Cavanaugh Cold Case

by Marie Ferrarella

  He wondered if the woman had any idea just how damn appealing she looked right at this moment, with her eyes blazing that way. She would never know the intensity of the control he was exercising.

  “As a matter of fact,” he replied, “yes, I did.”

  Suspicion entered her eyes. “What?” she asked.

  Malloy made no effort to get any closer even though standing where he was caused him to get progressively wetter. “Don’t forget to call in tomorrow morning to tell my uncle you’re going to be coming in late.”

  All sorts of red flags were going up in her head. “Why? Because we’ll be having so much fun in bed?” she asked sarcastically.

  “I was going to say because you had to stop by the tire store to get a 205/65r15 tire to replace the flat you have, but what you just said is definitely not an unappealing idea, either.”

  The look he gave her was sexier than sin, and she could feel her temperature going up by the microsecond.

  “Oh.” Heat was climbing up her neck, turning her face a bright shade of pink. “I thought that you—I mean that I—I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t give it another thought,” he told her. “On second thought, judging from the color on your cheeks, maybe you should.” His grin was boyish and wicked at the same time. “I’ll see you tomorrow sometime,” he said just before he got back into his car.

  As if someone had snapped their fingers, Kristin magically came to as the car began to pull away.

  “You make me crazy,” she shouted after it.

  Despite the wind and the rain, he’d heard her.

  “The feeling,” Malloy said to the reflection he saw in his rearview mirror, “is mutual.”

  * * *

  He came in early, intending on going through the rest of the missing person flyers he’d flagged and reviewing the little they knew about the cold case so far.

  When the phone on his desk rang, he didn’t hear it at first. By the time he did, he yanked the receiver up impatiently. He wasn’t getting anywhere, and it frustrated him.

  “Cavanaugh,” he bit off.

  No one responded. For a moment, he thought that whoever had called had hung up. But then a rather faint female voice asked, “Are you the detective who came to the campus the other day, looking for information about Abby Sullivan?”

  Malloy snapped to attention. “Yes, I am. Who am I talking to?”

  “This is Rachel McNeil,” the woman told him. “I had several classes with Abby.”

  “Were you friends?”

  “Not really, but I knew her. And Zoe.”

  “Zoe?” he asked,

  “Zoe Roberts,” the woman on the phone said, supplying the girl’s last name. Something stirred in the back of Malloy’s head, but it was gone before he could grab hold of it.

  “Zoe and Abby met in college,” Rachel went on to tell him, “and they got pretty close from the way it looked. Studying together, that kind of stuff. I don’t know if this means anything,” she said apologetically.

  “Go ahead,” he coaxed. “Sometimes the slightest small thing breaks a case.”

  “When Abby didn’t turn up in her classes, Zoe became really worried. She was certain that Abby hadn’t just dropped out or taken off. She told anyone who’d listen that something bad had to have happened to Abby, and she was going to find out what.”

  “And did she?” he asked in a calm, restrained voice. He didn’t want to frighten the woman off.

  “I think Zoe disappeared, too. At least, I never saw either one of them again.”

  As he listened, Malloy made notes to himself. “How did you happen to hear that I was looking into Abby’s disappearance?” he asked.

  “I teach at UCA now. Teachers talk,” she added almost as an apology.

  He took down her phone number and thanked her for coming forward. “I’ll be in touch,” he promised.

  “Please, let me know if you find out anything,” Rachel requested. “I always wondered what happened to them.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” he promised just before he hung up. His mind was already racing.

  * * *

  “Did you get your tire replaced?” Malloy asked as he walked into the morgue some time later.

  She’d gotten in over an hour ago, having bribed the man at the tire store to put her at the head of the line and get her back on the road within the half hour. That and flashing her medical examiner credentials had her out the door in twenty-two minutes.

  “You mean you haven’t already checked my car out in the parking lot?” she asked. When he said nothing but continued to look at her, Kristin sighed. “You do realize that you’re treating me like a two-year-old.”

  “Two-year-olds don’t drive,” he pointed out, still obviously waiting for his answer.

  “Yes,” she told him through gritted teeth, “I got my tire replaced. You really didn’t have to come by to check on me.”

  “I didn’t,” he answered honestly. “I came by to tell you that I think I might have identified another one of the victims.”

  She forgot about being annoyed at the way she felt he was treating her. “When? How?”

  “That victim you identified, Abby Sullivan,” he said by way of setting up the background. “I went to the college she was attending when she disappeared and talked to the teachers she had who were still there.”

  This wasn’t anything new, she thought, disappointed. “I know, you told me. Nobody remembered her.”

  “Well, it seems that word got around the college that someone was asking questions about her and that Abby might have been killed by a serial killer.”

  “Okay,” she said. He still wasn’t saying anything new. “How does that get us the identification for a second victim?”

  “Seems that one of the current professors at UCA was a student at the same time that Abby was and they shared a few classes. According to her, they weren’t close, but they were friendly enough.”

  Kristin stopped pretending she was working. “How do you know this? Did she call you?”

  Malloy nodded. “She called me this morning, saying that maybe Zoe Roberts was another one of the killer’s victims because Zoe and Abby were pretty close, and after Abby disappeared, Zoe tried to find out what happened to her.”

  This was definitely good news. It could get them one step closer to finding out who was responsible for the murders, but at the same time, Kristin could feel her stomach turning in protest. “Let me guess, Zoe went missing, too.”

  “I pulled her flyer,” Malloy said, producing the photocopy he made off the database. He handed it to Kristin. “Now all you need to do is see if you can match her dental records to one of the eleven skulls you have left.” He saw the stunned, somewhat dazed expression on Kristin’s face as she reacted to his news. “What’s the matter?”

  Looking away from the flyer, she raised her eyes to his. “Didn’t you notice?”

  “What? That she and Abby looked enough alike to be sisters? Yeah, I noticed.” But there was more to it than just an unexpected coincidence. It meant that the killer had been going after a certain type. “It’s not all that unusual,” he told her. “Lots of serial killers have a ‘type.’”

  “And we just found his,” Kristin said excitedly. She looked at him again. “This is a real breakthrough, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” For a moment, he allowed himself to absorb the genuine excitement he saw on her face. The look transformed her, made her appear softer and even more appealing than she already was.

  The next moment, he shook himself free of that train of thought. There was a serial killer to find and other young women to identify and finally lay to rest. His reaction to Kristin was just going to have to be put on hold for now.

  “I’d better go back to my desk and start p
ulling all the twenty-to twenty-five-year-old missing persons flyers for twentysomething blue-eyed blondes.” He laughed dryly at the thought. “This being California, I’ve got a feeling that’s still going to be a sizable pile.”

  “But less than before,” she told him.

  The comment had him looking at her. “Are you turning optimistic on me?” he asked, amused.

  “No, I’m being scientific—or, more to the point, mathematical,” she said, a bit defensively. “Bring me half the pile once you’re done pulling flyers.”

  Now she really had his attention. This seemed like a turning point for their association. “Are you offering to help?”

  Maybe she’d gone too far. Kristin retreated. “You said you’re working alone, that your partner’s out on sick leave. I thought you could use the help. If you don’t want it—”

  “I never said that,” he interrupted quickly, honestly glad of the offer. Granted, the woman was exceptionally easy on the eyes, and this gave him more of a legitimate excuse to be around her, but he actually could use the assistance and told her so. “I need all the help I can get.”

  The comment made her laugh. “You said it, I didn’t.”

  He cocked his head ever so slightly, as if that helped him absorb the sound better.

  “You’ve got a nice laugh, Doc.”

  “Go.” She waved him away. “I’ve got work to do.”

  But as she heard him walk out of the morgue and into the hallway, Kristin smiled to herself for no definite reason.

  * * *

  “It’s a match!” Kristin declared excitedly, making the announcement to the skeletal remains on the exam table.

  She had just matched Zoe Roberts’s dental X-rays to the dental impressions she made of one of the remaining eleven skulls. It had been her sixth try with as many different skulls.

  Malloy had picked that moment to walk back into the morgue carrying a stack of some forty-three missing persons flyers under his arm.

  “What’s a match?” he asked, immediately caught up in Kristin’s uninhibited exclamation of triumph.

  Startled, she swung around to face him. She was so excited, she forgave Malloy for scaring her half to death. “I just found Zoe Roberts, or what’s left of her, thanks to these dental X-rays her dentist faxed over. Actually, it was the dentist who took the original dentist’s place, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we’ve got our second victim’s name.

  “Oh, Lord, we’ve got our second victim’s name,” Kristin repeated in a voice that was far more subdued and shaken.

  “Mixed feelings?” Malloy guessed, reading between the lines.

  “If they were any more mixed, I’d be pouring them straight out of a blender,” she admitted. Kristin looked up at him as she suddenly remembered something. “You’ll take me with you, right? When you go to break the news to her family, you’ll still take me with you?”

  Why would she think that he’d change course now? “Why wouldn’t I? A deal’s a deal.”

  “Right.” And then, still riding the emotional roller coaster she was on, Kristin allowed herself another moment of triumph. She felt almost giddy. “We’ve put a name to our second victim!”

  She was overcome with a real sense of elation and triumph at the same time that she was battling a wave of sadness over the fact that a family would be grieving all over again for a final time once the news was broken to them. Kristin found herself turning toward Malloy and throwing her arms around him, half in celebration and half because she felt a sudden, overwhelming need for human contact and comfort at the same time.

  And what happened next took her even more by surprise.

  Chapter 12

  It felt like the entire world had shrunk down to the very small, intense sphere that contained just the two of them.

  Kristin was exceedingly aware of every single nuance that made up the man she had so spontaneously thrown her arms around. Aware of his hard chest, his muscular biceps, his warm breath along her face and very, very aware of the way he looked at her.

  As if she were the last woman on earth and he was glad of it.

  She was aware, too, that there was nothing more on this earth that she wanted to do at this moment than to kiss him and be kissed by him.

  Her heart hammered wildly in her chest.

  * * *

  Desire lanced all through him, permeating every single space—large and small—of his being. The thought traveled through Malloy’s head that this was neither the time nor the place for this.

  It was a first for him.

  Ordinarily, anytime, anyplace was the right time and place for him to kiss a willing woman, to hold her and make her his before the actual act ever took place. For as far back as he could remember, Malloy had thrived on stolen moments, stolen kisses and, most of all, on stolen trysts.

  But not this time.

  Not with this woman.

  As the thoughts played themselves across his mind, he felt that he had to be losing either his grip or his mind, possibly both.

  This wasn’t like him.

  But then, she wasn’t like any other woman he’d ever encountered.

  She was special, even though, if pressed, he couldn’t quite define exactly why.

  So, rather than leaping in and making the most of the opportunity that had just presented itself to him, Malloy forced himself to loosen his hold on her. And then he dropped his hands to his sides and stepped back from quite possibly the most tender trap that had ever tempted him.

  Struggling for some semblance of control, not to mention normalcy, he said casually, “I guess we make a pretty good team at that.”

  Oh, God, what had she almost allowed herself to do?

  In a moment of complete insanity, she’d all but thrown herself at him, and the only thing that had saved her was him. Not any feelings of self-preservation on her part, not her own common sense, but him.

  Up was down and down was up, and now that she thought about it, there was a very good chance that she might very well never get her bearings again.

  Braced, Kristin looked into the cocky detective’s eyes, waiting for him to taunt her or at least tease her about what had almost happened.

  She held her breath.

  Okay, in the scheme of things, a kiss was no big deal, but she would have been the one doing the kissing—this after she had let Malloy know exactly what she thought of his happy-go-lucky, carefree-bachelor attitude—and of him, neither of which was flattering.

  Shaken, she had no choice but to clutch to the line Malloy had just tossed out to her about their so-called “teamwork.”

  “I guess we do,” she agreed in a stilted voice. Clearing her throat, wishing fervently that she could clear away the haze in her mind as easily, or better yet, just disappear, Kristin forced herself to focus on the case. Maybe it would distract him and make him forget about what had almost happened.

  And complicating everything was the nagging little question: Why hadn’t he kissed her? Didn’t he find her attractive? The man had a reputation of romancing every woman under eighty, yet when the opportunity to kiss her had presented itself, he hadn’t.

  Why?

  C’mon, Kris, back to the case. Don’t let him mess with your head. That’s probably exactly what he’s trying to do.

  “I guess this confirms it then,” she said, doing her best to block out every other stray thought. “Our killer did have a type. He definitely went after blue-eyed blondes.”

  “Now all we have to do is figure out why,” Malloy concluded.

  “What do you mean, why?” She didn’t understand where he was going with this.

  “Well, did she remind him of a girlfriend who’d jilted him—or who he thought had jilted him? Did she remind him of his mother or maybe an aunt who tor
tured him as a child? The more we know, the more we can figure out why he targeted who he did and, with luck, it’ll lead us to him.”

  When Kristin groaned, he laughed. “Nobody said this was going to be easy.” He watched her for a long moment, temporarily regretting his more chivalrous instincts. “None of it.”

  Another wave of warmth suddenly undulated through her.

  The case, think about the case.

  “That woman who told you about Zoe. Did she have anything else to add, maybe another name?”

  “No, but I told her I’d get back to her if we could confirm that one of the victims turns out to be Zoe. Maybe she’ll remember something by then,” he added hopefully.

  “Don’t you have to notify the next of kin first before you tell a victim’s friend?” Kristin asked. She was only vaguely aware of the proper protocol.

  “Haven’t found any yet,” he told her. “But I just did a cursory search. I figured I’d do a more thorough one once I get back from the funeral.”

  “Funeral?” Kristin questioned. Ordinarily, she didn’t ask personal questions, didn’t pry into the lives of the people she worked with. But this, this had been different right from the start, and she heard herself asking him, “Whose?”

  “Abby Sullivan’s.” In wanting to maintain contact with the man who had connected him with his daughter after all this time, Henry Sullivan had called him at the precinct to let him know where and when the funeral was being held. “I feel that since we were the ones to break the news to him, it’s only right that I attend the funeral.”

  This was definitely going over and above what she thought Malloy was capable of. She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before.

  “You really are sensitive, aren’t you?” she asked, part of her still waiting for him to say or do something that would negate what she’d just said.

  “Only partially,” he told her. “I’m also going in case, for some perverted reason, her killer turns up to watch the ceremony. Serial killers are a weird bunch, and they all have their odd quirks that in some way enhance their kills. Who knows? This one might need to see the grieving faces and know that he was responsible for putting them there.”