Cavanaugh Vanguard

by Marie Ferrarella

  “That’s just the problem,” Jackson told the councilman matter-of-factly. “As soon as the walls started coming down, bodies began falling out.” He knew he was stating it rather simplistically, but that was the general gist of it.

  Harris stared at him as if the detective had suddenly lapsed into some strange foreign language.

  “You’re joking,” he practically choked out.

  “I only wish we were, Mr. Harris,” Brianna said, stepping in. “And until the investigation yields some concrete—no pun intended—answers, I’m afraid that all work on the site will have to be on hold.”

  Harris turned pale. “Is there any way around that?” he asked, distressed.

  “Not unless you can tell us who killed these people and how they wound up being part of the architecture,” Jackson said.

  “I ca-can’t,” Harris stuttered, his eyes moving like tennis balls from Brianna to Jackson, then back again. “How would I possibly know that?”

  “If I could answer that, Mr. Harris, this whole conversation would be moot,” Brianna told him kindly.

  But rather than go away, Harris’s panic only intensified. “You don’t understand. I talked the council into this. Every day that the project isn’t started, we’re hemorrhaging money.”

  She really did feel sorry for the man. “We’re trying to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible,” she assured the councilman, who was now visibly perspiring.

  Her assurance didn’t help. The man continued looking ghostly white.

  “Try harder,” he implored. As Brianna and Jackson rose to their feet, Harris said, “You’ll keep me posted about this and tell me the minute we can begin work?”

  “You’ll be our first call,” Brianna promised just before they left.

  “Why did you lie to him?” Jackson asked, curious. Of the two of them, he would have said that she was the do-gooder while he was the one who didn’t give a damn about public relations, and yet she had clearly lied to the councilman. He was definitely not going to be the first one they notified, or even the fifth person. There was protocol to follow.

  They were outside now, and as Brianna glanced up, she saw clouds gathering.

  “Because I hate to see a grown man cry and he was about as close to that as I’ve seen in a long time,” she told Jackson. “Besides, it gives him something to hang on to, and he looked like he really needed that.”

  Jackson drew his own conclusions from her ostensibly charitable actions. “So you don’t think he had anything to do with this creative cemetery?”

  “Other than being greedy and somehow making money on the deal, no, I don’t think he’s mixed up in this—at least for now, anyway,” she amended. “I’m willing to be shown the error of my ways if it turns out that I’m wrong,” she added. “But for now, I think we need to look elsewhere for our answers—and the killer. Or killers, as the case may be.” She looked at Jackson over the roof of his sedan, one hand on the passenger door handle. “This really is a mess, isn’t it?”

  He laughed shortly. “Yeah. To quote Oliver Hardy talking to Stan Laurel, ‘Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.’”

  Brianna’s eyebrows drew together in a delicately sculpted furrow of confusion. “Who?”

  Jackson shook his head. “Never mind.” He opened the door on his side. “Just get in the car.”

  But she remained where she was, trying to get to the bottom of the quotation he’d just carelessly tossed at her. “No, really, am I supposed to know who those people are? Is that a reference to something out of your past?”

  He thought back to a childhood with a black-and-white TV set rescued out of a Dumpster and used to entertain his brother to keep Jimmy from crying for the mother who had abandoned them. He and Jimmy had watched classic films on some now-defunct channel. Laurel and Hardy had been prominently featured—but he wasn’t about to tell O’Bannon any of that. No telling when she’d bring it up.

  “Just get in the car, or run alongside it while I drive. I don’t care. Take your pick,” he said, getting in behind the steering wheel.

  “Getting in,” she announced as he turned on the ignition.

  “Good choice.”

  Chapter 6

  Walking into the squad room, Brianna saw that her regular partner, Francisco Del Campo, was back at his desk. He appeared to be working on something on his computer.

  “Hopefully, that’s a good sign,” she commented to Jackson.

  When he made no response, she glanced over her shoulder and saw that Jackson wasn’t listening. Instead, he seemed to be scanning the immediate area as if he was looking for something.

  “Can I help you find something?” she asked him.

  “Some place to sit might be helpful,” he answered, still looking around.

  “And I suppose you want a desk to go with that,” Brianna quipped.

  Jackson stopped scanning the area and instead glanced at her. “I see that you still have that droll sense of humor.”

  “I’ve got something better than that. I’ve got a chair and a desk for you. It’s right over there.” She pointed to it. “Come with me.”

  He fell into place behind her. “Don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “Nope.” She led Jackson over to a desk a couple of aisles over from her own. Gesturing toward it, she asked, “How’s this?”

  Jackson surveyed the desk. “Isn’t someone sitting there?”

  “Yes, you, for the next two weeks,” Brianna answered.

  He frowned. “How about the person who goes with the papers, the books and those photos over there?” he asked, gesturing toward a couple of framed photographs on the side of the desk.

  “That would be Will Jefferies. Right now he’s at a seminar, his eyes glazing over, for a week, and then he goes on vacation for another week.”

  Jackson eyed her skeptically. “So you think we’re solving this in two weeks?”

  “Hopefully,” Brianna responded. “If not, then we’ll find another empty desk for you. And we’ll keep on finding empty desks until we solve this damn thing.” She saw Jackson dubiously eyeing the cluttered desk. “Just put all that either on the floor or in the drawers. He’s certainly not going to mind.”

  “What about his computer?” Jackson pointed out. “Isn’t it password protected?”

  Brianna pressed her lips together to suppress a laugh. “Jefferies wouldn’t know a password if it bit him. That’s part of the reason he’s away, taking that seminar.” That problem solved, she began to turn away. “I’ll let you get settled in. I need to talk to Del Campo to find out if he had any luck tracking down the hotel’s last guest lists.”

  “Wait,” he called after her. She stopped and half turned, waiting. “Settling in will take me less than five minutes,” he said. “What do you want me to do after that?”

  A smile slowly spread across her lips. “You could try calling your brother back.”

  Brianna walked away before he could respond to that. She was fairly sure that he wasn’t going to respond happily or politely.

  “Any luck, Francisco?” Brianna asked as she approached Del Campo’s desk.

  The detective swung his chair away from his computer to look at Brianna. The eight-year veteran of the force looked rather pleased with himself.

  “Some,” he answered. “I tracked down the hotel’s last assistant manager. And before you ask, the hotel’s last manager died in a car accident a year and a half ago, so he wasn’t available for comment.”

  “Not without a séance,” she quipped. “So, what did you get from the assistant manager?”

  Del Campo laughed drily. “You mean besides attitude?”

  “Why attitude?” she asked, perplexed.

  Del Campo handled himself rather well. Unlike some detectives, he knew how to ask questions and get people talking, so th
e attitude couldn’t be in response to questions that Del Campo had asked.

  “Suffice to say that Ryan Holt—that’s the assistant manager—didn’t have any glowing words of praise for the hotel’s owners.”

  “Owners?” Brianna repeated. “Plural? I thought the hotel belonged to Winston Aurora.”

  “Turns out that it belonged to all three of the Aurora brothers,” Del Campo informed her. “And they’re not quite as generous to their employees as they would like the world at large to believe.

  “Half the time I talked with Holt, he was complaining about how small his salary had been, making the monthly pension he’s receiving now pretty paltry. Seems he wasn’t too keen about the benefits the Auroras paid their employees, either.”

  She rested a hip on the corner of his desk, crossing her arms before her as she took the information in. “Do you think he might have been responsible for sealing in those bodies into the hotel walls?” she asked Del Campo. “Wouldn’t be the first time a disgruntled employee got back at his bosses by framing them for some kind of a crime.”

  Francisco shook his head. “Not unless he had someone else doing the heavy work for him. The guy’s built like a giant toothpick. He would have had trouble dragging a five-pound bag of potatoes ten feet, much less depositing it behind a wall.”

  Okay, so they’d struck out there. “Did he offer up anything useful?”

  “Oh, yeah!” Del Campo answered with enthusiasm. “Seems that the guy hung on to every scrap of paper he put his name to when he worked at the hotel. I’ve got a ledger with the names of the last five years’ worth of guests to stay in it.” A wide smile broke out. “Hey, this might interest you,” he told her, thumbing through the pages until he found what he was looking for. “Two of the guests in that ledger were permanent.”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant by that. “You mean that they had rooms reserved for them year-round?”

  “No, they were in hotel rooms year-round,” Del Campo told her. Then he explained, “They lived in the hotel instead of in an apartment or house.”

  “That’s kind of expensive,” she commented. “Not to mention kind of transient.”

  “Well, it’s definitely too rich for me, but not for people who have money and enjoy being pampered and fussed over. Think about it. Someone makes your bed for you every day and cleans your suite the second you go out. You get room service if you don’t feel like eating in the hotel dining room. You don’t have to cook ever again. Hell, there are people who live on cruise ships all year round. Here at least you don’t risk getting seasick—or, more important, sinking,” he emphasized.

  Brianna laughed as she shook her head. That way of life definitely did not appeal to her. Living in a hotel room or on a cruise ship would make her feel completely rootless.

  “Different strokes for different folks, I guess.” Getting off the desk, she picked up the list Del Campo had written up for her. She briefly looked over the names. “Good work, Francisco.”

  “Speaking of work, how’s it going with Major Crimes over there?” Del Campo nodded his head in Jackson’s general direction.

  She looked over toward Jackson, although she really didn’t need to. “I’ve worked with him before.”

  “You’re not answering my question,” Del Campo pointed out.

  She supposed she wasn’t, but she wasn’t about to say anything critical about Muldare. That would throw a wrench into the works.

  “He’s different,” Brianna allowed. “Listen, Francisco, can you find something out about Muldare’s background for me?”

  His curiosity piqued, Del Campo moved closer toward her. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything,” she emphasized. “Family background, just things like that,” she answered, deliberately keeping her request vague. This business with his brother had made her curious.

  Del Campo looked at her, puzzled. “What does this have to do with the case?”

  “Nothing,” Brianna admitted. It had absolutely nothing to do with the case they were investigating, just the man she was investigating it with. “Just my curiosity kicking in.”

  Del Campo laughed at her answer. “You mean just your Cavanaugh kicking in.” When he saw a trace of annoyance crease her brow, he said, “I know all about your family, Bri. You all have this idealistic notion that everybody’s supposed to be happy and connecting with everybody else. You know, it doesn’t always work that way, partner.”

  She didn’t care for being analyzed, even by someone she liked. “Just get me the information whenever you can—in your spare time,” Brianna threw in to make it sound casual.

  Del Campo almost laughed in her face. “Yeah, like I know what that is,” he said as Brianna walked away.

  “Whenever,” she tossed over her shoulder.

  When Brianna returned to her desk, Jackson was already there, waiting for her.

  “Did you get a list of former hotel guests from Del Campo?”

  She placed the list Del Campo had typed up for her on her desk so that Jackson could look at it.

  “Right here,” she answered, pushing it closer to him. “Did you call your brother?”

  Jackson never looked up. “He wasn’t a guest at the hotel.”

  She blew out a breath. Why did everything always have to be so difficult with him? But then, she reminded herself, she’d been raised on difficult. She had three older brothers. “You know what I mean, Muldare.”

  He murmured something under his breath, then said, “Unfortunately, yes, I do. But that’s a private matter and we’re here during business hours,” he reminded her. “Which means we need to be taking care of business. And I’ve got a feeling that everyone wants to see this case resolved and placed in a nice little box with a tight lid on it. The sooner, the better,” Jackson emphasized.

  The problem was, Jackson wasn’t wrong, Brianna thought. It took very little imagination for her to envision the mayor getting involved in this. The Auroras were essentially the city’s founding fathers, and as such, the family was a very big deal in the city of Aurora.

  They contributed to all the local charities as well as to the police and fire departments. Whatever needed doing, if there weren’t sufficient funds in the city’s coffers to get it done, the Aurora family could always be counted on to open their wallets in order to cover the expenses. No one wanted to offend them.

  But what about the people who weren’t able to speak for themselves? What about the people whose bodies had been uncovered in the rubble that the wrecking ball had brought down? Granted, they—or what was left of them—were past being offended. But not past being avenged.

  Brianna took a deep breath, struggling not to work herself up.

  She didn’t realize that Jackson had been talking to her until she felt his hand on her shoulder. Coming around, she almost jumped as she turned to look at him.

  “Earth to O’Bannon.” The way Jackson said the phrase to her, Brianna knew it wasn’t the first time he had tried to get her attention.

  “What?” she asked, trying to appear in the moment—as if she hadn’t somehow misplaced the last couple of minutes while she’d been lost in thought.

  “Are you back now?” he asked, something akin to amusement on his face.

  “Sorry. Just tell me what you were saying,” she retorted shortly.

  He inclined his head obligingly. “I said, do you want to start looking for the people on that list so we can question them, or do you want to go to the morgue to see if the ME has anything useful to tell us yet?”

  The man definitely did not have a gift for words, she thought.

  “We can swing by the morgue first,” she told Jackson. “But when we talk to the ME, do yourself a favor and leave out the word useful, okay?”

  He wasn’t following her, something, he was beginning to recall, that happened on a fairly regular basis. The woma
n had a way of messing with his mind and distracting him, not just because of what she said, but the way she looked when she said it. He had to force himself to focus on the words and not the woman saying them. “What?”

  “You make it sound as if you’re talking down to a person when you phrase it like that.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jackson said, exasperated.

  “All right,” she said, finding it difficult to remain delicate. “I’ll put it another way. You need people lessons, Muldare.”

  “I know how to do my job,” Jackson retorted, ticked off by her criticism.

  “I didn’t say you didn’t know how to do your job,” she protested. “As a matter of fact, Muldare, you’re a great cop. But you have a knack for rubbing people the wrong way.”

  This was getting to be tiresome, and he made no effort to hide his feelings from her.

  “I’m not in it to rub people the right way,” he informed her. “I’m in it to keep people from getting killed by the bad guys—and to find out who did it if they are.”

  “You’ll be able to do your job a lot quicker and get a lot more cooperation from people if you don’t make those people have to fight the urge to go after you with pitchforks and torches.”

  “So you say,” he replied wearily, just wanting to put an end to this annoying discussion she seemed to feel duty bound to have with him. “You want me to drive to the morgue?” he asked Brianna.

  He was missing her point about being nice to other people, but he was being polite to her—in a fashion. She took what she could get and hoped that would open the door to more.

  “See, that wasn’t so hard now, was it, Muldare?” she asked.

  Jackson shook his head, doing his best to hang on to the frayed ends of his temper. She had the ability to get under his skin and get him to lose his temper faster than anyone else he’d ever dealt with.

  “You know, half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about, O’Bannon. The other half of the time, I wish I didn’t,” he told her wearily.

  “And it only gets better with time, trust me,” a tall, dark-haired detective said to Jackson as he passed them.