Mission: Cavanaugh Baby (10 page)

And none quicker than Joel.

“Well, I guess you might as well put your relatives to use,” Ashley responded. “Maybe Brenda can clean up the disk so we can at least make out the visitor’s gender.”

Even as she said it, Ashley wasn’t quite ready to give up the recording just yet. Instead, she fast-forwarded it, hoping that perhaps they’d wind up getting a better look at the person once he or she left the apartment again.

But although she went through a sufficient amount of the recording, no one stepped out of the apartment. Instead, she fast-forwarded the recording to the point where she saw herself approaching the apartment window.

And as she watched, she saw herself removing the screen and window pane.

Shane blew out a breath, frustrated as well as mystified. Where was the perpetrator? “Well, we have a decent recording of you breaking into the apartment,” he commented.

She ignored the flippant observation. “Where did the perp go?” She wanted to know.

“There was no one in the apartment when you got in?” he asked.

She took offense to that. “Don’t you think I would have said something if there’d been anyone in there when I looked through the window to see that woman lying there?” she demanded.

In contrast to her heated question, Shane merely remained silent, waiting for the answer to the question he’d asked.

Ashley sighed, relenting. “Just the victim,” she said. Despite her bravado, it was easy to see that she was clearly stunned. She looked at Shane. “All I can think of is that the person must’ve gone out through the patio when he or she heard me crawling through the window. Gone through it and taken the baby along with them.”

“Well, CSI went over the whole apartment. If there was anything outside on the patio—not to mention any
one
—they would have found it,” he told her.

The people in the unit were only human, right? “If they knew to look there. Maybe there was something they overlooked,” Ashley proposed.

Shane saw the eager look in her eyes, and he could almost hear what she was thinking. “You want to go back there.”

Leaning back in the chair, she spread her hands wide. “I don’t think we have a choice. The killer seemed to know that he could get away that way—if it was a he,” Ashley qualified. Leaning forward again, she stared at the frozen form on the monitor. No matter how long she looked, she couldn’t make out the gender of the figure.

Shane looked at the monitor thoughtfully. “I think we did establish one thing, though.”

What had she missed? It goaded her that he’d picked up on something that she obviously had overlooked. “What? What did we establish?” she asked, mystified. “We don’t even know if it was a man or a woman.”

“Granted,” he said, inclining his head to give her that point. “But whoever it was, the victim apparently knew them.”

“What makes you say that?” She’d thought the same thing, but wanted to hear his reasoning. It would validate and give substance to her own interpretation.

“Easy. There wasn’t even a slight hesitation when the victim opened the apartment door. She let the caller right in.” Shane rose from the desk where he’d done his viewing. “It’s late,” he declared. “Let’s drop that recording off at the lab. Then in the morning, we can either watch Brenda work her magic, or go back to the victim’s apartment and have a closer look around that patio.”

It sounded like a plan to her. She was all for going over the apartment a second time—or in her case, a first time. “Maybe we could also talk to some of the neighbors, see if they saw or heard anything,” she suggested, doing her best not to sound as if she was a novice at this.

“Already did that,” he told her.

She pushed back the wave of disappointment when it occurred to her that his investigation had to be, perforce, incomplete.

“But there were a lot of them who’d gone off to work by the time you did your canvas. Maybe one of them left just as the perp was coming in. Could be that one of them saw something, remembered something.” She looked at him. “It’s worth a shot,” she proposed.

“Considering we’re currently firing blanks, sure, why not?” he answered gamely.

Most likely, they were just spinning their wheels, but there was a small chance that the feisty little animal control officer could be right, he thought.

Shane popped the DVD he wanted Brenda to look at out of the machine and slipped it into an evidence envelope. He then placed the other three disks together in an envelope he also marked as evidence.

“Okay, let’s register this with the lab tech so that Brenda sees it first thing in the morning,” Shane told her.

“Sounds good to me,” she told him, shutting off her machine before she left the room.

The thought briefly occurred to Ashley that he was treating her as if she was part of a team. The corners of her mouth curved as she allowed herself to savor the notion just for a moment or two.

After all, what did it hurt?

Chapter 9

T
hey were back at it bright and early the next morning. It didn’t surprise Shane to find Ashley waiting for him by his desk a few minutes before the start of his shift. Hers, too, Shane imagined. It made him wonder if she had a life outside the department.

He could identify with that.

They lost no time in going to see Brenda down in the lab.

“Brenda, this is Ashley St. James. She’s attached to Animal Control. Ashley, this Brenda Cavanaugh, Dax’s wife and the chief of detectives’ daughter-in-law—as well as a legend in her own right,” Shane said, making the initial introductions between the two women.

He’d brought Ashley down to the basement where the crime scene investigation unit, as well as the computer tech unit, was tucked away. The latter was very nearly the solo domain of the vibrant young woman he’d just introduced her to.

Accustomed to the outpouring of charm whenever one of the Cavanaugh men found themselves in need of her unique skills, Brenda was not taken in by the complimentary words. Instead she pretended to look at the detective suspiciously.

“Just how many hours of sleep is this going to cost me, Shane? You’re laying the glowing adjectives on with a shovel.”

Shane grinned, looking, Ashley caught herself thinking, almost boyish. He certainly looked a great deal friendlier than he had when he’d first come on the scene yesterday morning.

“I’m just giving you your due, Brenda,” he told the computer tech. “I’m just giving you your due.”

Brenda refrained from laughing out loud. In truth, she didn’t mind this game they all played with her. She had a skill, and she enjoyed using it to aid the police department, not to mention the vastly sprawling family she’d married into.

“Part of my ‘due,’” she informed Shane, “is that I wasn’t born yesterday—or the day before.”

“And yet, there you are, looking hardly older than a teenager while being cleverer than the lot of us put together.” He turned toward Ashley. “If it can be done with a computer,” he told her with a touch of family pride, “Brenda will do it.”

“Shane.” There was a warning note in Brenda’s tone. She pushed her chair back from her desk to study him for a moment. “This is getting to sound worse and worse. Just what sort of a miracle are you asking for?”

Shane sighed for effect, then leveled with her. “I need a face, Brenda.”

This time she did laugh. Of all the things he could complain about, this was not one of them. In her humble opinion, the Cavanaughs had cornered the market in good looks.

“Trust me,” she told him, “the one you have is more than just presentable.”

He held the disk up to focus her attention. “And the one on here could lead us to a killer.”

“That’s more like it.” Interest had instantly entered Brenda’s eyes. There was nothing she loved more than a challenge to her inherent abilities. She shook her head. “You really do know how to push all the right buttons in my case, don’t you, Shane?”

“Your husband’s a cop and a crack shot,” Shane replied innocently. “I wouldn’t dare press any of your buttons.”

Delight was evident in her voice. “You, Shane Cavanaugh, would dare anything.” Her eyes shifted over to Ashley. “This one had the word
trouble
stamped on his forehead when he was three minutes old. I would watch my step if I were you.”

“There’s nothing to watch,” Ashley replied politely. “The detective and I are only working together temporarily.”

Brenda studied the younger woman for a moment. She did
not
look convinced. Instead what she looked was amused. “That’s what they all say,” she assured Ashley with a wide smile.

“They?” What was the tech talking about? “Who’s ‘they’?” Ashley was curious in spite of herself.

“Every Cavanaugh wife who started out thinking she was immune to the Cavanaugh male charm,” Brenda informed her matter-of-factly.

Well, whatever trance the other women had obviously fallen under, that was
not
about to happen to her.

“First time for everything,” Ashley told her, dead certain that she was not about to “fall victim” to anything that had a legend built around it. She thought for herself and danced to her own piper. Detective Shane Cavanaugh was a good-looking man, but that played absolutely no part in anything, she thought stubbornly. “We got an image on the surveillance disk of the person we think killed our victim. Can you enhance the figure enough for us to at least determine if it’s a man or a woman?”

Brenda looked quizzically at the disk that Shane handed her, her brow furrowing slightly. “What’s on here, anyway? Private photographs of the Invisible Man?”

“Or the Invisible Woman,” Shane supplied. Personally, what he’d seen had struck him as being too gruesome for something a woman would have done, but he knew that there were a lot of people who would disagree with him. Women were not really the gentler sex; they were actually the tougher one.

Brenda looked at the disk for a moment, then shook her head. She had a feeling she had her work cut out for her. “You two certainly don’t ask for much, do you?”

“If we didn’t,” Shane pointed out, “we wouldn’t be coming to you, Oh Mighty and Powerful Wizard, now, would we? A middle-of-the-road techie would have been more than sufficient in that case.”

Brenda laughed to herself. “You do know how to pour it on, I’ll give you that.” She didn’t believe half of what he was saying to her, but she would have been lying if she didn’t admit that she liked hearing it. She glanced toward the woman Shane had brought with him. “Like I said—and it bears repeating,” she assured Ashley, “I’d be careful around this one if I were you.
Very
careful.”

If you couldn’t fight ’em, join ’em,
Ashley thought philosophically. If being knocked around between foster homes had taught her anything, it was how to be flexible, to roll with the punches and say anything that allowed you to walk away from a bad situation in one piece whenever possible.

That wasn’t the case here, but she didn’t want to do or say anything to get on the tech expert’s bad side. So she agreed with her.

“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” Ashley replied in a voice that clearly announced she really wasn’t worried about being disoriented by the handsome, dark-haired detective.

“What can you tell me about the DVD?” Shane coaxed Brenda, even though she had only popped it into her machine.

Brenda looked up at him thoughtfully from where she was seated at her desk. “Well, right off the bat I can tell you one main thing.”

That wasn’t possible, Ashley thought. The woman
had
to be pulling their legs. She hadn’t even called up the first frame yet. But, seeing as how this computer tech was the chief of D’s daughter-in-law, she held up her end of the conversation.

“And that would be?” Ashley asked.

Brenda managed to maintain a straight face. “A watched computer tech never boils.”

This time a small, amused smile escaped and curved Ashley’s mouth. At least the chief of D’s daughter-in-law had a sense of humor, she thought.

“Nice to know.”

“You didn’t tell me you were auditioning for the comedy club,” Shane said wryly to Brenda.

The look on Brenda’s face was pure innocence. “You never asked me.”

“Anything else you’d like to get out of your system?” he prompted.

“Nope, that about does it,” Brenda replied. She was already dealing with the grainy features of the recording. “Come back later,” she suggested. “I’ll see if I have anything for you.”

Shane glanced in Ashley’s direction before saying, “Good enough for me.”

“Now we canvas the apartment complex?” Ashley asked as they left the lab and walked down the hall to the elevator.

“Unless you have a better idea.”

In actuality, Shane was entertaining a better idea of his own, but it really had nothing to do with the case they were dealing with. Besides, at this point, he thought it might be a smarter move if he played it safe and went about plotting his campaign to win over the sharp-eyed officer slowly. If he did that, he could build up his momentum and she couldn’t really accuse him of being shallow.

“No, no better idea,” she replied. “As a matter of fact, canvassing the apartment complex sounds pretty good to me,” she told him. “You never know what you might come up with the second time around.”

Funny, he thought. That was something his father had said to him during the pep talk he’d given him after Kitty had broken off their engagement.

“You can’t just shut yourself off from life, Shane. You have to pick yourself up and get back into the game in order to heal. You never know what you might come up with the second time around. Look at me—I never thought I’d ever fall in love with another woman after all those good years I had with your mother. I was a one-woman man whose one woman had passed away. I thought that was it for me—but obviously I thought wrong. You are, too,” his father had assured him.

At the time he’d thought it was just empty talk. But maybe not, he caught himself musing as he stood beside Ashley.

The elevator announced its arrival with a muted ding.

“So,” Shane began as he followed her into the elevator. The doors closed rhythmically and took them to the first floor. “
Are
you leaning toward Homicide?”

She looked at him. Why was he asking that? Was it a trick question? Cavanaugh couldn’t possibly entertain the idea that the victim had just suddenly expired. Of course it was a homicide.

“Well, it’s obvious that someone butchered her to get her baby, isn’t it?” she asked, indicating that she was a hundred percent behind the idea that this couldn’t be anything else
but
a homicide.

He laughed and shook his head. She’d misunderstood. “No, I mean for your choice of a department. Is Homicide where you want to work?”

“Oh.” They’d touched on this last night, but she supposed she hadn’t been very clear about it. Being vague had been a way of life for her for a long time. Growing up, she’d found it safer not to take a definite stand on anything unless she had no other choice or option open to her.

The elevator arrived on the first floor, its doors yawning open and allowing them to disembark.

“Yes,” she replied a little formally. “I’ve decided that Homicide is my first choice,” she replied, answering his question.

He didn’t see it as an obvious choice for someone like her, even though his sisters had gravitated toward that department. His sisters, Bridget, Kendra and Kari,
never
took the obvious path when it came to anything
.

“Why?” he asked her. “Why Homicide instead of, say, Burglary or Narcotics?”

That was simple enough for her to answer. “Because death is the ultimate insult, and somebody has to speak for the dead.”

“So, you speak for the dead as well as for the animals.” He allowed that to simmer in his brain for a minute. “Tell me,” he asked, “where does the average
breathing
person come into all this?”

That, too, had an easy answer. “Beneath my radar,” she informed him glibly.

For a moment he thought she was kidding. But one look into her eyes negated that impression. “You’re serious,” he realized.

“As serious as a third strike for a career criminal,” she told him without blinking an eye.

He could see, given her upbringing, why she might feel that way about it. However, he was just as convinced that she shouldn’t continue on in this vein. This wasn’t a life, it was a by-the-numbers existence, he judged, and as such it meant that she was getting very little out of life by way of enjoyment, at least in his opinion.

Shane figured that really had to change if, just possibly, Ashley had a chance of changing, too.

Whoa, he warned himself. He’d only known her for a little more than a day. That amount of time didn’t make him an expert on anything, much less an apparently emotionally wounded young woman.

“Why don’t we go in my car?” he suggested when he saw that she was heading toward her own vehicle.

Ashley stopped, glancing over toward the vehicle she drove every day, the Animal Control van.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because in these hard times, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to save on gas and use one car.” He could almost see what she was thinking. “And if we drove up to the complex in yours, people might not take us seriously.”

Ashley fixed him with a look. “The dog catcher thing again,” she quipped.

He wanted to spare her feelings. After all, she performed a necessary service. But by the same token, people would regard her as a lightweight, not a real officer. She needed to look the part from head to foot and, by association, that applied to her vehicle, as well.

“Right on the first guess,” he told her.

Ashley stood where she was for a moment, seriously debating continuing on her way to her van. It would have been her act of defiance.

But in the end, she conceded that Cavanaugh did have a point. People didn’t take people working for Animal Control as seriously as they took regular officers. And she did very much want to be taken seriously.

Who knew? This might be her only shot at showing what she knew and what she was capable of. She didn’t want to blow it because she favored her own vehicle over his.

“Okay.” Ashley gave in. “We’ll take your car.”

He refrained from making any sort of acknowledging comment, thinking that it might backfire on him and turn her off just when he’d made up his mind to find out what it took to open this complicated woman up, not shut her down.

* * *

The drive over to Monica Phillips’s apartment complex was quick this time of the morning. Once there, they began by knocking on the door of the victim’s nearest neighbor.

A middle-aged woman answered on the third knock. Standing in the doorway, holding the door to partially shield herself, the woman looked the pair over critically as well as impatiently. The TV could be heard in the background, and she appeared to be eager to return to her program.

“Whatever you’re peddling, I already bought it,” she snapped as she began to close the door again.