A Cavanaugh Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Think about it. If he’s the only one, he has to grab the girl, stick her into the van, then run to the driver’s side and drive away. Too risky that way and too time-consuming. Megan was taken from her front yard in broad daylight. There had to be two people involved. And maybe the second guy got careless, left his prints on the dashboard, or the door panel. All we need is one clear print if the guy has a record somewhere.” She looked at Tom, silently asking him to humor her. “It’s all we’ve got.”

  He nodded after a moment. What she’d just said made sense. And who knew? Maybe they would finally get lucky with this case.

  “You’re right,” he told her. He grabbed his wallet and car keys off the bureau. “Let’s go.”

  They arrived at the car-rental agency in record time. A very nervous-looking Clark was pacing back and forth before the dark office. An equally jumpy-looking Chihuahua tethered to a leash kept pace with him.

  The moment Clark saw the white Crown Victoria approaching, he tensed, his drawn face looking even more pasty in the light from the streetlamp. It was apparent that he was eager to go home and put all this behind him as quickly as possible.

  “It’s back here, I’ll show you,” he offered eagerly, then hurried away without waiting.

  “Was there any footage of the van being brought back?” Kait asked. Maybe this time, the man hadn’t kept his face so hidden. If they had a clearer picture to work with, maybe someone would recognize him.

  “No, sorry,” Clark said. “Camera broke down right after you left. The boss is real mad. He just got that one on eBay about three months ago. Said you can’t trust anyone these days,” the clerk complained, shaking his head.

  “So, no tape,” Tom repeated. He found that just too much of a fortunate coincidence. Entering the lot, they made their way over to the white van. It was the only one there. “Just the van,” he said as they stood in front of it. The vehicle had recently been washed. There didn’t appear to be a speck of dust on it. He frowned. “Probably no fingerprints, either.”

  “We don’t know that,” Kait insisted, for once refusing to relinquish hope. “We get this to the lab, have them go over every inch of the van to see if—” She stopped talking abruptly, then said, “Oh, damn.”

  Tom looked around, searching for what had just caused her to stop midsentence. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. “What?”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she lamented. Every time she was ready to go flying out of the gate, something stopped her and held her back. “There’s not going to be anyone working at the lab—is there?” she asked, prepared for a negative reply, hoping for a positive one.

  “The lab’s usually closed on a Sunday,” Tom said, confirming her fears. And then he smiled. “But you forget, I’ve got an in with the head of the day unit,” he said with a wink.

  His father. How could she have forgotten that? “You think he’ll come down if we ask him to?” she asked, holding her breath.

  The answer to that was a resounding yes. “When my dad was a kid, one of his sisters—or one of the little girls he thought was his sister at the time—was abducted. No ransom note, nothing. She was gone for months. The family pretty much gave up all hope of ever finding her.”

  He’d heard the story more than a few times when he was growing up, first as a warning to be careful not to trust strangers, and later on as a reaffirmation about the positive things that happened in life—as well as the reason why his father became part of the police force.

  “But it turned out she was one of the lucky ones, thanks to the relentless efforts of the detective who caught the case. His name, by the way, was Seamus Cavanaugh.”

  She looked at him in disbelief. But he didn’t appear to be pulling her leg. “Was that—”

  Tom nodded. “Yeah, the man who turned out to be Dad’s real father.”

  Kait could only shake her head in wonder. “Talk about it being a small world…”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said with a laugh. That had always been his mother’s favorite line. He could only think how she would have reacted to the past couple of months. No doubt she would have been stunned. And, most likely, echoing the line over and over again. “So, to answer your initial question, yeah, I’m pretty damn sure I can get my father to come out and open up the lab. I’m equally sure that he’ll go over the car with a fine-tooth comb. If there’s a fingerprint to be found, he’ll find it.”

  With that, Tom took out his cell phone to call his father.

  Kait turned toward the clerk, who seemed to be growing more and more antsy.

  The moment she looked in his direction, he blurted out, “Can I go home now?”

  She could understand his wanting to go home, but the man was sweating. And it was exceedingly cold tonight. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Is something wrong, Clark?” she asked him, watching his face.

  “No.” He glanced around uneasily, then seemed to almost huddle closer to her if not actually against her. “Why do you think there’s something wrong?”

  “Well, for one thing, you’re fidgeting,” she pointed out. “Any particular reason for that?”

  “Yeah,” he bit off, agitated. “According to you, whoever drove that van is a kidnapper. He might not take kindly to my calling you about the van. What if he comes back and sees me talking to the police? He’ll kill me, I just know it!”

  She sincerely doubted that the man would be back, not if he went through all this trouble to get rid of the van in the dead of night in order to erase any connection between it and him. But the rental clerk was almost jumping out of his skin and she took pity on him.

  “If he does come back, you call us right away and then get as far away from here as possible,” she advised in as calm a voice as she could. “But I wouldn’t worry about him if I were you. We’re bound to get him, and when we do he’ll be going away for a very long time. The last thing on his mind will be the rental agency and you.”

  Clark looked at her, a wide-eyed puppy. “You think you’ll get him?”

  “Thanks to you, yes, we’ll get him.” And when we do, I’m going to get him to tell me where Megan is even if I have to beat it out of him, she added silently.

  The clerk’s agitated, microscopic pet had been barking at Tom and at her nonstop since they’d arrived. She looked at the nervous man now and asked, “What’s your pet’s name?”

  “Killer,” he told her.

  “Of course it is,” she murmured under her breath.

  If ever a name didn’t fit a pet, this was it. But he made so much noise, she could barely hear herself think. And Tom was still on the phone, trying to hear what was being said on the other end of the line.

  Kait crouched down and held her hand out to the animal in a nonthreatening manner. She let the dog sniff first her fingertips, then her hand before she made the attempt to pet the animal.

  When she did, Killer instantly flopped down on his side, waiting to be petted some more.

  “He doesn’t usually do that,” Clark said, mystified at his pet’s reaction.

  “I’m pretty good with animals,” she told him as she rubbed the dog’s small stomach. At least he’d stopped barking, she silently congratulated herself.

  The dog shifted so that he was completely on his back, his little paws held up as if begging. And in a manner of speaking, he was. He presented Kait more of an area to rub.

  Kait laughed softly. What she’d told the rental clerk was true. She was good with animals. She had an affinity for them, especially the ones that had been turned loose to wander the streets, hungry, or the ones that had been badly abused before they’d been thrown out.

  She could relate to both their survival instincts and to the basic distrust they harbored. Some hands were ready to strike rather than offer friendship.

  “He’ll be here in twenty minutes,” Tom announced, terminating his call and slipping the cell phone back into his pocket. “He’s bringing Della-Vega. Della-Vega will get the van to the lab,” he added, realizing
that the name probably meant nothing to her. “They’ll go over it there. He promised to call if there was any news.”

  Kait nodded, pleased. And then she asked a little uneasily, “Was he annoyed?”

  Tom could not remember ever seeing his father annoyed. The man was far too even-tempered for that.

  “As it happens, he was still up,” he told her. “He’d just come home from the party a couple of minutes before I called—and my dad knows that I wouldn’t just call him at this hour to shoot the breeze, so, no, he wasn’t angry. Just surprised that the van was brought back at all. He said that it would have been a lot easier for the guy if he’d just had the van go over a cliff.”

  Kait had already explored that avenue. The only conclusion she reached was that maybe someone in on the abduction was ordinarily a law-abiding citizen the way they’d guessed when the prints hadn’t come up in any database. Law-abiding citizens didn’t destroy others’ property if they could help it.

  But then, she reminded herself, they didn’t get involved in the abduction of little girls, either. So what was going on here? The further they got in the case, the less clear things seemed to get.

  Her head really began to ache as she jumped from theory to theory, not knowing which to embrace and which to abandon. What they desperately needed were leads.

  She prayed that Tom’s father would be able to give them some.

  Tom noticed the strained look that crossed her face. “Headache?” he asked.

  He’d gotten it right on the first guess, she thought. The man read her far too easily. And that little habit made her very uneasy.

  “I’m working on one,” she told him.

  “I’ve got some Aspirin in the car,” he volunteered. He saw the question enter her eyes and explained, “I get pretty achy after sitting in the car for twelve hours on a stakeout.”

  She nodded, grateful for the offer. “Aspirin sounds great.”

  “So is it okay if I go now?” the rental clerk asked again. He’d picked up his pet, and with the animal pressed against his chest he looked ready to go—quickly.

  Tom glanced in the man’s direction. He’d almost forgotten about the mousy clerk. But rather than give the man the go-ahead, he glanced at Kait instead. This was her show.

  “Can he go?” he asked her.

  For her part, Kait was surprised that the detective, one of those men who seemed to thrive on his masculinity, deferred to her.

  She liked that.

  “I’ve got no further use for him right now,” she answered. “So, yes, it’s okay.”

  “You can go,” Tom told the clerk in case the man had missed that.

  Man and dog were gone in a flash.

  “You know,” Tom speculated, leading the way around to the front of the dark rental office again, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say that mousy little clerk was setting us up for something.”

  She told him why she’d already dismissed that theory. “I think he’s too cowardly for that. My guess is that what he said is true—he’s afraid the guy who took the van might still be watching for some reason and he doesn’t really want to be seen with us. He reminds me of the type who’s afraid of his own shadow—literally.”

  Kait scanned the area slowly, taking everything in, from the scattered parked cars, all apparently empty, to the vacant, darkened stores, denuded of their signs and placed up for rent. The area appeared desolate and deserted.

  “But, just in case,” she said, “do you have your gun with you?”

  He grinned easily, his eyes indicating his right leg. The weapon was strapped on there, beneath his jeans. “Never leave home without it.”

  They had that in common. The smile she offered in return was tense around the edges. “Me, neither.”

  “You know, it might be really sexy,” Tom suggested, trying to break up the tension, “seeing you wearing just your weapon and nothing else—except maybe your high heels.”

  She laughed at the image. To do that would have made her feel far too vulnerable. “In your dreams, Cavanaugh.”

  “Yup,” he agreed, his eyes glimmering. “That about sums it up.”

  His vehicle was still parked at the curb, right in front of the rental agency. He unlocked the passenger side and then opened the door. Reaching in, he opened up the glove compartment and took out a small greenish plastic bottle. It was half-empty.

  “There you go,” he said, handing her the bottle. He watched as she shook out two pills. “Now all we have to do is find you some water so that you can swallow those d—”

  He was about to say “down” but found that he didn’t need to. Neither did he need to look for water or any other liquid for that matter. As he watched her, Kait had popped the pills into her mouth, leaned her head back and then swallowed.

  Tom could feel the small white tablets sticking in his throat even though he hadn’t been the one doing the swallowing.

  “Did you just swallow those dry?” he asked her in disbelief.

  Replacing the top, Kait handed the bottle back to him. “Uh-huh.”

  “And they’re not stuck in your throat?” he asked incredulously.

  The corners of her mouth curved a tiny bit as she said, “Nope.”

  If it had been him, he would have choked. He found he usually needed an entire full glass of water whenever he had to down any pills.

  “You are a woman of many hidden talents,” Tom marveled.

  She laughed at the expression on his face. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “No,” he readily agreed, then thought back to what the rental clerk’s phone call earlier had interrupted. The talents he’d uncovered already were pretty provocative. “But I’d like to.”

  It was just empty, distracting talk, she told herself. He didn’t mean anything by it, and she would do well to remember that and not take his words seriously.

  Certainly not to heart the way she so badly wanted to.

  This had no future.

  They had no future.

  With just a thimbleful of luck, she and Tom would be closing in on the kidnapper soon. And, one way or the other, they would find Megan. Once they did, her time here would be over. She had no reason to remain in Aurora. Her job—and her life, such as it was—was back in New Mexico. His job, as well as his enormous family, was out here.

  What she’d found in the dark, in his arms, no matter how wonderful, would all be part of her past in the blink of an eye.

  She had to remember that.

  Chapter 14

  “So, were you able to find any decent fingerprints?” Kait asked hopefully.

  It was several hours later. Once secured, the van had been towed to the lab and brought in via an underground, back entrance. She’d tried to pace herself in order to give her partner’s father enough time to go over the vehicle. She didn’t want the man to think she was breathing down his neck, even though, in effect, that was exactly what she was doing.

  Belatedly, she realized that she was thinking of Tom as her partner, not just someone she was temporarily working with. When had that happened? She pushed the question from her mind. Answering wouldn’t help anything. In fact, it might even make things worse. Life had suddenly gotten very complicated.

  Rather than return back to Tom’s place, she’d opted to go to the squad room and review the list of known child predators that they had already interviewed once. She was looking for some small nugget of information that she and Tom might have missed the first time and that would, once noted, eventually lead her to the answer and the man she was searching for.

  Because she stayed at the precinct, so did Tom. Above her loudly voiced protests, he divided the list between them and then engaged in the same careful reexamination that she was conducting.

  Unfortunately, he was also coming up with the same answer: nothing.

  When she announced that she was taking a break and going down to the basement to see if his father was having any better luck than they were, he’d been more than happy to
take a break with her.

  Kait’s question now hung in the air. Sean looked up from his microscope. His sharp blue eyes shifted from Kait to his son.

  “Any prints?” he echoed, and then laughed shortly. He was knee-deep in them. “We’ve got tons of prints. Take your pick.”

  She tried to reconcile what he was telling her with the fact that the van had been brought back in the dead of night so that the driver could avoid detection—or at least so she had thought.

  “The men who took Megan didn’t bother wiping down the inside of the van?” Kait asked incredulously. That didn’t make any sense at all.

  “I think it was more of a case that they were hoping to have their prints lost in the crowd. Or maybe I’m just giving them too much credit,” he allowed. “Maybe they just didn’t think about having their fingerprints being traced back to them.”

  “In this day and age?” Tom asked in disbelief. “Don’t these people watch TV?”

  There was a hell of a lot on TV these days, not like when he was a boy and the choices were limited, Sean thought.

  “Maybe they’re more into reality shows than procedurals,” the older man theorized. “Whatever the reason, so far I’ve come across about fifteen sets of prints. I’m running as many through the database as I can at one time. Here are the first matches.” He picked up several pages that he’d printed out and offered the lot to the young woman. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Kait said, mentally crossing her fingers that this time, they would find something. “And thanks for coming in on a Sunday.”

  “If we find that little girl, it’ll be more than worth it,” Sean told her. With that, he lowered his eyes and got back to work.

  The print matches had all come with names and current addresses. Armed with that, she and Tom set out to track down the abductors, praying that the men they were after weren’t something else, as well.

  “You look dead on your feet.”

  Kait had collapsed onto the passenger seat in his car after yet another one of the matches Sean Cavanaugh and his CSI lab had provided had turned out to be someone with an alibi for the afternoon that Megan had been taken from her front yard.