Читать книгу Cavanaugh's Missing Person - Marie Ferrarella - Страница 17

They took Kenzie’s vehicle to the area at the edge of Aurora Park where John Kurtz’s head and hands had been found.

On the rather short trip over, O’Reilly sat in the back of the vehicle with his K-9 partner, Jupiter. The animal remained still until just before they arrived at their destination. Then he began moving about in the back seat.

Kenzie could feel herself growing tense with every passing minute, not because Hunter was sitting in the front passenger seat next to her, but because she had the very uneasy feeling that the detective could very well be right. If he was, that meant that they had a serial killer on their hands, and that was the last thing that any of them really wanted.

Except maybe for Hunter, she silently amended, slanting a look in his direction as she parked her car in the designated spot for park visitors. Finding out that this was the work of a serial killer could wind up being quite a feather in his cap, given that cold cases were called that for a reason.

One really didn’t expect them to ever get warm.

“Is this the area where the body parts were first found?” O’Reilly asked Hunter as he got out of the vehicle.

Hunter glanced into the back seat that O’Reilly had just vacated. Jupiter, still in the car, was moving from side to side, growing progressively more eager to be set free.

“Judging by the way your dog is acting, I’d say that’s a firm yes,” Hunter answered.

“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this,” Kenzie said to the two men with her. “Or a good feeling,” she added, glancing at Hunter, “depending on which point of view you take.”

“Stay, Jupiter,” O’Reilly ordered as he opened the rear door closest to him.

It was obvious that the shepherd wanted to leap out, but he remained where he was as his trainer reached in to get his leash and firmly wrapped it around his hand.

“Neat trick,” Hunter commented to the handler. “Think you could teach it to me sometime?”

“Why?” Kenzie asked, looking at Hunter. “Are you having trouble keeping your girlfriends from bolting out of the car on you?”

Hunter grinned at her, amused rather than annoyed. “That’s not the problem at all,” he replied.

A sharp comeback rose to Kenzie’s lips, but she bit it back. She’d started this round and if it played itself out, they’d wind up losing sight of why they were here to begin with. She couldn’t afford to squabble with Hunter, at least not until she knew what they were up against.

“Truce,” she declared grudgingly, looking in Hunter’s direction.

“Fine by me,” Hunter answered. He glanced toward the German shepherd straining at his leash. “O’Reilly, your dog looks really eager to show us his stuff. Why don’t you let him?”

Jupiter was out of the vehicle now, all but dancing from side to side. It was easy to see that he was champing at the bit to get going.

O’Reilly, by no means a small man, looked as if he was having trouble holding on to the German shepherd. “I don’t think I have much choice in the matter.”

The words were no sooner out of O’Reilly’s mouth than he slackened his hold on the leash. Jupiter suddenly began to tear through the area, all but dragging his handler in his wake.

“I guess that’s our cue to get going,” Hunter commented.

Because the rain had really come down heavily here, drenching the area, the ground was still very wet in a lot of spots. The resulting mud made the terrain extremely slippery.

Following Jupiter and O’Reilly wasn’t nearly as easy as Kenzie had initially thought, no matter how carefully she tried. Trying to keep up, Kenzie slid twice. Both times she managed to catch herself at the last moment. The only thing that comforted her was that she saw Hunter having trouble keeping upright, as well.

But just as she was silently reveling in his narrowly avoiding making contact with the oozing mud beneath him, she suddenly felt her feet sliding out from under her. In a heartbeat, she braced herself for an undignified pratfall.

At the last possible moment, Kenzie felt a strong hand grip her arm, righting her and preventing her from making a face-plant in the mud.

The air whooshed out of her as first shock, and then an instant later relief, vibrated through her.

Her heart hammering wildly in her chest, she looked to her right, hoping against hope that O’Reilly had made a quick U-turn and was the one responsible for her last-moment save.

But it wasn’t O’Reilly. It was Brannigan who was holding on to her arm.

Brannigan had been the one to save her face and her pride.

“Thanks.” Kenzie uttered the word as if each letter cost her dearly.

Hunter smiled and graciously inclined his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard gratitude so grudgingly dispensed,” he told her.

She glanced at her arm. His hand was still wrapped around it. “You can let go of my arm now,” she informed him icily.

“Are you sure?” he asked dubiously. “It’s still pretty slippery here.”

He was up to something, Kenzie thought. She just didn’t trust this Boy Scout routine of his.

“I’m sure,” she answered. She scowled when he went on holding her arm. “You’re cutting off my circulation,” she told him.

His smile widened. “From what I hear, according to your brothers I’m not the one cutting it off.”

Kenzie shook off his hold. Striding after O’Reilly and Jupiter, she struggled to hold on to her temper. She did owe Hunter, aware that he could have very easily just let her fall. She still didn’t understand why he didn’t, but even so, that put her, at least temporarily, in his debt.

And she didn’t like it.

“Can we please just stick to business?” Kenzie requested.

“Speaking of which,” Hunter said, glancing over toward Jupiter. The dog had abruptly stopped in his tracks and was now suddenly digging eagerly. “I think we just might be in business now.”

Hunter carefully made his way over toward the German shepherd as the dog furiously burrowed through the mud, oblivious to the fact that he was growing incredibly dirty as he dug.

“Looks like Jupiter found the rest of that body you were looking for,” O’Reilly commented.

“Not quite,” Kenzie said, squatting down to get a closer look at what the dog was digging up. She turned her head as more mud went flying at all of them. “O’Reilly, get him to stop for a minute,” she requested.

“Jupiter, stay!” O’Reilly ordered gruffly.

Getting in closer again, Kenzie frowned. And then she turned her head slightly as she looked back at Hunter. He was a few inches away from her. “You don’t need to breathe down my neck, Brannigan.”

“I know. I thought that was a bonus,” he told her innocently. Then, before she could speak up, Hunter said what they were both thinking. “That torso has been in the ground too long to belong to John Kurtz.”

She frowned, hating the fact that she agreed with Brannigan’s assessment. “And I’m thinking that it’s also not decomposed enough to belong to your cold case,” Kenzie added.

“This makes three,” Hunter said quietly, as if saying the words too loudly would somehow make everything fall apart. “It’s official,” he told Kenzie and the officer. “Looks like we have ourselves a serial killer.”

Kenzie felt her heart sink. Whether it was because she agreed with him, or because he was the one who put it into words first, she didn’t know. Either way, she had her cell phone out. She hit a number on her speed dial.

“Who are you calling?” Hunter asked.

She held up her hand, silently requesting him to stop talking.

“Destiny?” she said, recognizing the voice of the person who had picked up on the other end. “Is the chief around?” she asked formally. “Thanks.”

“CSI?” Hunter guessed.

Kenzie nodded. Just then, the wind shifted. The next moment, Jupiter was off and running again. O’Reilly could barely keep up. In all probability he might have lost the dog had Jupiter not stopped in front of another mound. It was all dirt, not mud this time. Either way, the dog began digging furiously again.

Watching what Jupiter was doing, Kenzie came to attention as the phone was being picked up on the other end.

“Uncle Sean? This is Kenzie. Looks like I’ve got some unfinished business for your investigators. Detective Brannigan had the K-9 unit bring out a cadaver dog to go over the scene at Aurora Park where that head and hands were found today. The thinking was to find the rest of the body, but the dog dug up more bones. Old bones,” she emphasized. “How soon can you have someone from your team get here? Great. We’ll be here.”

Ending the call, she slid her phone back into her pocket. She looked over toward O’Reilly, who was having more trouble restraining Jupiter. The shepherd looked eager to take off again.

“The crime scene investigators will be here shortly,” she told the handler. She eyed the German shepherd. “Is he just excited, or—”

“I think it’s ‘or,’” O’Reilly replied with a heavy sigh.

Kenzie gestured toward the dog. “By all means, give him his lead,” she told O’Reilly.

Once again Jupiter was off and running, with O’Reilly not too far behind.

“Looks like that flash flood unleashed someone’s hidden graveyard,” Hunter observed. He made his way over to the third set of bones the dog had just dug up.

“Yes, but whose?” she questioned, saying it more to herself than to the detective standing near her. She surveyed the area with dismay. “This can’t just be the work of one person—can it?” she asked him.

“There’s no telling what one person is capable of,” Hunter answered. “The Green River Killer racked up one hell of a large body count before they finally caught on to him.”

Kenzie shivered. She remembered reading about the case. The man who was ultimately responsible for the killings broke all the previous rules that had, everyone believed, once been set in stone. The serial killer wasn’t a withdrawn loner. Instead, he was a member of the community. A well-respected member who taught Sunday school on occasion, ran a youth group and was a man whom everyone liked. No one would have ever suspected him of doing anything wrong, let alone killing so many women.

With the playbook rendered completely null and void, that meant anything was possible and just about anyone could be a killer.

That unfortunately left the suspect pool wide-open, she thought.

“Looks like this means we’re going to be keeping company for a little while longer, Kenzie,” Hunter told her.

Kenzie jumped. For a minute, lost in thought, she had totally forgotten that he was there. Annoyed that Brannigan had managed to make her react like a skittish teenager, she asked him almost belligerently, “What makes you say that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? My killer is your killer,” Hunter pointed out simply. “It doesn’t make any sense for us to pursue the guy separately.”

From where she stood, pursuing the killer separately made a lot of sense, Kenzie thought. Mainly because she didn’t want to work alongside Brannigan any more than she had to. In her opinion, the man was as shallow as a raindrop and she was in no mood to be subjected to his feeble attempts to impress her or to dazzle her with his so-called detective skills.

“Why not?” she asked, challenging him. “This way, we can approach the crimes from two separate points of view.”

“We can still do that, but together,” Hunter countered stubbornly. “And it’ll go faster if we don’t have to stop and call each other every time a new idea hits one of us. All we’ll have to do is look across the table—or however you intend to have your bull pen arranged,” he told her.

Stunned, she realized just what he was getting at. “You’re talking about getting a task force together,” Kenzie cried, part of her still hoping that he would deny it.

But he didn’t. Exactly.

“That all depends,” Hunter answered loftily. “Do the two of us constitute a task force?”

Suddenly feeling cornered, she searched for a way to put Brannigan off. “I need permission to get a task force together,” she told him.

Hunter looked totally unfazed by her excuse. “You’re a Cavanaugh. Do you really need permission to do something?” he asked skeptically. It was obvious that the detective didn’t think so.

So, he was one of those, was he? He thought she was privileged. Well, she didn’t think she was privileged and she certainly didn’t act as if she was, Kenzie thought, annoyed.

“It’s because I’m a Cavanaugh that I need permission,” Kenzie informed him, incensed that Brannigan had the gall to put her on the spot like this. “Just because I have that last name doesn’t mean I’m privileged.”

The smile on Hunter’s face seemed to mock her and she would have given anything to physically wipe it off his lips—with her fist.

“The chief of Ds told you to say that, didn’t he?” Brannigan guessed. His expression made it abundantly clear that he got a tremendous kick out of what Kenzie was saying.

She was not about to confirm Brannigan’s guess, even though she grudgingly admitted that it was dead-on. As things stood between them, she would rather die than come out and say that.

Instead, she resorted to wordplay. “That doesn’t alter the circumstances,” she informed Brannigan with a toss of her head.

“All right,” he obliged. “So go ahead, ask the chief for permission to put a task force together. The sooner you do, the sooner it’ll be granted—” he glanced down at the body parts that Jupiter had just unearthed “—and the sooner we’ll be on our way to finding the SOB who gets his jollies doing this sort of sick thing.”

“SOBs,” Kenzie corrected pointedly.

Hunter looked at her, confused. “What?”

“You said there might be two of them, remember?” she reminded Brannigan. “I’m just trying to cover all our bases.”

“Right,” he agreed. He had said that, Hunter thought. But at the time he was just making guesses. “Hard to believe there’re two people out there who are this depraved.”

Kenzie looked at him, wondering if he was really on the level or if he was just pulling her leg, trying to get on the right side of her for his own reasons.

The look on his face didn’t really give her a clue.

She had to ask him. “You’re serious?”

Hunter nodded. Since they were apparently going to be working together, he shared a little of his basic philosophy with her.

“Gotta hang on to the light, or you wind up sinking into the darkness and before you know it, you wind up giving up.”

That sounded deep, she thought. Too deep for Brannigan, she maintained. Kenzie was afraid to leave her defenses down, even for a moment.

“That’s one way to look at it,” Kenzie told him flippantly.

“Okay, so what’s your way?” Brannigan asked her as they watched the shepherd begin to dig into the earth for yet one more time.

Kenzie looked at the detective. Sunlight was weaving through his hair. She did her best to ignore that, looking for his flaws.

“My way?” she repeated.

“Yeah,” he answered. Jupiter was growing more agitated. “How do you look at what you do?”

She recited the mantra she liked to live by. “Catching the bad guys and making the world safer for everyone else.”

Brannigan grinned at her and she was certain he was going to say something flippant or make fun of her. But instead, he surprised her by saying, “See, we’re not that different after all, you and I.”

She did not want to be likened to this man by anyone, least of all him.

“Oh, we’re worlds apart, Brannigan. Worlds apart,” she emphasized.

Hunter pointed over toward Jupiter, who apparently had unearthed still another would-be grave.

“I’d say that it looks like our worlds just got a little closer, Kenzie,” he told her.

She clenched her teeth. “I told you not to call me that. Only my friends and family call me that.”

“So how do I get to be part of your friends’ club?” he asked.

“Simple,” she told him. “You die and come back as someone else. Anyone else,” she underscored.

He laughed, obviously getting a kick out of her—that was not what she had intended.

“I’ll see what I can do about that,” Hunter promised just before he made his way over to Jupiter’s newest discovery.