Cavanaugh on Duty(15)

It wasn’t hard to guess why she looked like that. “Another body?”

“Another body,” she repeated heavily.

Esteban’s expression remained unchanged, and he asked for street directions wearing that same impenetrable look. All of a sudden, she felt a growing need to somehow break through that outer shell of his, to reach the part of him she was certain could still feel. After all, it had been inside him once—why not still?

“Same M.O.?” he asked her.

She considered that point. “Yes and no. The location is different, but the woman’s throat was slashed just like our retired mail carrier’s was—and she’s a retired teacher.”

Two retired victims in a row. Esteban frowned. He doubted if that was just a coincidence in the killer’s random selection process.

“Maybe someone’s got it in for retired people,” he cracked.

“Terrific,” Kari retorted, sincerely hoping that was not the case. “Then we’re going to need a hell of a lot bigger task force,” she concluded, paraphrasing a famous line from a classic movie. Except in that case, the word “bigger” referred to acquiring a boat—this meant more manpower, something the department always seemed to be short of these days.

Esteban proceeded slowly, going over the facts of the first case and seeing if they measured up to the evidence in the second one.

“They didn’t find the victim rolled up in a rug in a storage unit, did they?” Because that, he couldn’t help thinking, would have been truly bizarre.

“No, no rug,” Kari told him. “The victim’s granddaughter hadn’t heard from her for a few days, and when she tried to reach her, she didn’t get an answer. She said that raised a red flag since her grandmother was always very good about returning calls. So the woman went to her grandmother’s house to check up on her and found her in the kitchen, her throat slashed.”

Esteban nodded as he took the new information in. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

Kari slanted him a look as she eased her foot off the gas pedal and onto the brake, coming to a stop at a red light. That was overly optimistic, especially for him.

“You really think so?” she wanted to know.

He shook his head. “No.”

She sighed. “Me neither. But I really don’t like where this is headed.” It had all the signs of a serial murder case in the making.

“Makes two of us,” he commented brusquely.

* * *

The woman’s granddaughter, Anne Daniels, had to be sedated and wasn’t up to answering any questions by the time Kari and her partner reached the crime scene.

The cheery-looking town-house kitchen, bathed in afternoon sunlight, looked like an improbable place for a murder. But then, she’d learned that murder never cared about its surroundings. It barged in everywhere.

“I guess there’s no question about where the victim was murdered,” Esteban said grimly as he bent down to study the rather frail-looking dead woman. “There’re no defensive wounds.”

“He came up behind her and caught her by surprise.” Kari let out a shaky breath. “The poor thing never had a chance. She looks like she could have been overpowered by a strong three-year-old.”

“Notice anything else?” Esteban asked her.

She looked down at the body, wondering what he was referring to. “I’m not sure...” Then she glanced over at an eight-by-eleven cookie sheet. It was covered in parchment paper and a dozen extralarge mounds of cookie dough ready for the oven. “Baking cookies.” She looked up at Esteban. “I think she was comfortable with whoever it was who killed her.”

“Maybe,” Esteban allowed. “Or maybe she was too busy to hear the intruder coming in. But I’m referring to what’s missing.”

Her eyes swept over the victim again. “Missing?”

He nodded. “No crude drawing of the scales of justice.”

The story of Reynolds’s murder had just hit the news, but the detail about the scales had been deliberately left out. “Maybe this is a copycat killer,” she theorized.

“Maybe,” he echoed in that stoic voice she was really starting to dislike.

Feeling frustrated, wanting to glean something useful, Kari went outside the town house and proceeded to question the neighbors, asking the standard questions about noise and any odd behavior. No one had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary.

“Batting zero here,” Kari muttered, growing more exasperated.

Neighbors on both sides of the victim’s town house were appalled that something like this could have happened to “such a lovely woman like Mae.”

The two neighbors, a divorced vet and an unemployed construction worker who was currently in between significant others, had nothing but kind words about the woman, who’d periodically baked “the best damn raisin cookies on the planet” for the two men. Neither had heard any loud noises coming out of the woman’s home.

“I wish I had. I wouldn’t have let anything happen to Mae if only I’d known. She didn’t deserve this,” the construction worker—a large, burly man who gave Kari the impression of towering over her, even though he was the exact same height—said with genuine sorrow in his voice. “She wasn’t...wasn’t...you know.” He stumbled over his words, then looked toward Esteban to fill in the missing term he couldn’t make himself utter.

“No, she wasn’t,” Esteban answered, assuming that the man was asking whether the retired schoolteacher had been raped or violated in any way. “The M.E.’s preliminary exam indicated that she hadn’t been violated.” It was a lie. The M.E. hadn’t even arrived yet, but the man asking looked really distressed, and Esteban felt for him. “Why?” he asked. “Do you know anyone who would—”

Esteban didn’t get a chance to finish. The construction worker was shaking his head. “No, no, it’s just that there’re so many crazy people running around these days.... It’s bad enough she was killed, but to have that happen first, well it’s just unthinkable.”

“From all appearances, it was quick,” Esteban reassured him.

When both neighbors offered their services to “get justice for Mae,” Kari quickly promised to let them know if there was any way they could help.

* * *

“Well, that was enlightening,” she commented to her new partner as they walked away from the two men and headed back toward the victim’s town house.

Esteban looked at her. A slight scowl formed on his brow. Had he missed something? “You pick up something from what was said?”

“No. I meant enlightening about you,” she corrected, glancing his way.

Esteban’s frown deepened. She’d lost him. As far as he knew, he hadn’t said anything of consequence. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I didn’t realize until just now that you still have a compassionate bone in your body. What you just said to that construction worker was meant to make him feel better. You and I both know that we won’t get the whole story until the M.E. files his report.” She smiled up at him. “So that was really nice of you. I would have bet money that you would have just walked away, leaving him to think the worst.”

Esteban’s intense blue eyes narrowed just as the CSI van turned the corner at the end of the block and drew closer. But he wasn’t looking at the van—he was looking at Kari.

“What do you mean ‘still’?” he wanted to know. Tossing out that word meant that she must have believed that he was compassionate before, and for that to be true, she had to have known him previously.

That, in turn, spoke to the vague feeling of familiarity he’d experienced in the Chief of Detectives’ office.

The feeling, he realized, he was experiencing again now.

Plus more.

Esteban waited for her to answer him so he could put that sentiment to rest once and for all.





Chapter 8



Kari was trying to decide how best to frame her answer to her new partner’s question when the CSI van pulled up in front of the latest victim’s town house. For a moment, curious as to which of the team had come out to process this crime scene, she forgot about Fernandez.

The three team members quickly got out of the van. They lost no time arming themselves with the equipment needed to document any and all findings at the crime scene. After all, you never knew what could eventually give them that one clue that would help lead to the woman’s killer.

Kari was surprised to see that her father was once again heading up the team. She’d just assumed that he would still be focused on the last murder victim.

“Spreading yourself a little thin, aren’t you, Dad?” Kari asked as she came up behind her father.

Sean closed the trunk and turned around to face her. “I could say the same thing to you and your partner here,” he said, nodding at Esteban.