“Puzzles can do that to you.”
Kristin’s eyes widened as her mouth dropped open. That was not the voice of the man who had told her to go home earlier.
She swung around.
Surprise turned to annoyance as she looked at the man who had walked in. “I thought you left.”
“Apparently, whoever you were just talking to thought the same about you—I filled in the blanks in your conversation,” he explained, taking the liberty of reading between the lines and answering the quizzical expression on her face.
“Never mind who you thought I was talking to,” she retorted. “What are you doing here? Did you lose your way?”
There was no missing the sarcasm, but Malloy responded as if she’d asked a legitimate question.
“Not since I was a kid and my father had the entire family scouring the whole forest, looking for me,” he said matter-of-factly. It was an event that had taken him years to live down. “After you mentioned your thing for jigsaw puzzles, I had a feeling you might get too caught up in all this—” he nodded at the table in front of her “—and forget to eat.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Kristin asked testily.
She didn’t like being second-guessed or anticipated, at least not by a hotshot who felt that all he had to do to get any woman into his bed was to crook his finger at her. She’d heard the stories, and Malloy Cavanaugh had two strikes against him before they’d ever exchanged a single word.
“Well,” he began in an easygoing manner, “I’m trying to tell you that’s why I came back with your dinner.”
She scowled at him. “I don’t have a dinner.”
“You do now,” he told her, producing a bag from the local sandwich shop and placing it on the only empty corner of the exam table. “I didn’t know if you liked your hero sandwiches hot or cold, so I took a chance and had them heat it. If you’d rather have it cold, let it stand for a while. Just don’t forget to eat it,” he added as a reminder.
She felt herself getting defensive. Where did he get off lecturing her? Or acting like her mother, for that matter? She got enough of that every time she visited home.
“I didn’t ask you to bring me back any food,” she informed him as if she was disavowing any responsibility for his so-called act of kindness.
“I know.”
The simple response effectively took the wind out of her sails and succeeded in making her feel like a bad-tempered ogre.
“Thanks,” she muttered grudgingly. “What do I owe you?” Kristin walked over toward the small desk that butted up against the back wall to get her purse.
Following behind her, Malloy shrugged indifferently. “A lead when you come across one.”
He knew perfectly well what she was talking about, Kristin thought irritably. “I meant what do I owe you for the sandwich.”
Malloy’s smile slipped through all the layers she had wrapped around her to keep her safe from people like him. “So did I.”
She took out her purse from the drawer, then pulled out her wallet.
“I like paying my own way,” she insisted. “Now, what do I owe you? Seriously,” she emphasized, her tone indicating that she wasn’t going to stand for any more of his snappy patter.
“Okay,” Malloy replied gamely. “How does your firstborn sound?”
She stared at him. “What?”
“It’s a large sandwich,” Malloy deadpanned. “And I had the kid behind the counter throw in two giant chocolate chip cookies.”
“How did you know?” she asked. When he made no answer other than to raise an eyebrow, she said, “About chocolate chip cookies being my favorite?”
“Lucky guess,” he admitted, “Besides, who doesn’t like chocolate chip cookies?”
“My mother,” she answered before she could think to stop herself. “She thinks chocolate chip cookies are a cop-out. She’s into much more complicated baking,” she explained, even though she just wanted to distance herself from the topic—and mainly, from talking to him, period. Malloy was definitely messing with her ability to think.
“Sounds like an interesting woman,” he commented. “I’d love to meet her.”
Yeah, and she’d probably love to meet you, Kristin couldn’t help thinking. If she knew her mother, all the woman needed would be one meeting with the handsome detective and she’d be ordering wedding invitations and reserving a church.
“Why did you do this, really?” Kristin asked him, unwrapping the foot-long sandwich laden with three kinds of meats and two kinds of cheeses—melted together. Since it was heated, the aroma seemed to ambush her, tantalizing her saliva glands. “I mean, I haven’t exactly been friendly to you.”
His shrug was careless—and absolving. “I figured it was because you were hungry.”
“And?” she asked, waiting.
“And I drugged the sandwich,” he answered matter-of-factly. He glanced at his watch. “In exactly thirty-three minutes, you’ll be unconscious, in my lair and I’ll be having my way with you. Or, you’ll have your way with me, whichever way you’ll want to play this,” he added with a disarming wink.
Kristin silently regarded the sandwich, now unwrapped, on her desk. “I guess I had that coming to me,” she admitted almost reluctantly.
Malloy offered her a pseudoinnocent smile. “Mine is not to judge. By the way, don’t forget to go home,” he told her as he began to head for the door.
“Cavanaugh,” she called after him. When he turned around, she asked, “which is the real you, the hotshot or the nice guy?”
“Yes,” he answered with the same seemingly innocent smile.
And then he left.
* * *
Malloy consumed a twin to the foot-long sandwich he’d picked up for Kristin on his way home, finishing it just as he pulled up into the driveway.
After parking his car and letting himself into the townhouse, Malloy began stripping off his clothes as he made his way to his bedroom. He kicked off his shoes, fell facedown on his bed and was asleep within ninety seconds of contact.
Possibly less.
* * *
He remained that way until six thirty the following morning when a pronounced ache in his neck penetrated his dreams and woke him up. He’d spent the entire night on his stomach, never a good idea, he silently lectured. He felt like one end of a parenthesis.
Wincing, he stumbled into the bathroom, took off the last of the clothes that had remained on his body and showered. The ache in his neck kept him under the hot water an extra three minutes.
Mindful of the long-running drought that was very much still a part of California’s long-term forecast, guilt finally had him turning off the hot water and reluctantly getting out.
This wasn’t the weekend, he reminded himself. He didn’t have time to indulge himself.
Approximately nine minutes later, Malloy was in his kitchen, eating what was left of a four-day-old pizza that was practically the last thing still sitting in his almost empty refrigerator.
He was going to have to remember to stock up on new leftovers, he told himself.
Eventually.
The thought was gone by the time he’d locked his front door a few minutes later.
* * *
Getting in early, Malloy fired up his computer and spent the next two hours going through twenty-to thirty-year-old missing persons flyers.
The number he found was nothing short of daunting. If he was strictly going by the database, it seemed as if at one time or another, close to half the population under the age of fifty had gone missing. Because of the information he’d managed to get out of the closed-mouth medical examiner, for now he ignored the one male victim who had been found on the property and restricted his search to women, but even that number turned out to be overwhelmi
ng.
He sat back at one point and just shook his head. In this day and age with all the various methods of social communication that were open to his generation and the one that was even younger, Malloy couldn’t help wondering how anyone managed to fall off the grid this way and stay off of it.
Even those who had gone missing twenty years ago should have turned up by now—provided, of course, they weren’t dead, he reminded himself. Which was what this was all about.
It took him all that time just to compile a secondary file of missing women from within the area who would have been between the ages of eighteen to thirty at the time, which, according to Kristin, was the approximate ages of the bodies. He’d decided to widen both ends of the spectrum.
Even that number felt incredibly overwhelming. Not because he would have to go through them one by one and make decisions, but because there were so very many people who had never been found, alive or dead.
How did families live with that sort of uncertainty, day in, day out? he marveled.
Malloy thought of his own family. Every last one of them would have moved heaven and earth to find a missing relative whether or not they had the resources of the police department to aid them.
Which, fortunately in their case, they did.
But what if they didn’t?
Malloy shook his head. He had to block unproductive thoughts like that. If he dwelled on that aspect to any extent, he might not be able to get any further in his investigation than he’d already gotten—which was not very far at all.
He wondered if Kristin had progressed with her work. If connecting hip bones to the right pelvic bones had in any way moved the process of possible identification along, or if all those dismembered young women they’d found were going to be designated as “Jane Does.”
The idea haunted him.
Normally, working cold cases involved finding out how—and why—a specific person had been killed. He’d never had a corpse remain unidentified before, much less an army of them.
Malloy reached for the phone on his desk a couple of times, wanting to call Kristin to ask her if she’d found anything on her end. But after several false starts, he never picked up the receiver.
Although patience wasn’t his strong suit, he decided that perhaps the good doctor deserved a breather, at least from him. Maybe she actually did work more efficiently when she was alone, just as she had maintained.
He could only hope that once she did come up with something—and she looked far too intense not to—she’d give him a call if only because she was the type to “pay her own way” as she’d maintained, and after all, the sandwich had been a form of a bribe.
To his frustration, the phone on his desk remained silent.
But just as he got up to get himself a third cup of really bad coffee, a catchy pop tune from the last decade faintly filled the air. The phone in his pocket was making its presence known.
“Cavanaugh,” he announced after he’d swiped the screen, sending it into its receptive mode.
“Is this the annoying Cavanaugh who’s handling cold cases?” he heard a melodic female voice ask.
Malloy smiled broadly to himself. “Ah, Doc, you kept my card.”
“I forgot to throw it away,” she countered, deliberately deflecting any hidden meaning the act of retaining his card might have for him.
“So you decided to call the number on it?” he guessed. “Did you call to hear the sound of my voice, or do you have something to tell me?” he asked, allowing just a shade of hope to filter through his words.
“Oh, I have a lot to tell you,” Kristin answered. “But if you’re specifically asking me about all these body parts that are currently surrounding and haunting me, yes, I called about them.”
“I’ll be right there,” he promised.
“I can tell you what I have to say over the phone,” she said, trying to save him a trip—and herself from having to deal with him face-to-face. His presence was difficult to factor into the sum total of her day and still remain entirely unaffected—no matter what she attempted to pretend to the contrary.
“Yes, but I can’t see you over this phone,” he pointed out.
“It’s not necessary to see me in order to get this information,” she told him almost defensively, really hoping she didn’t sound that way.
“Maybe it’s not necessary to you,” he allowed, “but it is to me. I’m a very visual man,” he explained. “I need to see things before I can retain them.”
“You’re not serious.”
She supposed there could be a grain of truth to what he was telling her. Kristin had to admit he’d gotten her to the point where she was beginning to doubt the most normally acceptable concepts.
“Frequently,” he told her. “And twice on Sundays. Hang on, I’ll be over before you have a chance to regret calling me.”
“Unless you’ve found a way to travel back into time, Detective, I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” Kristin responded.
Malloy could have sworn, as he terminated his call, that he had heard a smile in her voice as she said the last line.
That was enough for him to actually envision one in his mind’s eye. It was also enough to spur him on and have him make his way down to the morgue in a record amount of time.
The fact that he used the stairs rather than wait for an elevator didn’t hurt, either.
Chapter 6
“What did you do, run all the way?” Kristin asked, surprised to see Malloy turn up so quickly when he walked through the morgue’s door less than five minutes after she’d spoken to him.
He’d had his own reasons for hurrying, but he refrained from saying so. Instead, he told her, “A magician never divulges his secrets.”
“A magician? You’ve quit the force?” Kristin deadpanned.
Malloy laughed. “Ah, so you do have a sense of humor,” he commented appreciatively. “Even if I were tempted to make that happen, I couldn’t.” When she seemed confused, he explained, “Quit the force. I’d have everyone in the family hunting me down. Like it or not, this is the family business and it’s become a tradition handed down through three generations.”
“You obviously must like it,” she observed. He didn’t strike her as the type to do anything he didn’t want to do, family tradition or no family tradition.
“What makes you say that?” he asked, curious.
She set aside the camera she’d been using to photograph the end results of one of the bodies she’d reassembled on the table to the left.
Kristin wasn’t about to flatter him and inflate Malloy’s ego, so she kept her assessment down to the bare minimum.
“Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said ‘even if I were tempted,’ which means you’re not tempted. You’re on the force by choice.”
“Busted,” he answered with a grin. The woman made a fair detective herself, he thought in admiration. “How about you?”
She’d lowered her visor, not wanting to waste anytime. “How about me what?”
“Why are you doing autopsies—or whatever this practical phase of it is called—” he waved a hand at the tables of bones that were throughout the room “—instead of working in a hospital or a doctor’s office?”
She hadn’t even told her mother about the little boy who had died on her watch, or how she’d felt as if her insides were gutted because he had done so despite her best efforts to save him. What she said was, “Because the dead don’t talk back.” And then her voice became cooler as she said, “I’m sorry, but when did this suddenly turn into a therapy session?”
Malloy pretended to be taken aback by her question. “I’m sorry, I thought we were sharing.”
“We are—we’re sharing information,” she said pointedly. And then she realized that her response still left it wide open. “
Work information,” she emphasized, then added, “Unless you’re not interested in ID’ing one of the bodies.”
Excitement entered both his voice as well as the expression on his face. Everything else was pushed into the background. “You actually managed to identify one of the victims?” he asked.
She couldn’t help thinking that he sounded like a kid at Christmas. Kristin was beginning to think that Malloy Cavanaugh was far more complicated than the image he liked to project—or the reputation that had preceded him.
“No,” she answered honestly, “but I found a way for you to do it.”
He’d really thought that this was going to take weeks of chasing after imaginary leads that eventually led nowhere. The prospect that it might be otherwise filled him with hope.
“I’m listening.”
“One of the women had a hip replacement—”
He immediately jumped on the morsel she’d held out. “Those things are numbered, aren’t they?” he asked, anticipation echoing in his voice.
She nodded. “The prosthetic has an ID number. If we can track that down, we have the name of one of our victims.”
“Wait,” he said as his thoughts were coming together. “Did you say a hip prosthetic?”
“I realize you probably would rather work with a breast implant,” she said dryly, “but—”
“That’s not it,” he told her, waving the suggestion down and for once not making a wise crack about said body part. “But I thought you said that the victims were all between the ages of eighteen to thirty.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Kristin confirmed. “What’s the problem?” she asked.
“Well, wouldn’t she have to be older to warrant a hip replacement?” he asked. Senior citizens got hip replacements, not girls right out of high school or college.
“No.” Kristin shot down his assumption. “There are a lot of reasons for a young woman to get a hip replacement.” To convince him, Kristin ticked off only a few of the ways the need might have come up. “She could have been in a car accident, or just been unlucky enough to fall and break her hip. There’s also juvenile arthritis. Then there are some dancers who have the grave misfortune of wearing out certain joints and body parts way before their time—want me to go on?”
Cavanaugh Cold Case Page 6