Cavanaugh Reunion (5 page)

“Some of the others have mentioned seeing you around the city with this woman. I told them they were crazy, but then on Friday I saw you myself, and now I’m begging you,” he entreated, putting his hand on
Andrew’s arm, “break it off before Rose gets hurt. You spent all that time looking for Rose when everyone else, including me, thought she was dead. Don’t throw all that away because of some middle-aged itch you want to scratch.”

“You done?” Andrew wanted to know.

“Yes,” Brian said quietly. “Just promise me you’ll break if off with her.”

“It would seem like the thing to do.” To Brian’s surprise, his brother got off the stool, walked to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room and called out, “Rose? Would you mind coming here?”

Brian hurried over to him. “What are you doing?” he whispered into Andrew’s ear. He knew that for some, the need to confess was almost an overpowering reaction, but he would have never thought it of Andrew. This had all the makings of a disaster. “Don’t dump this on Rose. Don’t tell her you’ve been cheating on her just to clear your conscience.”

“Good advice,” Andrew quipped.

Before Brian could ask if he’d lost his mind, Rose walked in. “Hello, Brian. Nice to see you.” She turned toward her husband. There was no missing the love in her eyes. “You wanted me, honey?”

“Only every minute of every day,” Andrew said, a gentle smile curving the corners of his mouth. He slipped his arm around her waist. “Rose, could you tell Brian where we were last Friday?”

Rose sighed, shaking her head. “Don’t see why you would even want to admit to it.”

He laughed, giving her a quick hug. “Humor me, my love.”

“Okay.” Rose turned toward her brother-in-law. “We saw the most god-awful movie.
Heaven Around the Corner.
Quite honestly, I still can’t figure out how the people behind that silly thing managed to get funding to produce it.” Her eyes crinkled as she slanted a glance and a grin in her husband’s direction. “Even Andrew could have written a better story.”

“Thank you, dear,” Andrew deadpanned. “I can always count on you to extol my many talents.”

She laughed. Standing on her toes, she brushed a kiss against his cheek. “Don’t worry, dear. No one can touch your cooking.”

Still holding his wife to him, Andrew turned his attention back to his younger brother and Brian’s allegations. “Satisfied?”

Rose looked from one man to the other, a curious expression filling her eyes. “Satisfied about what? What’s this all about, Andrew? Brian?” She waited for one of them to enlighten her.

“Brian thought he saw me clear across town last Friday. At the Crystal Penguin. With another woman. I don’t know which is more absurd, the restaurant part or the other woman part.” He caught the look on Rose’s face. “The other woman part. Definitely the other woman part,” he assured her.

Amused, Rose laughed. “Not unless Andrew’s suddenly gotten superpowers and found a way to be in two places at the same time.”

Brian sighed with relief. “You don’t know how glad it makes me to hear that.” But then he frowned slightly. There was still a mystery to be unraveled. “But whoever I saw looked just like you, Andrew.”

“Maybe it was one of the boys,” Andrew suggested.

But Brian shook his head. He’d already thought of that. “Too old.”

Andrew gave him a quick jab in the arm. “Thanks a lot.”

He hadn’t meant it as an insult. “You know what I mean. Around our age, not younger.”

“Someone else out there with those handsome features?” Rose teased, brushing her hand across her husband’s cheek.

“I know. Lucky dog,” Andrew deadpanned. He grew a little more serious as he asked Brian, “And you’re saying this isn’t the first time this doppelgänger’s been spotted?”

Brian nodded. “Jared’s mentioned seeing ‘you,’” he told Andrew, referring to one of his sons. “Said you ignored him when he called out to you. And Zack said he thought he saw you walking into the Federal Building about a month ago. Same scenario. He called out and was ignored.”

Listening to this, Rose glanced at her husband. He’d become quietly thoughtful. “I know that look,” she said. “You’re working something out in your head.”

“What’s on your mind?” Brian probed.

Andrew raised his eyes to look at Brian. “That maybe Mom wasn’t imagining things all those years ago.”

S
till completely in the dark, Brian and Rose exchanged quizzical glances.

Brian was the first to speak. “Mom wasn’t wrong about what?”

Andrew looked up as if he’d suddenly become aware that he wasn’t alone and talking to himself. “That the hospital had given her the wrong baby.” He doled out the words slowly, thoughtfully, as he continued sorting things out in his mind.

“The wrong baby?” Brian echoed, staring at Andrew as if his brother had just sprouted another head. This was making less sense now, not more. “Which one of us is supposed to have been this ‘wrong baby’? Mike or me?”

Andrew took a deep breath before answering. It had been a very long time since the name he was about to say had been uttered. An entire lifetime had gone by. It had
become a family secret, known to only his late parents and him. Maybe it was time to air out the closet. “Sean.”

“Sean?” Brian repeated, more mystified than ever. “Andrew, maybe you’ve been standing in the kitchen too long and the heat’s gotten to you. I know that there are a lot of Cavanaughs to be tallied these days, but there is no Sean in our family.”

“I know.” Andrew’s eyes met Brian’s. “That’s because he died.”

Brian shook his head as if to clear it. It didn’t help. “Andrew, what are you
talking
about?”

In for a penny, in for a pound.
He needed to get this whole thing out. It was long overdue.

“Something Mother and Dad never wanted to talk about.” He looked from his brother to his wife. “Sit down, Brian. You, too, Rose.”

Rose dropped onto the counter stool beside her husband. “I think I’d better. Is this where you tell me I’m married to someone who’s descended from the Romanovs?” she asked, clearly trying very hard to lighten the somber mood that was encompassing them.

Maybe he should have done this years ago, after their parents were both gone. But he’d always felt it wasn’t his secret to share. And he’d been so young when it was all going down. There were times he had almost talked himself into believing it had all been just a dream.

“No, love.” He felt her slip her fingers through his, as if silently offering him her support, no matter what was ahead. God, he loved this woman. “This is where I
tell Brian that there were actually four Cavanaugh boys, not three.”

None of this was making any sense to Brian, and it was only getting murkier. And if this Sean person was supposedly dead, who was it that he had seen walking into the Crystal Penguin on Friday?

“So where is this Sean?” he asked, struggling with a wave of angry confusion that was totally foreign to him. “Did Mom and Dad decide they could only afford to keep three of us and made us draw straws to see who’d stay and who’d go? And why haven’t I heard anything about this before?”

Andrew chose his words very carefully. “Because Sean died before he was a year old.” He backtracked a little to give Brian a more concise picture. “He was born between Mike and you.” Andrew closed his eyes, remembering the anguish on his mother’s face. Everything about the day had left an indelible impression on his young mind. “One morning, Mom got up all sunny because Sean had slept through the night for the first time. She went into the nursery to get him and then I heard her start screaming.” As he spoke, it all came back to him in vivid color. “I remember Dad rushing in and then coming out with the baby in his arms, trying desperately to revive him. But it was too late to save him. He was blue. Sean’d died somewhere in the middle of the night.” He felt Rose tighten her grasp on his hand. “They called it crib death back then.”

“SIDS,” Rose murmured. “Sudden infant death syndrome.”

Andrew nodded. He noted that Brian still looked confused, and unconvinced.

“So this is what?” Brian pressed. “Sean’s ghost walking the earth?”

“No,” Andrew answered patiently. “But when she first brought Sean home from the hospital, I’d see Mom staring at him, shaking her head. Saying that she felt there’d been a mix-up in the hospital. That this baby didn’t
feel
like
her
baby.” He took a deep breath. “After Sean died, Dad told me that maybe some inherent, unconscious defense mechanism had made Mom find reasons not to get close to Sean. He said it was as if she’d subconsciously known that Sean wasn’t going to live long.

“The very thought of losing Sean upset her so much, Dad told everyone at the time, including me, that we weren’t to talk about Sean anymore.” He looked at his youngest brother. “You were born less than a year after that. She went a little overboard and completely doted on you,” he reminded Brian.

Brian shrugged, trying to lighten the moment for both his brother and himself. “I always thought it was because I was so adorable.”

Andrew laughed shortly and snorted. “Not damn likely.”

“So now what?” Rose prodded gently, looking from her husband to her brother-in-law and back again.

“Now,” Andrew answered, “we go and find out who this guy who looks like me is—”

“And more important, exactly where and when he was born,” Brian interjected. “That includes the name of the hospital.”

Rose sighed. Shaking her head, she rose from the stool. “I’ve got a very strong feeling that I’m going to
have to be buying more dishes soon.” She looked at the table in the next room. “Not to mention more chairs.”

Andrew laughed and gave her a one-arm hug while planting a quick kiss against her temple. “This is one of the reasons why I love you so much, Rose. You’re always one step ahead of me.”

“Only to keep from being trampled by the Cavanaugh brothers,” she quipped just before she left the kitchen.

Since Andrew had dropped this bombshell on his unsuspecting brother, he knew that his wife had made a graceful exit so the two could talk in private. However, he had no doubt that she would ask her own questions later.

With almost five hours of sleep under her belt, Kansas was back at the shelter. Bypassing the yellow crime-scene tape that encircled the entire outer perimeter of what was left of the building, she made her way inside. Once there she began sifting through the rubble in an effort to piece together as much information as she could about what had gone on here less than a day ago.

She’d managed to find the fire’s point of origin and also to rule out that the fire had been an accident. She discovered what was left of the incendiary device. It had a timer on it, which could only mean that the fire had been deliberately set, and whoever had done it had a definite time in mind. To kill someone specific? she wondered. If so, whoever had set it had miscalculated. No one had died last night.

The device wasn’t a match for the MO of any of the known arsonists or pyromaniacs in the area. There was an outside chance that it could still be the work of
someone belonging to one group or the other, someone who had managed to go undetected. Until now.

It was frustrating, she thought. There
had
to be some kind of a connection, no matter how minor, if she was to believe that these weren’t just random fires haphazardly set. But what connection? And why? Why these structures and not the ones down the block or somewhere else? What did these particular buildings that had been torched have in common—assuming, of course, that they actually
had
something in common?

Rocking back on her heels, Kansas ran her hand through her hair and sighed. It was like banging her head against a concrete wall. There were no answers to be found here.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

Caught completely off guard, Kansas swallowed a gasp as she jumped to her feet. When she swung around, she found O’Brien watching her from a few feet away. She’s been so preoccupied, she hadn’t heard anyone come in. She was going to have to work on that, she told herself.

“A penny?” Kansas hooted. “Is that all it’s worth to you? I take it I’m in the presence of the last of the big-time spenders.”

“I don’t believe in throwing my money away,” he told her matter-of-factly. “I also didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Oh?” She looked at him, perplexed. “Tell me, just where would you expect to find a fire investigator, Detective?”

He shrugged, joining her. He looked down at the
rubble she’d been sifting through. “I just thought you’d gotten everything you needed last night.”

Maybe he was a little slow on the uptake, she thought. The good-looking ones usually were.

“If I had,” she pointed out patiently, crouching down again, “I’d know who did it. Or at least why. Right now, I’m still trying to find all the pieces of that puzzle,” she said under her breath.

Crouching down beside her, Ethan looked at what she was doing with interest. “Find anything new?”

Amusement curved her mouth as she glanced up for a moment. “Are you asking me to do your work for you, Detective?”

“No, I’m asking you to share,” he corrected. He thought the point of all this was to find who was responsible, not participate in a competition. “We’re both part of the same team.” He
couldn’t
be that naive. “Detective, not even different divisions of the same department are on the same team, and in case you haven’t noticed, you’re with the police department and I belong to the fire department. Big difference,” she concluded.

He followed her statement to its logical conclusion. “So to you, this is a competition?” He wouldn’t have thought that of her, but then, he reminded himself, he really didn’t know this woman. Chemistry—and there was plenty of that—was not a substitute for knowledge.

It wasn’t a matter of competition, Kansas thought defensively, it was a matter of sharing information with someone she trusted. Right now, she had no basis for
that. Moreover, she didn’t trust this man any further than she could throw him.

“To me, Detective, you’re basically a stranger—”

He finished the statement for her. “And your mother taught you never to speak to strangers, right?”

One would think, after all these years, the word
mother
wouldn’t create such a feeling of emptiness and loss within her. But it did.

“I’m sure she would have if I’d had one,” Kansas answered, her voice distant. He looked as if he was going to say something apologetic, so she quickly went on. “What I’m saying is that you’re an unknown quantity and I haven’t got time to waste, wondering if you have some kind of ulterior motive…or if I can confide in you because you’re really one of those pure-hearted souls who believes in truth, justice and the American way.”

“I think a red cape and blue tights would go with that,” he responded dryly. “Me, I’m not that noble. I just want to put this son of a bitch away before he hurts someone else—and if I have to work with the devil or share the stage with him to do it, I will.”

There was only one conclusion to be drawn from that. For the second time, Kansas rose to her feet, her hands on her hips. “So now I’m the devil?” she demanded.

He looked surprised that she would come to that conclusion. “No, I didn’t say that. You really are something,” he freely admitted, “but
devil
isn’t the word that readily comes to mind when thinking of you.” He flashed a grin at her that shimmied up and down her spine and was totally out of place here. “I was just trying to let you know how far I’d be willing to go to catch this guy if I had to.”

His grin, she caught herself thinking, had turned utterly sexy. And he undoubtedly knew that. She’d never met a handsome man who was unaware of the kind of charisma he wielded.

“So,” Ethan was saying, “why don’t we pool our resources and see what we can accomplish together? Bring your team over to the precinct,” he encouraged.

It pained her to admit what she was about to say. “I
am
the team.”

“Then you won’t need to find a large car to drive over.” Ethan put his hand out to seal the bargain. “What do you say?”

She looked down at the hand he held out to her. While she preferred working on her own, the point here was to catch whoever was setting these fires and keep him—or possibly her—from doing it again. The firebug needed to be caught as quickly as possible…before actual lives were lost.

She slipped her hand into his and shook it firmly. “Okay.”

“Attagirl.” He saw a look come into her eyes he couldn’t fathom. Had she just taken that in a condescending manner? “Sorry, I didn’t mean it the way it might have sounded. Just expressing relief that I got you to come around so quickly.”

Okay, she needed to set him straight right from the beginning. “You didn’t get me to ‘come around so quickly,’ Detective. It’s just common sense. You have an entire task force devoted to tracking down this firebug.” There was a safe expression, she thought. It didn’t espouse any particular theory other than this unbalanced person felt a kinship to flames. “That means
you have more resources available to you than I do. We can hopefully move forward more quickly and put an end to this sick reign of fire before someone
is
actually killed.”

Ethan nodded in agreement. “A woman after my own heart.”

She paused to pin him with a look that spoke volumes. Mostly it issued a warning. “Not even in your wildest dreams, Detective.”

Ethan smiled to himself. Nothing goaded him on like a challenge. Maybe, he thought, he’d get this strong-principled, “get the hell out of my way” woman to eat her words. He had a feeling that she could be a hell of a wildcat in bed.

“If you’re through here,” he said, “you’re welcome to come back to the precinct with me now and take a look at the information we’ve got.”

It was probably more than she had compiled. They had only recently been entertaining the idea that the fires were connected and the work of just one person or possibly one team.

Kansas nodded. “Okay, I just might take you up on that, Detective.”

“I do have a first name, you know.”

Kansas looked at him with the most innocent expression she could muster. “You mean it’s not ‘Detective’?”

“It’s Ethan.”

Like he was telling her something she didn’t already know. She made it a point to access all the information she could about the people whose paths she crossed.
“Yes, I know. What floor are you on, Detective?” She deliberately used his title.