Cavanaugh Cold Case (14 page)

“There's nothing to thank us for yet, Professor Sullivan,” she told him.

“You brought my girl back to me. Not the way I would have liked,” he added sadly, then had to pause for a moment to keep his voice from breaking. “But at least I know where she is now.”

Nodding his head as if completing some private conversation in his mind, Henry Sullivan slowly walked away.

Malloy took one last look around the cemetery to see if perhaps someone was attempting to keep out of sight while viewing the proceedings. As far as he could ascertain, there was no one.

“I'd better get you back to the morgue before someone notices that your toe tag is missing, along with the rest of you,” he quipped.

The words sounded frivolous to her and hit Kristin the wrong way. She shook her head. “Just when I think that there's actual hope for you, you start acting like an idiot, and I'm left wondering how I could possibly have given you any points at all.”

“I'm on the point system?” Malloy asked, amusement curving his mouth. “How many points do I have to get in order to win?”

“There aren't that many points in the whole world,” she informed him, doing her best to sound distant and resurrect the crumbling barriers that just refused to remain up between them. There was something about the way he looked at her that kept creating fissures in those walls no matter how hard she tried to keep them in place. “At least, not where you're concerned.”

He was doing it again, watching her as if he could see her thoughts. Kristin couldn't get away from the feeling that she was waiting for a shoe to suddenly and irrevocably drop.

Although they were standing in the cemetery, alone for all intents and purposes, he still leaned in and whispered, “I do love a challenge, Kristin.”

Kristin, he'd called her Kristin. Not “Doc” the way he usually did. Kristin couldn't help feeling that somehow, she'd just been put on notice.

The question still remained, notice of what? He'd had a perfect opportunity to take advantage of her rather emotionally vulnerable state earlier at the morgue. She'd actually thought that he was
going
to kiss her—and he hadn't. He'd been the gentleman she didn't think he was. Now, had he done that for an honorable reason—or because he was carefully laying the groundwork to completely disarm her and then do exactly what she'd thought him capable of doing all along?

A couple of weeks ago, she would have never even wavered in her thoughts, but now she felt torn, leaning first this way, then that. And all the while, she felt herself being drawn closer and closer to this man whose reputation to “love 'em and leave 'em” was well-known throughout the entire precinct.

Drawing on all the bravado she could pull together, she looked at Malloy and asked, “How do you feel about losing?”

“I don't know,” he answered after what seemed like a moment's reflection. “It's never happened.”

She straightened her shoulders, drawing herself up to her full height and trying to appear just a wee bit taller and more formidable than she actually was. “Well, then, Detective Cavanaugh, brace yourself for a brand-new experience.”

Damn, but she felt as if his eyes were totally undressing her as Malloy replied in a quiet voice, “I'm counting on it.”

Kristin decided that it was wiser if she just said nothing further, not until she managed to sufficiently rearm her defenses against this silver-tongued devil in a suit.

Chapter 13

A
s soon as he got back to his desk, Malloy began searching for Zoe Roberts's next of kin. It took some extensive digging, but because he'd managed to pick up a few computer tricks from Valri, he was finally able to learn that his second identified victim was a product of the social services system.

According to what he uncovered, there had never been a father in the picture, and her mother had died of some unspecified disease when Zoe was eleven. With no other identifiable relatives to be found, Zoe Roberts was turned over to social services.

Once absorbed into the system, she went from one foster home to another—he counted eight in total—until she finally aged out at eighteen. Throughout those turbulent seven years, she had somehow managed to keep her grades up and had, apparently through sheer determination, earned a full scholarship to UCA.

Malloy closed the file and rocked back in his chair for a couple of moments. He stared at the blank screen, thinking.

It just didn't seem fair to him.

“All that potential, just to wind up in an unmarked grave for the past twenty years,” he said to himself. “Who the hell did this to you, Zoe?”

“So now you're talking to yourself, Detective?”

Malloy didn't have to turn around to know who belonged to the melodic voice coming from behind him. He did, anyway.

“What are you doing in my part of the building, Doc?” he asked.

An odd restlessness as well as an unrelenting curiosity had brought Kristin here to the cold case squad room. She wasn't the type to remain idle, especially when there was something to do.

“Well, I sent the autopsy report in to be transcribed, and until you give me another name to match up to the remaining nine skulls, or homicide sends me another body, I really don't have anything to do. By the way—” she dropped the stack of flyers he'd left with her on his desk “—for what it's worth, I separated the blondes from the rest.”

But Malloy's attention was focused on something she'd just said. “Nine skulls?”

“Yes.” Why was he questioning that? He knew how many had been dug up as well as she did.

“We started out with twelve and identified two. Wouldn't that leave ten?” he asked.

“It would—but you're trying to identify women, and if you recall, one of those skulls turned out to belong to a man.”

“Right. I guess I lost sight of that.” Rocking back in his chair, he scrutinized Kristin for a moment. He had a feeling there was more, but he didn't want to come right out and ask, so he led up to the subject and let her fill in the blank. “You didn't have to come all the way up here to bring me the flyers. I would have picked them up. All you had to do was give me a call.”

“I didn't come here to bring you the flyers,” she clarified. “I came to find out if you managed to locate Zoe's next of kin.”

“She didn't have any.” Even as he said it, it sounded so pitiful to him. Having grown up in what was tantamount to a crowd scene, he couldn't begin to imagine how lonely Zoe Roberts's upbringing had to have been. “She was an orphan long before she attended UCA.”

If there was no next of kin, that left only one person to notify about finding Zoe's remains. “Have you called her friend yet? The one who initially gave you Zoe's name?”

“Oh, you're talking about the UCA professor. They weren't really friends,” he reminded her. “According to Rachel McNeil, they were more or less acquaintances because they attended the same classes, and no, I haven't called her yet. Why?”

Kristin had to admit that even though she wasn't supposed to get caught up in this aspect of her work, the mystery was beginning to consume her. “Well, she's definitely had some time to think since she called you, and I just thought that she might remember something more about either Abby or Zoe that could help solve the case.”

He'd been thinking along the same lines, but he was curious to hear just what Kristin's exact thoughts were. “Like what?”

Kristin shrugged. These were all vague thoughts that had been slipping in and out of her head. “Like the names of mutual friends Abby and Zoe had at the time, or maybe the names of boyfriends if either of them had any—or just anything unusual that might have been going on at school at the time Abby and Zoe disappeared. Something has got to lead to a breakthrough,” she insisted.

Malloy read between the lines. “Feeling a little claustrophobic in the morgue?” he guessed.

For a split second, Kristin's back went up. “I am
not
claustro—” And then she relented. “At least I wasn't until this case came along.” With a sigh, she came totally clean. “I'd like to help move the case along, and there's no more insight to be gotten from those bones that were dug up. I've matched and assembled them as best I can, gleaned approximate height and weight from all twelve remains, and like I said, I've gotten caught up in this.”

She saw Malloy opening his mouth, and she second-guessed what he was about to say. “And before you say anything, yes, I ran it past the chief. He's always encouraging the team to exercise independent thinking, so if this helps wrap up this case somewhere down the line, he's fine with my coming along with you.”

“And you have no problem being my sidekick?”

“I'm not your sidekick,” she corrected with just a touch of indignation. “You're Cold Case, I represent the medical examiner's office as well as the crime scene investigation unit.”

“Well, that's a mouthful,” Malloy commented. “Just for the record, I have no problem with you coming along—as a sidekick or as a representative of whatever you just said. But just so we're clear, this
is
my case and my field, so you follow my lead.”

“Do you want me walking two steps behind you, too?” Kristin couldn't help asking.

“Only if we happen to be on the side of a steep mountain road,” he quipped. He rose to his feet. “You ready to go?”

She hadn't sat down since she'd entered the squad room, looking for him. “Absolutely.”

He grinned at the sound of that. “I'll remind you of that later,” he said.

His comment made her wonder at first, and then she decided that she was better off not knowing exactly what the detective had meant by that.

* * *

Having transferred her number from the phone on his desk to his cell, Malloy called Rachel McNeil from the road. He told her that he had some information for her and that he wanted to meet with her at the earliest opportunity.

“I just taught my last class for the day and was about to go home,” the English professor told him. “Is this about Zoe?”

“Yes.”

He didn't want to say any more than that until he saw her. Sometimes, his older brother, Duncan, had taught him, you could learn more from the way someone said something than from what he or she said.

“All right, I'll wait for you,” the woman agreed. “How soon can you get here?”

Malloy glanced at his mileage. “I'm about fifteen minutes away. Where can I meet you?”

“I'll wait for you in front of Paul Klapper Library,” Rachel replied, apparently assuming that he was as familiar with the campus as she was. “There're several benches out front,” she went on. “We can talk there.”

“Public place,” Kristin commented once he terminated the call. He'd had it on speakerphone. “Did you frighten her last time?” she asked, curious.

“I doubt it.” He took a left turn at the end of the block. “I'm harmless.”

Kristin refrained from laughing, but not from commenting. “You, Cavanaugh, were never harmless. Not even when you were born.”

He eased to a stop at the light and spared her a look. “Why, Doc? Do I frighten you?” he asked.

“Just making an observation,” Kristin answered evasively.

He tabled that for a future discussion. They were almost at the campus. “Right now I need you to pull up a map on my GPS and locate Paul Klapper Library on the UCA campus.”

She looked at him in surprise. “You don't know where it is?”

“Not offhand,” he admitted. He was catching all the lights now, and the entrance to the campus was coming up soon. “I found the administration building. I didn't memorize the layout of the entire campus.”

“So you didn't go to UCA?” Kristin concluded in surprise.

“I'm not a local boy, no.”

“I thought all the Cavanaughs were local.”

“Most of them are, but some of us came from Shady Canyon,” he told her, mentioning a city some fifty miles away. He could see that she had more questions. “Long story. Maybe I'll tell it to you some time—after we solve this case.”

“You say it like it's a sure thing.”

“What? Solving the case or my telling you the story?”

This time, she did laugh. “Both.”

“That's because I only know how to approach things one way,” he explained. “From a positive perspective. The college is coming up just ahead,” he told her, interrupting himself. “Which way do I turn?”

Caught up in the conversation, Kristin barely had time to type in the school's address and then enlarge the map that materialized.

“Left,” she said quickly. “Make a left at the end of the winding road.”

Because of the last minute instruction, the turn he made was sharp—and jarring. It wasn't the way he normally drove.

“Remind me not to let you navigate next time,” he said dryly as he pulled into an empty space some distance away from the actual library.

“What makes you think there'll be a next time?” Kristin challenged cryptically, unbuckling her seat belt.

He slanted just the briefest glance her way. “Just a hunch.”

The mild answer got under her skin for more reasons than just one.

Without another word, Malloy got out of the vehicle and hurried up the handful of stairs that took him from the compact parking lot to the front of the library. Kristin was right behind him.

Rachel McNeil was sitting on the bench closest to the stairs. The moment she saw him, she instantly rose to her feet.

“Was I right?” the slender, conservatively dressed woman asked before he had even reached her. “Was Zoe one of the bodies you found with Abby's?”

Before he answered her, Malloy took a moment to make the necessary introductions. “Doc, this is Professor Rachel McNeil. Professor, this is Dr. Alberghetti. She's the medical examiner who matched Zoe Roberts's dental X-rays to one of the bodies we found.”

Rachel covered her mouth. A tiny sound of dismay still managed to escape. For just a moment, the years melted away from her face, and she was an undergraduate again.

“I knew it. I had a feeling. I just had a feeling they wouldn't have just run off that way,” she said to Malloy. “Especially not Zoe. She was determined to prove herself.”

Malloy studied the woman for a moment. “I thought you said you didn't know either of them that well,” Malloy said as they all sat down on the stone bench.

Kristin sat down next to him and edged out a little in order to have a better view of the woman they had come to question as well as notify.

“I didn't, really,” Rachel explained. “But we studied together in the library. That library,” she emphasized, indicating the building behind them. “It was a lot smaller back then,” she remarked. “A few of us would get together to study and pick each other's brains before tests. Zoe was always the most intense, even though she was like a walking encyclopedia.”

Malloy took out a small, well-creased notepad and a pen from his pocket. “Can you remember any of the other people in the study group?” he asked Rachel, opening the notepad.

But she shook her head. “No, I'm sorry. That was two decades ago. I just remember Abby because of that police detective who came to the campus to question us. And Zoe because she was so sure something bad had happened to Abby. She said she was going to go looking for her—”

“Did she say where she was going to look?” Kristin asked.

Rachel shook her head again. “I was going out with this junior, and I didn't pay any attention. Not until Zoe went missing, too.” She sighed. It was obvious that she felt somehow responsible because she hadn't been paying attention. “That's something that stays with you,” she added quietly.

“You just mentioned a police detective,” Malloy said. “Do you remember his name?”

Rachel thought for a moment. “Monahan or Mulroney, something like that.” She offered an apologetic smile.

Malloy made a notation. The name was easy enough to obtain. The investigative detective would be a matter of record.

“You just mentioned a boyfriend,” Kristin said, picking up on the woman's narrative. “Do you remember if either Abby or Zoe had a boyfriend?”

This, Rachel seemed rather clear on. “All Zoe had time for were her books—and Abby,” she added. “I had the impression that Zoe didn't have any friends, and from what I heard, she latched on to Abby when they hit it off as freshmen.”

“Did Abby have any boyfriends?” Malloy asked, following Kristin's lead.

Rachel thought for a moment. It was obvious she was attempting to remember that far back. “I saw her talking to this guy a few times, but I wouldn't have called him her boyfriend.”

Any crumb was better than none. “Do you remember
his
name?” Malloy asked. So far, it didn't seem as if names were Rachel's long suit.

By the frustrated expression on her face, she really tried to remember the student's name—and failed.

“Sorry.” But she did have something to offer. “I do remember he was in her botany class, or some class that had to do with plant life. I remember thinking that was kind of odd because most guys that age weren't into things like growing plants—except maybe the kind they could smoke. Abby did say that he'd told her that he was only taking the class to please his father, because the old man was really into plants.”