Читать книгу Cavanaugh Stakeout - Marie Ferrarella - Страница 15

“Wait,” Andrew responded suddenly as the doctor’s words registered. “Does that mean that my father’s conscious now?” There was no missing the eager hope resonating in his voice.

“He was for a few minutes,” Dr. Logan qualified. “But when I told your father that I wanted to keep him here overnight for observation, he started to become very agitated. I thought that it was best if I gave him a sedative.”

Brian wanted the ER doctor to realize that their father wasn’t just being difficult. “The problem is our father doesn’t really like being in a hospital,” he explained.

Dr. Logan nodded, curtailing the need for any further explanation. “I completely sympathize, but I still want to keep your father for twenty-four hours, just to make sure he’s all right before I discharge him.” His expression turned serious. “Your father did sustain a severe blow to his head,” he told the family gathered around him. “I’m sure none of you want any unpleasant surprises suddenly coming up if he goes home too soon.”

“Do what you need to do, Doc,” Andrew told the emergency physician, speaking on behalf of the entire family. “We want to be sure to keep that annoying old man around for a lot more years to come.”

Dr. Logan seemed to take Andrew’s words seriously. “Well, barring any more unforeseen incidents like this one, I’d say that you should probably get your wish. Except for being banged around and getting a number of cuts and bruises, your father appears to have a very strong constitution.”

Andrew blew out a breath. “That’s definitely reassuring. When can we see him?” the former chief of police asked.

While hearing everything that Dr. Logan had just said was definitely making him feel more hopeful, Andrew still felt a very strong need to see his father with his own eyes before he could begin to rest easy.

“Tomorrow morning,” Dr. Logan replied automatically.

As the ER physician turned on his heel to leave, Rose quickly moved directly into the man’s path.

“Doctor, please,” she said, then looked toward her husband.

Logan read between the lines. The woman’s meaning was clear. “All right. But just one of you,” he asserted, raising his voice so that it carried in order for everyone to hear. “And just for five minutes, is that clear? If Mr. Cavanaugh should come to, I don’t want him getting any more agitated.”

“Understood,” Andrew responded solemnly.

Logan nodded. “All right then. You’ll find him in the third bed.” Since all the beds were hidden behind individual curtains, the ER physician offered, “I’ll take you to him.”

Andrew hesitated, looking back at his two younger brothers, silently asking if either of them wanted to go in his place.

But no one contested the decision. “You’re the head of the family,” Brian told him.

“Go on in before the doctor changes his mind,” Sean urged.

With a grateful nod, Andrew quickly followed Dr. Logan out of the area.

They went down a long corridor and then the doctor abruptly stopped.

“He’s right in here,” Logan said, parting the curtain just enough to give Andrew a glimpse inside the interior. “Remember, five minutes,” the doctor cautioned again and then left in order to give Andrew some privacy with his father.

Drawing closer, Andrew very gently took his father’s hand in his. For the very first time that he could remember, his father’s ordinarily strong hands somehow looked and felt almost fragile. They weren’t the powerful hands he recalled, that seemed capable of lifting up and holding anything.

Hands that seemed almost inconceivably strong and incredibly capable.

Andrew squeezed his father’s hand, but Seamus didn’t squeeze back.

When he thought of what might have happened, Andrew felt tears spring to his eyes. He blinked hard to keep them from falling. This wasn’t the time to fall apart, he thought.

“You gave us one hell of a scare, old man,” Andrew whispered thickly to the unconscious man in the hospital bed. The sight of a bandage wrapped around his father’s head, all but covering his right eye, hurt to look at. What if the damage had been worse? “What did those lowlifes do to you?” Andrew asked, trying to control his mounting anger. “And why were you even there at this time of night? You have people for that,” he insisted almost angrily. This didn’t make sense and it didn’t have to happen. “Young people,” Andrew stressed. “Haven’t you learned how to delegate yet?”

Andrew sighed, answering his own question. “Of course you haven’t. You’re a Cavanaugh and you feel you have something to prove—to yourself if not to the rest of us.”

There was no answer forthcoming from his father even though Andrew would have given anything to have heard his father’s voice as the older man attempted to explain his actions.

But he just continued being unconscious.

“I sure hope you can tell us who did this when you come to, because you know that you’ve got every single member of the family dying to make that person pay for hurting you.”

For a second, he could have sworn he saw his father’s eyes flutter. But then they were still and his father continued sleeping.

“Chief?” Logan said respectfully, peering in between the curtains.

Andrew knew that his time was up. “I’ve got to go, Dad.” He leaned over his father’s bed and pressed a kiss to the older man’s forehead. “I’m happy you’re still with us. Happier than you’ll probably ever know.”

Andrew went to retrieve his father’s cell phone from the plastic bag where his clothes and possessions had been placed. Finding it, the former chief of police stepped away from the hospital bed and reentered the corridor.

Despite the fact that his father was unconscious and couldn’t help provide any leads, it was time to get this investigation started. In his experience, there was always someone, whether they knew it or not, who had seen something.

The trick was to find that someone.

With renewed purpose, Andrew went back out to where the rest of his family was waiting. He looked around for Brenda, one of Brian’s daughters-in-law. Brenda was the head of the IT section in the crime-scene investigation lab. He needed the young woman’s expertise at the moment.

Spotting her next to her husband, Dax, Andrew headed over to them. Brenda and Dax were instantly alert the second he approached them.

“How is he?” Dax asked before his wife could.

“Still unconscious. He looks pretty banged-up,” Andrew admitted. “But he’s a tough old bird. He’ll be issuing orders by morning,” Andrew said confidently.

Murmurs of “That’s great” and “Thank God” echoed throughout the area.

Andrew held out the phone he had taken to Brenda. “This is my father’s phone,” he told her. “Pull whatever you can off it so we can retrace his steps before he was attacked.”

Brenda immediately took possession of the cell phone, wrapping it in her handkerchief to avoid smudging any possible fingerprints that might be on it and didn’t belong to anyone in the family.

“Right away, sir,” she promised.

“Once the chief of police, always the chief of police,” Brian commented to his older brother with a smile.

“Look,” Andrew began, “I know that technically I don’t have the authority to ask anyone to do anything, but—”

“Sure you do,” Shaw, the current chief of police and Andrew’s son, said, interrupting his father. “Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll find the SOB who did this to Grandpa,” he promised. “There’ll be so many of us out there combing the area, we’re going to wind up tripping over one another. But we’ll find him.”

Andrew looked over toward Finley, who had been keeping silent, but Andrew could guess what was going on in the young man’s mind.

“Finn was the one who was first on the scene,” he reminded the others. “That makes him the lead detective on this.”

“Once I realized who the victim was, I knew that there would be no shortage of help with the investigation.” Moving toward the center of the group, the tall, good-looking, dark-haired young man’s green eyes swept over the people standing closest to him.

Finley Cavanaugh belonged to the other branch of the family, the branch that Andrew had uncovered when he went to search for Seamus’s younger brother, Murdoch. Murdoch and Seamus had been separated at a very young age when their parents divorced, splitting the family in two and going their separate ways.

Things didn’t always have fairy-tale resolutions, despite the best intentions. Murdoch died before the two brothers could be reunited. Even so, Murdoch’s four children and their families slowly migrated to Aurora and eventually became, to a great extent, part of the city’s police department. Some had already become police detectives before they transferred, while others were eager to prove themselves in this new venue.

All were happy to become part of a larger whole.

And now they found themselves united in a less joyous undertaking: trying to find and bring to justice the cold-blooded carjacker and would-be killer who had done this to one of their own.

“This isn’t a matter of territory and I’m not about to try to pull rank here,” Finn told the group. “We all want to get whoever did this to Seamus and then left him to die in a deserted parking lot,” he said, his voice growing cold and steely.

Several voices resounded in the group, agreeing with what Finn had just said.

Riley shivered. “If that man hadn’t been walking his dog when he was…” Her voice trailed off, as she was unable to finish her thought.

“But he was out in the right place at the right time,” Brian told his daughter. “Focus on that.” Wanting to say something further to Finn along those lines, Brian turned toward the young detective. But the man was no longer there.

Seeing the perplexed look on Brian’s face, Sean asked, “Who are you looking for?”

“Finn. He was just here,” Brian said, still looking around to find Finn. He hadn’t seen the young detective leave.

“Looks like he wanted to get started looking for the person—or persons—who did this to Dad,” Sean said, supplying his take on the matter.

Brian nodded. “He’s got the right idea.” He raised his voice to address them all. “Let’s put all our resources together and see if we can make short work of this. Those of you who have them, talk to your CIs.” He glanced at the members whom his order applied to. “I want answers, people. Was this a random mugging or was Seamus targeted? If it’s the latter, find out why he was targeted and by whom,” the chief of detectives stressed. “We have got one of the finest police departments in the country,” he reminded the people gathered around him. “Let’s put that to good use.”

Everyone knew that wasn’t a suggestion—that was a quietly issued order.

“Well, that certainly didn’t take long,” Sean commented to Finn several hours later as he and two other members of his crime-scene investigation team carefully circled around the abandoned, badly battered vehicle that had been tracked down. The car had been discovered less than ten miles away from the parking lot where Seamus had been found.

Finn had been the one who had found the car, after beginning his search the moment he had left the hospital. As soon as he had verified that the vehicle was the one that had belonged to Seamus, he had immediately placed a call to Sean.

Sean and his team were out there within twenty minutes, snapping photographs and documenting anything that could even remotely be considered evidence.

“When do you think I’ll be able to run prints?” Finn asked Sean. “Provided you find them,” he qualified.

“When we find them, you’ll be the first to know,” Sean assured him. He looked thoughtfully at the smashed-up vehicle. “You know, for a carjacker, this guy was certainly very careful not to leave any incriminating fingerprints around,” he observed.

“No matter how careful, there’s always a slipup,” Finn told the older man, trying to smother the impatience that was mounting within him.

“I hope you’re right,” Sean replied. “By the way, thanks for the heads-up when your men came across this,” he said to Finn.

“My dad always said that if you want the best results, make sure you go with the best,” Finn answered, never taking his eyes off the members of the CSI team as they systematically worked in and around the vehicle. He kept his fingers crossed.

“I’m sorry I never got to meet your father,” Sean told Donnal Cavanaugh’s son.

Finn paused for just a moment, recalling his father. “You would have liked him,” he told Sean. “Come to think of it, he was a lot like you,” he decided. The next moment, he cleared his throat. “I’d better stay out of your way,” he told Sean. “You’ve got my number if you find any prints.”

“Like I said,” Sean told him, getting back to work as Finn began to walk to his own car, “you’ll be the first one I call.”

Finn picked up his phone the second that he heard it ring. He didn’t bother checking the caller ID—he just naturally assumed that it was Sean on the other end of the line.

“Did you find any fingerprints?” he asked immediately.

“It was the cleanest car I’ve ever dusted,” Sean admitted.

He knew going in that it was only a slim chance that the crime-scene investigators would find a print, but even so, Finn felt deflated. “So then the answer’s no?” he asked, disappointed.

Instead of a confirmation, Sean began, “Except—”

Instantly alert, Finn interrupted the head of the crime-scene lab. “Except what?”

“Except that whoever stole that car from my father didn’t stop to think when they went to adjust the rearview mirror. They wiped down every surface except for that one.” He could hear Finn all but champing at the bit, so he put him out of his misery. “We found just one partial fingerprint on the back of the rearview mirror.”

“Do you have any idea who the print belongs to?” Finn asked. If anyone would have asked him for a description of himself, Finn would have said that, in general, he was usually a patient man. But at the same time, there was something about waiting that really got to him. Especially when he was involved like this.

“Not yet,” Sean answered. “But we will. We’ve got Valri running the print, looking for a match. If whoever stole the car is in the system in any manner, shape or form, I guarantee that she’ll find them. Valri’s the best all-around computer tech that we have,” Sean said.

Finn still saw a slight problem with that. “What if the person’s not in the system?”

“Well, then we’re no worse off than we were before,” Sean answered. “But remember, there are a lot more people in the system now than there used to be. People need to be fingerprinted for any number of reasons these days. Keep a positive thought,” he told his nephew cheerfully.

Finn pressed his lips together. “Right,” he murmured.

“Oh, and, Finn?” Sean said just as Finn was about to hang up.

“Yes?”

“There was one more thing.” Sean paused and it was for effect, something he didn’t usually do, but given the nature of this case, he felt he could be forgiven this one time.

“Yes?” Finn asked again.

“We found blood in the trunk.”

“Blood?” Finn repeated, stunned.

“Yes. It looks like there was a body transported in the trunk,” Sean said.

“Talk about burying the lead!” Finn cried. Pulling himself together, he asked, “Do you know who the blood belongs to?”

“Not yet,” Sean answered. “We’ll call you about that, too,” he promised.

“I will be waiting,” Finn said, trying not to sound as impatient as he felt.

More than an hour later, the phone rang again. Finn had just gotten up from his desk and was about to leave the robbery division’s squad room. The moment he heard his phone, he hurried back and yanked up the receiver. “Finn Cavanaugh.”

“You know that positive thought I told you to keep earlier?”

Finn recognized Sean’s voice immediately. Hope sprang up in his chest. “Yes?”

“We found a match to that print,” Sean told Finn. “Or rather, Valri did.”

Sometimes things really did work themselves out, Finn thought. “Who does the print belong to?”

“It belongs to a Marilyn Palmer,” Sean answered. “There was only one arrest down in her file. Nothing too spectacular. She was part of some sort of group staging a college protest a few years ago. She spent the night in jail, then was released to her mother. As near as Valri could tell, there have been no repeat performances since that date.”

“Until she stole Seamus’s car,” Finn reminded Sean grimly, “and carted off a body in the trunk.”

“Right, until then,” Sean agreed.

“Have you matched that blood yet?” Finn asked.

“No luck so far, but we’re working on it,” Sean said. “Now, if you have a pen, I’ll give you Marilyn Palmer’s address.”

“All right, shoot,” Finn said to the head of the CSI day unit, ready to copy down any and all information that Sean had for him.

Finally, Finn thought in relief, they were beginning to get somewhere.