Cavanaugh on Duty(32)
“Hal and I are old friends,” Blake explained, picking up the narrative. There was a heaviness in his voice that was impossible to miss. “When I first sat on the bench, Hal was my mentor. He went out of his way to take me under his wing, teach me everything he knew. This shouldn’t have happened to him,” he said angrily, looking back at the body.
“Could this have been the work of someone he sent to prison?” Kari asked.
“There’s always that chance,” Blake admitted.
Suddenly, he locked eyes with Greer and they exchanged knowing looks. Although the couple was blissfully happy now, their romance had gotten off to a perilous start. Kari recalled how it was a death threat that had brought Greer into Blake’s life in the first place. Fortunately, all that ugly business was behind them now.
Blake cleared his throat and then continued. “In our profession, we all live with the possibility of vengeance, but I can tell you that Hal Rockwell was the most honest, the most decent judge I ever had the pleasure to work with. Once they’d served their time and got out, he helped a lot of the folks he’d sentenced to prison find work and rebuild their lives, as long as they demonstrated a willingness to turn over a new leaf.”
A selfless person. Just like the first two victims, Kari thought, although not the third. None of this was making any sense. Could they have all been living secret lives, part of some secret society that ultimately led to their deaths? Instead of answers, she was grappling with more and more questions.
“Would you mind if we came by tomorrow to ask you a few more things about the judge? You know, pick your brain after you’ve had some time to get a good night’s sleep?” she suggested to Greer and her husband.
“I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep tonight,” Blake speculated.
Greer slipped her hand into his, silently offering Blake her support. “Let’s go home, Blake,” she urged. “We won’t be much help and we’ll only get in the way right now.” Very gently, she guided the judge away from the crime scene. But before she left, she made eye contact with Esteban. “Get this bastard,” she mouthed.
Saying nothing, Esteban acknowledged her request with a nod.
It was enough.
* * *
Despite the fact that she was still wearing the silver cocktail dress, Kari decided to go straight to the squad room with Esteban rather than making a pit-stop at home to change into something more functional. The hope that this latest victim would somehow cause the dominoes to finally fall into place outweighed her need to throw on something that was a bit more comfortable than the slinky evening dress.
Kari pinned the latest victim’s photograph next to the others and started a fourth column listing what they knew so far.
“Maybe once we get a chance to talk to Blake, we’ll find that common denominator we’re looking for,” she said to Esteban.
“What if there isn’t one?” he countered. “What if our serial killer is just some certifiable crazy who slashes people’s throats whenever the mood strikes or he perceives some slight—real or imaginary?”
She refused to even consider that possibility right now.
“No, there’s got to be something, some trigger, something about these people rather than all the other individuals he comes across in his day-to-day life that turns him into a homicidal maniac. At the very least, there has to be some common place where their paths cross.” Kari stared at the board. There wasn’t nearly enough information under each victim for them to work with. “It’s going to drive me crazy until I figure it out,” she said, more to herself than to him.
Kari sank down in front of her computer, pulling up the files she’d compiled on the first three victims, and tried to see if there was any sort of overlap, any common links between any of them and the judge.
Completely immersed in her search, she wasn’t aware that Esteban had stepped away from his desk until she swung back around to answer the phone on her desk.
Where had he gotten to? she wondered as she said into the phone receiver, “Cavelli-Cavanaugh.”
“Put your traveling shoes on, Hyphen,” the lieutenant’s deep voice rumbled into her ear. “There’s been another one.”
“You’re kidding,” she cried in disbelief. Nothing for almost a week and a half, and now two in one day? What was it that drove this killer?
“I never kid before dawn, Hyphen,” he told her sardonically, then rattled off the address he’d just received. “Oh, and before you start complaining about being overworked, I’m filling out the paperwork to get you and Fernandez a task force to help you with this case. Just because you’ve got two names doesn’t mean I expect you to do twice as much work. You got any problem working with Donnelly and Choi?” he asked, naming two detectives attached to another section of the department.
“Donnelly and Choi will be fine,” she told him, then asked with a glimmer of humor, “Haven’t you heard? I’m easygoing.”
“Yeah, right.” He laughed shortly. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “And the sun rises in the west. Get yourself over to the crime scene, Hyphen.”
The line went dead. The lieutenant wasn’t much for hellos or goodbyes.
Kari sighed, hanging up just as she saw Esteban walking back into the squad room. He was carrying a covered coffee container in each hand.
“Thought you might need this,” he explained, setting one cup down in front of her on her desk.
Kari rose to her feet and picked up the container. “Don’t take the lid off,” she told him as he was about to sit down and get comfortable. “We just got a call that there’s been another murder.”
He stared at her for a moment as if she’d lapsed into another language. “You’re kidding.”
“Same thing I said,” she told him, grabbing her purse. “Unfortunately, the lieutenant was serious.”
Esteban put his hand on her shoulder, stopping her before she could stride out of the squad room. “You look beat. Want me to drive?” he asked.
“Coffee, chauffeuring. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were being nice to me. I’m not dying, am I?”
“Not that I know of,” he deadpanned.
She took a breath, forcing herself to deal seriously with what she took to be the situation. “Look, I just want you to know I don’t expect any special treatment just because—well, just because,” she concluded. They were alone, but the squad room was no place to talk about this in any kind of detail.
“Duly noted,” he told her. “But for the record, you do look beat. The offer still stands,” he said. “Want me to drive?”
She liked being in control, had fought for it for half her life. But sometimes it was nice to have someone else take over and carry the load. Maybe this was one of those times.
“I won’t say no,” she said.
“First time for everything,” Esteban commented. His expression gave no indication that he was pleased. He put his hand out for the keys.
After a beat, Kari surrendered them.
* * *
“You were right, you know,” Esteban stated quietly several miles into their trip to investigate the latest crime scene.
“Of course I was,” she said with feeling. When he gave no indication that he was going to clarify what he meant, she was forced to ask, “About what this time?”
He carefully picked his way through what he considered a minefield. Each word brought with it a memory, memories he didn’t feel equipped to deal with. “About knowing me from high school. I did go to the same school you did, and I was the football quarterback.”
Kari reminded herself that she wasn’t supposed to know any of his backstory between the end of high school and the moment he’d walked into the squad room. It wasn’t easy. But keeping that in mind, she asked the first logical question that would have occurred to her under those circumstances.
“Why did you lie about it?”
He looked straight ahead at the road, his expression stony. “Because I buried all that a long time ago.”
She told herself to leave it alone, but would he have expected her to? She ventured forward cautiously, testing the waters as she went.
“Mind if I ask why?”
“Because everyone I cared about was alive back then, and if I think about that, then I have to think about their deaths and the pain hits me all over again,” he said fiercely, struggling with his emotions. “I can’t go through that. It’s better just to leave everything buried.”
She knew he wasn’t asking her for advice, but she gave it anyway—because she could see he was in pain and she wanted to help.
“Those people you loved, they wouldn’t want to see you like this,” she said gently, trying to appeal to his sense of logic. “They’d want to see you try to be happy.”