“You may just have found our first genuine break in this case, Doc,” Malloy declared with enthusiasm.

“You’re welcome,” Kristin murmured as she lowered her eyes back to the partially reconstructed skeleton on the table before her.

Which was why she failed to be prepared for what came next. By the time she realized what was happening, it was too late.

Caught up in the moment, Malloy bracketed her shoulders between his hands and delivered a very enthusiastic and yet innocent kiss to her cheek.

The next second, he had released her and quickly crossed the floor, getting halfway to the door.

“I’ll get back to you,” he promised half a second before he was gone.

Kristin stared at the opened door, stunned. Half of her was hoping that he would live up to his promise—and half of her really hoped that he wouldn’t.

* * *

Be sure to check out the next books in this exciting series: Cavanaugh Justice— Where Aurora’s finest are always in action…

Cavanaugh Cold Case
Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–winning author MARIE FERRARELLA has written more than two hundred and fifty books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com.

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To

Reta Renner

Who Can Pronounce

Cacti and Succulent Names

That Make My Tongue Ache

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

Josephine 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

It 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.

A man wearing gray dress slacks and a crisp, long-sleeved, button-down blue shirt approached the gates. He appeared totally out of place in the rural-looking, overgrown nursery.

He also looked extremely agitated.

Unlocking the gate, the man greeted Malloy by announcing, “Finally!” as he pulled the gate back.

Malloy drove down the slope and into the nursery, pulling his vehicle over to the first available parking area. The entire space was meant, he assumed, to accommodate several vehicles, but it looked barely wide enough to house three very compact cars. Planning was obviously not someone’s strong suit.

Deliberately taking his time—he didn’t care for the man’s attitude—Malloy stepped out of his car almost in slow motion, his shoes carefully making contact with the sun-cracked dirt as if he could feel the heat through the bottom.

Looking at the man who made no secret of sizing him up, Malloy said, “Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘finally,’” the man bit off sharply. “Maybe now that you’re here, you can move this so-called ‘investigation’ to its conclusion.” It wasn’t a question but a strongly worded order. Angry, the man contemptuously indicated the four idle fellows standing in the distance. “That construction crew is being paid by the hour to stand around and watch that woman bend over.”

Okay, maybe he’d had less than the minimum hours of sleep to be sufficiently operational, Malloy thought, but he had just had a really good jolt to his system, thanks to the coffee he’d imbibed a minute ago, and the scowling man in front of him still wasn’t making any sense.

“You want to run that by me again?” Malloy requested. “Starting with your name.”

“I’m Roy Harrison,” the guy grudgingly bit off. “And I just had my lawyer buy this property for me.”

There was practically steam coming out of Harrison’s rather large ears. In his position, Malloy supposed he wouldn’t exactly be thrilled, either.

“I take it congratulations are not in order,” he commented.

“Damn straight they’re not,” Harrison snapped. “I paid for a cacti and succulent nursery, lock, stock and barrel. I didn’t pay for some freaking boneyard,” he bit off in complete disgust. “Can’t you and that dour-faced former cheerleader take these damn bones and do whatever it is you have to do with them somewhere else? I’ve got a nursery to get ready to open,” the man complained unnecessarily.

“I’m afraid nothing’s happening on that end until all the evidence is bagged and tagged, and we can determine whether or not this was the actual scene of the crime—or if the victims were killed somewhere else.”

Though he kept his expression deliberately neutral, Malloy had to admit that he rather enjoyed putting a pin in the man’s balloon. He’d never cared for people who were filled with their own sense of importance—especially if they felt that gave them a reason to throw their weight around.

His answer did not sit well with the new nursery owner. Harrison’s scowl became almost fierce as he waved a hand angrily in Sean Cavanaugh’s general direction. The latter was standing in the distance, working alongside his team.

“I overheard that old guy say that these bones have been in the ground for maybe two decades. What the hell difference can it make now where you look at them?” Harrison demanded. “They’re old.”

“It makes a great deal of difference,” Malloy told the new owner, his voice deceptively calm. “And that ‘old guy’ you just referred to happens to be the head of the crime scene investigation lab—and my uncle,” he added crisply. “So maybe you could find it in your heart to show a little respect for the man and his considerable knowledge. Who knows?” Malloy added “pleasantly,” his obvious contempt for the owner beginning to show through. “You play your cards right and the chief actually might find a way to shorten the time.”

Harrison already looked infuriated to find himself stymied in this manner, not to mention that he highly resented being rebuked by someone he obviously felt was beneath him.

The next moment, Harrison took out his wallet, his implication clear as he tugged on a larger bill, having it peer over the top of his credit cards. “What can I do to make this go faster?”

“Not bribing me would be a good start.” Malloy flashed a completely phony smile at the offensive nursery owner. “Hang tight, Harrison. I’m going to have some questions to ask you in a few minutes.” But before that happened, he needed to check in with the CSI team first. “Now, about that ‘former cheerleader’ you mentioned—”

A barely veiled sneer curved Harrison’s thin lips. “Let me guess, another relative?”

Malloy had just spotted the woman the new owner had to be referring to. She was the only female in the area, and, from what he could see at this distance, whoever she was, the slender blonde was nothing short of a breathtaking knockout.

All memory of Bunny, the woman he’d spent his extremely energized weekend with, completely vanished.

“Lord, I hope not,” Malloy commented under his breath. “I’ll get back to you,” he added without sparing the owner another look.

“Who can I call to make this go away?” Harrison asked.

“You don’t,” Malloy answered with finality, tossing the words over his shoulder.

Putting the abrasive owner temporarily out of his thoughts, Malloy made his way toward what was the only center of activity within the area—if he didn’t count a neighbor’s rooster.

The lone fowl was housed in an opened coop facing the northern perimeter.

Flapping his wings and moving about in what could only be called an agitated manner, the rooster crowed intermittently despite the fact that the sun had long since been up and the current hour was quickly approaching noon.

Obviously the rooster’s inner clock needed some adjusting, Malloy absently thought.

For the moment, his attention was not on roosters, or the dead bodies. It was strictly and exclusively on the attractive woman with the killer figure. Despite her appreciative male audience standing a few feet away, watching her every move, the woman appeared to be absorbed by the bones she and two of the CSI agents were digging up out of the ground and arranging on a long, extended roll of burlap.

The annoying owner had been right, Malloy noted, scanning the immediate area. The construction crew Harrison had hired really were, for all intents and purposes, immobilized, no doubt ordered to remain that way by his uncle.

But the crew definitely didn’t appear to be suffering any discomfort because of that edict.

Instead, the idle four men looked to be quite entertained as they took in every nuance, every movement made by the young woman studying the various excavated bones.

Malloy approached the young woman and placed himself between her and the sunlight that had, until that moment, been highlighting the collection of bones she had been assembling.

“Hi, I’m Malloy,” he told her.

The voice and sudden distracting shift of light caught her attention. After a couple beats, Kristin finally looked up.

If the exceedingly handsome, exceptionally confident-looking man with the sexy grin momentarily threw her off her game, Kristin Alberghetti gave no indication of that reaction.

Instead, her eyes met his, and she silently waited for him to explain why he was here blocking her light.

The name he offered nudged at something in the back of her mind. After a moment, recognition set in.

Malloy Cavanaugh. One of the Cavanaughs.

His reputation had preceded him.

“Of course you are,” she replied, turning her attention back to her work.

“And you are?” he asked after several seconds went by and she still didn’t volunteer her name, even though he had given her his.

“Busy,” Kristin answered crisply without looking up. “And you’re in my light,” she added rather impatiently.

“Funny, I would have thought that you cast enough light on your own to brighten up anything you needed to look at,” Malloy observed.

The blonde looked up again, her expression telling him that the remark—and his charm—left her more than just merely cold.

“Sorry, no,” she replied. Ice chips formed around each word. “Would you mind stepping to the side? I got the impression that the owner of this nursery wanted me to be done before I even got here, so if you move out of the light, I can try to accommodate him.”

“Sorry,” Malloy apologized, following her request. “My bad.”

“I imagine you probably say that a lot,” Kristin commented, sounding as if she were addressing the observation to herself instead of to him.

Feisty, Malloy thought. Ordinarily, he probably would have backed away. This was, after all, a case, and he wasn’t the type to waste too much time trying to break through a woman’s barriers. For one thing, life was too short. For another, he was being paid to be a detective, not a lover. And there were a great many willing women out there to choose from.

But, on the other hand, there was a certain appeal to the concept of “feisty,” especially when it was coupled with someone who looked the way this woman did.

Exactly who was she?

What was her official position in the department, and how did he get her to open up to him?

“You’re new,” he said, hoping to initiate a conversation.

Kristin spared him just the minutest of glances before she went back to her work. “Actually, I’m not,” she told him.

“I haven’t seen you around,” he told her. “And I always notice beautiful women.”

“Well, I guess you missed one this time,” she responded, carefully separating two bones that looked as if they had been fused together by grit and time.

Rather than annoying him, the flippant way she’d answered what was clearly a line—he hadn’t been trying to be subtle—seemed to oddly attract him to an even greater extent.

Crouching down beside the woman, he said, “Let’s start over.”

The look she gave him would have withered a lesser man.

“Maybe later. I’m working now.” Her expression turned impatient. “And you’re in my light again.”

“Right.”

To accommodate her, Malloy rose to his feet, taking care to allow the sunlight to stream over and bathe the bones laid out before her.

This one, he told himself, was going to be a tough nut to crack.

And he couldn’t wait to get started.

Chapter 2

But for now, as tantalizing as the woman kneeling over the boneyard was, Malloy knew he had to place his private plans on the back burner.

A really distant back burner.

For now, he had a crime to begin to unravel and, from the looks of it, a number of dead people to identify.

Growing up, Malloy had always loved puzzles, both the mental kind and the kind that came inside boxes that were labeled with intentionally daunting numbers like “1000 pieces.”

The older he got, the higher the number of pieces stuffed into the box became. But back then, no matter how many parts the puzzle came in, with enough tenacity on his part, they always wound up fitting into one another to form a unified whole.

He had come to learn years ago that life didn’t always imitate art. If he were being honest with himself, “hardly ever” was more the case. But each of these bones now spread out on the cloth went into forming a whole person. All he needed to do was find out who that whole person was, so that he or she could be laid to rest.

All he needed to do.

The words echoed in his head, mocking him. There was no “all” about this job, unless the word referred strictly to the number of bones that were even now piling up next to the medical examiner.

As he watched, the pile just kept growing.

It was like trying to look away from a train wreck. Horrific though it was, he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Not because he didn’t want to, but because identifying the deceased was his job.

So he watched as the CSI team members continued to find more and more body parts, carefully laying each part on the long, unfurled rectangular cloth beside the somber medical examiner. From all appearances—at least to his limited range of expertise in this particular field—time had been the butcher rather than some overzealous serial killer trying to bolster his sagging self-esteem by hacking apart people.

Rather than walk away and get back to the owner as he’d intended, Malloy retraced his steps to the medical examiner.

“Any chance that those overly observant construction workers ogling you over there might have stumbled across some old Native American burial ground while plowing up the ground with their bulldozer?” he asked her.

Kristin looked up to see if the cocky detective was joking. But the expression on his face, while exceedingly friendly, was apparently serious.

She turned back to her work. “If that were the case, Detective, it was a pretty exclusive burial ground. So exclusive that I highly doubt it existed.”

“Again, please,” Malloy requested. “In English this time.”

Impatient, Kristin rocked back on her heels. In order to be able to look at him, she shaded her eyes. “The bodies that have been dug up so far all belonged to women. While there were some tribes that were predominantly matriarchal in nature, I’ve never heard of any of them segregating their dead.” And then she shrugged as she added a coda. “Anyway, these bodies aren’t really that old.”

Malloy’s eyes swept over the various piles of bones. They looked dried and, in some cases, splintered. “Could have fooled me,” he murmured.

“I’m sure a good many things could fool you, Detective, but I don’t have time to discuss that,” she said, getting back to work. “I’d like to finish up here before the turn of the next century.”

Rather than take offense, Malloy merely shook his head. “That was cold, Doc,” he told her.

Kristin felt herself bristling. She didn’t like the note of familiarity in his voice. “That was accurate, Detective Cavanaugh.”

He didn’t back off, the way she’s hoped. Instead, he said, “Call me Malloy. All beautiful women do.”

At a loss as to how to respond or how to put this man in his place, Kristin retreated. Sighing deeply, she went back to ignoring him. She turned her attention to tagging body parts.

“Are you sure they didn’t unearth some kind of a cemetery when they broke ground over here?” Malloy pressed. There seemed to be just too many body parts for anything but a cemetery.

Kristin raised her eyes to look up at him just for a moment. She didn’t bother hiding her disdain. “You have trouble understanding the word ‘no,’ Detective? Or is it that you’re just not accustomed to hearing it?”

He didn’t answer her.

He didn’t have to.

The grin that found its way to his lips did it for him.

Kristin bit off a few choice words that rose to her own lips. This wasn’t the time to get distracted or get embroiled in a verbal exchange that wasn’t going to lead anywhere. Especially when what she had before her could very well be the defining moment of her entire career. She didn’t have time to get sidetracked by a sweet-talking, sinfully good-looking, dark-haired detective who obviously thought that all he had to do was glance at a woman with those bone-melting, seductive green eyes of his and she automatically became his.

Her bone-melting days were definitely in the past.

Long in the past.

So rather than tell this man what she thought of him, Kristin restrained herself and asked what to her seemed to be an entirely logical question.

“Don’t you have work to do, Detective? Or has the department taken to paying its detectives to stand around like obtrusive lead statues that do nothing but get in the way?”

“Is there a problem here?” Sean Cavanaugh asked, coming up behind the unit’s newest—and in his estimation, brightest—medical examiner.

He’d interviewed and hired her himself after Jacobs, the department’s last medical examiner, felt compelled to accept a better position in the private industry. Outside of proposing to his second wife, he felt it was one of the best decisions he’d ever made.

“Just asking the doc here some general questions pertaining to this boneyard that’s being unearthed even as we speak.” He flashed a wide grin in her direction. “She’s giving me the benefit of her rather droll point of view.”

Sean looked from his nephew to the young woman he felt was capable of great things. He knew all about Malloy’s reputation. He’d raised several sons like that himself and knew firsthand that it took a while for the kinks to work themselves out. Malloy was a good cop and ultimately an even better human being. The name of the game was patience.

Sean, in turn, smiled at the young woman between his nephew and him. “I’m sure that Dr. Alberghetti will let us all know when she’s had time to formulate a scientific opinion regarding this unfortunate treasure trove of death that the construction crew stumbled across.”

Easygoing almost to a fault, Brian Cavanaugh’s somewhat slightly older brother had just finished his sentence as a teeth-jarring, crowing sound pierced the air again.

The closest thing to a dirty look passed over Sean’s face as he glanced over his shoulder. “Doesn’t that blasted bird ever just stop making noise and go to sleep? That’s the third time he’s crowed since we got here. Isn’t he supposed to be tuned in to some inner clock or something?”

“I don’t know about an inner clock, but it’s too bad that he can’t talk,” Malloy commented, his eyes sweeping over the immediate area, then taking in the weather-battered trailer in the distance, as well. He had to be getting back to the unfriendly owner. “Maybe then he could give us some insight on what happened here.”

“He wouldn’t be able to,” Kristin said flatly, not bothering to look up. “Roosters live about ten years. Fifteen at most. These bodies all appear to be older than that.”

Taken aback, Malloy looked at her quizzically. “You actually know how long roosters live?” He raised his eyes to meet his uncle’s. “Wow, she’s just a regular font of miscellaneous information, isn’t she?”

Sean smiled in response. “She reads a lot in her downtime,” he told his nephew. “Although there isn’t going to be very much downtime in her immediate future, I’m afraid.”

“She also has excellent hearing,” Kristin interjected without pausing what she was doing.

“My apologies, Kristin,” Sean told her, willingly taking the blame. “That was rude.”

This time Kristin did stop what she was doing. When she spoke, her words were addressed only to the older man, who she considered to be her mentor despite the fact that he had no medical degree.

“You could never be rude, sir. He, however,” she went on, casting one dismissive glance in Malloy’s direction, “is an entirely different story.”

“Ouch.” Malloy pretended to wince. “Moving right along—”

“Please, do,” Kristin murmured just audibly enough to be overheard.

Roy Harrison picked that moment to approach the trio, a dark, impatient scowl all but embedded on his long, thin face. “Hey, when is she going to be finished?” he demanded, irritably waving his hand at Kristin.

Kristin was about to speak up and put the sour-looking man in his place when she heard someone else doing it for her.

“When she’s done,” Malloy informed the disgruntled new owner of the nursery in no uncertain terms, his tone far removed from his usual friendly cadence.

Kristin looked at the detective in surprise. She hadn’t expected him to come to her defense. Part of her waited for Malloy to add, “Just kidding,” but he didn’t.

“Is she going to keep on digging straight down to the other side of the world until she turns up all the bones from here to there?” Harrison retorted.

“Nope, just the ones that are buried along the perimeter of your property,” Sean told him pleasantly. His words didn’t match the chief’s expression.

Apparently, Malloy thought, sarcasm was wasted on the nursery’s new owner, because he took the head of the CSI unit seriously.

“My bulldozer can go a lot faster,” Harrison told them.

It didn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that the man’s only interest in the matter was speed, and that he couldn’t care less about any sort of resolution as far as solving the crime went. The abrupt cessation of work was costing him a considerable amount of money for each minute that went by, and not only was money the bottom line, apparently as far as Harrison was concerned it was the only line.

“Your bulldozer can also crush a lot of those bones beyond recognition,” Malloy told him before Kristin could speak up.

In his estimation, Harrison was clearly a Neanderthal type, and anything that the medical examiner had to say, Malloy knew, wouldn’t carry any weight. There was no point in having her hit her head against a brick wall.

“It’s not like they’re exactly a pretty sight right now,” the frustrated nursery owner snapped.

“Mr. Harrison, the less time you spend standing here, talking and tying us up, the faster this’ll go and the faster you’ll be able to get back to building up your nursery,” Malloy pointed out. “Now, if you really want to talk, that’s great,” he continued cheerfully. “I have plenty of questions I’d like to ask you.”

At this point, the scowl on Harrison’s face was going clear down to the bone. Second-guessing the detective’s question, he snapped, “No, I didn’t kill anybody.”

The smile that flashed across Malloy’s lips was entirely superficial and empty. “That’s very reassuring to know, Mr. Harrison, but that wasn’t going to be my question.”

“Oh.” Harrison looked somewhat taken aback. “Well, what was it, then?” the nursery owner asked, trying not to look flustered.

To get out of the medical examiner’s way—and possibly on her good side—Malloy began to inch his way up the incline, leading the nursery owner back toward the uninviting trailer. “How did you come to be the owner of this property?”

Following the detective, Harrison looked at him as if he were simpleminded. “The usual way. I bought the damn thing.”

“From?” Malloy asked, attempting to coax more information out of him.

Harrison’s expression grew even more condescending as he looked at the man asking him these questions. “The person selling it.”

Malloy blew out a breath, trying not to let his temper get the better of him. This wasn’t anything new. He’d dealt with idiots before. “I need a name, Mr. Harrison. Who sold you the property?”

Harrison stopped walking. “My lawyer handled it. He dealt with some long-time employee who worked here. The guy was acting on behalf of the owner.”

The man was definitely a challenge to his patience, Malloy thought. “I still need a name, Mr. Harrison.”

“I don’t have a name,” Harrison snapped irritably. “I already told you. My lawyer handled all that. He does all my transactions.”

“All right, then I’ll need his name,” Malloy said, the calm timbre of his voice belying the way he really felt about this verbal square dance.

Part of him would have felt a certain amount of satisfaction if he could have discovered that Harrison was behind these murders. He made a mental note to investigate the man’s background and his general whereabouts twenty years ago—although he would have been very young at the time.

“Fine,” Harrison bit off. “I’ve got his card in that tin can of an office up there.” He waved his hand contemptuously toward the trailer.

“Lead the way,” Malloy said amicably, fairly certain that Harrison wasn’t aware that he was being led up to that trailer already.

Harrison frowned at the former owner’s living accommodations. “First thing in the morning, I’m having that piece of junk hauled off and getting a real RV set up in its place until I can have a building erected.” He aimed a penetrating glare at the detective next to him. “Unless that’s against the law, too.”

Malloy counted to ten in his head before he addressed the owner’s contemptuous statement. “None of it’s against the law, Mr. Harrison. There are just procedures that have to be followed.”

“Procedures be damned,” Harrison snorted. “I’m losing money here.”

“And I’m very sorry about that, Mr. Harrison,” Malloy responded, his voice almost singsong in tone, even as he deliberately assumed a contrite expression. “You could write a letter to the department, detailing the inconvenience that this investigation is causing you—not to mention the money it’s costing you,” he added, then approximated a sympathetic tone, saying, “Maybe they’ll reimburse you.”

Again Harrison stopped walking, wonder written across his dour face. “They’d do that?”

Malloy eased himself out of the corner with the skill of a savvy con artist, something he had picked up by observing the people he tracked down and arrested.

“I don’t handle that end of it, but nothing’s impossible,” he told the nursery owner innocently.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the amused look on Sean’s face. The latter had come closer and overheard him. It took effort for Malloy to maintain a completely unaffected and neutral expression as he followed Harrison the rest of the way up the incline and into the trailer.

The trailer’s interior had a musty smell, thanks to piles of papers that hadn’t been sorted and either filed away or disposed of in a long time. Harrison cursed roundly under his breath as he searched his desk.

“Here!” Harrison declared dramatically, finally finding the business card he was looking for. He all but slapped it into the detective’s hand.

“You might want to call ahead and tell him I’ll be stopping by,” Malloy advised. He slipped the business card into his wallet and tucked the wallet away. “Do you remember when you bought this property?”

Suspicion crowded the distrustful brown eyes. “Almost five weeks ago. Why?”

“That was going to be my next question,” Malloy told him, his voice deceptively friendly sounding. “Why?”

Harrison’s dark eyebrows drew together in a perplexed look. “You mean why did I buy it?”

“Yes.” It seemed a simple enough question on the surface, Malloy thought. “Was it a lifelong passion of yours to surround yourself with greenhouses full of exotic plants? Or were you looking for a business write-off when you bought this property? Or...?”

He let his voice trail off. There was still the possibility that Harrison had somehow been involved in these murders that made up the cold case. Maybe the man knew about the bodies buried here and didn’t want them falling into the wrong hands. In his haste to make money, he’d forgotten that the bodies were on this side of the property rather than the developed side.

Malloy watched the nursery owner and waited for him to respond.

Harrison stared at him for a few moments, then shrugged. “I just wanted my own business, and I thought that being in charge of a nursery like this would be relatively stress free.” He punctuated the sentence with a dry, self-mocking laugh. “How’s that for a stupid move?”

“Not necessarily a stupid move, Mr. Harrison. Things’ll be resolved one way or another,” Malloy assured him. “So, you didn’t know the owner before the property changed hands?” he asked innocently.

“Didn’t know the owner after it changed hands, either,” Harrison retorted. “All I know is what my lawyer told me. The nursery used to belong to this collector who got too carried away collecting. He opened up a nursery and did a fair amount of business. He died some fifteen, eighteen years ago and left the place to his sister. She kept the place going, turning it into a real thriving business. When she got sick, she put one of the employees in charge. Eventually she asked him to sell it for her and then I got it. End of story.”

Malloy glanced out of the window down to the site of activity at the far end of the property. From this vantage point, he could see his uncle, the two other members of the CSI team, not to mention the doctor with the killer legs, still working the multiple grave site, all under the entertained eyes of the four construction workers.

The latter group gave no signs of moving, the former gave no indication that they were about to stop. All of which put a decided crimp into Harrison’s anticipated opening date.

He turned around to look at the new owner. “I’m sorry, I missed the last sentence,” Malloy apologized. “What did you just say?”

Harrison frowned at what he took to be the detective’s inattention. “I said, ‘End of story.’”

“I’m afraid not yet,” Malloy corrected, looking at the man pointedly.

Chapter 3

The Cold Case Division of the Aurora PD was not a very big department. Nor was it a very popular department to work for. Tracking down sometimes decades-old information was definitely not to everyone’s taste. Patience was at a premium.

When Malloy had been promoted to the rank of detective and put in his application to join that division, he’d viewed working cold cases as a challenge, a way to prove his mettle and his tenacity. Because of his last name, he knew he had to work harder. Cavanaughs were scrutinized closely and held up to a higher standard. This was his way of proving himself.

But there was just so much of a challenge that a man could be expected to take, and working a cold case that had all the earmarks of involving more bodies than were regularly found on a major league baseball team was, in his opinion, over and above the call of duty.

It wasn’t something that he really felt he could tackle alone.

So when Malloy got back to the squad room and saw that his partner was not sitting at his desk, he grew somewhat anxious and testy.

For the past week, Frank Weatherbee had been on vacation, but he was due back today. Malloy looked over toward his partner’s desk to see if there were any telltale signs of life—like Weatherbee’s ever-present bag of barbecue chips—on his desk. But there were no chips. Not a thing was out of place, which Malloy didn’t take as a good sign. When Weatherbee was in, everything on the detective’s desk was out of place.

Malloy scanned the squad room. “Anyone seen Weatherbee?” he asked, raising his voice so it would carry throughout the room.

The detective sitting closest to him, Wade Cooper, shook his head. “Haven’t seen Weatherbee since he went waltzing off on his vacation, the lucky SOB.”

“Well, he should have come waltzing back this morning,” Malloy pointed out, annoyed.

“Maybe he decided to take an extra day,” Cooper guessed, a vague, careless shrug punctuating his statement.

“He knows better than that,” Malloy said, rejecting Cooper’s suggestion. “We’re shorthanded in the department to begin with—and he knows I’ll kill him.”

Cooper shrugged again, his narrow shoulders hardly making a ripple beneath the wrinkled houndstooth jacket he wore. “Hey, I’m just guessing here. Why don’t you ask Julie?” he said, referring to the department’s administrative assistant. The woman’s desk was just outside of their captain’s cubbyhole of an office. “Maybe Weatherbee called her to say he’s running late because of traffic.”

Malloy hoped that was all that it was, although it was getting on in the day and if his partner was going to be here, he would have already made it in.

It wasn’t traffic.

When Malloy asked Julie Myers about his partner, he found out that Weatherbee had called in. But the word “traffic” had never entered the conversation.

However, something else entirely had. Something else that Julie went on at length to explain. As he listened, Malloy’s mouth dropped open. Talk about rotten timing.

“He did what?” Malloy asked, staring at the woman who had been with the department longer than his uncle Brian had been the chief of detectives.

Patiently, Julie repeated—verbatim—what she had just told the annoyed-looking detective. “Weatherbee said he broke his leg and can’t come in.”

The hell he couldn’t, Malloy thought in disgust. He’d seen some of his cousins power through with gaping holes in their sides, not taking a break until the case they were working on was all wound up and closed.

Didn’t people believe in work ethics anymore?

“I need him,” Malloy argued. “Hasn’t Weatherbee ever heard of crutches?”

Julie gave him a sympathetic look. “The detective said he was too banged up to use them.”

That had Malloy momentarily reconsidering his reaction. “Was Weatherbee in a car accident?” he asked Julie.

The older woman shook her head. “No, a bike accident. From what he told me, he and his wife collided while they were biking through the Los Angeles Forest.” There was a drop of sympathy in her voice as she told him, “Weatherbee’s mother is taking care of both of them.”

“Biking?” Malloy echoed incredulously, still working with that piece of information. “What’s he doing on a bike? The guy’s as coordinated as an octopus crossing the Painted Desert.” He blew out a breath. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so damn annoying and inconvenient. “Of all the stupid, harebrained—”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” Julie protested, raising her hands to ward off his words before they became too colorful. “I just took Weatherbee’s call. I didn’t rent him the bikes.”

Malloy nodded, a somewhat contrite expression on his face. He shouldn’t be taking his frustrations—or Weatherbee’s stupidity—out on her. Julie had nothing to do with the situation. It wasn’t her fault that his partner was one sandwich short of a picnic.

“Yeah, sorry, you’re right.”

Malloy frowned to himself as he looked back out at the squad room. It was small, as far as squad rooms went, with fewer than half the number of detectives that departments like Homicide and Robbery had.

Everyone was up to their eyeballs in caseloads.

He looked back at the older woman. “Hey, Julie, how would you like to get out from behind that desk and go out in the field to work a case with me?” he asked, only half kidding.

Humor quickly dissipated in the face of the less-than-eager look the woman gave him. “I know, I know,” Malloy sighed. “What was I thinking?”

Julie answered without even sparing him a glance. “Probably some illicit thoughts about the hot little number you spent the weekend with would be my guess.”

Taken by surprise, Malloy stared at the administrative assistant. “How did you know about that?” he asked, both amused and slightly mystified.

“Because, Malloy, you always have a hot little number to spend the weekend with,” Julie answered. There was a note of affection in her voice as she told him, “If you were my son, I’d have sent you to a monastery a long time ago.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” he contradicted with far more blatant affection, “because then you wouldn’t be able to see my bright, shining face every week.”

Julie shook her head in amazement. “You really do flirt with every woman you come across, don’t you?”

“Only if they’re breathing—” and then he winked “—and lovely, like yourself.”

“This is April, Cavanaugh, and way too early for you to be shoveling deep piles of snow. Go work your case before it gets any colder,” she advised, waving him on his way.

He had been right earlier, Malloy thought as he walked away. This definitely did not have the makings of one of his better days.

Hopefully, he thought as he got into his car again five minutes later, this day wasn’t going to get any worse.

* * *

It didn’t get worse, but it didn’t get better, either. The man he had driven over to see, Roy Harrison’s lawyer, was not in his office.

“When will he be back?” Malloy asked the inert-looking young woman at the front desk of William James, Esq.’s office.

The young woman, who Malloy assumed was either the lawyer’s administrative assistant or his younger sister attempting to work off a debt, mechanically mouthed an answer to his question. “Monday.” Then added, “Two weeks from now.”

“Two weeks?” Malloy echoed. Was the man representing an out-of-state client? “Just where is he?”

The woman’s expression couldn’t have looked more bored if she’d rehearsed it for hours in her mirror. “He’s on vacation.”

Damn, had the whole world suddenly gone vacation crazy? Was he the only one who had missed that memo?

“Can you give me the number to his hotel or wherever it is that he’s staying? I have some questions for him regarding one of his clients.”

The young woman made no move to retrieve anything. “I’m sorry, that won’t be possible,” she said in a singsong voice. “Mr. James can’t be reached by phone. He said he needed this time to unwind.”

Maybe it was his suspicious mind, but that sounded entirely too convenient. Refraining from making a comment, Malloy handed the woman his card.

“If he calls in, give him my number. Tell him to call me, day or night. It’s about Roy Harrison. I need to clear up a few things. Tell him dead bodies are involved.”

He’d thrown in the last line to get the woman’s attention, since she appeared to be half asleep, on her way to oblivion.

He succeeded. Her eyes opened so wide, it looked as if she might have trouble closing them again.

“Really?” she asked breathlessly.

“Really,” he confirmed with just the right touch of disinterest.

“You said ‘bodies.’ Plural.” Her eyes were glued to his face. “How many?”

“Many,” was the only word Malloy offered. “Make sure you tell him to call me the minute he makes contact with you,” he emphasized.

Her hand covered the card he’d given her almost possessively.

When she answered him, her voice had dropped down a level, sounding almost conspiratorial. “The second I hear from him,” she promised. “Absolutely.”

He wasn’t going to hold his breath, Malloy thought, leaving the two-story building where the lawyer’s office was housed. But then, maybe he’d succeeded in getting a little movement going in that area, making James’s secretary see how important the situation was.

Without anything tangible to go on, Malloy decided to pay the ME’s office a visit to see if the sexy medical examiner had gotten any further with her examination of the mound of body parts.

Hopefully she could offer him something more to go on than she had in their last encounter.

It felt like he was spinning his wheels. While he had always been a fan of road trips, they involved real wheels and an actual physical destination. Spinning his wheels figuratively while trying to get somewhere on a case had the exact opposite effect of a real road trip. It only succeeded in making him feel exceedingly frustrated.

Malloy took a chance that the good doctor had returned to the morgue and had gotten started on making heads or tails out of the collection of bones she and the CSI team had gathered together. This was his first stop when he drove back from the lawyer’s office.

Getting off the elevator in the basement, he followed the signs leading to the morgue. Malloy was faintly aware that there was music being piped into the building’s corridor. It wasn’t classical music, the way he might have expected—something soothing to quiet any unsteady nerves or a queasy stomach—after all, this was where the morgue was located—but something twangy.

Since he listened to music only occasionally and then to just whatever was currently on the pop stations, it took Malloy a moment to place just what genre he was listening to.

Country.

And whose idea was that? he wondered. Was that supposed to be some subtle commentary on the great circle of life? Down-to-earth folks returning to the earth, or some such circular reasoning?

Well, it didn’t really matter one way or another. He didn’t care for the music, but he wasn’t here to indulge his aesthetic sensibilities. He was here for some sort of answer, or at the very least, a hint of a direction to go in. Right now, he had nothing, and he found that incredibly frustrating.

The door to the morgue was closed. For a moment, he debated leaving it that way and coming back later. He didn’t want to disrupt anything that might be going on behind those closed doors.

But then, maybe it was business as usual and the medical examiner was just working with a giant, life-size jigsaw puzzle. In that event, he could even be of some help.

Anatomy wasn’t his thing, but jigsaw puzzles were.

With that in mind, he knocked once, then turned the doorknob. When he found it to be unlocked, Malloy entered the room.

There was only one living occupant in the room. A bright overhead light illuminated the main exam table. There were other tables, with other overhead lights, but they were turned off. In general, other than the one bright light, the oversize, somewhat chilly room was somberly in the dark.

* * *

Engrossed in trying to recreate just one body out of all the various parts that had been dug up and were now available to her, Kristin hadn’t heard the knock on the door.

She wasn’t even aware that anyone had entered the room until Malloy was less than a foot away from her. At that point, he cleared his throat to get her attention and very nearly caused her to knock over what had taken her over an hour to assemble—a less than half completed body out of all the bits and pieces that had been carefully laid out on all the other unlit tables.

Stifling a shriek, Kristin spun around and glared accusingly at the man who had very nearly caused her heart to pop out of her chest.

The cocky detective.

She might have known.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded angrily.

She didn’t like losing her poise that way, especially not in front of an audience—and most especially if that audience was comprised of a man she found to be unimaginably irritating for oh-so-many reasons.

“I’m interested,” Malloy told her simply, looking at the progress she’d made with the body parts. He was definitely impressed. This woman had serious jigsaw puzzle skills.

“I’m not,” she retorted coldly, her eyes narrowing as she continued to glare at him, hoping he would get the blatant hint and just go away. “I thought I made that clear this morning.”

When he raised his eyes to hers, Kristin instantly realized she’d made a gross mistake in her assumption. He wasn’t here seeking her out for her company. He was here looking for her expertise.

The first words out of his mouth confirmed it.

“I was referring to your professional opinion.”

Embarrassed—and hating it—Kristin could feel heat traveling up both sides of her neck as well as along her cheeks. She struggled, snatching up various unrelated thoughts to get herself focused on something other than what an idiot she’d just been.

“I knew that,” she murmured.

At any other time, he would have probably taken the opportunity to tease her a little. He liked the way her blue eyes flashed when she got angry.

But he was short one partner and his competitive nature wouldn’t allow him to remain stuck in the mud, not making any headway whatsoever, for long. Solving cold cases was what he was being paid for. He wasn’t about to drop the ball now.

But in order to keep from dropping it, he first needed to get a ball not to drop. And right now, he had nothing to grasp on to except for the bare bones—pun intended, he thought—of a mystery. He had all the questions without a clue as to where to even begin looking for some of the answers.

“So,” he began as if they were having just a friendly conversation, “what have you learned?”

Kristin made no reply. Instead, she just looked at him suspiciously. The detective wasn’t being cocky, he was actually asking the question. Was this just another tactic, or was this the genuine Malloy Cavanaugh beneath the jaunty bravado?

She couldn’t tell.

When in doubt, go on the offensive.

“Are you asking me to spoon-feed you answers?” she asked.

“Yes, please.”

He saw the skeptical look on her face intensify. Maybe he needed to play on her sympathies—provided she had any, he qualified. Right now, the jury was still out on that one.

“I’m down one partner, and the only possible lead I have is on vacation in some unknown location that apparently doesn’t have cell phone signals, internet or any kind of telephone service. I need something to go on,” he told her truthfully, then began with the most logical question. “Did you get a final count on how many bodies were in the ground?”

“At last count, there were ten. The CSI team uncovered ten skulls,” she told him. “But they’re not finished digging yet.”

That must be making Harrison happy, he couldn’t help thinking.

“Ten,” he repeated, digesting the idea. “That means—if we’re lucky—there are ten missing persons flyers to go with those skulls.”

She inclined her head, as if agreeing with him. But it wasn’t a wholehearted gesture. “If the reports were filed.”

Malloy laughed dryly. “Not much for positive thinking, are you?”

“Give me something positive to think about,” she countered, challenging him.

He would if he could, but he had nothing yet. “What else can you tell me?” he asked, then quickly qualified, in case they were still on the wrong foot, “About the case.”

“Of the ten people, nine of them are female,” she told him.

“And one male?”

Kristin bit back a few choicer comments and only said, “I can see why you’d be so sought after as a detective.”

He ignored the sarcasm, focusing on what didn’t jibe for him. “Don’t you find that kind of odd?”

“What, you being sought after?” she asked. “Actually, yes, very.”

The woman had a smart mouth, and he found himself wanting to shut it in the most effective way. Later, he promised himself. He’d get to that later. It would serve as a reward for a job well done. “I was talking about the fact that there was a male in the group,” he told her.

Kristin shrugged. He had a point—not that she would say so to him. “Maybe our one male was a transvestite and managed to fool the killer. Oh, and there’s one more thing,” she said, leaving the best for last.

“Go ahead,” he urged gamely.

“The bodies weren’t hacked apart.” At least, not the ones she’d had time to assemble. She’d examined those sections very closely.

“So they weren’t murdered in a fit of rage.”

Waiting a beat, Kristin gave him the second part of her findings. “They were broken apart—while the victims were alive.”

“Then they were murdered in a fit of rage,” he said, amending his previous statement. And then he looked at her with a touch of impatience. “Well, which is it?”

Her eyes met his, and just for a split second, Kristin caught herself losing her train of thought.

Rousing herself again, she went on to tell him, “I just present you with the facts as I find them. It’s up to you to do the speculation.”

With that, she lowered her visor and got back to the business at hand, putting together ten dismembered Humpty Dumpties.

Feeling almost as if he was experiencing whiplash, Malloy watched her work for a moment. This case was definitely not going to be easy—for a hell of a lot of reasons, he told himself.

Chapter 4

Kristin could feel the detective’s eyes on her. Ordinarily, she could block out her surroundings and work under any conditions, adverse or not. But she had this distinct impression that the detective wasn’t watching her work, he was watching her, which was something else entirely.

And she didn’t much like it.

“Why are you still here?” she asked, not giving the man the satisfaction of looking up at him as she posed the question.

Malloy’s voice was mellow and easygoing as he replied, “I thought I’d broaden my education. You know, you can really learn a lot about a person by watching them work.”

Obviously the man’s supply of lines was endless, Kristin thought reprovingly. Since ignoring him was obviously not working, she decided to put Cavanaugh on the spot instead.

“Oh?” she said skeptically. “And what is it that you’ve learned by watching so intently?”

“That you’re precise and meticulous—and you don’t like being observed.”

“I don’t mind being observed. What I mind is the person doing the observing—especially when he should be working.” The look she gave him left no doubts about how she felt about his standing there.

Rather than backing away because he’d been rebuked, Malloy smiled engagingly. “Do I make you nervous, Dr. Kris?”

“You make me irritated, Detective Cavanaugh,” Kristin corrected. “Now, if you want me to come up with some answers for you to work with, you’re going to have to let me do my job,” she said, then added with finality, “alone.”

But rather than leave, the way he had initially begun to do, Malloy looked around at the other exam tables. There were six in all, brought in during the rampage of another serial killer several years ago. Now the tables were covered with bones that might or might not be part of the person whose skull rested at the top of each table.

As he glanced around at the various clusters of remains, a thought occurred to Malloy. “Do you think this might be related to a sex trafficking ring or something along those lines?”

Kristin stopped working and looked up. “Excuse me?”

“You know, sex trafficking,” he repeated, then went on to elaborate in case she missed his drift. “Unsavory types smuggling young women from around the world for the single purpose of making money by turning them into sex slaves.”

“That would be more profitable if they were alive,” she pointed out dryly as she got back to sorting. “For most men, dead women are not a turn-on.”

“Very true,” Malloy agreed amicably enough. “But maybe something went really wrong, and whoever was in charge of this group decided he or they had no other recourse except to kill all these women.”

Under normal circumstances, she supposed that the sexy detective’s theory was plausible enough. But not in this case. “There’s just one thing wrong with that,” Kristin said flatly.

“I’m all ears.”

No, he wasn’t. He was a great deal more than that, Kristin thought grudgingly. Malloy Cavanaugh was all broad shoulders, a quirky, sexy smile and whimsical green eyes that she found vastly disturbing when they were turned on her.

Her unbidden observation came out of nowhere, and she tried to banish it back to the same location, but without much success.

This whole case was making her tired.

“These women weren’t smuggled in from outside the country.”

The facts, Kris, deal with the facts. The scientific ones. It’s the only way you’re going to get him to go away.

“How do you know that?” Malloy asked, rounding the exam table in order to see what she was talking about.

Kristin drew in a breath. Cavanaugh was standing way too close to her, but telling him to back off might start him thinking the wrong thing—or the right thing, as was the case. She decided it was best to keep silent on that score. The sooner she got him to leave, the better.

“Their teeth,” she pointed out. “The ones who have had dental work done show that whoever worked on them did a decent job. The others just have good teeth. That isn’t usually the case for those whose backgrounds include poverty and malnutrition.”

He had an adequate enough imagination, but it was hard for him to envision the remains that were arranged on the exam tables once being living, breathing women.

“So it’s your opinion that this little band of not-so-merry women was homegrown?”

Kristin bit back a comment about his choice of descriptive words. Instead, she forced herself to make a dispassionate comment. “Appears that way.”

Okay, so far he had that the women were most likely from somewhere in the immediate area—or at least this country rather than somewhere out of the country, and that all of them, except for one, were women. It was something, he granted, but still not very much to go on.

“Can you give me a rough estimate of when they were killed?” he asked.

She really wished he’d take a few steps back and stop crowding her. But since he apparently wasn’t moving, as casually as she could manage, she did.

“Well, it wasn’t all at the same time,” she told him. “My preliminary judgment would be that this happened between twenty and twenty-five years ago.”

“So this wasn’t a mass grave,” he speculated.

His wording made her think. “More like a grave of opportunity,” she said. “The guy would keep coming back to bury his latest victim because apparently no one had discovered his previous transgressions.”

The medical examiner’s conclusion interested him. He had no problem adjusting his own thinking to factor in good points. Ego had never been a problem with him. “What makes you so sure it’s the same guy?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “But judging from appearances—by that I mean the way he dismembered them—it looks that way,” she theorized. As if she suddenly realized what she was saying, Kristin stopped working and raised her eyes to his. “Are you through picking my brain, Detective?”

“I haven’t even gotten started,” he told her honestly, flashing a grin that held a great deal of promise, as well as sizzle.

Kristin found she had to struggle to ignore the unwanted effects he was having on her. How did she get rid of this man?

“That wasn’t really a question,” she told him. “Let me be more clear. You’re through picking my brain.”

“What’s the matter, Doc?” he asked her good-naturedly. “Haven’t you ever heard of teamwork?”

Her eyes narrowed to two blue lasers. “I have, Detective. Are you familiar with the concept of carrying someone?”

He cocked his head, as if that would somehow help him get into her thoughts, and asked her innocently, “Is that an offer?”

“That is an observation,” she informed him tersely. She was telling him that she was aware he was looking to her to do all the heavy thinking here and he was just absorbing her answers without contributing. “Obviously too subtle for you.”

His smile only grew more engaging. “I’m really not the subtle type.”

“Yes, I noticed,” she bit off. She didn’t know how to make it clearer than this. “Now, this might get you to first base or whatever base you’re aiming for with someone else, but I like to feel that I’m earning the money I’m being paid, so unless there’s something else you either want to ask me or share with me, please, leave,” she underscored.

Instead of going the way she would have expected any normal male to do, he stayed exactly where he was, as if she’d just given him a choice. “Well, the idea of sharing doesn’t sound bad to me,” he began.

She’d set herself up for that one, Kristin silently reprimanded herself. “Please, leave,” she repeated, and this time she made sure that there was nothing in her tone to leave any wiggle room for him to misinterpret her words.

Malloy inclined his head, as if he’d finally gotten what she was telling him. “Until the next time,” he told her as he began to take his leave.

“Heaven forbid,” Kristin muttered under her breath just loud enough to be heard.

Opening the door, Malloy wound up all but walking into the two CSI agents who had been in charge of digging up the area where all the body parts had ultimately been found.

Ryan O’Shea and Jake Reynolds were pushing a gurney with what looked to be a black body bag between them.

“Where do you want this, Doc?” O’Shea asked.

Kristin didn’t need to ask what they’d brought in. The sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her the answer to that one.

“More?” she groaned, temporarily forgetting about the annoying detective who had invaded her turf and was still in it.

O’Shea nodded. “It’s the gift that apparently just keeps on giving.”

“How much more giving?” she asked warily as she eyed the body bag.

“We found two more heads,” Reynolds told her, aligning the gurney with one of the exam tables and unzipping the bag.

Kristin closed her eyes for a moment, as if trying to center herself before she spoke. Opening her eyes again, she looked at the body bag. It didn’t look full, but it didn’t appear to be empty, either.

“Just the heads?” she asked.

O’Shea had the good grace to look a little apologetic. “And a handful of miscellaneous bones that might or might not belong to the heads.”

“In other words, just like the rest of it.”

“Exactly like the rest of it,” O’Shea told her, then added quickly in a far more positive voice, “The good news is that I think that’s it.”

“The bad news is that there are twelve of them.” Malloy offered up that observation. Three sets of eyes turned toward him as he continued, “Twelve people without their entire bodies, without names and without a clue why they were unlucky enough to join this exclusive boneyard.”

He studied the piles that were already out. Because of his upbringing, to him, bodies meant families. “And twelve families waiting for some word about one of their own who is never coming home again.”

Kristin glanced in his direction, wondering if the detective had just said all that for her benefit, or if Malloy Cavanaugh actually did have a sensitive side to him.

The next moment she decided that she was probably giving the man way too much credit. Someone who looked and acted the way that Malloy Cavanaugh did didn’t have to have a more sensitive side to him. From what she had heard about him, he did just fine with what genetics had given him to work with. There was no need for sensitivity to enter the picture.

She was partial to sensitivity, responding to that far more than the good looks the man was so generously endowed with. No matter how gorgeous a person might be, looks only went skin deep. Sensitivity went clear down to the bone.

“So you’re not digging any more?” Malloy asked the CSI agents.

“Nothing left to dig,” O’Shea replied. “Not unless we want our heads handed to us by that maniacal nursery owner, Harrison, because we’re burrowing under his greenhouses and destroying those butt-ugly plants that the guy’s got everywhere for no reason. We finished digging up the perimeter.”

“You do realize that there might be more bodies on the property,” Malloy pointed out, turning toward the men. “It’s probably less likely,” he allowed, “but there is still that possibility.”

“We realize, Detective,” Reynolds replied with a hint of annoyance. “We didn’t just start working crime scene investigations yesterday.”

“Good to know,” Malloy replied matter-of-factly. “So, what’s the plan?”

“Come morning,” O’Shea answered, “we’re going to use the GPR—the ground penetrating radar machine that X-rays what’s beneath the surface,” he explained for Malloy’s benefit, “so if there are any more bones buried somewhere on the property, we’ll know where to dig.”

Malloy looked at the two men, surprised. He knew from conversations around Andrew’s table that department funds were tight. “When did CSI get that?”

“It took a bit of juggling,” Sean Cavanaugh said, answering his nephew’s question as he walked into the morgue’s exam room, “but I managed to appropriate the funds for it six months ago.” He nodded at Kristin as he continued talking to Malloy. “The last annual fund-raiser we had, after the department finished funding its usual widows and orphans charities, the rest of the money was allotted for new materials for the crime scene investigation lab.” He looked rather pleased as he added, “I thought this was a good way to utilize the money. This way, manpower isn’t needlessly wasted.

“Once the boys sweep the property,” he concluded, this time addressing his words to Kristin as O’Shea and Reynolds left the morgue, “we’ll know if there are any more bodies to put together and identify.” He looked at the different tables. “You’ve been busy.” There was admiration in his voice. “How are you doing?” Sean asked her.

She smiled ruefully at the table she was next to. It contained the body she was presently trying to reconstruct. “Not exactly like the jigsaw puzzles I used to love putting together as a kid, but I think it’s coming along.”

It was obvious that Sean was pleased with the progress her efforts were making.

“If anyone can do this,” he told her, “you can.” He glanced at his watch. “Well, I’ve got to get back to the lab. Call me if you need anything,” he told her, then added, “Good job,” just before withdrawing.

Kristin turned back to her work and saw that, unlike the others who had come in, Malloy was still in the room. “Wouldn’t that be your cue to leave, too?” she asked. By her count, he’d started to leave at least three times. Why was he still here?

Something she’d said to his uncle had caught his attention, and he wanted to ask her about it. “You worked jigsaw puzzles as a kid, too?”

Too.

The word was a warning. She gazed at him warily, wondering where he was heading with this. Was he going to turn this around somehow and use this to his advantage?

Instead of answering his question—a question she knew that he obviously had the answer to—she stated defensively, “That doesn’t bond us.”

“No,” he agreed. “But it does give us something in common.” He moved closer to her, not to crowd her but to get a better view of the various bones that were spread out on the exam table in front of her. “Want any help?”

Kristin scrutinized him, trying to determine if he was being serious. “You’re joking.”

He raised his eyes to hers. “Not at the moment.”

Rather than tell him outright what she thought of his offer, she pointed out the obvious. “You don’t have a medical degree.”

His shrug was dismissive. “I have an excellent working knowledge of anatomy, and from what I’ve read, you actually don’t need a medical degree to do this kind of work. It’s preferred, of course, but smaller towns make do with laypeople as long as they’re familiar with that old song.”

“Song?” she questioned. “What old song?” What the hell was this self-centered, conceited man going on about?

“You know the one,” he told her, trying to coax the title out of her.

She had no time for games. “No, I don’t,” she told him sharply. “If I did, I wouldn’t be wasting my breath, asking you, now would I?”

Rather than tell her the name of the song, he took her totally by surprise and began to sing it. “The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone, the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone...”

Was he crazy? If he wasn’t, he was a completely loose canon. Either way, she wanted him out of her morgue. He was just too utterly distracting.

“Stop,” Kristin cried, holding up her hand to reinforce her point.

Abruptly ending the song, he looked at her with complete innocence. “Something wrong?”

“You’re actually going to sing that to me?” she asked incredulously.

“Sounds better than just saying it,” he told her. “And anyway, it was written as a song, so I just thought I’d get the point across better if I sang it to you. I was told I have a decent singing voice,” he added as if that might make her reconsider letting him finish the tune.

“Then go sing to whoever told you that.” She closed her eyes, trying to pull herself together. “You’re giving me a headache, Cavanaugh, and I need peace and quiet to concentrate.”

“What part of ‘peace and quiet’ does that country and western song fit into?” he asked, indicating the music that was being piped in. “The peace, or the quiet?” His expression was the face of innocence—annoyingly so.

She blew out a breath and, with it, just possibly the last of her patience. “I just like listening to it. It reminds me of my dad—and why am I bothering to explain myself to you, anyway?” Kristin demanded, stunned as she realized what she was doing.

“Because that’s how people get to know each other,” Malloy said simply.

This was getting really out of hand now, and good-looking or not, this arrogant SOB was wasting far too much of her time.

“We’re not supposed to get to know each other, Cavanaugh. We’re just supposed to work together on this case—for now,” she emphasized.

“Friends work together better than strangers,” Malloy told her.

That did it. Kristin glared at him, biting back choice phrases. Keep it professional, Kris. Keep it professional, she told herself.

“I have enough friends.” The statement was delivered through gritted teeth.

“I don’t,” Malloy countered, then added, “You can never get enough of a good thing, don’t you agree?”

“Ordinarily, yes,” she replied icily. “But not in your case.”

Rather than take the cue she was so blatantly giving him, Malloy grinned, humor sparkling in his eyes. “I’m wearing you down, aren’t I?”

“What you’re doing,” she retorted, “is wearing me out.”

His grin just grew broader. “Same difference in the long run,” he assured her. Then, before she could resort to anything drastic, he left the room, promising, “I’ll get back to you.”

He heard her release a guttural sound that amounted to a stifled shriek of frustration.

Yup, Malloy thought as he closed the door, he was definitely getting to her.

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