Ashley thought for a moment. “There was this one year that this Marine came to the group home,” she recalled. “He was dressed as Santa Claus, but he was using padding and a fake beard and you could see that underneath all that, he was actually a young guy. The padding had moved by the time he was finished,” she recalled with a fond smile on her face. “The other kids in the room all believed he was the real deal, and I was going to say something to set them straight.”
“Did you?” he asked.
Ashley shook her head.
“Why not?” Given the fact that she was exceedingly keen on following the straight and narrow path, he would have bet that she would have felt she was striking a blow for truth by exposing the fake Santa Claus. And yet she hadn’t; she’d allowed the myth to continue.
Why?
If she closed her eyes, Ashley could almost see the scene unfolding before her. “Because Santa looked into my eyes, and at that moment, I realized that if I said anything, I’d be ruining Christmas for a bunch of little kids who needed hope, not truth, so I didn’t say anything. That was my Christmas present to them.”
Shane laughed and shook his head. “You were a complicated person even then, weren’t you?”
Ashley shrugged. She’d never thought of herself as being particularly complicated. She just was who she was, a woman with no pretenses.
“I had a lot of time on my hands. I had to entertain myself somehow. Now what?” she asked, deftly changing the conversation back to the reason they were way out here in the first place. “Since her father has an alibi and wasn’t carrying out the wrath of God, that takes us back to square one for a second time. How many times can we keep doing that?”
“As many times as we need to until we get it right,” he told her pragmatically. “We haven’t interviewed Monica’s coworkers yet. Maybe she confided in one of them, mentioned something about being followed or, more specifically, being stalked.”
“A stalker?” Ashley questioned, turning the idea over in her head. “You think a stalker did this to her? Is that what you’re going with?”
“Until something better comes along,” he answered. “But I take it by your tone that you don’t.” There was a tanker truck in front of them. He sped up to get around it before the road narrowed and he was stuck behind it for the next forty or fifty miles. “Okay, what do you think happened?”
She really didn’t have a working theory yet, and that frustrated her. “I think that Monica Phillips had a terrible childhood, and then just when things looked to be turning around for her, she came to a tragic end.” Hence the adage that life wasn’t fair, she thought, blowing out a breath. “Whoever did this to her, if they had to kill someone, it should have been her father, not her.”
“Agreed,” Shane responded. “But not exactly the viewpoint we’re supposed to embrace,” he pointed out, although he had to admit that he found her position somewhat amusing as well as unorthodox.
“Sorry,” she murmured more to herself than to him, “it’s all I’ve got at the moment.”
“Which is why we’re going to talk to Monica’s coworkers,” he told her. “Maybe they can shed some light on the situation, help us put together the pieces of her life. Tell us if they knew if there was anyone new in the picture.”
* * *
It turned out that Monica had worked at Baby Mine, the exclusive boutique that had provided most of the baby furniture and stuffed animals that she had in her apartment, rather than shopped there. Abigail Reynolds, the manager, was a warm, maternal-looking woman who had a gift for immediately making anyone who walked through the doors of her charming little baby boutique feel welcomed.
Mistaking them for a couple shopping for their first baby on the way, the woman immediately backtracked when they told her their purpose for being there. She looked genuinely appalled when they gave her the real reason that Monica hadn’t showed up for work the past three days.
Abigail looked around her shop, shaking her head.
“I don’t know how I’m going to break the news to the girls. They all loved her.” Her eyes misted over as she told them, “Nicole was going to throw her a baby shower next week.” She paused for a moment, trying to get herself under control. “They were all just as excited about that baby as Monica was. Hard to say who was more eager for it to be born, Monica or the rest of the girls who work here.”
“And she wasn’t resentful?” Shane asked, carefully watching the woman’s face to see if she was telling the truth.
“‘Resentful’?” the woman echoed, then laughed sadly. “There wasn’t a resentful bone in that girl’s body. The baby was all she talked about—and I mean all. Every penny she made, if she didn’t use it to buy food or pay her rent, she would put toward buying something for the baby. I was at her apartment just last week, and I swear that it looked like an annex for the store,” the woman told them, gesturing around the show room for emphasis.
“Even with the employee discount, that must have totaled up to a pretty penny,” Ashley intoned. She’d glanced at a price tag or two. These were not bargain-basement prices.
“I’ll say,” the manager readily agreed, “but Monica said she wanted this baby to have everything that she didn’t.” Abigail moved in closer so that she could lower her voice, mindful of being overheard by the customers. “She didn’t talk too much about her childhood, but I gathered her father wasn’t the kind people voted Father of the Year.”
“Not even if he was the only father left standing,” Ashley assured the older woman. She saw the look that Shane gave her and knew she had perhaps spoken out of turn. She didn’t care. After the way the reverend had talked about his own deceased daughter, she wasn’t concerned about tarnishing the man’s precious reputation.
“Would you know if she’d recently seen her father or anyone she knew from her childhood?” Shane asked. Alibi or not, he wasn’t a hundred percent certain that the reverend didn’t have a hand in his daughter’s murder.
Abigail shook her head. “As far as I knew, her father didn’t even know where she lived, much less that she was pregnant.”
“He did,” Ashley told her. “The words he used weren’t very flattering.”
“From what I heard, I gathered that her father was some kind of religious fanatic,” a second woman said, joining them at the side of the store. “Is this about Monica?” the woman whose name tag read Dorothy asked. “Is she okay? She hasn’t been answering her phone.”
“Monica’s dead,” the manager told her. “Someone killed her.”
Dorothy looked horror-stricken. She covered her mouth to muffle the cry of protest that rose to her lips.
“Was she particularly close to anyone here?” Shane asked the two women.
“She was friendly with everyone,” the manager told them. “But I don’t think she was closer to one person more than another.”
There were tears sliding down the younger woman’s cheeks. “She always had a smile and a good word for everyone.”
Abigail nodded to confirm the other woman’s statement. “I had customers coming in, asking specifically for her because she seemed to take such a personal interest in them.” She pressed her lips together to control a momentary loss of composure. “If you ask me, the poor thing was hungry to connect with people, with families.” She looked at the other woman as she said this. Dorothy nodded in agreement.
Maybe there was something to go on here, Shane thought. “Would you mind giving us a list of your clientele? Just the ones who would ask for her.”
A somewhat skeptical frown furrowed the manager’s brow. “Nothing personal, and I would really love to help find whoever did this terrible thing to Monica, but I can’t have my customers thinking that I allowed them to be harassed. They’ll stop coming here if they believe that,” she explained.
Shane was about to say something t
o try to convince the woman to change her mind, but Ashley was faster. “If these customers specifically asked for Monica, then they had to really like her,” she pointed out. “And they would want to find whoever did this to her, don’t you think?”
The manager exchanged looks with Dorothy. The latter nodded vigorously, agreeing with what had just been said. Abigail relented, won over by the argument.
“I guess you have a point,” she agreed. “All right. Wait right here, and I’ll get the names from our computer and print them up for you,” Abigail promised.
“That would be great,” Ashley told the woman. She retreated, with Dorothy following quickly in her wake, still looking shell-shocked.
As they waited, she could feel Shane looking at her. The moment they were alone, Ashley met his gaze. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked.
“No, on the contrary, you did something very right,” Shane answered with an enthusiasm he didn’t try to hide. “I was very impressed. You’ve got good instincts and the makings of a really good detective, Ashley.”
Compliments weren’t something she was acquainted with or comfortable receiving. For the most part, if anyone addressed a comment to her, it was usually criticism, not praise. As a result, she didn’t know how to respond to positive comments—or to Shane.
So she did what she usually did when she felt out of her depth. She mounted a defense.
“Is this where I’m supposed to insert the words thank you?” she asked him flippantly.
Instead of answering her or ending the conversation, Shane turned the tables on her and countered with his own question. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” she challenged, digging up anger to use as a layer of protection.
“Why do you get sarcastic or defensive whenever I say something nice to you?” he asked her. “If you’re having trouble recognizing it, I’m trying to give you a compliment.”
“Don’t try,” she retorted, zeroing in on the word and pretending to find it offensive. “I don’t need compliments.”
He wasn’t buying it. “Everyone needs compliments,” Shane told her. “Because everyone needs to feel that they’re appreciated.”
She lifted her chin. “I don’t.”
Then, to put some distance between them, thinking that he couldn’t follow her, she wandered through the store, glancing at the various items. The price tags were enough to give her sticker shock.
Contrary to what she’d thought, Shane was following her around. He shook his head in response to her denial. “You might be fooling yourself, Ashley, but you’re not fooling me. I’d say that you need to feel appreciated more than most people because you’ve never felt that anyone did appreciate you.”
She frowned but continued to try to put distance between them. It proved to be fruitless. Shane just kept on following her. “I think you should stick to solving the case and leave the armchair psych 101 stuff to someone else.”
“No armchair psych,” he countered mildly. “Just common sense.”
The manager reappeared with a list in her hand that she held out to him. Accepting it, Shane thanked the woman.
Abigail waved her hand at his words. “You can thank me by telling them that one of your computer techs got it from some cyber database and not me,” she requested, lowering her voice so that the two customers near the front didn’t overhear her. “We have a decent-size clientele, but in these rough times, we can’t afford to lose any of our customers—which just might happen if they find out that their privacy has been invaded.”
“Everyone’s privacy has been invaded,” Shane pointed out, folding the paper and placing it into his coat pocket. “Everything’s accessible with a little effort. You just made it easier for us. But don’t worry, we’ll be discreet. My partner here is the last word in discretion,” he attested, nodding at Ashley.
The manager smiled and looked as if she was somewhat relieved. “Now get that son of a bitch who killed that poor baby,” she instructed.
* * *
“Why did you tell that woman that I was your partner?” Ashley asked the moment they were out of the boutique.
He looked mildly surprised by the question. “Because right now, you are. And who knows? The way the department plays musical partners these days, you might very well be my partner once this plays out.”
Shane had called his partner, currently on disability, a number of times since the shooting to see how he was doing and also to inform him that the wedding was off.
Wilson had commiserated with him over the blow. The last call had come from him, and he had let Shane know that he might not be coming back after all. His wife was afraid that the next time he was shot, he’d wind up lying in a coffin, not a hospital bed.
“I’m sorry to do this to you, Shane. I really am, but LouAnne’s insistent.” He’d paused during that last call and then went on to say, “You and me had a really good thing going there for a while, didn’t we?”
Never one to give up easily, Shane had said, “Well, don’t play taps on the partnership just yet.” But even as he’d said it, he’d had a feeling that the final curtain on their collaboration was coming down.
Fast.
“Maybe so,” Ashley was saying to him now, regarding his belief that she could wind up being his partner. “But I’ve got a long way to go toward getting my shield.”
“Maybe not as long a way as you think. I’ve got some pull with the chief of D’s,” he told her with a wink.
She didn’t know all that much about the people who ran the department, but she did know this. “He doesn’t do shortcuts,” she pointed out.
At least, that was what she’d heard. According to everyone, Brian Cavanaugh was a man of integrity who couldn’t be bribed or threatened into doing anything. It had to come from his sense of honor. She could live with that.
More importantly, she could even admire that.
“No, he doesn’t do shortcuts,” Shane agreed. “But he does keep an eye on the men and women he thinks have more potential than the rest of the officers. You wouldn’t be temporarily filling a detective’s spot if you were just average or adequate at your job.”
She sincerely doubted that the chief even knew her name, much less anything else about her.
“But I’m in Animal Control,” she reminded him, and they both knew what the rest of the departments thought of the people who worked in Animal Control—that they were just a little better than trained chimpanzees. She didn’t have to go into detail.
“Yeah,” he agreed, a deadpan expression on his face. “And a lot of the people you’ll be dealing with are animals.”
Ashley laughed then and, as before, he found that he liked the way that sounded and the way it softened her features. Each time that happened, he found her even more appealing than the last time.
Because they were stopped at a light, Shane was able to look at her for longer than if they were moving. He took full advantage of the opportunity.
“Trying to memorize my features so you can pick me out of a line-up?” she asked, still looking straight ahead through the windshield. The countryside was beautiful, but after a bit, its sameness was growing to be somewhat monotonous.
“No, just trying to memorize what you look like when you’re actually smiling, since you don’t seem to do that very often.”
“There’s a reason for that. I haven’t found all that much to smile about in the past twenty-five years,” she told him matter-of-factly.
It wouldn’t be until much later that Shane realized that that was the moment he decided it was his mission in life to change that for her.
Chapter 14
The woman in the nursery sat in the rocking chair, her body hunched forward, curled almost into a ball. She was struggling against defeat. Struggling to rise above the noise assaulting her.
Her hands were over her ears, covering them.
It didn’t help.
She could still hear it. Still hear the crying. The endless, pathetic crying.
She didn’t want to feel this way, didn’t want to feel the anger that was bubbling up inside her, ready to spill out. But the sobbing infant was giving her no choice.
And no rest.
She hadn’t rested since she’d brought the baby home. Hadn’t even had any time for the others, the way she had before.
Soon they might start crying, too, even though they had always been such good infants.
“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded, looking malevolently toward the noise coming from the newest crib. “I’ve fed you, changed you, rocked you. You’re supposed to be okay now. You’re not behaving the way you’re supposed to,” she accused the infant.
Her words made no impression.
The noise continued.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Everyone always maintained that infants cried for a reason. They were either hungry or wet or sometimes sick or in some sort of pain.
This one didn’t want to eat. Everything she ate only backed up and came out again, or at least it did after a point.
The words echoed again in her brain.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
She knew that. Hadn’t she been a nurse in the maternity ward all those years, handling newborns? She knew how they behaved. If that stupid, stupid woman hadn’t made such a fuss in the hospital, claiming that she was trying to take her baby from her, she would have still been working there, at the hospital. She was certain that she would be. And then maybe she could have had a chance to ask one of the other nurses—or even a doctor—what was wrong with her baby.
It was better to ask a nurse because nurses knew more than doctors. Everyone knew that. Nurses worked the front lines while the doctors all clustered in the rear, issuing orders and occupying themselves with their golf game scores.
Useless people, she thought, frowning.
But now, for some reason, she had no access to anyone from the hospital. Nobody was returning her calls, no matter how many messages she left with the operator or on the answering machine when even the operator didn’t pick up.
Mission: Cavanaugh Baby Page 15