confessed.

  She shrugged off his words. “Hey, it happened a long time ago, and until this morning, you and I didn’t even know each other so there’s no reason for you to be sorry about any of it.” Ashley lifted her chin proudly. She refused to be on the receiving end of pity, no matter how well intentioned. She wasn’t that homeless waif to be pitied anymore.

  To prevent the detective from saying anything more and making them both uncomfortable, Ashley turned the key quickly and pushed open the door.

  Even before she entered the house, she heard the new dog barking up a storm. The other two dogs, bless ’em, had remembered their training. Whether it was instinct or a keen sense of smell that helped them tell her apart from anyone else, they knew it was her unlocking the door. Because of that, there was no reason for either of them to bark.

  The moment she walked in, the two older dogs surrounded her, vying for her attention, each wanting to be the first one to be petted.

  “Hey, hey, hey, guys, it’s only been a little more than an hour. You couldn’t have missed me that much.” She laughed. “Has the new guy been giving you trouble?” she quipped, amused at the abundant show of affection.

  Looking down at the terrier, who was growling at Cavanaugh, daring him to take a step closer, Ashley bent to pick up the dog.

  “What did I tell you about your attitude, Albert?” she chided. “You’ve got to make an effort to get along with the guys.” She shifted the dog so that his small face was looking up directly at hers. “You’re safe here and there’s nothing to worry about, but you can’t give everyone a hard time, understand?”

  In response, instead of barking, the dog licked her face.

  “No, that’s not going to get you off the hook,” she told him, laughing again.

  Despite her protest, Shane could see that the display of affection got to her.

  She seemed completely at ease, as well as almost like a completely different person around the dogs. It was then that he realized what was different about her. Her guard wasn’t up, and she wasn’t radiating tension the way she seemed to earlier, when she was just around people.

  It hadn’t been a fluke back at the apartment complex. Animals apparently responded to her, and she responded to them.

  “You make it sound as if they understand you,” he observed.

  “Of course they do.” The look on her face indicated that she didn’t understand why he would doubt that even for a moment.

  Chapter 8

  “You’re not actually planning on keeping that dog, are you?” Shane asked once they had arrived back at the precinct.

  True to her promise, she’d only spent a few minutes at her house. Once she was sure that the terrier hadn’t gotten into anything that he shouldn’t, that he hadn’t decided to use the inside of the house as his own personal bathroom and that the other two dogs hadn’t ganged up on him in her absence, she had closed up the house and driven back to the police station.

  Rather than follow in the detective’s wake, something, most likely her ever-present sense of competition, had urged her to take the lead. She made certain to keep his car in her rearview mirror at all times. She also made certain to stay ahead of him for the duration. If he sped up, so did she.

  Hurrying up the front stairs to the entrance now, Ashley glanced in the detective’s direction. Why would he ask that, and why would he even want to know?

  “Why?” she asked bluntly. “Do you want him?”

  “Me? No.” He had nothing against dogs, but then, on the other hand, he didn’t really have anything for them, either. “I just thought that since you already have two large dogs, that particular one would be too much work for you to take on. He seemed a little hyper to me,” he added when Ashley didn’t answer him at first.

  When she did answer, her voice was crisp and cool, with an added element that he couldn’t quite identify. “Jack Russell terriers aren’t exactly known for being calm and laid-back. And this one has had more than his share of drama and trauma. That being said, everyone deserves to be loved.”

  Her answer gave him pause. Shane looked at her as he held open the heavy glass door. He got the definite impression that she wasn’t talking just about the dog anymore. If he didn’t know better, he would have said that she identified with the now homeless animal.

  It sounded rather strange, not to mention possibly far-fetched, but Shane couldn’t really shake the feeling that he was right, now that he’d put it into words for himself.

  Did she identify with homeless, unloved creatures? He found himself more than a little curious about this pushy, headstrong officer. Looking at her, he wouldn’t have thought she was unloved at all. Quite the opposite. But then, although he had no such problem himself, he’d come to recognize that self-image had little to nothing to do with what a person saw reflected in their mirror in the morning.

  “After you lost your parents, did any of your relatives step up?” He saw a dark look enter Ashley’s eyes, a look that warned him to back off now if he knew what was good for him. But he was already in this and saw no other way but to go on with his question, to stick with the subject until he got an answer. “You know, did anyone offer to take you in?” he persisted when Ashley said nothing.

  Her voice was a little strained when she finally did answer his question.

  Strained and distant.

  “They couldn’t determine who my parents were. The interior of the car had burned to a crisp, as had the two people in it. No identification of any kind was ever found. The way I saw it,” she said with a careless shrug, “if there was no identification, no one was forced to come forward and claim me.”

  What a strange way to put it, he thought, as if she believed that if anyone was related to her, they’d clung gratefully to the cloak of anonymity and deliberately stayed silent.

  He knew he should just shut up, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. He supposed this was proof that he really was a Ca
vanaugh, if he ever needed it. Cavanaughs had a tendency to pursue such things as family and honor beyond all reasonable boundaries.

  “Were you ever adopted?” he asked gently.

  Her expression was close to stony as she raised her chin almost defiantly, as if daring him to make something of it. “No, I was never adopted. I wasn’t cute enough, I suppose,” she told him tersely. “I went the other route. Foster homes, some good, some not so much. I was sent back a lot because I wasn’t respectful enough.” She sounded proud of the fact.

  Her mouth curved almost sardonically as Ashley recalled the foster parent who had made that criticism about her.

  “In one case, that meant that I wouldn’t allow my foster father to use me as his substitute wife when his real one went out of town to visit her sister.”

  Shane felt the very air leave his lungs as the horror of that situation hit him. Things like that had never even remotely touched his own childhood or the childhood of anyone he’d grown up with. It wasn’t until he’d become a cop that he was even aware that there were children who lived with that sort of a threat every night of their lives until they were old enough to either run away or exact their revenge.

  “Did he...?” He purposely left the words unspoken, giving her the option of filling in her own version if she chose to.

  Ashley raised her eyes to his. “He tried,” she answered. “Just once he tried. I grabbed the closest weapon—his cherished baseball bat—and took a swing at a place I wasn’t about to let him use. I got sent back the next morning.” Although the man had been livid, he hadn’t filed any charges against her, hadn’t exacted any punishment. He’d been in the wrong and had obviously sensed that she wasn’t afraid to give her version of the events. He’d chosen silence as the best option and had her sent back to the group home.

  Shane found himself vacillating between anger and feeling sorry for her. “How old were you?”

  “Ten.” The single word had an edge to it, as if she was waiting for him to challenge her.

  Shane began to understand why she was closer to animals than to people. From the sound of it, she had never found anyone she could trust, or relate to.

  “You know,” he told her as the elevator arrived, “I can take it from here if you’re tired and want to get back to your house. It is getting late,” he pointed out.

  “That’s okay, I’ll just tag along,” she said with a touch of sarcasm, getting on the elevator. “That is, if you don’t mind a glorified dog catcher hanging around you while you examine the evidence,” she told him, deliberately making reference to the label he’d affixed to her position.

  Being exposed to her a little more than he had been earlier, the phrase he’d used before was now a source of embarrassment to him.

  “I didn’t mean any disrespect...” he began.

  “Yeah, of course you did,” she contradicted mildly. “But don’t worry about it,” Ashley told him in the next breath, dismissing the incident. “It wasn’t exactly the first time someone thought what I do is inconsequential and it sure as hell isn’t going to be the last time.”

  “Is that why you’re looking to get out of the section and into Homicide?” It seemed like a clear-cut choice to him.

  It would have been simpler just to say yes, but Ashley had never been one for taking the simple, expedient route.

  “It’s more a matter of getting to use my brain a little more. I like being challenged, like having to use my brain to figure out what happened, how all the pieces fit together even if they don’t seem to at first. I really don’t see all that much of that sort of thing working with Animal Control.” She laughed softly to herself. “There, it’s more of a catch-and-release type of situation.”

  “Except that you don’t do much releasing,” Shane interjected. It was more of a guess on his part, given the facts he’d just picked up today.

  Rather than butt heads over the point, she referred to the obvious. “If that was true, my place would look like a zoo,” she pointed out. The elevator bell dinged, and the doors yawned open. She looked at him. “Your floor?”

  “This is it,” he confirmed, gesturing for her to get out first.

  Bypassing the squad room, he led her to what amounted to a small alcove with a door located further down the hall. The alcove was in the complete opposite direction.

  Opening the door, he allowed her to look in first. The room was slightly larger than it originally appeared, which still gave it the dimensions of a large walk-in closet. There were a total of three monitors lined up next to one another with three desks beneath them, all with keyboards and DVD players.

  “Pick a seat,” he said, gesturing in the general area of the desks. She picked a chair on the left. Rather than take the one on the other end, he chose the one in the middle, sitting next to her. “Since it looked as if there were several surveillance recordings and you wanted to come along, I thought we could split the work between us, get it done in half the time.”

  “Your lieutenant won’t mind my viewing these?” Ordinarily she would have gone right at it, but since he was being nice, she thought it was only fair not to let him get into trouble because he was letting her join the investigation, at least unofficially.

  “Captain,” he declared. “He’s a captain, not a lieutenant. And all he cares about is how many cases are cleared. We’re down a few people, not to mention my partner who’s on extended medical leave, recovering from that gunshot wound.” It seemed to him that they were always down a few people. “I figure the captain would welcome an extra set of eyes.”

  “Once you tell him,” Ashley ventured, waiting for him to comply.

  “Yeah, once I tell him,” he agreed, making absolutely no effort to turn that hypothetical situation into reality. For one thing, the captain had gone home for the day.

  “Okay, let’s get started,” he suggested, then looked at her. “You’ve got the recordings,” he reminded her.

  Ashley was already retrieving the disks from her pocket. She placed all four of them next to one another on the desk.

  “Take your pick,” she told him, gesturing at the disks. He took the two closest to him, and she moved the other two closer to her.

  “Too bad I forgot to bring the popcorn,” he commented drolly.

  “Next time,” she said automatically.

  She was being flippant, but he rather liked the idea of that, of working with her again at some other, future date.

  “‘Next time,’” Shane echoed. “Okay, here goes nothing,” he said as he inserted the first of his disks into his machine.

  She had already done the same with hers. An image flickered on the screen and she found herself watching the film taken from one corner of the complex.

  * * *

  The recordings featured the area where the victim’s apartment was located. They found themselves watching an exodus of various vehicles from the parking lot as a number of the residents drove off for work this morning. The influx of a few cars coming into the complex and its parking lots represented either friends dropping by, or others swinging by to pick up people as presumably part of a carpool run.

  In a couple of cases, the cars belonged to the complex’s maintenance men arriving for work.

  Watching the endless monotony broken up by the occasional vehicle or resident walking by with either mail to send off, utilizing the mail slot in a nearby bank of mailboxes, or trash to throw into the local Dumpster, Ashley began to feel her eyelids getting seriously heavy. Any second now, she thought she was going to drop off to sleep.

  “Gives new meaning to the word boring, doesn’t it?” she heard Cavanaugh commenting.

  Her eyes flew open. Ashley couldn’t help wondering if he’d just watched her falling asleep and was having fun at her expense.

  Taking in a subtle breath to pull herself together and desp
erately try to come to, Ashley murmured flippantly, “We should make a copy of this and sell it as a cure for insomnia.”

  And that was when she saw it. Saw someone walking up to the apartment door she recognized as the victim’s.

  Gripping the armrests, Ashley straightened. She was instantly wide awake and alert. “Hold on, I think this is it. I think this recording caught whoever went into the victim’s apartment this morning.”

  His sense of observation sharpened to a fine point, Shane moved his chair closer to hers, craning his neck to see.

  “Can you make out the face?” he asked with a touch of eagerness.

  “I’m not sure I can even make out the person’s back,” she confessed, frustrated. The quality of the recording was exceedingly poor. The tape had obviously been used over and over again to make recordings. “Is that a stocky man or a plus-size woman?”

  Shane’s shoulders rose and fell in a silent admission that told her he had no clue.

  “You got me,” he admitted. “I can send this down to the lab wizard, see if she can make it any clearer for us.”

  “‘Lab wizard’?” she repeated quizzically.

  But Shane was quite serious. He nodded to her silent query. “Brenda.” Since the name obviously meant nothing to her, he gave her a more extensive introduction. “She’s the chief of detectives’ daughter-in-law,” he added as a sidebar.

  “Of course she is.”

  Ashley shook her head, astounded, although she tried not to appear that way. What was it like, she couldn’t help wondering, having a family who always had your back, who always looked out for you, no matter what? Who seemed to have more members than a small Third World nation? She would have given anything to have grown up knowing the answer to that question.

  “Tell me, is there an area of this police department that doesn’t have a Cavanaugh in it?” They probably even had someone in the maintenance department, working undercover, she mused.

  “Animal Control comes to mind,” Shane quipped, then he suddenly recalled, “although the vet who treats the dogs in the K-9 unit is the chief’s niece.”