Once they got to the house, Mahoney led them to a room on the first floor that was located at the rear of the structure. The door was locked. Mahoney fished through his pockets until he found the key he was looking for.
Opening the door, Mahoney didn’t stand on ceremony. He walked in first.
From the looks of it, Kristin thought as she was the last to enter the room, the man’s wife wasn’t allowed in at all. There was dust absolutely everywhere, and the top of the scarred desk was a disaster area. It was obvious that the business end of his winery was not run from this room.
Mahoney pulled open the bottom drawer of a rusty, battered-looking metal file cabinet, and after rummaging through it for a long while, he finally found the file. Since there really was no flat surface available to him, he spread the pages on top of the miscellaneous papers on his desk.
He murmured to himself as he searched. Three pages of torn sheets later, he declared, “Parker. Kid’s name was Anson Parker.” He looked at Malloy, pleased with himself. “Now that I think of it, the kid was kind of intense. He called and asked me how the case was coming along a couple of times. I got the feeling he cared about the Sullivan girl.”
“And he was another student on the campus at the time?” Malloy asked,
This time, Mahoney didn’t need to think about the answer.
“Yeah. Agriculture or botany, some kind of earth thing,” he told them, waving his hand around vaguely as if he was trying to capture the thought. And then his eyes narrowed as he looked at Malloy. “Why all this sudden interest in the girl after all this time? Did you find something?” he asked, his voice growing more eager as he considered the possibilities.
“Yeah,” Malloy answered. “We found her body.”
“So she was killed,” Mahoney said. The triumph was short-lived and hollow. “Poor kid. You got any idea who did it?”
“That’s what we’re trying to piece together,” Kristin said, but she doubted that the man heard her. His attention was focused on Malloy.
The retired detective was regarding the active one with almost an envious eagerness. “Can I ask where you found her?”
“She was buried along the perimeter of a cacti and succulent nursery,” Malloy informed the older man.
He chose his words carefully. Because he was retired, Mahoney was the equivalent of a regular civilian and, as such, not entitled to any more information than what the average citizen might be privy to listening to the morning news.
“A construction crew was bulldozing the land, and they accidentally dug up her remains.” He paused, watching the retired detective’s face before adding, “along with the remains of eleven other people.”
There was genuine surprise on the other man’s face. For now, Malloy ruled him out as a possible suspect. But that didn’t mean that the man was completely out of the running. Retiring from the force didn’t automatically prove his innocence.
“You’re kidding me,” Mahoney cried, staring at him. “Twelve bodies? Do you have any names? Any further form of ID’s?”
“Just Abby’s so far.” No, that wasn’t right. He recalled the second name and watched the man carefully as he said, “And her friend’s, Zoe Roberts. We’re still trying to identify the others.”
Mahoney might have tried to give the aura of a man happily retired from the force, but it was easy to see that a part of him missed it. His questions were almost eager.
“You think that the Sullivan girl was the victim of a serial killer?”
“Right now, we’re open to any working theory,” Malloy told him. They had to be getting back. The drive wasn’t a short one. Taking out his card, he handed it to the retired detective. “You think of anything else that might have slipped your mind about this case, give me a call. Anytime,” Malloy emphasized.
Mahoney looked down at the card in his hand, then back at Malloy. The expression on his face showed that his interest was definitely engaged. “I knew an Andrew Cavanaugh back in the day. Any relation?”
Malloy nodded. “He’s my uncle.”
Nodding and smiling, the other man pocketed the card. “Small world,” the detective said. “Small world. I’ve told you everything, but I’ll call you if I do remember anything else. But you’ve got to call me if there are any new developments on the case.”
“It’s a deal,” Malloy said, shaking the man’s hand again.
One, he hoped as he and Kristin began to walk away from former Detective Dan Mahoney and his vineyard, that would bear useful fruit.
Chapter 18
“What’s your next move?” Kristin asked once they were back on the road.
She was looking at Malloy’s profile and she saw him smile just a little. “Well,” he told her after a beat, “I was thinking along the lines of dinner and a movie.”
It took her a couple of seconds to realize that Malloy was teasingly referring to their yet-not-quite-formed relationship, not the case.
“I’m talking about the investigation,” she told him evenly.
“Oh, that. Well, other than hoping that you and your assistants get lucky, matching those missing women from the flyers’ dental X-rays to the skulls at the morgue—” he knew that was still in the really long-shot realm “—I haven’t come up with any new avenues to pursue.”
She heard the frustration in Malloy’s voice. “What about that nonboyfriend that Mahoney mentioned?” she asked. “The botany major or whatever he was supposed to be. I think the detective said his name was Anson something-or-other...”
“Parker,” Malloy recalled, working his way over to the right lane on the freeway. “He said the guy’s name was Anson Parker.”
Now that Malloy said it, she remembered. “Right. Him. Both Mahoney and that UCA professor we talked to mentioned Parker, although she just remembered his major.” As she talked, her idea took on shape. “Maybe there’s a reason this Anson Parker stuck out in both their minds,” she suggested.
“I suppose it’s worth a shot,” Malloy agreed, adding, “We’re not exactly going anywhere with this right now. The cacti nursery’s new owner’s lawyer is still unreachable on that damn cruise he’s on—”
“Still?” Kristin questioned. “Where is this cruise, the Bermuda Triangle?”
“I have no idea,” he retorted, the frustration level in his voice rising. “All I know is that I can’t reach him by phone or carrier pigeon—I tried the former just before I met you in the parking lot for our road trip—and the upshot of that is that I can’t ask him questions about the sale—or the former owner’s name.”
Something wasn’t right here, Kristin thought. “And you can’t get your answers from the new owner?” she asked. “I admit that the guy didn’t exactly strike me as being friendly and cooperative.” The truth of it was he had been positively rude to her when she’d arrived and stated her business at the nursery. “But he didn’t strike me as being a village idiot, either.”
“He’s not a village idiot,” Malloy agreed, taking advantage of the open road and bearing down on his accelerator a little harder than he normally would have. “Just not the type who wanted to be bothered with any details. According to him, that’s what he ‘pays other people to do.’ He has them iron out all the minutia so that all he has to do is bask in the spotlight and take all the final credit when the time comes.”
Kristin fell silent, thinking, as he continued making excellent time and zigzagging through openings in the traffic as it began to build.
“How about the county registrar?” Kristin finally asked.
The line of conversation had been dropped a good ten minutes ago. “How about him for what?” Malloy asked.
“It’s a she,” Kristin stated matter-of-factly. “The county registrar’s name is Barbara Allen. And her name is on every property tax bill that gets sent out every year,” she told hi
m, answering the unspoken question she saw in his eyes as to how she knew the woman’s name. “And what I was getting at was how about going to the county office to find out the chain of ownership?”
“I’m listening,” Malloy told her, waiting for her to continue.
“Every time the property changes hands, the sale and the name of the new owner has to be registered,” she told him.
For some reason, he’d forgotten all about that. Rather than be embarrassed by the oversight, Malloy took it from there now. “If we find out who owned that piece of property approximately twenty years ago, maybe we can finally start finding out just what the hell was going on at that nursery that caused all those bodies to be buried there.”
So far, a cursory check of the local news stories from that time frame had yielded absolutely nothing that would have allowed him to make a connection between the bodies and the nursery.
“So what are you going to do?” Kristin asked, eager to help in any way she could. She’d come to think of this as her case, as well. It was a definite first for her.
“What I’m going to do first is get you back to the morgue,” Malloy answered.
She sighed. She wasn’t in the mood to be teased. “That was a given,” she informed him. “And then?” Kristin asked, turning in her seat to get a better look at his face.
The whimsical curve of his mouth told her that his first thoughts weren’t exactly focused on the case. She had to admit, albeit only to herself, that she was having the same problem. She would have also had to have said that she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that her first priority—work—kept slipping into the background in light of this new development in her life.
“And again, I’m talking about the case,” she underscored.
Since she was obviously being serious, Malloy grew serious himself.
“I’d thought I’d get someone in tech support to go through the DMV database to see if Anson Parker still lives somewhere in the state. If we can find him, maybe he can enlighten us about who Abby associated with back then and if she actually talked about dropping out of college and running away, or if someone just arbitrarily thought that up.”
“According to Mr. Sullivan, that was news to him and his wife,” she reminded him.
“Parents are usually the last to know anything about their kids,” he commented, discounting the man’s statement.
“Are you speaking in generalities?” Kristin asked. Or was he basing it on personal experience, she couldn’t help wondering.
“Why, you have a rebuttal to that?” Malloy asked, curious.
“Not a rebuttal, just a personal experience,” she corrected. “Except for one glaring bone of contention, my mother and I were usually pretty much on the same wavelength when I was growing up.”
“Glaring bone of contention,” Malloy repeated, intrigued. “Let me guess. Your mother hated the guys you dated.” That was usually the classic reason for mother-daughter conflict. He could remember specific examples of that within his own family of three sisters.
Boy, was he wrong, Kristin couldn’t help thinking. The exact opposite had been true, which was why she’d kept her sparse dating life to herself.
“I’ll have you know that my mother was prepared to literally adore any guy I brought in through the door as long as he wasn’t Jack the Ripper,” she informed him.
“So, then what was the glaring bone of contention?” he asked.
Kristin laughed shortly, mainly to herself. “The fact that I didn’t bring in any guys through the door,” she stated simply.
“You snuck them in through your bedroom window?” he guessed, trying to decide whether or not the younger version of Kristin would have been rebellious enough to pull something like that off.
“I didn’t bring them in at all,” she told him. She could see that he wasn’t following her, and she really couldn’t blame him. She hadn’t mentioned the key component in all this. “My mother wanted to be—and still wants to be—a grandmother in the worst possible way.”
He was still waiting for the fly in the ointment. “But?”
They’d made love and he’d seen her naked, but baring her soul was something else entirely. It was difficult for her. But because he was looking at her, waiting, she forced herself to tell him.
“But there’s never been anyone I was willing to take that risk on.”
Okay, still not clear, Malloy thought. “Risk?”
“That one evening he just wouldn’t walk in through the door.” He was part of a cop family. He had to understand that, Kristin thought. “I don’t ever want to be in that place that my mother was in when my dad was killed.”
“What place?”
“Devastatingly alone,” she answered grimly, recalling what her mother had been like back then. “Even with the family all around her, she was still alone.”
“So, just so I have this straight,” he said slowly. “To avoid being alone, you’re choosing to be alone, is that right?”
Kristin frowned at him, exasperated. “When you say it that way, it doesn’t sound like it makes any sense.”
Malloy called it the way he saw it. “I don’t think that there is any way for it to sound like it makes any sense.”
Kristin took offense. “I wouldn’t talk if I were you,” she pointed out. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re alone, too.”
“I’ve noticed,” he told her, sparing her a look. There was no point in sparring with one another over this. Things would work themselves out, he silently promised. All it would take was time—and patience.
“How about two loners grabbing a bite to eat on our way back to the precinct?” he suggested, deliberately changing the subject.
She glanced at her watch. This was the height of lunchtime. “Might be getting crowded right about now,” she told him.
He knew that, and he had no desire to continue any conversation with her in the center of a teeming mass of humanity.
“I was thinking along the lines of takeout.”
“That’s a better idea,” she agreed.
Being around her, Malloy thought as he took an off-ramp that led them away from the freeway, had caused him to entertain a lot of “better ideas” lately.
* * *
“You’re getting to be a regular fixture around here lately, Malloy,” Sean commented good-naturedly. He had just almost walked into his nephew as the latter turned a corner, hurrying to the morgue at the same time that the CSI chief was coming from there.
“Still working on the same cold case with your ME,” Malloy replied, getting his bearings.
Sean paused for a moment. “How’s that coming along?” he asked with interest.
Malloy tried to sound upbeat, but at the moment that was getting increasingly difficult. “I was just coming to tell her that another potential lead we thought we had has just vanished on us.”
Sean nodded. “Keep at it. You’ll find an opening,” he said with far more confidence than Malloy was currently feeling. “By the way, this has nothing to do with work, but Andrew’s having another one of his get-togethers Saturday afternoon.”
“Any particular reason for this one?” Malloy asked.
Sean laughed softly. “Andrew always has a reason, but he doesn’t always share it with the rest of us. I do think he’s got something up his sleeve, though.”
“Why?”
“When he told me to spread the word, he said to make sure you were coming and bringing Kristin with you. And her mother,” he added as if the woman was an afterthought.
Malloy had a feeling he knew better. “And her mother?” he repeated, intrigued. Waiting for a reason.
He wasn’t given one. “The man moves in mysterious ways,” Sean said. “Do us all a favor and ask Kristin to come and bring her mother.”
Malloy didn’t get a chance to attempt to refuse—not that he was inclined to. The next second, Sean retreated, turning down another hallway.
* * *
She looked up the moment Malloy stepped into the morgue. It was almost as if she could sense his presence even before he crossed the threshold.
He seemed a little down, she thought.
“Any luck?” she asked, hoping that she wasn’t reading his expression correctly.
But as he drew closer, Kristin knew that she had guessed it.
“Yeah,” he answered her question. “Bad. I had Valri double-check my findings. My sister’s beginning to regret having such a technical aptitude for computers,” he commented dryly. “But we both wound up coming to the same conclusion.”
“Which was?” she asked, unable to wait until he set the proper stage for this.
“Anson Parker hasn’t renewed his California driver’s license in the past eighteen years.”
She tried to think of all the different things that could actually mean, other than the obvious.
“Did the license just expire, or did he move and apply for a new license in another state?” she asked. If his sister was the computer whiz kid he’d said she was, then Valri could definitely track that piece of information down.
And, it turned out, she had tried.
“Val couldn’t find any evidence of a new application anywhere. Parker could have just decided to drop out of society,” Malloy went on to suggest. “Or he could have gotten a new identity for some reason.”
“Or he ‘couldn’t’ do any of those,” Kristin suddenly guessed.
“What do you mean by ‘couldn’t’?” Malloy asked.
Rather than answer him, Kristin swung around and hurried over to one of the long metal drawers that were built into the far wall. The metal drawers in the morgue stored the bodies.
“Kristin, what are you thinking?” he asked, following her.
Grabbing the handle, she pulled it open in order to get to the drawer behind the door and the body that was lying there. Or rather, the piles of bones.
Cavanaugh Cold Case Page 18