Cavanaugh Cowboy

by Marie Ferrarella

  Sully tried to give the man a little hope. “It depends on the condition of the body being autopsied as well as how big the person was and how decomposed.”

  Rick considered the stipulations Sully had just enumerated. “Well, other than his color once the mud was washed off—and the fact that he was dead—Warren looked to be in pretty good shape,” he assessed.

  Just then, they heard the door in the rear of the clinic being opened. Dan and Alisha used the third examination room to do minor surgical procedures in lieu of shipping a patient off to the hospital, which was also fifty miles away. This was the first time that an autopsy was being performed in the room.

  All three people in the waiting room were on their feet, hurrying toward the rear of the clinic.

  Dan met them in the middle. The blue surgical garb he had put on for the procedure had blood on it, and he looked really tired.

  “Are you finished with the autopsy?” Rick asked.

  “In the interest of brevity,” Dan told them, “I just did a preliminary one.” He paused to strip off his gloves and remove the mask that was now hanging from about his neck.

  “Were you able to determine the cause of death?” Sully asked.

  Even with the mud washed off to a greater degree, it was hard for Dan to distinguish what was a wound and what was actually bruises and scratches.

  Dan nodded. “There were two knife wounds delivered straight to the heart. As near as I can see, Warren bled out, most likely after whoever did this to him buried him,” Dan conjectured. “The poor guy didn’t have enough strength to dig himself out of his impromptu grave, much less try to get help.”

  Envisioning the scene, Rae shivered. But her expression seemed almost stony as she asked the doctor, “Did you find out anything else?”

  Dan wearily shook his head. “No, sorry. The actual ME can do a tox screen once you transport the body to the hospital. Maybe it’ll produce some more answers.”

  “You did great, Doc,” Rick told the man with enthusiasm. “I know this was a huge imposition. Thanks a lot for coming out and doing this—especially on such short notice.”

  Dan flashed an even wearier smile. “Sorry I couldn’t have been more help,” he apologized.

  The sheriff saw the look on Rae’s face. She looked particularly upset. “What’s the matter?”

  Rae shook her head. “I still don’t know who to notify.”

  “Maybe there’s something in his things that’ll tell you,” Rick suggested.

  That wasn’t going to be of any help, she thought. “He took his things with him,” she answered.

  “I can go back at first light to where we found him.” Sully told her. “Maybe Warren’s knapsack is there somewhere.” He said it to give Rae a sliver of hope, although he strongly doubted that he’d unearth the knapsack.

  And then he thought of something and swung around to look at the doctor. “Doc, his fingerprints weren’t obliterated, were they?”

  Dan looked at the detective, slightly confused. “Are you asking me if they were burned off? No, why would you think that they had been?”

  At this point, he wasn’t taking anything for granted. “Just checking,” Sully answered. He turned toward the sheriff. “We can take his fingerprints and I can forward them to the crime scene investigation lab techs back in Aurora.”

  “Won’t they think you’re freelancing?” Rick asked. He was only half kidding.

  “My uncle runs the lab’s day shift,” Sully told him. “I can get him to see if Warren ever worked anyplace before he came here where he would have had to be fingerprinted. If he did, we can match the place to the city where he came from.” He saw the dubious look on the sheriff’s face. “The database in the department is pretty extensive,” he explained.

  Rick was beginning to think that the detective had access to endless resources. “Hey, I’m just glad for the help,” the sheriff told him.

  “Kind of makes you feel like life is passing Forever by, doesn’t it?” Rae commented to the man.

  “I see it as a tradeoff,” Rick answered. “Because along with all that state-of-the-art technology come all the invasive headaches that go with it.” He smiled at Rae. “I like things peaceful and quiet myself.”

  The doctor nodded. “I tend to agree with you, Sheriff. Now, unless you want anything else, let’s get a copy of those prints to send out and then I’m going to lock this clinic up—for another six hours before patients start turning up at the door,” he told the others with a resigned sigh.

  “Let me go to my office so I can get an inkpad and paper for you,” the sheriff told Dan. “We might as well keep this as official as possible,” he added as he headed toward the front entrance.

  Sully started to take a seat in order to wait for the sheriff’s return. Rae, he noticed, was going toward the rear of the clinic. With a suppressed sigh, he rose to his feet again.

  Dan realized that Rae was behind him and he stopped walking. “Do you need something, Rae?”

  “No, but I thought you might need some help cleaning up in the back.” She saw the puzzled look on his face and said, “I mean, you did just do an autopsy back there, right?”

  “Cleaning off the mud on his body made more of a mess than the autopsy did,” Dan assured her.

  “All right, then I’ll clean up the mud,” she volunteered.

  Anyone else would have been more than willing to sit this out. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Dan asked her.

  “Want to?” she repeated. “No. But I like being useful. I’m sure you didn’t want to leave your nice, cozy home to come in and cut up a dead body, especially since you needed to clean it up first.”

  Dan could see that arguing with her was definitely an exercise in futility.

  “Okay,” he said, giving in. “Come this way.”

  “Got room for one more?” Sully asked, catching up to them after first attempting to argue himself out of doing this. When Dan looked at him quizzically, Sully told the doctor, “Well, it’s not like I’ve got something else to do.”

  “This is going to go down as one of the strangest nights I’ve ever spent in Forever,” Dan told them as he led the way to the last exam room.

  He pushed open the door again. He’d pulled it shut out of habit when he’d left the room.

  Aside from several towels that were all bunched up on the floor in one corner, towels that Dan had used on the body when he was cleaning off the mud, the room appeared to be fairly clean.

  However, fairly clean wasn’t good enough. Rae knew that the room had to be kept sterile from patient to patient.

  “You want me to boil something or pour boiling water on it to sterilize it?” she asked Dan, not knowing exactly what sort of procedure he followed.

  Dan looked as if he was having trouble trying not to laugh, but he managed to keep a straight face since he didn’t want to offend her.

  “Just put those towels into the hamper and wipe down the exam table with some alcohol.” He pointed toward a generic opaque bottle over on the counter beneath a cabinet.

  “Anything else, Doc?” Sully asked, looking around the rectangular room.

  “Not unless you can think of something,” Dan said. Hearing a noise coming from the front of the clinic, Dan glanced in that direction. “Hopefully that’s the sheriff and not a patient looking to be first in line when we officially open our doors.”

  Sully had no frame of reference for the kind of foot traffic the doctor was talking about.

  “Are you always busy?” he asked.

  “Always,” Dan told him, and then he smiled. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I like making a difference,” he confided. “To be honest with you, this feels a lot better than having the kind of practice where I make enough money to buy a new Ferrari every two years. That, by the way, was the kind of doctor I thought I was going to b
e—until I came out here and realized what being a doctor really meant.”

  “Why did you come out here?” Sully asked the former New York doctor just as the sheriff walked into the exam room.

  “Long story,” Dan answered. “Maybe I’ll tell it to you if you stick around here long enough,” he added, crossing the room to meet the sheriff.

  The latter produced a large inkpad and regulation paper to collect Warren’s fingerprints and offered it to the visiting detective.

  “Do you want to do the honors?” the sheriff asked Sully.

  “This is still your jurisdiction, Sheriff,” he told the sheriff. “I wouldn’t want to step on your toes or anything.”

  Rae rolled her eyes. “If the two of you will stop being so nauseatingly polite,” she said to Sully and the sheriff, “I think Doc is really ready to lock up and go home.”

  But Dan had another thought as Rick carefully collected the dead man’s fingerprints.

  “What about the body?” he asked, looking at the man he had just put back together and sewn up. The stitched-up Y incision appeared particularly vivid on the dead wrangler’s chest.

  Rick wasn’t following his friend’s meaning. “What about it?”

  “Do you want to leave him here like this until morning?” Dan asked the sheriff. “Or do you want to store him somewhere?”

  Rick knew what the doctor was alluding to. That as outlandish as it sounded, the body might be stolen. He really doubted that anyone would break into the clinic for that sole purpose, but then he wouldn’t have thought anyone would have stabbed someone to death in his town, either. For the time being, there were no norms to cling to.

  “Good point,” Rick agreed.

  But before the sheriff could offer up a course of action regarding overseeing the body until morning arrived, Sully said, “I’ll stay with the body.”

  Sully’s eyes swept over the other three people in the room and he added, “Unless there are any objections, of course.”

  Chapter 13

  “I don’t have any objection,” Rae said, speaking up. “But if anyone should stay here with the body, it should be me,” she told Sully as well as the sheriff. “Warren worked for me. I owe this to him,” she said. She gave no indication that she was about to be dissuaded.

  Sully’s eyes met hers. She saw pity there, and it annoyed her.

  “Don’t you have a ranch to run?” he asked.

  She looked somewhat grim as she considered the question. “At this point, I’m really not sure if I do or not.”

  “What are you talking about?” the sheriff asked.

  Her expression only grew more somber. “I’m supposed to keep the ranch running smoothly, and I think that this definitely qualifies as not smoothly,” she said, looking over at the form lying on the table beneath the sheet Dan had placed over him.

  “You didn’t kill Warren,” Sully pointed out.

  “No, but I also didn’t keep him from running off and consequently having this happen to him.” Rae gestured toward the table.

  “I’ll tell Miss Joan about finding Warren in the morning,” Rick told her kindly. “No point in waking her with this news now.”

  It would have been easier that way, Rae thought and part of her was very tempted just to let the sheriff take over as he’d volunteered. She didn’t look forward to seeing the look of disappointment in her benefactress’s eyes. But she lived up to her responsibilities, and telling Miss Joan about Warren getting killed was all part of that.

  “Thank you, Sheriff, but no, I have to be the one to tell her,” Rae said.

  Rick didn’t look overly happy about her decision—this was his town and he felt responsible for it—but he understood the position she was taking.

  “If you change your mind, Rae, you know where to find me.”

  Rather than saying anything, Rae merely nodded. She waited until both the sheriff and the doctor left the clinic. The quiet that ensued once they were gone was jarring.

  Looking at the remaining person with her, she told Sully, “You know you don’t have to stay.”

  The look on his face said that she wasn’t about to push him out. “I’m not staying because I have to,” he told her.

  She sighed. “Why are you staying, then?” she asked.

  Sully held up one finger. “I’m the one who found him, and,” he continued, raising a second finger, “I figure you could use the company.”

  She didn’t know if he was being kind or patronizing. “This isn’t a sleepover, Cavanaugh,” Rae pointed out.

  “I wasn’t intending on sleeping,” he informed her, the corners of his mouth curving just the slightest bit, as if he was privately sharing some humorous anecdote with himself.

  Her eyes narrowed just a little. “Nothing else is going to happen, either,” she informed him just in case he was getting any ideas about the two of them being together in close quarters with no one else around to chaperone them.

  Sully looked totally unfazed. “Good to know,” he replied.

  Confused and frustrated, Rae blew out a breath. “You know, you are a very complicated man, Sully Cavanaugh,” she accused.

  “On the contrary, I’m a very simple man. If I have a job to do, I keep at it until it’s done. And then I just kick back and relax. Pretty much like most people,” he concluded.

  “You are not like most people,” Rae informed him with finality.

  They were still out in the waiting room. It was easier to talk out here than it was with a deceased body nearby. Another smile tugged at the corners of Sully’s mouth.

  “Why, Rachel Mulcahy, is that a compliment?” he asked, his hand covering his heart.

  She shot down his lighthearted humor. “No, that wasn’t a compliment, and don’t call me Rachel. My name is Rae,” she insisted.

  She was trying to divest herself of all trace of softness, he thought. But it was still visible. “Rachel is prettier.”

  Did he think she cared what he thought? “The name is Rae,” she repeated with more feeling.

  “Tough, able,” he said, analyzing the name. “Is that what you’re going for?”

  For two cents, she would have read him the riot act. But for some reason, she felt compelled to actually answer Sully’s question. “Not that it’s any business of yours, but out here I have to exhibit those qualities above all else.”

  “I think we’d both agree that life was rougher in biblical times.” Before she could ask him why he was suddenly babbling about biblical times, Sully answered her unspoken question. “In the Bible, it said that Jacob toiled seven years in order to marry Rachel, only to be tricked into marrying her older sister. That would have been pretty daunting for another couple. But he persisted—and so did Rachel. And after toiling another seven years for her, they were finally married. By waiting for him, Rachel proved to be just as strong and tough as he was.”

  She frowned. “Fascinating, Cavanaugh, and very educational. But I still like the name Rae. My dad used to call me Rae. I know it was because he wanted a boy.” There was no malice in her voice, no indication that realizing that fact hurt her. “But it didn’t matter,” she insisted. “I like the name Rae.”

  Listening, Sully drew his own conclusion. “A rose by any other name...” His voice trailed off.

  Her eyebrows drew together in a quizzical expression. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  Sully smiled. “That’s a lesson for another day. It doesn’t matter,” he said good-naturedly. “Rae’s a nice name.” Changing the subject, he said, “Why don’t you stretch out on one of the sofas? I’ll keep watch over our stationary friend back there.” He nodded toward the rear of the clinic. “He’s not about to go anywhere, anyway.”

  “I don’t think the sheriff was worried about that,” she told Sully. And then she grew just a little quieter and serious. “You don’t think
whoever killed him is going to try to make off with the body, do you?” It sounded impossible, but then, twenty-four hours ago the idea of a murder in Forever seemed impossible.

  “Not unless Warren swallowed something that would give away his killer’s identity.” The moment he said the words, Sully saw an uncertain look come over Rae’s face. “Look, Forever’s different from anything I’m used to, I’ll grant you that. But I really doubt that Warren has anything inside him that would tell us who his killer was.”

  “You’re right,” Rae agreed, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  “I’ll ask the doc in the morning if there was anything out of the ordinary about Warren’s autopsy that he didn’t mention—just in case,” Sully promised.

  Rae murmured, “Thanks,” saying the word as if it was difficult for her to voluntarily utter it.

  “So, why don’t you stretch out like I said?” he asked, nodding at the closest sofa.

  “I’m exhausted,” she admitted, “but there’s no way I’m going to get any sleep, not while I’m trying to figure out just how I’m going to tell Miss Joan about this.” She saw him opening his mouth and cut him off. “And don’t tell me that I should let the sheriff handle it. That’s not his job.”

  “Actually,” Sully contradicted, “notifying next of kin and other interested parties about someone’s death is his job.”

  Hearing him mention next of kin reminded her of something else she still had to do. “And that’s another thing—I need to find out if Warren even had any next of kin.”

  Her words brought back the response he’d given her earlier. He’d promised that he intended to look into that for her.

  “Right,” Sully said. Rae watched the detective take out his cell phone and press his thumb against the lower part of the screen. “Why don’t I get started on that?”

  “Now?” Rae asked incredulously. She looked at her watch. “It’s two thirty in the morning.”

  “It’s even earlier than that in Aurora,” he told her as he began to type in a text to his cousin. “But I want Valri to see this first thing in the morning, before she gets in.”