Cavanaugh In Plain Sight (Cavanaugh Justice Book 42)

by Marie Ferrarella

  Telling herself that she might as well get on with her day, Krys took a quick shower and felt incredibly vulnerable for the six minutes that she was undressed and in the shower. Thanks to her stint overseas, she had learned how to take what amounted to the world’s quickest showers: in and out at what seemed like the speed of light.

  Drying her hair took longer, but only because she had gotten dressed first. That way she was confident she could make a really quick getaway if that turned out to be necessary. The condition of her hair wouldn’t have slowed her down, although it might have wound up attracting attention.

  Showered and dressed in less time than it took to think about it, she found the world was finally coming into focus for her and hurried down the stairs. She crossed into the living room—where she found Morgan wide awake and looking a great deal better than she felt he decently should have.

  The man definitely didn’t look as if he had spent the night in a recliner.

  “Why do you look as if you slept all night?” she accused the moment he turned around. The man looked absolutely refreshed. “You didn’t sleep all night, did you?” she questioned.

  “No,” Morgan answered matter-of-factly. “I took a catnap from around two fifteen to two thirty-five,” he told her. He added with a smile, “That seemed to do the trick for me.”

  She stared at him. He was kidding, right? “How is that even possible?” she asked, telling him, “That’s not normal.”

  “I didn’t say it was normal,” Morgan pointed out. “I just said I took a catnap. About the best way that I can explain it is that when I’m not on duty this way, I manage to store up a fair amount of sleep. I seem to be able to tap into that storage whenever I need to.”

  He had to be making this up. There was no other explanation for this uncanny juggling act of his that he was boasting about. “I don’t believe you,” she told him.

  “That is your prerogative,” Morgan replied magnanimously. “So, now that you’re up, what’s on tap for today?”

  Discounting what he had just said to her about his unbelievable sleeping pattern, she focused on answering his question. “I’ve got four interviews set up for today. One of them is with a test subject who abruptly took back the story she had told me. I want to find out if she was lying to me then, or if she is currently lying now.”

  He thought of what he’d had to go through himself on those occasions when he was forced to dig down until he finally got to the truth. Sympathizing with her, Morgan shook his head.

  “Something wrong?” she asked him. She could feel herself growing defensive even though she didn’t have a clue as to why.

  “Doesn’t it sometimes get to you?” Morgan asked her.

  “Doesn’t what sometimes get to me?” Krys asked.

  “Always having to lock horns with people, dealing with them as if lying was a given, or that they thought of you as the enemy,” he said.

  “I tell myself that I’m ultimately looking for the truth and that’s really enough to placate me,” she told Morgan.

  He didn’t look convinced. “What if you don’t find the truth?”

  That meant giving up and it just didn’t happen, she thought. “Then I just keep digging until I do,” she told him.

  Morgan had no doubts that she was telling the truth. She didn’t give up until she had her answers no matter how long it took—and that apparently was what was putting her life in danger, he thought.

  He supposed that sort of dedication was to be admired, but he wasn’t here to admire her. He was here to make sure that she didn’t get killed because of her “noble” dedication.

  But who would take over after he accomplished his job? After he kept her safe until her stalker was apprehended—or permanently stopped. He had no doubt that she would continue operating this way when she undertook her search for the next story, the next truth.

  The next dangerous subject matter that could get her killed.

  Not his problem, Morgan told himself. He just had to get her through this.

  Even as he thought it, he didn’t completely believe it.

  “Since you don’t have anything to eat, how do you feel about getting breakfast at your local fast food place?” he asked her.

  “I feel fine about it,” she answered. “As a matter of fact, my system would probably go into some kind of shock if I actually ate breakfast in a real kitchen,” she confessed.

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “That sounds like a challenge,” he told her.

  “No, no challenge. Just a simply fact,” she replied. At this point in her life, she’d had more breakfasts on the go than she had consumed sitting down in an actual kitchen.

  He nodded, getting ready to leave with her. “Remind me to stop at a grocery store on our way home tonight so I can pick up some things and make you a real breakfast tomorrow morning.”

  “Do you actually want to cook?” she asked him, saying the verb as if it was tantamount to running naked through a town square.

  “Do I really want to?” he repeated, rolling the question over in his mind. “No,” he answered honestly. “But it’s one of those necessary evils that you learn to live with,” he told her. “Right along with paying taxes—and obeying the law.”

  Does he really equate the two? she wondered. “You’re kidding me now, aren’t you?”

  He grinned. “I guess I must be doing a decent enough job at it since you’re obviously not really sure what I’m doing.”

  No, she thought, and that went double for her because instead of concentrating on the story, the way she should have been, she found herself thinking things about Morgan Cavanaugh that had absolutely nothing to do with her story, or leads or what she did for a living.

  Focus, damn it. Stop thinking about how he makes your skin tingle, she upbraided herself. You don’t get paid for that.

  “Let’s just say I’m good at guessing,” she finally told him. “Now I’ve got less than an hour before my first appointment, so let’s hope that fast food place lives up to its name.”

  “Count on it,” he told her as they walked out of her house.

  He paused in order to make sure that her door was securely locked. Satisfied, he nodded and gestured for her to keep walking.

  Chapter 12

  Krys shifted in her seat.

  “I feel like I’m growing roots,” Morgan said. His eyes never left the entrance leading into the Mexican restaurant. He and Krys had been sitting in the parking lot for almost an hour and a half waiting for her contact to arrive. “I’ve certainly consumed enough ice tea to sufficiently water a tree. You sure that woman you’re supposed to be meeting got the name of the restaurant right?” he asked Krys.

  “She was the one who picked it,” she told Morgan.

  So far, Claire Williams, the woman who had already changed her story once, was turning out to be a no-show. The meeting for the interview had been set up to take place in this restaurant, which was clear across the city, far away from Weatherly Pharmaceuticals, solely for the reason that the woman was afraid of being accidentally overheard by someone from the company. But apparently Claire Williams had decided that this wasn’t safe enough, and she had either changed her mind about the meeting or even possibly lost her nerve.

  They had been sitting out here all this time waiting for her to show, but it was looking as if she wasn’t going to.

  Krys had been checking her phone every few minutes for a call or text, expecting to be on the receiving end of at least an excuse if not an outright apology, but so far, neither appeared to be forthcoming. After ninety minutes had gone by, she was beginning to lose hope.

  Morgan had been watching Krys grow progressively more agitated. “I think it’s safe to say that this woman isn’t coming,” he finally told her. “Why don’t we just move on to your next appointment? Maybe something came up and for some reason this Williams wo
man wasn’t able to make it to the restaurant.”

  Krys sighed. “I suppose you’re right.” Having the woman be a no-show just didn’t sit well with her. Claire hadn’t seemed like the type to do that without so much as an explanation. “But I just can’t get over Claire standing me up like this. She just seemed so genuinely sincere.”

  Morgan had seen this sort of behavior countless times before. “It happens,” he told her. “Maybe she had time to think this over and decided that it just wasn’t worth the risk and was too embarrassed to admit it. Or she might even have been threatened—or bribed,” Morgan told her, citing a couple of reasons why the woman was a no-show. “Believe me, there are a lot of ways to get someone to change their story.”

  “I know,” she replied. She wasn’t born yesterday, Krys thought defensively. “But I would have bet anything that Claire wasn’t like that. When she first came to me, it wasn’t easy piecing everything together. I had to practically drag the information out of her word for word,” she told Morgan. “She didn’t relish being a whistleblower or telling me that the tests conducted on her hadn’t yielded the desired results.”

  “But didn’t she first tell you that they did? That her cancer had appeared to have gone into remission?” he asked her.

  “That was what she was first told, but then she found out her data had been manipulated so that the resulting figures made it seem as if her condition had gone into remission,” she told Morgan. “Claire was adamant about that, not to mention upset. Someone like that doesn’t just do an about-face at the last minute, claiming she had been mistaken after all. That’s why her disappearing act now looks so suspicious.”

  The journalist seemed so passionate about the stand she was taking, Morgan was inclined to believe her. Something could have happened to Claire. Maybe whoever had tried to eliminate Krys had gotten to Claire as well.

  “Why don’t you give me all the information you have on this woman,” he told Krys. “I can send someone to check her out, find out where she’s currently staying.”

  “You don’t think that something’s happened to her, do you?” Krys asked. She really didn’t want to face that possibility.

  He could see that beneath her bravado, Krys was sincerely worried. She did not harbor a Pollyanna view regarding the nature of some of the people she was dealing with. Morgan couldn’t help wondering just how far one or more of the key people at the company would be willing to go to squelch any damning testimonials about this so-called miracle drug Weatherly Pharmaceutical was backing.

  Rather than answer her question outright, he said, “I’ve found that expecting the worst and hoping for the best have always worked for me. Where are you supposed to meet the next person you’re going to be interviewing?”

  Krys didn’t have to look at the appointment log she had on her phone. She knew all the entries on it by heart and answered Morgan’s question. “I assumed that Claire’s interview was going to last until eleven, so we have some time to get to Gerry’s.”

  “Gerry’s?” he repeated.

  Thinking he was unfamiliar with the restaurant, she wrote down the address for him. “Gerry’s,” she declared, turning the piece of paper around so that he could look at it.

  He took in the location. “That’s clear on the other side of the city,” he said. Why was she chasing around from one end of Aurora to the other? “Were you trying to qualify for frequent flier miles with these interviews?” he quipped.

  “I was dealing with paranoid people,” she told him. “I didn’t want to risk one person seeing the other or overhearing their testimony,” she told him. “That could cause all four subjects to just clam up.”

  Morgan nodded. He could see that. “That makes sense,” he agreed.

  “Glad you approve,” she said tersely.

  He realized she was disappointed, but he didn’t care for her tone. “Hey, in case you missed this point, I’m on your side, remember?”

  She flushed. He was right and she wasn’t being fair. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I guess my disappointment got the better of me,” she explained, although that really wasn’t an excuse. “Not to mention that I am worried about Claire.”

  Morgan let the incident slide. “My mother used to have a saying: don’t borrow trouble. It’ll find you soon enough if it wants to. There’s no point in worrying about it until then.”

  Krys managed what passed for half a smile as she acknowledged the late woman’s comment. “Your mother sounded like a nice, levelheaded woman.”

  He heard the wistful note in Krys’s voice. “She was,” he agreed. He’d been thinking about his mother these last couple of days. He normally didn’t unless he was at a family gathering, and even then it was only once in a while. And Krys was the kind of person his mother would have liked. “That’s why her advice to you would be not to take unnecessary risks pursuing your stories.”

  Krys laughed at the directive. “Everything about being an investigative reporter involves taking so-called ‘unnecessary’ risks.” She didn’t want to argue about it. Instead, she turned his ‘advise’ back on the detective. “And what about you?”

  He wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “What about me?”

  “You’re a police detective. Isn’t that all about having to take risks?”

  He assumed that Krys was still talking about his mother’s advice. “She was the wife of a policeman. She knew all about that. She just wanted to make sure all of us were careful when we chose our battles,” he said matter-of-factly.

  She could see that they could wind up debating over this all day—and she didn’t have all day, so she deliberately changed the subject.

  “Didn’t you say something about having someone on the police force check into Claire’s whereabouts, make sure she’s all right?” she reminded him.

  “Yes, my partner,” he told her. “I’m on it,” he said, taking out his cell phone before he got into his vehicle. He nodded toward her ever-present laptop. “Give me whatever particulars you have on this woman so I can pass it on to Fredericks.”

  Krys obliged, flipping open her laptop. She tucked the cover under the keyboard so that Morgan could read any information he needed as if it was written on a regular pad.

  As Morgan read aloud to his partner, Krys continued scanning the area in the hopes that Claire was just running late and would turn up at the last possible moment.

  Morgan had barely finished giving Fredericks the most pertinent information about the absent whistleblower when he heard his partner mutter something inaudible under his breath.

  Straining to hear, Morgan asked, “Anything wrong, Fredericks?” He thought his partner was about to beg off looking into Claire’s whereabouts, saying that he was currently swamped.

  There was a pregnant sigh on the other end. “Well, about that person you said you wanted tracked down—” Fredericks began, then paused.

  “Yes?” Morgan coaxed, waiting.

  “I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” Fredericks said. “Which do you want first?”

  Morgan frowned to himself. “That was fast,” he couldn’t help commenting, still keeping his back toward Krys. “I’ll take the good news.”

  “We found her.”

  “You found her?” Morgan questioned. “You mean Claire Williams?” he asked, confused. “You found Claire Williams?”

  “Yes,” his partner confirmed.

  It didn’t seem possible. “But I just asked you to look for her less than a minute ago,” Morgan protested suspiciously. “How could you have found her?”

  “That’s the bad news,” Fredericks told him. “She’s dead. A couple of hikers found her body in the park earlier this morning.”

  “Are you sure?” Morgan asked as he glanced over toward Krys.

  “I’m sure,” Fredericks answered. “She had her ID card on her.”

  The mom
ent he had looked in her direction, Krys became alert. She instantly cut the distance between them, her heart slamming against her chest. She’d seen that look before. It reeked of apprehension.

  “It’s Claire, isn’t it?” she asked. Then, before he could say anything, she filled in the crucial piece of information herself. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  Knowing what that would mean to her, not to mention that this was about another human being, he would have given anything to be able to deny her assumption. But he couldn’t.

  “Yes.”

  “When?” she asked, struggling to get past the sick feeling in her stomach.

  He told her what Fredericks had told him. “This morning. I don’t have a time of death yet, but her body was found this morning in the park.”

  Guilt pierced her like the business end of a saber. “Because she was coming to give me the specific details about her doctored test results. She’s dead because of me,” she cried. “This is my fault.”

  “No, it’s not,” he insisted. “This is the fault of whoever killed her—and whoever ordered that she be killed, not you.”

  But she wasn’t buying his excuse to whitewash what she had brought about. “None of which would have happened if I hadn’t pushed this,” she insisted, angry tears filling her eyes.

  Fredericks was saying something to him. He couldn’t listen to two people talking to him at the same time. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Morgan told his partner, then ended his call. He shoved his phone into his pocket. “C’mon,” he told Krys. “I’ll feel a lot better getting you to the police station so I can have a squad of cops guarding you.”

  She wasn’t about to get sidetracked, or allow fear to stop her. “This article is more important than ever now. I have to make sure it gets out,” she insisted. “I owe it to Claire.”

  “Nobody is telling you not to write it,” Morgan told her. “But it won’t hurt to be cautious. A few more days isn’t going to make a difference.”

  She didn’t agree. “The drug is due to be out on the open market in a week. There’s a huge demand for it. Who knows what kind of damage it might do if what Claire had told me was right? And, for that matter, who knows what sort of desperate measures someone in the company is willing to go to in order to ensure that it won’t be taken off the market?” she asked him.