Cavanaugh in the Rough

by Marie Ferrarella

  There was more to this, he thought. She was building toward something. “Go on,” he urged.

  She hadn’t expected O’Bannon to listen to her to this extent. She’d thought he’d interrupt, throwing in his own, probably more elaborate, theories, not hear her out.

  Because he was urging her on, she was forced to complete her thought for him. He didn’t look like he was going to allow her to walk away.

  “If this wasn’t planned, then it’s just a random act. And if it’s a random act, maybe whoever killed this woman killed for the sheer thrill of it...” She tried not to shiver, not to dwell on that possibility at all. It was the only way she could continue to work.

  “Which means he’ll kill again—is that what you’re saying?”

  “It’s plausible,” she allowed, then added what she had so painfully learned. “There are more serial killers around than people might think.”

  Chris watched her thoughtfully. But the next moment, his more flippant side surfaced again. “I see that you’re up on this month’s latest ‘crimes r us’ magazine articles.”

  She was not about to get any more specific than she already had.

  “Just something I picked up along the way.” And that was all she was willing to say about the matter.

  “Well, just in case this is actually a targeted killing and not a random-thrill one, first thing in the morning I’m going to see if any of Bethany Miller’s friends can tell me if she had a jealous boyfriend, or if there was a garden-variety stalker in her life, following her around.”

  Where had that come from? “Bethany Miller?” Suzie questioned.

  “Yeah. Oh, didn’t I tell you?” he asked a bit too innocently, which meant that he damn well knew he had omitted this little bit of information he was about to unfurl. “Uncle Sean ran our victim’s fingerprints through the system and got a name.”

  Anger smoldered in her eyes. “No, you forgot to tell me that little detail.”

  “I guess the prospect of breaking bread with you—or sharing chopsticks,” he amended with a grin, “knocked everything else of importance right out of my head.”

  Yeah, right, she thought. “And is it back in now?” she asked, annoyed.

  Chris’s face was the essence of sheer simplicity. “Yes.”

  “How did you find out her name?” Suzie asked.

  “Seems our victim was arrested for a DUI a year ago. Apparently, she liked to party even then.” Chris saw the frown on Suzie’s lips. Thinking something had occurred to her about the case, based on what he’d just told her, he asked, “What?”

  She could only glare at him. “You could have told me,” she said accusingly.

  “Then you wouldn’t have eaten with me,” he pointed out cheerfully. “As it was, I found out just as I was making my run to the restaurant. Like I said, she wasn’t going to get any more dead if you took a break from the case.”

  “Maybe I don’t need to take a break from the case,” Suzie told him. “Maybe what I need is to work the case—did that ever occur to you?”

  “No, but it’s beginning to,” he told her honestly.

  She was one of those workaholics, he thought. The type that always needed to be doing something in order not to be alone with her thoughts. Why were her thoughts so bad? he wondered. Was there something in her background or her life that tormented her?

  “Okay,” he announced, secretly hoping he could get her to call it a day, too. “I’m going to be going now.”

  Instead, she merely looked at him and murmured, “Be still my heart.”

  She wasn’t prepared for a reappearance of his kneecap-melting smile.

  “Someday, Suzie Q, I’m going to get you to say that for a completely different reason,” he promised quietly.

  Then, before she could say something that might spoil the evening they’d just shared, he said, “I’ll see you in the morning, Suzie Q, and don’t worry, we’ll get her killer and make the world a safer place for partying blondes.”

  He was looking directly at her as he said it.

  And then he left before she could tell him where to go.

  Chapter 6

  “Hey, O’Bannon,” Harold Silverberg, one of the senior detectives in the squad room, called out to Chris. It was barely eight-thirty the following morning and more than half the personnel had yet to arrive. “You’ve got company.”

  Busy looking up the address of the young woman who had, until roughly a month ago, been his victim’s roommate, Chris didn’t glance up at first in response to the detective’s alert. By the time he did, he found himself gazing at the woman he’d shared Chinese food with last night.

  Surprised and pleased, Chris smiled. She was the last person he’d expected to see in his squad room.

  “Ah, so the mountain can come to Mo—”

  “Save it,” Suzie said, cutting him off. “I want to go with you.”

  Chris never skipped a beat. “Should I be pinching myself?” he asked her. “Because this sounds suspiciously like the fantasy I was having early this morning just before my alarm went off.”

  She should have known he’d take it the wrong way. “Not with you,” Suzie emphasized impatiently. “I mean with you when you go interview those two philanthropists that you pointed out. Eldridge and—and...” She tried to remember the name of the second man and was coming up blank.

  “Silas,” Chris prompted helpfully.

  The second she heard the name, she remembered. “Right, Silas,” Suzie repeated. “I want to go with you when you talk to them.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, although he had no idea why tagging along to talk to the two financial giants and well-known philanthropists would set off her eager meter. Suzie didn’t strike him as a groupie and he couldn’t see another reason for her wanting to be present while he interviewed either mogul. “But that’s not on the agenda yet. I want to talk to Bethany’s former roommate first, then ask around at the modeling agency where she worked, see if anyone can shed some light on anyone who might have wanted to hurt her.”

  Suzie saw no problem. “Can’t you do it all?” she asked.

  “Well, yes,” Chris answered, “but contrary to popular opinion, not all at once.” Growing serious, he added, “My partner’s out on medical leave and everyone else is tied up with cases of their own, so until I can get some temporary help, it’s just me working the case and there are only so many hours in the day.”

  Reluctantly, Suzie took the only step she could. She volunteered. That was where this was ultimately headed, anyway, she thought. “I’ll help.”

  For once, Chris was caught completely off guard. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me,” she told him, trying not to sound irritated or impatient. It wasn’t exactly the best first step for this temporary partnership. “I said I’d help. I can clear it with my superior—just for this case,” she qualified.

  “Am I missing something here?” Chris asked. He couldn’t get himself to believe that she was actually volunteering to work the case with him. He certainly liked the idea, but he’d thought she was entirely against it. “Last night, you acted as if you never wanted to see me again.”

  She had no desire to rehash things. She wanted to move forward. “This isn’t about you, it’s about the case. About Bethany Miller and whatever other victims are out there.”

  Something in her voice caught his attention. “Sit down,” Chris prompted, indicating the chair next to his desk.

  She didn’t want to sit; she wanted to get started. “We don’t have time to waste,” she told him, a sense of urgency raising her adrenaline. The more she thought about the case, the worse it seemed to grow. They had to find Bethany’s killer and stop him—or her—before someone else was killed.

  But Chris wasn’t going anywhere until he got a few things straight.

  “Sit down,” he said again, more forcefully this time.

  Suzie had no choice but to do as he said. She had a feeling that O’Bannon might adopt an easygoing, laid-back ai
r, but like the rest of his family, he couldn’t be pushed anywhere he didn’t want to go.

  “Okay, I’m sitting,” she told him, spreading her hands wide to show that she was acquiescing. “What is it that you can’t say to me if I’m standing up?”

  “I just didn’t want to draw any undue attention to us—or you—since I got the feeling that you don’t particularly like attention being turned in your direction.” He watched her shift in the chair, looking somewhat uncomfortable. It just proved his theory. “Why are you suddenly so willing and eager to become my sidekick?”

  “I’m not willing and eager—and I’m not your sidekick,” she said, emphasizing her point. “But you’re the lead on this case and I’ve just got this feeling about it...”

  “What kind of feeling?” he asked.

  O’Bannon was probably going to make fun of her, she thought, growing annoyed at the very idea. But she had to get him to see things her way. She wasn’t just going to float along, following quietly behind him. That wasn’t why she wanted to be included.

  “That maybe we’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg,” Suzie answered.

  Chris had no idea where she was going with this. “Meaning?”

  She wished he’d just go along with her without making her explain everything. Deep down, she knew she was right. But she hated having to convince him of it.

  “Meaning there might be a lot more bodies out there that we haven’t found yet.” She braced herself for ridicule.

  But he didn’t ridicule her. Instead, he treated her hunch seriously. “What makes you think we’ve stumbled across a serial killer?” he asked.

  Suzie blew out a breath. “Nothing I can explain yet,” she was forced to admit. She felt that he’d laugh at her if she fell back on the gut-feeling explanation, and she was not going to tell him about her father. The problem was that the feeling she was experiencing was the same one as when she’d realized her father was the man who had killed dozens of girls over the years, girls he was supposed to have been helping. Girls who, it turned out, he’d felt sure no one would report missing because they had no one to miss them.

  Braced for rejection, or worse, Suzie was surprised when she heard neither from O’Bannon. So surprised that she had to ask, “What, you’re not going to laugh at me?”

  His eyes looked directly into hers, as if he was somehow communicating with her on a completely different level.

  “There’s nothing funny about a serial killer, and if you believe we’re dealing with one, well, Suzie Q, I guess that’s good enough for me,” he told her.

  She eyed him uncertainly, waiting for a punch line. He had to be up to something. It couldn’t be this easy.

  “Just like that?” she questioned. “You’re going along with me because I have a hunch?”

  Chris got the impression that he believed in her more than Suzie believed in herself. That had to be hard for her. And yet she was here, making her pitch, so she had to believe this more than she consciously realized.

  “Uncle Sean made it clear that he believes in you, and I believe in him. So, like my old math teacher worked so hard to drum into my head, if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C.”

  “Algebra,” she corrected quietly.

  He wasn’t sure if he’d heard her right. “What?”

  “You said math, but it’s algebra,” she told him. “You’re quoting an algebra axiom.”

  Rather than get annoyed, he laughed. “See? Having you around is making me smarter already.” But he needed to find out something before he got in too deeply with this. “Just tell me one thing. Is there any particular reason why you think that Eldridge and Silas have something to do with Bethany’s murder?”

  “I didn’t mean to make is sound as if they were working in concert on this.”

  “So you’re leaning toward a solo performance,” he said, building on the terminology she’d just used. “Okay, the question’s still the same. What’s the reason? Something has to have set you off and pointed you in that general direction. So what was it?” Chris asked.

  Suzie pressed her lips together. “I magnified the scene that they’re in.”

  He didn’t understand, but he gave her a chance to elaborate. “I’m listening.”

  Because he was, Suzie began to lose some of her nerve. Maybe her reasoning was faulty. Maybe she was wrong. And maybe she was allowing what had happened in her own life to color what she thought she was seeing now. She needed to go over this again for her own peace of mind before cluing him in.

  “Never mind.”

  “Look, you came all this way, you even did an about-face on working with me, so something had to have gotten to you. All I did was ask you one simple question. You should be able to share your thinking on this if you expect to eventually go to a judge with probable cause.”

  Her mind was scrambling and he’d lost her for a second. “What?”

  Chris explained it to her patiently. “If there’s anything to this theory you’re not sharing with me, now’s the time to let me know. Somewhere along the line we’re going to need search warrants to look for telltale evidence. In order to get that, we need probable cause to light a fire under the judge. You said you had a gut feeling, but gut feelings are based on intuition. You’ve got to give me something to work with here.”

  Suzie took baby steps. “It was his expression,” she told O’Bannon, thinking of Eldridge.

  “You picked up on an expression on that grainy cut?” Chris asked, impressed.

  She doled out each word as if it was precious and scarce. “I enhanced it.”

  “You’re a computer geek?” he asked, surprised. “Sorry, I mean you’re a computer tech?” She hadn’t mentioned this to him before.

  “No,” she admitted. When he continued to look at her, waiting for an explanation, she finally told him, “But I know how to work my way through YouTube. You can find a tutorial there on almost anything. I found one on how to enhance a piece of video footage.”

  He hadn’t expected that. “Okay, we’ll talk more about your enhancement prowess in a minute. Right now, tell me more about this expression that has you so fired up.”

  With each word she uttered, a shiver went down her spine, because the situation just reminded her of what she’d experienced looking at her father once the truth had come out.

  Hindsight, she’d come to discover, could be extremely painful.

  “It was smug, like he was about to get something he wanted—something he really wanted.”

  Chris interpreted what was behind the expression in a slightly different light. “Eldridge can buy and sell half of the state. The man’s on the board of over twenty different corporations and foundations. There’s no doubt in my mind that he was going to get whatever he wanted to get.”

  She shook her head. O’Bannon didn’t understand—how could he? No one in his family was a monster. He didn’t know what it was like to unwittingly live with someone like that, to look back and reevaluate every moment he’d lived through.

  “It was more intense than that,” she insisted. “It almost didn’t look...” She paused for a moment, hesitating to use the word. And then she finally gave in. There was no other word she could substitute. “Human. It almost didn’t look human,” she repeated.

  Chris studied her for a long moment before he spoke. “You make it sound like you recognized that look. Like you’ve seen it before.”

  Again, she debated the wisdom of telling him this, but if she didn’t, if she just backed away, how would she feel if it turned out that she was right—and another girl died because she didn’t want to open up a box that for personal reasons she felt was best left closed?

  “I have.”

  He found that hard to believe. Suzie struck him as rather young, and according to her own admission, she hadn’t been part of the CSI division in Aurora for more than nine months.

  “Where?” he challenged.

  She was not about to go into that. Not about to pull off the scab be
neath the Band-Aid that was barely hanging on. Instead, she took refuge in vague terms. “I deal with a lot of criminals.”

  “You deal with the evidence left by a lot of criminals,” he corrected. “That doesn’t give you firsthand knowledge or face-to-face dealings with killers, let alone with serial killers,” Chris pointed out.

  She used his own words as a jumping-off point. “Which I’ll get if you let me come with you,” she insisted. “You just said yourself that you’re down a man. I can fill that spot.”

  It was the word man that struck him. His gaze washed over her, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. “Not hardly.”

  “The spot of an investigator,” she told him pointedly, knowing exactly what he was thinking. “Look, it’s not unheard of for a detective to work with a crime scene investigator. It’s done all the time.” She paused. When he didn’t immediately agree, she told him, “If you don’t want me to come with you, fine, I can do some investigating on my own.”

  He could see her getting into trouble. See it vividly. And it would be on his head even if no one else pointed a finger at him. He didn’t want her getting hurt, and she seemed so determined to avenge the dead woman, she would blindly charge in where proverbial angels feared to go.

  Like it or not, he needed to team up with her for the duration of this.

  “Simmer down, Masked Avenger, you can come with me,” he told Suzie, relenting because he had no other choice and he knew it. “But make no mistake, we’re going to play by my rules.”

  “Fair enough,” she allowed, although silently, she couldn’t help wondering just what she was letting herself in for.

  She wasn’t happy about this alliance. And if it wasn’t for the fact that some unknown force seemed to be urging her on, telling her that if she hung back on the sidelines, the next dead girl would be on her, she would have told O’Bannon just what he could do with his rules and where he could put them.