Cavanaugh Vanguard

by Marie Ferrarella

  “If you don’t know,” Valri told him, jabbing at the elevator down button, “it’s not too late. Run. Save yourself.”

  Not paying attention to the advice, Jackson turned toward Brianna. “What’s the Cavanaugh gut feeling?” he asked as they all got in the elevator.

  Valri pressed the button for the basement and the door slowly closed. “Something that supersedes common sense and all the rules,” she told him.

  “And is usually right,” Brianna interjected with finality.

  Valri frowned. “That’s beside the point.” The elevator door opened, and she led the way toward the computer lab. “Hear that?” Valri asked, opening the door to the lab. “That’s the sound of people not working—because it’s Sunday.”

  Brianna decided to appeal to her cousin’s sense of family. No matter what the price, they were always there for one another.

  “Valri, the Aurora family is putting pressure on Uncle Brian and Uncle Sean—and who knows who else—to just drop the case, or barring that, just sweep it under the rug and call it an unsolved cold case. Uncle Brian told me they made it clear that they didn’t want an investigation, and if there was one, there’d be consequences.”

  Valri sighed. “This may still wind up being a cold case,” she warned.

  “But not until all the other possible open avenues have been explored,” Jackson stressed.

  “Ah, another county heard from,” Valri quipped, turning on her computer. “Okay,” she said, shifting her chair and moving it closer to the computer, “because it’s for Uncle Brian and Uncle Sean—and the new guy,” she added, her eyes sweeping over Jackson, “I’m giving this my best shot. But I’m obligated to warn you, two hours without coffee and I completely run out of steam.”

  “I’ll make a coffee run and bring you back a gallon of coffee if you want,” Jackson promised.

  “In the meantime,” Brianna interjected, “what can we do to help?”

  Eyes narrowed, her visibly tired cousin gave her a look. “Other than lose my home phone number?”

  “Yes, other than that.”

  Valri thought a moment, then said, “I’ll power up two of the unrestricted computers and send a third of the names on those missing-persons lists I’m going to start pulling up to each of you. You can start reading through them, too. That should cut down the amount of time I have to spend here.”

  Valri began to bundle the first batch of missing-persons reports to send to Brianna, her fingers flying over the keyboard as names and dates whizzed by on her monitor. “By the way,” she said, never looking up, “you owe me. Big-time.”

  “I’m good for it,” Brianna assured the other woman.

  “No, you’re not,” Valri replied. “But this time, you won’t be able to wiggle out of it.” She glanced toward Jackson. “I have a witness.”

  Jackson thought it in his best interest to keep his head down.

  Chapter 20

  “I don’t know about you, but my eyes feel like they’re totally tread worn,” Brianna declared.

  Pushing her chair back a little from the computer she’d been using, she leaned back in the seat and moved her head from side to side, trying to work out the kinks in her neck. She’d lost track of time as she, Jackson and Valri pulled up and read through scores of missing-persons reports for the better part of Sunday.

  Following Brianna’s lead, Jackson shifted his shoulders and stretched.

  “Why don’t we call it a day?” Jackson suggested, looking at his partner. His body felt as if it had been glued into place. In his estimation, spending a whole day working at a desk was nothing short of punishment.

  Valri didn’t need any more than that. “I will if you will,” she told them, sounding livelier than she had in hours.

  Brianna sighed as she assessed the large stack of papers on missing women that had been printed up as a direct result of their search. “I had no idea that there were this many lost people out there.”

  Jackson glanced over at the pile. There was no other word for it than daunting. “You don’t mean that literally, do you?”

  Brianna raised her eyes to his. She thought of her own life and how lucky she was. “No, I don’t.”

  Jackson saw the look in her eyes and guessed what was going through her mind. That comment about being lost was meant for him as well. He could feel barriers beginning to go up, separating them.

  He was an outsider; he always had been. Chances were he always would be.

  “Not everyone is lucky enough to be born a Cavanaugh,” he said dismissively.

  Brianna heard the sarcasm in his voice and she refused to allow it to put her off or to drive a wedge between them.

  “All it takes is a positive state of mind and a willingness to join in,” she told him.

  “Well, if I can get you two to leave the lab, I’m positive I can close up shop until tomorrow morning,” Valri said, powering down her computer. Looking at Brianna, she nodded at the stack of reports. “I trust those are enough to keep you busy for now.”

  Brianna was on her feet, picking up the missing-persons reports they’d compiled. There were a great many from the last three years that apparently fit the general description of the dead women found within the hotel walls.

  “Probably for the next few days,” she said, trying not to let the number overwhelm her. Brianna took a deep breath as if she was girding for the job that lay ahead. “All we need to do is find one,” she said, glancing at Jackson. “One missing woman we can link to someone in the Aurora family.”

  “Sounds more like we’re going to be trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Jackson commented. He looked at the stack, then at Brianna, and did his best to sound at least somewhat upbeat and up to the task. “All we can do is try.”

  Brianna tried not to think about how daunting that was going to be. Compiling the missing-persons reports had been the easy part. The hard part was very much still ahead.

  She turned toward her cousin. “Thanks for all your help, Valri.”

  Valri nodded, following Brianna and Jackson out the lab door. Falling back, she locked up. “I hope it turns out to be worth it.”

  “It will,” Brianna said with a conviction she had to dig deep to bring to the surface. Under her breath, she added, “It has to be.”

  * * *

  She had every intention of getting into her own car and going home to read through the reports when Jackson pulled up to his apartment complex. But somehow, given one thing and then another, she never actually made it into her own vehicle. For one thing, Jackson invited her in to share the pizza he was ordering.

  She was hungry, so she said yes. At least, that was what she’d told herself.

  But by the time the pizza actually arrived, food was the last thing on either one of their minds. Jackson broke their steamy embrace just long enough to open his front door and pay the delivery boy.

  The pizza was forgotten the moment he closed the door again.

  They didn’t eat for a long, long time.

  * * *

  “I always liked cold pizza best, anyway,” Brianna told Jackson as they sat in his bed.

  “Yeah, me too,” Jackson agreed, taking a large bite of his slice and savoring it. “Think we’re going to get the killer?” he asked after another couple of bites.

  Brianna slanted a sidelong glance at him. “Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have to,” she told him flatly. “Given the forensics, whoever killed the first batch of women is probably dead. But this copycat killer or whatever he is, he’s still out there,” she said with passion, “and if we don’t find him and put him away, someone else will die. I feel it in my gut.”

  “That would be the famous Cavanaugh gut?” Jackson asked drily.

  “Yes.” Brianna didn’t bother to suppress a laugh. “That’s what it is.” />
  Finished with his second slice, Jackson moved the pizza box to the nightstand. “Mind if I examine it?” he asked, throwing off the covers. “Just for scientific reasons, of course.”

  Brianna couldn’t help herself. She started to laugh. “I think you’ve examined everything that there is to examine,” she pointed out.

  “Just to be sure,” he stressed, getting closer to her abdomen. “Strictly in the interest of science.”

  Brianna lay back in his bed. “Well, as long as it’s for science,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  Her voice vanished completely as he got down to the business at hand.

  * * *

  “These are the reports we managed to find on the missing women who fit the general description of the bodies you’ve autopsied,” Brianna told Kristin the following day.

  Standing next to her, Jackson emptied several folders and placed their contents in a stack on the medical examiner’s desk.

  “We eliminated as many possible candidates as we could,” Jackson added. “We thought that since you did the autopsies and had closer contact with the bodies of the most recent victims, you’d be in a better position to eliminate at least a few of the rest.”

  Kristin looked at the reports and then picked up the ones on top to glance over. “Are these mine to go through?”

  Brianna nodded. “You can hang on to them. We’ve made copies. Just tell me which ones make it to the semifinals and we’ll hunt down the women’s dental records if we can. Just so you know,” Brianna went on, “a few of the women in that stack have priors, so their DNA or prints might be in the system. A couple for shoplifting, another one was arrested at a protest rally. Two for solicitation,” she concluded. “But from all indications, the rest of these women have had no contact with law enforcement. No time in juvie, no priors or arrests.”

  Kristin nodded. “Okay, we’ll work backward,” she said. “If any of the five bodies in the morgue resemble someone in this pile, I can have the lab try to track down medical records and see if we can come up with a match to one of our five victims.”

  “What about social media?” Jackson asked her out of the blue when they left Kristin.

  Her brow furrowed as she looked at Jackson. “What about it?”

  “Well,” he said as they went down the corridor, “I’ve got no use for it myself, but apparently most people can’t seem to make a move without notifying the immediate world what they’re up to. Maybe some of the missing women in those reports posted something on their social-media page before they went missing. We might find something to give us insight into their lives and who they hung out with. And maybe, if we’re really lucky, even a clue as to what happened to them.”

  Leaving the building, she looked at Jackson, impressed. “Boy, you don’t talk much, but when you do, you really have something noteworthy to say. You realize this means a lot more reading for us.”

  Given half a chance, Jackson preferred being outside, in the field, but when it came to this case, he’d resigned himself to more indoor work.

  “As long as it leads to the bastard who did this, it’ll be worth it.”

  * * *

  “This has got to be the most vapidly vain documented generation to have ever drawn breath,” Jackson commented more than a day later, utterly exasperated.

  They had been going through a mind-numbing number of social-media pages ever since they’d left the morgue. It seemed like one page just naturally led to another link, which led to another and another. It had been like that for the last thirty-six hours.

  “Why would anyone take pictures of their food?” he demanded incredulously, shaking his head. “Why not just eat it?”

  Brianna shrugged. “Maybe they wanted to remember what it looked like when it was served.”

  She felt as if she was reaching the end of her rope, tired of going through pictures as she searched for some hidden trigger in all of these commemorated non-occasions.

  “You want to remember a sunset, the look in someone’s eyes when they turned toward you at just the right moment. You don’t want to remember food,” he insisted, his tone bordering on disgust.

  “Hey, don’t get all worked up. I agree with you,” Brianna protested. “But I guess these people think differently. Maybe we could use a break,” she suggested, closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose. All the photographs were beginning to run together and the people in them to look alike. “Say, go out to get something to eat and come back,” she proposed.

  “Sure,” Jackson answered. “I could—Wait—”

  She shrugged, willing to put her suggestion on hold. “No problem. I’ll wait. I’ll just flip to another incredibly boring site.”

  But Jackson shook his head. She didn’t understand. “No, I mean, wait—I think I might have found something.”

  She didn’t bother to suppress the groan that escaped. “Not another page of someone posting someone else’s embarrassing photos.” They’d already come across several less-than-flattering picures. “I’m still trying to erase the last ones from my mind.”

  He didn’t bother contradicting her supposition. “Come here,” Jackson said, beckoning her over to his computer. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen, afraid it might just vanish. “Look at this.”

  Coming around to his desk, she looked over his shoulder at the photo he had frozen on the monitor. “That’s a pretty fancy-looking party,” Brianna commented. According to the caption, the photograph had been taken at a fund-raiser. Everyone there was wearing clothes that would have set back most people half a year’s salary, if not more. “Whose social-media page are you on?”

  “I’ve lost track,” Jackson confessed. He hit an arrow that took him back to the last location he had pulled up. “It belongs to Jocelyn Aurora.”

  Brianna looked at him. “That’s Winston’s daughter,” she recalled. The thin, colorless girl had all but faded into the wall the one time she had met her.

  “Yeah, but look here, over in the corner,” Jackson directed. “That girl with Damien Aurora. Doesn’t that look like one of the girls in the missing-persons report?”

  Right now, everyone looked like everyone else to her. “Enhance it,” she told him.

  “How do I—? Oh.”

  Impatient, Brianna reached over and did the honors herself. Touching the screen, she spread her fingers out, making the section beneath her fingers grow until it was three times as large.

  “You’re right,” she said, excitement building in her chest. “It is one of the girls. It’s—Hold on—” Turning away, she quickly riffled through the stack that had been on her desk, spreading the pages out so they covered his desk. “I just saw that face a few minutes ago on her own page.”

  Brianna shuffled through the pages a second time, more methodically, looking at each face intently.

  “There!” she declared, jabbing her finger at the page she had been looking for. “That’s her. That’s—” She read the name beneath the photograph. “‘Mandy Prentice.’”

  Brianna held up the page beside the enlarged photo on Jackson’s computer monitor. She stared at the two images, one sharp, a graduation photo enshrining a far happier time, and one fuzzy despite the enhancement, clearly a shot taken when Mandy—if it was Mandy—was trying to disentangle herself from the grip of the person holding on to her wrist.

  Damien Aurora.

  “We need to print this picture,” Brianna cried. “Hot damn, I think we just got our break!” She threw her arms around Jackson’s neck and pressed an elated kiss to his cheek. “There’s more where that came from if this turns out to be what we’re looking for,” she promised, excitement all but pulsating in her voice.

  “You two partying?” Del Campo called out, looking up from his computer.

  “Just maybe,” Brianna told him. “I want you to drop whatever you’re doing and get any
kind of medical records you can find on a Mandy Prentice. When you find them, bring them over to Kristin Cavanaugh at the morgue. If we’re right, the mystery of the Old Aurora Hotel is about to be unraveled.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Jackson cautioned. “This picture could be just a picture. Winston Aurora and his wife throw these fund-raisers all the time. Just because Damien is there and grabbed that girl’s wrist doesn’t mean he killed her.”

  “Maybe not,” she agreed reluctantly, “but it’s a starting point.” She looked back at the picture. Enlarged, Damien’s expression was clearly visible. He didn’t appear playful or even annoyed. Instead, he seemed as if he was furious with the girl whose wrist he was gripping. “With a little imagination, you can almost see him dragging her off.

  “But the best part is,” Brianna continued, trying her best to control her growing excitement, “if Kristin can make a positive ID that one of the bodies in the morgue is Mandy Prentice, then we have a reason to bring Damien Aurora in for questioning, if for no other reason than he might have been one of the last people to see Mandy alive.”

  Jackson hated being the voice of reason. It wasn’t a role that suited him. But he didn’t want Brianna being humiliated in front of other people, especially not the Auroras.

  “You know his father is going to get him an army of lawyers,” Jackson told her. “You won’t be able to get near him.”

  She began to say something in response when she suddenly stopped. Her mind was whirling because something Jackson had just said had triggered a memory, something she remembered coming across.

  “Jackson, you’re brilliant,” she declared. Turning on her heel, she hurried back to her own desk. Typing, she pulled up a file.

  “Not that I’m arguing with you about your assessment, but why am I brilliant?” Jackson asked, coming around to stand behind Brianna.

  Moving back, she gestured at the monitor. “Because of this.”

  There, on the screen, was a summary of an arrest dated two years ago. The person arrested was Damien Aurora.