Cavanaugh Encounter

by Marie Ferrarella

  “No, actually I didn’t,” Frankie answered, putting her cell phone down on the coffee table for the time being. “That was Valri.”

  “Valri?” he repeated, puzzled. “My Valri? Why would she call you?”

  “Well, apparently we bonded last night,” Frankie told Luke. “Anyway, it seems that she knows some tech people who can access information...” She paused, looking for the right way to put this. “Let’s say, off the record.”

  Frankie definitely had his attention. Rather than beat around the bush or resort to euphemisms, he said, “You’re talking about hacking.”

  She got down to the heart of the matter—and the reason Valri had called her the minute she’d gotten the information.

  “What I’m talking about is that it turns out my cousin used the same online dating site as Ellen O’Keefe did and Valri’s associate was able to get me—us,” she corrected, knowing this had to be a joint undertaking, “the names of the men who responded to my cousin’s dating profile.”

  Trying her best to rein in her excitement, she looked at Luke and said, “Kristin’s killer’s name is probably among those names.”

  He hated to rain on her parade, but he wanted Frankie to keep things in perspective. “If he didn’t use an alias.”

  Frankie blew out a breath. He had a point, but she didn’t want to think about that right now. “One step at a time,” she told Luke, already hurrying back to her bedroom to get dressed.

  “Our first step,” Luke reminded her as he followed right behind Frankie, “is to get to the latest crime scene.”

  Standing in her closet, Frankie grabbed the first clothes she came across.

  Damn it, she hated it when he was right. “I forgot about that,” she said ruefully.

  “I know,” Luke responded sympathetically. “I wish I could, too.” He thought for a second, trying not to react to the fact that she was quickly getting dressed in front of him. He forced himself to look away and concentrate on the case. Otherwise, it might be a while before they got to the scene of the crime. “Look, why don’t you do what you have to do. I’ll just say I couldn’t get hold of you.”

  She pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. “I’m not having you lie for me,” she protested—although she loved him for suggesting that.

  The thought startled her and she felt almost shaken. Focusing instead on what she had just found out, Frankie said, “Valri’s forwarding the information to my smartphone. I can review it after we leave this new crime scene.”

  He appreciated her dedication. “Then let’s get going.”

  With that, Luke crossed back to the living room to retrieve his jacket and his phone.

  She was right behind him as they went out the door. “Aren’t you afraid someone’ll notice you’re wearing the same clothes you had on last night?”

  “Men don’t notice that about each other,” he told her.

  He could see that Frankie was still concerned. Probably because she was worried that people would see them arriving at the crime scene together and put two and two together. He wanted to set her mind at ease.

  “But if anyone does comment, I’ll just say that I grabbed the first clothes I could get my hands on when the call came in. Not my fault they happened to be the same ones I wore yesterday.”

  He’d come up with that excuse so effortlessly, Frankie thought. “I take it you’ve done this before,” she commented.

  Luke chuckled. “Don’t ask any questions you don’t want the answers to,” he said with a grin.

  Of course he’d done this before, Frankie admonished herself. He had a reputation, she knew that. And now she was one of the many women he’d been with.

  Let it go, Frankie. Let it go. You’ve got more important things to think about.

  And she did. She owed it to Kris.

  Even so, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about Luke and the night she’d just spent with him, as well.

  This wasn’t going to end happily for her in the long run. It’s not the final destination, it’s the journey that counts, she told herself and clung to that.

  * * *

  “He got another one,” Sean Cavanaugh grimly told his nephew and Frankie when they walked into the seventh floor apartment where their latest victim had lived. “Sometimes I think this is the reason Andrew throws as many family gatherings as he does—to help us get the taste of death out of our mouths.”

  He looked over at what was clearly a covered body on the floor.

  Moving toward the victim, Luke pulled up the sheet. The dead woman looked just like all the other women who had come before her. Dark haired and in her twenties. He carefully replaced the sheet and rose to look at his uncle. “Who found the body?” Luke asked.

  “I did.” A shaken, mousy-looking woman stepped forward. She seemed as if she was barely holding it together.

  “That’s Patricia Laihee,” Sean told him. Both Luke and Frankie held up their credentials for the traumatized woman’s benefit.

  “Martha was supposed to meet me for breakfast this morning,” the woman continued. “When she didn’t show up, I tried calling her a couple of times but it went straight to voice mail. Martha never shuts off her phone,” Patricia insisted. “I had an uneasy feeling, so I came over to her apartment.”

  “How did you get in?” Luke asked, his voice low and almost soothing in an effort to keep the woman calm.

  “I’ve got a key, but the door wasn’t locked.” The very memory was obviously agitating the woman. “When I came in, I found Martha on the floor. She was cold,” Patricia cried. “And she wasn’t breathing.” Her eyes filled with tears as she regarded the strangers in her friend’s apartment. “Why would she do this? Everything was finally going right for her. Why would she do this? Why would she kill herself?”

  “You think she killed herself?” Frankie questioned, taking her cue from Luke. She had a feeling that one wrong word and the woman was going to break down right in front of them.

  Patricia looked at her as if she didn’t understand why that was even being asked. “There was a syringe on the floor next to her body. Martha must have overdosed.”

  “She took drugs?” Luke asked gently, prodding the woman along.

  It took Patricia several attempts to pull herself together before she could finally answer the question.

  “She used to,” she replied, her voice strained. “But Martha was clean,” she insisted. “I visited her every other day when she was in rehab, and she swore to me that she was never going to let drugs dictate her life again. That she was going to get clean and make something of herself.” Tears were streaming down her face. “And I believed her. She was my best friend and I believed her,” Patricia sobbed.

  Luke looked in his uncle’s direction.

  Sean knew without asking what Luke needed from him. “I’ll do a full tox screen,” Sean promised. “Most likely, it’ll be like all the others. No indication of any recent drug use, except for one large, fatal overdose administered in the last twelve hours,” he said, his voice heavy.

  “What does he mean, all the others?” Patricia asked. She directed her question to Luke, her eyes wide. “What others?”

  Luke tried to be as tactful as he could. The woman before him was in a fragile state and he didn’t want to add to her anguish, but he didn’t want to just sweep her question under the rug, either.

  “A number of former recovered drug addicts have been found dead due to a fatal overdose,” Luke explained. “Except that someone else was responsible for killing them.”

  “I don’t understand,” Patricia said, bewildered. She looked around at the crime scene investigators. “Someone did this to Martha? Why? Why would someone kill Martha?” she cried.

  “That’s what we’re trying to piece together,” Luke told her.

 
Patricia ran her hands up and down her arms, as if trying to chase away a chill. “Do you think that he killed Martha here?”

  “I’m afraid that it looks that way,” Luke answered. He turned his attention to Frankie. “This is a very upscale building. Find out if the building manager can show you any surveillance videos from the last fifteen hours.”

  Patricia suddenly spoke up. “Martha has, like, a nanny cam set up in the living room. Does that help?” she asked.

  “She has children?” Frankie asked. There was no sign of any children and she was immediately worried that something could have happened to them.

  But Patricia shook her head. “No, she doesn’t. Didn’t,” she corrected herself. “She was just worried that she might get robbed or that someone might break in when she wasn’t home. The camera’s in the spine of that book,” she volunteered, pointing to a rather large anthology book on the top shelf of a bookcase against the opposite wall.

  According to its title, the book supposedly dealt with nineteenth-century poetry.

  Luke pulled on a pair of plastic gloves and removed the thick volume from the bookshelf. When he opened it, he found that the book had been hollowed out to accommodate a small, motion-activated camera.

  Closing the book again, he handed it over to his uncle who slipped the entire anthology into a plastic evidence bag.

  “Thank heaven for paranoia,” Sean murmured in a low voice, taking care that the victim’s friend didn’t overhear.

  “I’ll have the lab get on this right away,” he told his nephew and Frankie.

  Luke called over the police officer who had been the first on the scene. “See that Ms. Laihee gets home,” he told the officer.

  Patricia suddenly spoke up. “When you catch this monster, I want to know.”

  “You will, I promise,” Luke told her. Turning toward Frankie, he saw that she was staring into the next room. “You see something, DeMarco?”

  “Orchids,” she answered. If there was any doubt in either of their minds that this was the work of the same killer, the presence of orchids in a slender gray vase erased that. “Just like at the last few crime scenes.” She thought of the florist they’d questioned. “As soon as you find anything on that nanny cam, I want a hard copy to show to the florist.” She turned toward Luke. “I think maybe that bastard’s luck is finally beginning to run out.”

  “You might be right,” Destiny Richardson Cavanaugh said, coming in from the bedroom. “I just dusted the vase for prints. I found several.”

  “They probably belong to the deliveryman,” Luke pointed out.

  “Most likely,” his cousin Logan’s wife agreed. “But there’s also a partial on it and that, hopefully, might just belong to someone else.”

  “How about the syringe?” Frankie asked suddenly.

  “The killer probably held it with his handkerchief,” Luke said.

  “He probably held the cylinder that way,” Frankie agreed. “But say she was struggling. He had his hands full with her and he was trying to push the plunger down. There might be a thumbprint there—or at least a partial of a thumbprint,” she suggested.

  Destiny dusted the small, round area as they spoke, then looked up with a smile. “Give the lady a cigar. We have a partial.”

  Almost afraid to hope, Frankie said, “Let’s just see if it leads to something first, before anyone starts buying cigars.”

  Chapter 19

  The second they were back in the car and she had buckled up, Frankie was on her smartphone.

  Luke noticed that she had accessed something and was now scrolling intently from screen to screen. He recalled what Frankie had said earlier.

  He began to drive back to the precinct. “Is that from Valri?” he asked.

  Preoccupied, Frankie hardly heard his question. “Uh-huh.”

  “Find anything good?” Luke asked. Picking up speed, he drove his vehicle onto the freeway in order to get to the precinct faster.

  Frankie didn’t answer.

  Switching his car into the extreme right lane, unofficially regarded as the slow lane, Luke spared her a quick look. Frankie was still scrolling.

  “Detective DeMarco, I’m talking to you,” he said, raising his voice.

  “What?” Frankie looked up from her smartphone. “Oh, sorry, I was just reading the profiles of the men that were on my cousin’s laptop. Valri’s friend sent them to her and she forwarded them to me.”

  “And?” Luke pressed, still waiting for something they could work with.

  “And,” Frankie said, picking up on his lead-in, “it looks like there are definitely some candidates to consider here. We need to compare them to the ones who contacted Ellen O’Keefe, but I think we might finally be onto something.”

  Luke nodded, agreeing. “Okay. We’ll put a list of these guys together so we can get them down to the precinct and start questioning them.”

  Now he had her full attention. “No!”

  “What do you mean, no?” Luke asked, surprised at her reaction. Wasn’t this why she had requested the list in the first place? “It’s the fastest way to see if one of them is lying.”

  Frankie shook her head. “No,” she said adamantly. “It’s the fastest way to scare off the killer. He might even go into hiding, which could keep him from killing any other woman.”

  “That’s not exactly a bad thing,” Luke pointed out, picking up a little more speed.

  Didn’t he understand? she wondered. “No, but it also doesn’t bring him to justice and it definitely doesn’t keep him from killing women in the future.”

  The off-ramp was just ahead. For once, there was only a moderate amount of traffic. Even so, he spared just one quick glance in her direction.

  “Your idea is to draw the killer out by posting a profile of a woman who matches his type.” It wasn’t a guess, it was the best way of going after their serial killer.

  “Exactly,” Frankie cried, relieved that he was coming around and seeing things her way.

  “All right,” Luke agreed. “I’ll talk to the day sergeant and have him compile a list of policewomen who look like our killer’s type, pick a volunteer and have Valri make up a backstory for her before posting her profile on the website.”

  She felt as if he had just pulled the rug out from under her. They’d already talked about this.

  “Aren’t you overlooking the obvious?” Frankie asked pointedly.

  Exiting the freeway, he turned onto the through street that would eventually lead him to the precinct. Luke knew where she was going with this and he refused to go there.

  “No,” he told her firmly, “I’m not.”

  He was being deliberately stubborn, Frankie thought. But because he was the lead and because of the night they had spent together, rather than losing her temper, she laid out her argument.

  “I look like his type,” she stressed. “I have long, black hair, I’m in my twenties and, much as I hate the fact, I’m short. Just like all the victims,” she concluded.

  “But you’re not a recovered drug addict,” he said, reminding her of the most important thing all the victims had in common.

  She didn’t see that as a problem. “Valri can doctor records, give me a history to match the other victims. She’s good at that,” Frankie stressed.

  “You don’t have to sell Valri’s abilities to me,” he told her, getting irritated. Why wasn’t she being reasonable?

  Luke pulled his car into his assigned parking space. Because it was Sunday, there were hardly any other cars in the lot. Vehicles belonging to patrolling police officers were out doing just that. Patrolling.

  “I know the magic she’s capable of doing with that computer of hers,” he retorted, still referring to his cousin.

  “Then what’s the problem?” Frankie asked, getting o
ut of the car. In her annoyance, she slammed the car door shut.

  “The problem is that the guy we’re trying to find is a serial killer,” he answered, raising his voice again. “That means he kills people. Dark-haired women in this case,” Luke shouted.

  “I know. I pointed that out to you, remember?” she snapped.

  No one could get to him the way she could, he thought, struggling to regain control over his temper. “Well, I don’t want that dark-haired woman to be you, understand?”

  Did he think that just because he could make her knees melt and that they had slept together, that gave him the right to order her around?

  “You don’t get to make that decision,” Frankie snapped, glaring up at him.

  “Neither do you!”

  “Problem, children?” White Hawk asked, coming up behind them.

  They had gotten so caught up in their heated argument, neither one of them had heard White Hawk’s car pulling up in the row behind them.

  Luke had completely forgotten that he’d put a call in to his partner to come into the squad room because the case had just grown by another victim.

  Waving a hand at Frankie, Luke said angrily, “Super Detective here wants to go undercover so she can catch our perp.”

  Frankie turned toward White Hawk, trying to enlist his support on her side. “I look just like the killer’s type,” she insisted.

  They both looked at White Hawk expectantly, each obviously waiting for the detective to take their side in this difference of opinion.

  White Hawk paused for a moment before venturing to say anything. “She has a point,” he began.

  Her attention shifted to Luke. “See?” she asked triumphantly.

  White Hawk wasn’t finished yet. This time, he addressed Frankie. “As does he. O’Bannon doesn’t want you risking your life or getting hurt.”

  Frankie threw up her hands. “It comes with the territory, we all know that. And you’re both missing an important point. I know this case, this killer. I’m familiar with the way he operates. Any patrol officer you pick to go undercover to lure this guy out won’t be nearly as prepared as I am.”