Finished, he walked to the exit. Realizing he was leaving, Moira quickly followed him.
Their partnership, she thought to herself as she stepped up her pace, still had a ways to go before it could be considered fully operational.
* * *
“I had a feeling you’d be back,” Blake said when Moira was finally admitted into his chambers. “Another disturbed grave?” He asked the question as if it was just a mere formality and he already knew the answer.
Moira nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
Because she had called ahead, requesting a quick meeting regarding a possible second disturbance, Blake already had the court order printed and ready for his signature. He signed it now with a flourish. “Are you any closer to figuring out just what’s going on?”
Moira shook her head. “No more than before, sir. But I’m hoping we’ll get some more answers once we open this new grave.”
Putting his pen down, Blake handed over the signed order. “Well, let me know if you do find anything. I have to admit that this thing going on at St. Joseph’s Cemetery has definitely aroused my curiosity.”
“You’re not the only one, sir,” Moira assured the judge.
Satisfied they had what they needed, she said her goodbyes and walked back into the corridor.
Pocketing the court order, she headed toward the elevator. “Well, that didn’t take long.”
Davis tended to agree. From what he’d heard from other detectives, the process to get a judge to sign off on a court order could be long, drawn out and tedious. This had been like the proverbial breeze.
“Maybe the judge should start a chain of drive-through court orders,” Davis quipped.
She didn’t care for the joke at the judge’s expense. Kincannon had made things easy for them. Related or not, he certainly hadn’t had to.
“Would you rather get wrapped up in red tape?” she asked Gilroy.
The elevator arrived and they walked in. The button for the first floor was already highlighted, but he hit it again for good measure since there was no one else in the elevator with them.
“I’d rather you didn’t have such a smart mouth and crack wise all the time,” he told her.
“Sorry, I only come in one basic design,” she told him with a straight face.
“Annoying?” he asked, guessing at the design she was referring to.
Moira ignored his comment and focused on the real reason they were together: the court order to exhume coffin number two.
She glanced at her watch. “Think it’s too late to serve these papers on Weaver—or Montgomery—and to get the CSI team out to the cemetery to dig up Mrs. Owens?”
Davis shook his head. “It wasn’t too late for those two characters who ran out of the cemetery,” he pointed out.
“Who you chased out of the cemetery,” she reminded him. “I’d run, too, if I had this tall hulk of a man chasing me.”
Davis frowned. “Don’t split hairs.”
“You’re right—” She saw the surprised look on his face and realized he thought she was referring to his last comment. She was quick to correct him. “It’s not too late. Crime never sleeps, right?”
“Neither do detectives, apparently,” Davis observed wearily.
“Oh, come on,” she prodded, tongue-in-cheek. “You sound like you’re not having fun.”
He stopped just in front of his car in the courthouse parking garage. Most of the spaces at this hour were empty. “I was wrong,” he told her.
She looked at him a little uncertainly. “About what?”
He got in behind the wheel. “Maybe you actually are perceptive.”
Moira grinned as she got in on her side. Once seated, rather than buckle up she reached for her phone again, this time to call whoever was on duty at the crime scene investigations unit. “I just might surprise you,” she promised.
“I don’t think so,” he responded. “Not at this point.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she cautioned whimsically. “You haven’t known me that long yet.”
He slanted a glance at her. And if he had his way, he was never going to. “Like my mother used to say, thank heaven for small blessings.”
She heard the phone being picked up on the other end and temporarily suspended her conversation with Davis. “Hi, Uncle Sean. This is Moira. We’ve got another grave for your unit to dig up,” she said by way of introduction.
With a surprisingly minimum of detail, she filled the head of the CSI division in on the newest turn of events.
Ending the call, she turned to Davis. “We’re meeting them there so we can serve the court order and get started,” she explained, putting her phone away. This time, she buckled up.
Davis appeared to be only half listening to her.
But she managed to get all of his attention as, settling back in her seat, she asked him, “What was she like?”
He’d already started his vehicle and was now pulling out of the parking space. “What was who like?” he asked, turning to the right and following an endless flow of arrows to get out of the underground maze. “I swear it’s like playing leapfrog with you.”
Moira didn’t take offense. She was beginning to know him at this point and she knew he was being defensive. “Your mother.”
His eyes on the winding path out to the street, Davis nonetheless stiffened. “Why are you asking me that now?” he demanded.
“You just brought her up—that ‘thank heaven for small blessings’ line,” she reminded him when he said nothing. “What was she like?” Moira repeated.
He shrugged irritably. “I don’t know. She was a mother,” he answered flatly. “What do you want me to say?” he snapped.
“Something personal,” she said honestly.
He had no intentions of getting personal—with her or anyone else. Personal meant forming ties, and ties, when ripped apart, bled.
“Look,” he said, exasperated, “we’re working together—for a limited time,” he emphasized for the dozenth time or so. “We’re not socializing—”
“Oh, that reminds me—” Moira interjected as if a memory had just crash-landed on her brain.
Had he not been driving, Davis would have closed his eyes, searching for strength.
“Now what?” he snapped, knowing he wasn’t going to like what she had to say and knowing, too, that whatever it was, the answer—his answer—would be a flat, resounding no.
“One of my cousins—doesn’t matter who because at this point, you’re not going to get the names straight anyway—is having his baby christened and, as usual, Uncle Andrew is having a party—”
“Congratulations,” Davis said in a flat, sarcastic voice.
Moira pushed on, getting to the part she knew he would initially hate. Half the people who had been brought into the fold, so to speak, had to be dragged into it at first. Once entrenched, not a one of them had ever opted to leave. She figured that her family was just what her somber nonpartner needed.
She finally managed to get the invitation out. “And you’re invited.”
She could see his jaw growing rigid as he drove. “No, I’m not,” he contradicted.
Moira decided to draw him a full picture since he wasn’t getting it. “It’s a lot simpler if you just say yes now instead of having the Chief of Ds call you into his office for a ‘talk’ in a couple of days.
“Trust me, everyone’s very partial to Uncle Andrew,” she pointed out. “What he wants, everyone sees that he gets. And all he wants is to have everyone eat well, socialize and have a good time. Not exactly a sinister plot to take over the world.”
Davis was far from convinced. “What is this thing you seem to have about sucking me into your family dynamics?”
She had two choices. She could feign ignorance or she c
ould be honest with him and answer his question. She went with the latter. “Because I think you need a family, even if it’s not your own.”
For her trouble, all she got was a dark, scowling look. “What you ‘think’ doesn’t really interest me, Cavanaugh,” he told her flatly.
“You want to wind up like Marjorie Owens and Emily Jenkins with no next of kin to leave flowers on your grave?” she asked.
Her question made no sense to him. “I’ll be dead, it won’t matter to me one way or another.”
Moira sighed and, for a moment, he honestly thought that was the end of it.
He should have known better.
Why didn’t he want to have someone to care about? Someone who cared about him? No one could want that sort of loneliness by choice.
How do I get you to open yourself up, Davis? she wondered. Because she really, really found herself wanting him to open himself up. To her.
“What are you afraid of, Davis?” she asked him after a few minutes had passed by.
It was the first time she’d called him by his first name and he couldn’t say that he liked it—he also couldn’t have said why, and that bothered him even more than his uneasy reaction did.
“What am I afraid of?” Davis repeated, as if to get the question clear in his head. “Female detectives who won’t stop talking.”
Her face was the soul of innocence as she told him, “Sorry, don’t know anyone like that.”
For an uneasy moment Moira thought the detective was going to light into her—and then he just started laughing. “You are something else again, Cavanaugh.”
“So, are you coming to the party?” Moira persisted, trying to corner him.
“Don’t push it, Cavanaugh. We’ll talk. Right now, we’re here,” he pointed out.
Somehow he had managed to drive to the cemetery without her really fully noticing the fact.
“This is beginning to feel like home,” he joked in a tired voice.
“Only if you’re a zombie,” she muttered, getting out of the vehicle on her side. “Okay, let’s go find the happy recipient of the court order,” she urged, leading the way to the office.
Considering how much shorter she was than he, Davis noted, the woman certainly had long legs.
The next moment he banked the thought, banishing it as if it had never occurred to him. He had no business noticing things like that about the woman who kept insisting on referring to herself as his partner. He found himself anxious to solve the case. The sooner he did that, the sooner he would be free of her.
* * *
“What have you got against us, Detective?” Weaver moaned as he grudgingly led the way to the gravesite specified in the court order.
“Absolutely nothing,” Moira promised him. “The way I see it, we’re trying to keep you from being a victim of some kind of crime.”
“The way I see it, you’re doing more harm to my cemetery than an infestation of gophers,” Weaver complained, no doubt putting it into terms he was comfortable using.
Weaver looked the court order over intently one last time, then folded it and put it into his back pocket. “Everything looks in order,” he muttered, annoyed. “But you put everything back the way you found it,” he warned sternly.
But he couldn’t quite pull it off. His lower lip had quivered, giving him away.
“Provided we don’t find any evidence of a crime,” Moira clarified.
The groundskeeper didn’t look overly happy about the coda. Frowning, he ambled over to the side, out of the crime scene investigators’ way.
* * *
“Everything looks all right to me,” one of the CSI agents reported once the grave had been opened and the coffin lid raised.
This time, Moira forced herself to look at the body.
“Wait,” she requested just before the investigator was about to close the coffin lid again. “Let me see something,” she requested.
O’Shea, the other investigator who had also been present at the first exhumation, looked at her with interest. A fresh pair of eyes was always welcome. “Something catch your eye?”
She stepped around the lid, her gaze never leaving the body in the coffin. “Look at the way the body is lying in the coffin,” she directed. When no one commented she said, “It’s off to one side.”
“So?” Davis asked, still not seeing what she was pointing out.
“So, when they lower the coffin into the grave, it’s level on both sides, right? The body would remain in the middle, not slide off to one side.”
Davis didn’t see it as a big breakthrough. “Maybe someone slipped.”
But Moira shook her head. “Hardly likely. These coffins are constructed so that the ‘dearly departed’ don’t rattle around.” She looked back at what was left of Marjorie Owens. “This body’s been deliberately moved.”
“Why would someone dig up a coffin just to move the body around?” O’Shea verbalized what the others were thinking. “That’s pretty sick.”
“Maybe she was moved around because they were looking for something,” Davis suggested, speaking up. He tried not to notice the way the woman who was currently sharing his car lit up. And he definitely tried not to notice how seeing her that way warmed him.
“Like what?” O’Shea asked.
“Best guess is money,” Davis answered.
“Or jewelry from a jewelry heist,” Moira added, trying to contain the exhilarated feeling she was experiencing because someone finally saw what she did.
“That’s insane,” Weaver protested. He’d come forward when the discussion had taken a turn in this direction and his eyes were now as huge as saucers as he stared into the interior of the coffin.
Undoubtedly imagining it filled with money and jewels, Moira thought.
Chapter 13
“Okay, what do these two people have in common?” Moira asked.
She and Davis were back in her squad room again. Pulling some strings, she had been able to commandeer a mobile bulletin board, placing it in a small, unused corner of the squad room near the watercooler. At the moment she had DMV photographs of the two women whose graves had been disturbed tacked up on that bulletin board.
“They’re both dead,” Davis said drolly. He was nursing a deep black cup of coffee that looked to be one step removed from solid asphalt.
Because of the bulletin board, they had decided to set up shop in this corner, using a folding banquet table to accommodate them instead of regular desks. Moira had her laptop on her side of the table while Davis seemed content with just a pad and pen.
“Other than that,” she said pointedly before volunteering the first thing that had occurred to her when she’d looked at the vehicle license photos. “They were both buried twenty years ago and neither seems to have had any available next of kin. They’re also both women, but I don’t know if that has anything to do with any of this.”
Davis seemed to think her words over before commenting. “That would point to someone having knowledge of both dead people and to something possibly being stashed in their coffins now.”
There was one thing wrong with that theory. “Except that we didn’t find anything in either one of the coffins.”
Davis didn’t seem quite ready to give up his idea. “Maybe whatever it was wasn’t supposed to be there for long.”
But Moira shook her head. “That just seems like too much trouble to go through for something that temporary.” She stared at the two photographs, as if looking at them long enough might yield some sort of a viable answer. “Why not just stash whatever it is in a locker of some sort? It’s less conspicuous that way—and there’s no shoveling involved.”
Davis frowned at her. Much as he hated to admit it, she was right. “You’ve got a point,” he grudgingly admitted. “Did CSI trace
the shovel you found at the second grave to a buyer?”
“Would have been nice,” Moira agreed, “but, no, they didn’t. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the shovel and, unfortunately, shovels don’t come with serial numbers.”
“Fingerprints?” he suggested. After all, if it was used, someone had to hold the handle.
“Gloves,” Moira answered. “These people planned ahead.”
Davis blew out a frustrated breath. “They’re obviously not the amateurs we thought they were.” Thinking for a moment, he raised his eyes to hers as a thought suddenly occurred to him, and asked, “What if there are more?”
“More what?” she asked. “More people involved?”
Davis shook his head. “No, more tampered graves.”
She’d completely overlooked that possibility. Maybe there were more and, with more, there just might be an answer to all this.
Pleased, Moira smiled broadly at him. “Knew there was a reason I wanted to partner up with you. Sorry,” she immediately corrected herself, realizing that the word he objected to so strongly had accidentally slipped out. “I mean, I wanted to go steady with you.”
It took effort to keep his jaw from dropping. “What?”
Moira spread her arms wide. She tried for an innocent look, as well, but it refused to take. “Well, you said you don’t want me using the word ‘partner,’ but you didn’t say you had anything against my using the phrase ‘going steady.’”
“There’s no need for any kind of a ‘phrase’ or ‘term.’ We’re working together for the time being. That should be enough,” Davis fairly snapped at her.
“Don’t ruin the moment,” she warned him. Then, growing serious, she began making plans. “First thing tomorrow, we’re going back to St. Joe’s to see if any of its other permanent occupants have had their eternal rest disturbed.”
“Can’t wait,” Davis muttered. Uncrossing his ankles, he swung his long legs to the floor. “Is that all, boss-lady?”
“If that title dripped with any more sarcasm, you’d be in serious danger of drowning,” Moira glibly pointed out.
“I know how to swim,” was his rejoinder. “See you in the morning, Cavanaugh.”
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