A SEAL to Save Her (20 page)

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Cavanaugh Cold Case

by Marie Ferrarella

Prologue

J
osephine Alberghetti placed an overly generous portion of lasagna in front of her daughter, then sighed as she took a seat opposite her.

“Mom, you've been sighing like that since I walked in through the door ten minutes ago. What's up?” Dr. Kristin Alberghetti asked her mother.

Josephine pressed her lips together, as if hesitating to give voice to what was fairly bursting to come out. The next moment, the hesitation was over, just as Kristin knew it would be. Drama and her mother were best friends.

“When you first came to me and told me that you wanted to be a doctor, I was so proud I thought I would just burst,” Josephine told her only child. “I wasn't sure how we were going to pay for it with your father, God rest his soul, gone, but I remember being so very, very proud—and determined to help you reach your dream. I was willing to work my fingers to the bone, putting in twenty hours a day to make my little girl's dream come true.”

Kristin knew where this was going. The same place that it had gone before.

“Uncle Gasper lent you the money, Mom,” Kristin reminded her mother patiently. “Actually, he
gave
you most of it.”

Though her father's uncle had fought her, Kristin had stubbornly insisted on paying the man back. It hadn't been easy, but she did it, taking and holding down jobs whenever she could while going to medical school. Through extreme dedication and concentrated energy, at the sacrifice of her social life, she'd managed to graduate ahead of time, thanks to an accelerated program.

But this wasn't about her mother's sacrifices—of which she would have been the first to say that there were a legitimate number. This was about something else. And Kristin had a very strong feeling she knew what that “something else” was.

Kristin and her mother were seated at the table in the kitchen where she had spent her first seventeen years. She had only a little time to spare and had actually popped in to visit in the middle of the morning—­taking a couple of hours of personal time—because her mother had complained about being neglected. Feeling guilty, Kristin had juggled a few things, put a couple more on hold and then dashed over.

Kristin's grandmother, Sophia, a fixture in her life for as far back as she could remember, was also there. Kristin exchanged glances with the older woman now. She knew what was coming, as did her grandmother. Out of respect for her mother—because she knew how frustrated Josephine Alberghetti felt—Kristin kept her silence. But it wasn't easy.

“But why you took all that wonderful knowledge,” Josephine was saying, “and training and practically just threw it out the window to become a medical examiner, poking around inside of dead people, is really,
really
beyond me.” She looked at her daughter pleadingly. “Can't you just go into private practice? Think of the good you could be doing.”

“I
am
doing good, Mom,” Kristin told her mother. This certainly wasn't the first time they had done this dance, but her mother seemed to refuse to remember her good reasons for choosing this route. She patiently repeated one. “I'm bringing closure to a great many families who need answers.”

In response, Josephine rolled her hazel eyes dramatically. “Closure,” she murmured under her breath as if it was a dirty word.

“Leave the girl alone, Josephine,” Sophia told her daughter sharply. The family matriarch smiled at her granddaughter. “She is happy closing things. It is her life.”

“And she's
wasting
it,” Josephine retorted. “How is Kristin supposed to meet anyone when she's standing in the middle of a morgue, surrounded by dead people, for heaven's sake?” she demanded.

“Did you not hear her?” Sophia asked, the volume of her voice increasing as she made her point. At nearly eighty, Sophia Moretti's voice was as strong and loud as when she first arrived in America at the age of twenty-eight. “She is closing things for families. Maybe one of those families has a son—”

Kristin stared at her grandmother, grappling with a sudden feeling of betrayal. No matter what, her grandmother had
always
been on her side. “You, too, Nonny?”

Sophia leaned over the food-laden kitchen table to pat her granddaughter's hand. “I am just trying to—how you say?—
humor
your mama. Marry, don't marry, it is all the same to me. Just be happy, little one,” she said to her youngest granddaughter. “The family has enough small people already.”

“Easy for you to say,” Josephine pouted, not trying too hard to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “
You
have lots of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

Sophia pursed her lips together. “We are all family, Josephine. We share. You want some grandchildren? I will let you have some of mine.”

“Listen to Nonny,” Kristin coaxed. “We all live in Aurora. You need short people to hug, you can go over to Theresa's or Lorraine's or Angela's,” she said, enumerating her cousins, all of whom were married with at least two, if not more, children, “and hug one of their kids.”

“I love those children,” her mother replied honestly, “but it's not the same thing, and you know it,” Josephine complained. She looked at her own mother accusingly. “You're supposed to be on my side.”

Sophia raised coarse hands that had been weathered by decades of hard work and pretended to push back her daughter's words of rebuke. “I take no sides. I just sit and listen.”

To which Josephine responded with a contemptuous “Ha!”

Any response from Sophia Moretti was interrupted by Kristin's ringing cell phone.

Josephine sighed deeply as she watched her daughter reach into one of her pockets and take out the offending electronic gadget. To Josephine phones did not belong in pockets, and they certainly didn't belong at a family meal.

Holding her hand up for momentary silence, Kristin listened to the call. Her boss, Sean Cavanaugh, the chief of the crime scene investigation lab, was on the other end of the line.

“Sorry to interrupt your personal time, Doctor, but I'm afraid we need you at a crime scene,” he told her, his deep voice rumbling in her ear. “We've found two bodies so far.”

“So far?” Kristin repeated uncertainly, surprised at the way he'd phrased the news. “Are you expecting to find more?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” she heard him respond wearily. “It looks like there might be quite a few.”

How many were there in “quite a few?” Kristin wondered, a shiver threatening to slide up and down her spine. “That sounds like you've hit some kind of mother lode, sir.”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” he told her. “I'd appreciate it if you got here as soon as you could.”

“Yes, sir. On my way,” Kristin told him quietly.

Sophia lowered her voice as she leaned toward her daughter, taking care not to interfere with her granddaughter's call. “What means this ‘mother lode'?” she asked.

Josephine sighed as she rose to her feet and began to put away the food she had taken out the minute her daughter had walked through the door. Family mealtimes were treasured, no matter when they took place and how small the family unit at that particular moment might be.

Timing-wise, this had to be a new record.

She transferred Kristin's serving onto a paper plate, then with a minimum number of movements, efficiently wrapped it all up in aluminum foil. “It means, Ma, that Kristin is leaving.”

Chapter 1

I
t wasn't going to be one of his better days.

He could just feel it in his bones.

The road Malloy Cavanaugh was driving on was becoming almost dangerously hypnotic. He'd been on it for close to half an hour.

His eyes felt as if they were burning—always a bad sign—and his eyelids kept threatening to shut on him. Thanks to the rather considerable charms of a young woman he'd met the other night with the not totally inaccurate nickname of Bunny, he had gotten very little sleep the past two nights.

Hence, Detective Malloy Cavanaugh of the department's Cold Case Division was not his usual energized self this morning.

Catching up on a backlog of paperwork would have been far more to his liking at this point. At least, if he fell asleep at his desk, there was no danger of driving that desk into a ditch or off the side of the inclined road the way there was at the moment.

Aurora, California, where he had moved several years ago with the rest of his family, was a work in progress, a city whose council worked hand in hand with its developers. Consequently—and aesthetically—that development progressed slowly.

What that ultimately meant was, according to his uncles, Aurora had taken thirty-five years to go from a rural, two-lane, three-traffic-light town to the major thriving city it was today.

That also meant that there were still large parcels of land that were generally undeveloped. Most of them were located on the outskirts of the southern perimeter of Aurora.

That was where he was traveling right now, on his way to a crime scene, which, it seemed, had the dubious distinction of being both the site of a multiple homicide and the site of a cold case all at the same time.

The bodies, according to the investigators who had been summoned by the first officer on the scene, had apparently been in the ground for years; the exact amount of time—as well as the exact number of bodies—­had yet to be determined.

Hell of a way to start a Monday morning
, Malloy thought, stifling a yawn before it managed to momentarily make him shut his eyes.

He took in a deep breath, trying hard to rouse himself. A better way to go would have been to drink some of the pitch-black, strong coffee that was riding next to him in his vehicle's cup holder, but unless he pulled over—something, considering the narrowness of the winding road he was on, that was not advisable—he was not about to risk reaching for the tall container.

For that to happen, the split second that his eyes might be off the road could just be enough to send him careening into an accident—or his demise.

Notoriously happy-go-lucky and possessed of what some had referred to as a charmed life, Malloy was still not reckless enough to think himself above any and all accidents. Better safe than sorry had been an unspoken mantra in his family, courtesy of his very wise, late mother.

All things considered, he chose to obey that mantra this morning.

The coffee could wait.

Instead, Malloy did his best to snap his countenance into alert wakefulness by biting down hard on the inside of his bottom lip. He stopped just short of drawing blood.

Just where the hell was this damn stupid nursery he was going to anyway, he wondered grudgingly. Shouldn't he have arrived there by now?

According to the information he had been given just before he'd left the precinct, the bodies had been discovered by the owner of a construction crew while clearing some heretofore unused land that belonged to the nursery. The idea was to extend the nursery and erect several more large greenhouses across the two additional acres.

The greenhouses were to display even more specimens of cacti and succulents, as if four acres weren't already enough, Malloy thought darkly.

At the age of eight, after running through what he thought was an empty field at twilight, he'd tripped and gotten almost impaled on the sharp, near-lethal spines of a small, but menacing saguaro cactus. Since then Malloy had developed an aversion for everything and anything that even remotely looked as if it belonged to the cacti family.

To his mind, it only seemed natural that an aversion to succulents should follow, as well. Though a collector would argue the point, it seemed like one and the same to him.

He was vaguely aware that there were whole clubs devoted to meeting regularly and discussing the care and feeding of various different species of these visually ugly plants, but for the life of him, he could not fathom why.

Then again, he didn't understand why anyone would pay more than the cover price of a so-called rare comic book, either.

It took all kinds, Malloy told himself.

Taking a turn down yet another obscure road whose sign he had almost missed, Malloy breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently, he was almost at journey's end. There was a sign posted up ahead just before a newly installed chain-link fence.

The sign proclaimed Rainbow Gardens. The sign looked new, as well.

According to what he'd been told, the old nursery, which had gone by—to his way of thinking—the far more accurate name of Prickly Gardens, had been sold a little over a month ago. The present owner had come in with new ideas, the first of which had included expansion of the nursery so that even more plants could be properly showcased.

Sorry, no expanding yet
,
Malloy thought.
There's the little matter of some bodies to clear up.

Malloy pulled his car right up to the gate. The latter was closed.

There was another sign, an older, weather-beaten one, which told whatever traveler approached it that visitors were admitted “By appointment only.” It went on to say that if the visitor did have an appointment, to “Please, honk.”

There was what appeared to be a trailer standing some distance away, perched just above a row of several small greenhouses. Surrounding those greenhouses were a great many succulents and cacti planted in the ground and growing at a very prodigious rate.

Malloy assumed that honking was for the benefit of whoever was inside the trailer.

With his engine running as his car stood before the gate's fence, Malloy paused to drain half the coffee in the container he'd brought. Only then did he do as the sign advised.

He honked his car's horn.

When there was no immediate response, Malloy did it again, this time leaning on his horn until he saw movement from the trailer.