A Cavanaugh Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  It was quite possible that, in her grandmother’s efforts to sell her—the woman and her boyfriend needed money to support their ever-growing dependence on drugs—she might have been taken across a state line or two. But since she had no extensive recollection of that time, it didn’t count.

  Wanderlust hadn’t brought her to Aurora, a city in Northern California, but a promise. A promise she had given to a distraught mother who had begged her to bring back her baby. That the woman also happened to be her cousin just made the promise much more urgent and personal. It was a promise she had every intention of keeping, even if it wound up taking her to hell and back.

  So far, though, it had only taken her to Aurora, California. She’d come as fast as she could, and with any luck she would still be in time to save Megan Willows before the four-year-old was completely swallowed up without a trace.

  She’d promised to reunite mother and child by Christmas, and that meant within two weeks, leaving her with little time. She didn’t plan on wasting any of it.

  As she drew closer—close enough for Tom to become aware of a fresh, herbal scent—her brilliant blue eyes swept over the nameplates on both desks. The perusal brought a slight reproving frown of confusion on the woman’s full lips.

  “I’m looking for Detective Thomas Cavanaugh,” she said in a voice that reminded a man of golden whiskey being poured into glass used only for very, very special occasions. “Do either of you know where I might be able to find him?”

  The question was directed at both men as she studied each, one at a time.

  “Right there,” Angelo volunteered, pointing to his partner.

  Tom noticed that LaGuardia pressed his lips together—probably to keep from literally drooling as he gaped at the woman.

  For good measure, Kait looked down again at the nameplate on the man’s desk. This time, there was displeasure in her frown. The nameplate didn’t read Cavanaugh, it read Cavelli.

  Kait didn’t appreciate being jerked around. She’d had more than her share of that for a good part of her life. As first a police officer, then as the youngest officer to make detective, she’d had to prove herself over and over again. It got to be almost a daily event for the first year and a half, until the men she worked with began to take her seriously. Began to see that she intended to stay whether they approved of her or not.

  Eventually, they had come around. Not all of them, but enough. Enough to make her life just the slightest bit easier if she chose to take that route.

  For her part, Kait wanted no favors. She just wanted not to be harassed so that she could do her job the way she was meant to. Eventually, by the very nature of her dedication and her character, she won the respect she wanted.

  But she took none of it for granted, knowing that each day would have challenges. Challenges she intended to meet and win.

  “Your nameplate says Thomas Cavelli,” she pointed out, nodding at it.

  “Yeah, it does,” Tom acknowledged.

  His eyes drifted over the length of her. She was lean, but no pushover. He’d bet a large sum of money that beneath that fitted gray jacket and straight skirt was a muscular body. She didn’t do it to look good, he decided. She did it to be fit. To be ready.

  But ready for what?

  And what was a woman who looked like that doing here? She certainly wasn’t someone who’d recently had a child go missing. She bore none of the telltale signs of a woman who’d been suddenly stamped with tragedy. Nor did she appear distraught and holding it together for the sake of the child who had been lost or abducted.

  She smelled of something fresh and herbal, not of rampant fear.

  So who was she and why had the chief of detectives sent her here—if he actually had?

  Tom cast a skeptical side glance at his partner. But LaGuardia struggled not to visibly salivate as he hung on every syllable that passed over the woman’s perfectly shaped lips. If Angelo had put the mystery woman up to this, he would have taken more of a backseat to what was being played out before him.

  “So which is it?” Kait asked. A hint of impatience wove through her voice. “Cavanaugh or Cavelli?”

  It occurred to her that no matter which name it wound up being, someone as handsome as this man was undoubtedly far too consumed with his own appearance to be very good at anything else. He was probably someone’s son and had risen through the ranks because of that rather than any actual merit.

  “That is the question,” Tom responded, the corners of his mouth curving ever so slightly.

  And that, indeed, was the question. The question each of them had to tackle on their own. He and his siblings each had to make up their minds how to handle this new earthquake in their lives. Did they continue life beneath the moniker they’d always responded to? Did they stay Cavellis? Or did they switch over to the new name which, according to sworn testimony from the hospital administrator, was the right one?

  Cavelli or Cavanaugh, which would it be?

  Obviously, the chief of detectives had already made up his own mind about the matter.

  “That’s a boring story for a rainy afternoon over a bracing glass of bourbon,” Tom told her easily, his eyes never leaving her face. “The more important one is what brought you here?”

  He got down to business quickly, Kait thought. She could appreciate that.

  Taking a small, almost imperceptible bracing breath, Kait dug into her jacket pocket and took out her wallet. It contained exactly one credit card, her license, a few bills totaling eight dollars—and her official police identification.

  She flipped her wallet open and held up her ID for the quiet, scrutinizing detective to see. “I’m Detective Kaitlyn Two Feathers—”

  She got no further than that.

  “Two Feathers?” LaGuardia echoed. He stared at the torrent of red hair which seemed in direct contradiction to the Native American surname on her identification.

  “Yes,” she replied. There was just the slightest hint of humor in her eyes. The detective wasn’t the first person to react this way upon first hearing her last name. “Two Feathers.”

  Tom took a less brash approach. “Husband?” he asked mildly, since the woman before him looked no more Native American than he did.

  Actually, he probably could pass for Native American more easily since he had the dark, almost blue-black hair that was so prevalent among the people of the tribes sprinkled throughout the United States.

  “Why?” Kait countered. Her eyes met his in a steady, unwavering gaze. “Do I need one?”

  “Not in my book,” LaGuardia piped up before Tom could answer. One look at the older man and Tom could see that his partner was badly smitten with this commanding, unsmiling woman.

  “You don’t need anything,” Tom informed her mildly. “It’s just that you don’t look like a Native American, so I thought maybe that was your married name.”

  He glanced down at her left hand. She wore only a watch. A man’s watch by the look of it, since it seemed too large for her. A gift? Something to remember someone by? In either case, that was the only form of adornment the redhead had on either hand. Beyond that, there were no rings, official or otherwise. No bracelets and no piercings of any sort.

  He got the distinct impression that she was hiding something, something that went beyond her unusual surname. He couldn’t help thinking this was a woman of secrets.

  He grew more intrigued by the moment.

  Chapter 2

  The handsome detective’s reaction wasn’t anything new. Kait was used to people looking at her with a puzzled expression the first time they learned her last name.

  She could almost read their thoughts: but you don’t look like a Native American.

  There was a reason for that. More specifically, there was a reason why she didn’t look like a Navajo, which in her case was the tribe the name had originated from. She didn’t look like a Navajo because she wasn’t one.

  As close as Kait could figure, she was part Irish, part Welsh and part
mutt most likely. The mother she couldn’t remember and the grandmother she wished she didn’t hadn’t exactly had the time or the inclination to talk to her, much less ruminate about her roots and her heritage.

  Her mother had been forced to give her up when Kait was only a few days old—something she assumed the woman who gave birth to her did gladly since Kait’s very existence was a reminder of the man her mother had been convicted of killing in a jealous rage.

  Her mother had given her to her own mother. Her grandmother, Ada, had kept her around not out of any sort of love, but because she turned out to be useful. Ada quickly discovered, much to her happiness, that people were more apt to be lenient and forgiving of a woman caught stealing if the theft had been committed in an attempt to feed her granddaughter.

  At least that was what her grandmother told anyone who would listen whenever she was caught.

  That sort of thing went on for a couple of years—until Kait grew out of her “cute baby” stage. When that happened, her grandmother had tried to earn a profit in a more cut-and-dried sort of way—by selling her outright.

  Or trying to.

  Convinced that a childless couple would pay top dollar for a “little one of their own,” her grandmother had approached one such unsavory candidate, asking for “a rock-bottom price.”

  The man turned out to possess a remnant of a conscience, and he called the police to tip them off about what Ada was trying to do. The police in turn set up a sting, sending in two officers to pose as a couple desperate to start a family at all costs. The sting went down and her grandmother was sent to prison. Ironically, the same one where her mother was serving time and where she herself had started life.

  The name of the police officer who had been part of the sting was Ronald Two Feathers. It was his name that she proudly bore and had for a number of years now.

  But Kaitlyn saw no reason to explain any of that, or to tell the two detectives sitting at their desks—even the kneecap-melting, good-looking one—how the name eventually became hers legally. Nor did she intend to tell them that the missing little girl belonged to Ronald’s niece. Family matters were private to her. Besides, knowing her background made no difference one way or the other, and as far as they were concerned, it didn’t affect why she was here.

  As a matter of fact, had she lived the perfect American life—instead of the exact opposite for the first twelve of those years—she still would have been here, searching for Megan. Been here because of the desperate look in her cousin Amanda Willows’s eyes as she begged her to find her little girl, her baby.

  Amanda’s husband—and Megan’s father—was deployed overseas. It had taken two days to reach Corporal Derek Willows through channels, and now the young Marine was flying home to be with his wife in their time of anguish. Because of the zigzag pattern of the connecting flights, he would be here just before Christmas. More than anything in the world, Kait wanted to give the young couple something to celebrate, not mourn. It was the least she could do, if for no other reason than she owed it to Ronald.

  Unzipping the heavily creased leather binder she was carrying, Kait took out an enlarged, eight-by-ten photograph of a little girl with curly, dark brown hair. The photo had been taken at an amusement park on Megan’s last birthday. She was looking directly into the camera, and it was the smile and the bright eyes that immediately captured the viewer’s attention. The smile was so wide, so radiant and so genuine, it seemed almost three-dimensional as it jumped off the page.

  “This is Megan Willows,” Kait said in a voice that seemed stripped of all emotion. “Nearly four days ago, she was abducted right out of her own front yard by a man driving a white van.”

  Tom raised his eyes from the photograph to look at the woman who had brought this to him.

  Four days.

  In almost ninety percent of the cases, four days was practically a death sentence. The expression in the woman’s eyes told him she was aware of that. It was obvious that she chose not to focus on the grim prognosis but on the successful recovery of the child.

  At first glance, optimism would have been the last thing he would have associated with the red-haired detective.

  “Where’s the little girl’s home?” Tom asked.

  “Taos. New Mexico,” Kait added after a beat. She was quick to cut him off before he could say the obvious. “And yes, I know I have no authority here, which is why I spoke to your chief of detectives first. He said it was all right if I worked the case, as long as you were there to supervise.”

  There was more, a lot more, but he didn’t need to know that. Didn’t need to know that she wasn’t here in any sort of official capacity. Didn’t need to know that once her personal connection to the kidnapped girl had come to light, she’d been taken off the case no matter how much she’d asked not to be. His knowing wouldn’t help her find the little girl.

  She paused a moment before continuing. “I usually work alone, but I’d be willing to work with the devil himself if it meant getting Megan back safe and sound.”

  “The devil’s not available,” Tom commented. “I guess you’ll have to make do with me for the time being.” He glanced down at the photograph again. If that was his daughter and she went missing, he would be willing to move heaven and earth to find her. Was that what the detective with the deep blue eyes was doing? Moving everything in sight as she looked for a trail? “If this happened in New Mexico, what are you doing here?”

  “One very sharp little boy playing across the street copied down the van plates while his sister ran into the house to get Megan’s mother—apparently it was a play-date and Mrs. Willows was supposed to be watching the children.” Kait’s mouth twisted slightly in a smile she didn’t feel. “Unfortunately, she’d just stepped inside to get the kids some snacks. The abductor saw his chance, swooped in and grabbed the little girl before anyone knew what was happening. Her little girl.” As Kait related the story, she could actually feel Amanda’s pain. “It’s obvious that whoever took the child planned this abduction very carefully. My guess is that he had been watching her, learning if there was a route.”

  She used her words judiciously, Tom noted. He watched the detective’s face as he asked, “Abduction, not kidnapping?”

  Kait shook her head. “No. There’s been no ransom call or note. No demands made and no contact of any kind. This was someone who targeted Megan specifically, for a reason.”

  Even as she said the words, they tasted like bitter herbs in her mouth. This kind of an abduction meant the person who had abducted the little girl was either a pedophile or he had taken Megan, who was exceedingly pretty, in order to sell her.

  It was the latter possibility that had raised a red flag in Kaitlyn’s mind. Someone might be trying to sell the child the way her grandmother had tried to sell her. That kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in a country like this. Not ever.

  And yet it did. More times than she would even allow herself to think about.

  The detective from New Mexico had said two things that had caught Tom’s attention and raised questions in his mind. She’d mentioned that she had talked to Brian, not that her superior had placed a call to the chief of detectives and spoken with him. Was that just a slip of her tongue, or was she off the reservation, so to speak, and acting on her own?

  The spontaneous phrase evoked a hint of a smile to his lips. Under the circumstances, given the woman’s last name, he knew that she would most likely deem the harmless cliché inappropriate. He was relieved that he’d thought it rather than asked it, though he’d meant no disrespect. But Detective Two Feathers didn’t appear to him to have a sense of humor.

  She saw his smile before he managed to suppress it. “Something about this case strike you as funny, Detective?”

  “No, not at all,” he replied soberly. And that brought him to his second question, which he’d asked already. “So, you didn’t answer me. What brought you here?”

  “The van had out-of-state license plates,” she told him.
“When I ran them, it turns out that the vehicle was a rental and it belongs to a California rental agency. Specifically, a rental agency located right here in Aurora.” She would have gone to the FBI with this, but there was no proof that the van ever returned to California. She needed more evidence before the bureau could be called in.

  At least there was some kind of trail, Tom thought. The next question that occurred to him was one he regarded as rhetorical. “Have you gone to see them yet?”

  He didn’t get the answer he expected.

  Kaitlyn had wanted to, but her hands were tied by protocol. There were times—such as this—that she wished she’d become a private investigator instead of following in Ronald Two Feathers’ footsteps. P.I.s had more leeway and freedom in the way they operated. Red tape and tedious procedures drove her crazy, forcing her to walk when she wanted to run or fly.

  “No, I have not,” she told him, far from pleased with the admission. “That’s what I need you for.”

  The word need seemed to almost shimmer before him for a split second before he banked it down and forced himself to focus on the situation.

  Even so, he could literally feel LaGuardia looking on enviously. He was surprised that his partner was keeping as quiet as he was. Ordinarily, he jumped right into the conversation, eager to be a part of whatever was going down.

  “Always nice to be needed,” Tom commented. The remark was meant to be light, not a come-on, but he could sense the woman’s back going up. They would need to have a few things cleared up at the outset. “You know, you might want to lighten up a little. I think we’ll get along much better if you do.”

  “I have no interest in ‘getting along,’ Detective,” she informed him, forcing herself to sound distant and cool. “I just want to find the missing girl. Now can you help me, or do I go back to your chief of detectives and tell him he has to assign someone else to the case?”