Mission: Cavanaugh Baby (13 page)

He realized that he was feeling sorry for her.

The next moment, as he helped himself to a crisply fried chicken leg from the platter his sister had left for him, Shane couldn’t help but laugh. He had a hunch that if Ashley even
suspected
that he felt sorry for what she’d had to go through, she would probably wind up handing his head to him.

Literally.

Preoccupied, he took a bite of the fried chicken Kari had prepared for him, and his attention immediately focused on the happy explosion of flavor taking place in his mouth and on his tongue. Damn, but that was good.

If he was any judge, it looked as if Kari took after their newly discovered Uncle Andrew, who was famous for his impromptu spreads, the ones that were rumored to be able to feed untold masses.

Apparently cooking was in the genes, even if those genes were unaware of their connection to the Cavanaugh dynasty until just the past year.

Shane ate a few more pieces of chicken with relish, but even as he quickly consumed what was on his plate, he couldn’t help but wonder if Ashley was eating alone, or if she even bothered to eat dinner. Was her cupboard only filled with dog food? After spending the day together, she struck him as someone who made a habit of putting herself last.

It occurred to him as he cleared off his table and put the dishes into the compact dishwasher that he was really looking forward to seeing her again.

* * *

When he walked into the squad room the next morning, he found that Ashley was already there. He really wasn’t all that surprised. He supposed he was somewhat surprised that she hadn’t just stayed here last night. But a change of clothes—she was wearing civilian clothing rather than her uniform—told him that she’d gone home, at least for a little while.

Since she was on temporary loan from her department, for the moment replacing his wounded partner, his captain had put her at his partner’s desk. He figured that once either his partner was back, or he and Ashley solved the homicide—whichever came first—Ashley would be back to driving around, searching for strays.

He didn’t know if the idea bothered him or not. He supposed he’d figure it out after they spent some more time together.

“You’re here bright and early,” he commented, placing the cup of tea he’d gotten for himself on his desk and holding out the other one to her.

When she looked at it quizzically but made no effort to accept the offering, he told her, “Take it. It’s tea, not a bomb.”

Reaching over, she accepted the container. “Why are you bringing me tea?”

“I figured it was the fastest way to administer poison,” he quipped, deadpan, then asked her his own question. “Why do you think?”

She regarded the warm container in her hands in silence for a moment, then mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “Thanks” as she removed the lid. A small scented plume rose from the container like a tiny smoke signal. The contents beneath smelled faintly like vanilla.

Seeing Shane walk in and having him offer her the cup of tea had temporarily made her forget what she’d uncovered by being on the computer for the past hour. She wasn’t accustomed to being on the receiving end of anything but grief.

Remembering, she announced, “I found her next of kin.” When Shane greeted her words with a blank look, she quickly elaborated. “Our involuntary C-section. Monica Phillips. I found her parents. Or, more accurately,” she amended, “I found her father.”

Shane sank into the chair at his desk. The thought of what lay ahead of him was more than a little daunting. He’d never had to inform a next of kin about the death of a loved one before. It wasn’t an experience he was looking forward to by any stretch of the imagination. “I forgot about that.”

“About what?” Ashley queried. Judging by his expression, whatever he was referring to wasn’t good, she thought.

“About notifying the next of kin about what’s happened.”

That had to rank as the least favorite duty of any detective: telling parents that their child’s eyes were never going to open again, never look at them with love again, she thought. And she could relate.

Finding out had very nearly broken her.

“I’ll go with you,” Ashley heard herself saying.

Chapter 12

H
er offer to come along surprised him.

As did the feeling of relief that came almost simultaneously.

“Okay, let’s go, if you’re determined to come with me.” Shane pushed his chair away from his desk and rose to his feet. About to walk out, he glanced over his shoulder. Ashley had made no move to follow him. Had she changed her mind about coming along after all?

A closer look at her face told him that mentally, she appeared to be miles away. “You okay?”

The question broke through the layers of years that had temporarily closed in on her. Ashley blinked and tossed her head, shaking off the memories that only served to hurt her heart.

“Sure,” she answered a bit too cheerfully. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You had this strange expression on your face,” Shane told her. “Like for a second, you weren’t here at all.”

She was going to have to work on her poker face, Ashley upbraided herself, waving his words away with a careless gesture.

“Just thinking.” Ashley pulled out the small, thin messenger bag she’d deposited into the bottom drawer and slung it over her shoulder. “You want me to go tell the father?” she offered.

Shoulders braced, she reminded him of a soldier about to go into battle. It was obvious to him that she hadn’t heard what he’d just said when he’d gotten up. She really had been a million miles away. He couldn’t help wondering where that was—and exactly what had triggered her sudden journey.

“No, I’m primary on this, that’s my job,” he told her, much as he hated the thought of what he had to do. But if he wanted to work in Homicide, it was all part of the territory. He might as well get used to it. Still, her offer did make him curious as to what had motivated it. “Why? You want to do it?”

“I’m willing,” she said, deliberately sidestepping a direct answer to his question.

He laughed shortly as they headed out of the squad room. There was very little humor in the sound. “Get much practice by telling people their pets have been flattened?”

She looked very serious as she replied, “No, not really.”

Why would someone volunteer to take on something so spirit-crushing if they didn’t have to do it, or had at least grown immune to doing it? He needed an answer. Maybe that would begin to unlock the puzzle that Officer Ashley St. James clearly was.

“Then why?”

She shrugged carelessly, avoiding his eyes as she pushed the down button for the elevator. Why couldn’t the man just accept help and not try to examine it under a microscope? “Because you looked as if it would really bother you to have to do it.”

So this was just an act of charity on her part? Again, why? “And it wouldn’t bother you?”

The elevator doors opened. She went in, turned around and pressed the button for the first floor, still avoiding his eyes. “It would, but I’ve learned how to block out whatever bothers me,” she told him.

He supposed that was as good an answer as any. In any event, he sensed it was the only one he was getting. “Thanks, but no. It’s my job. I’ll do it.” He saw her slant a glance in his direction. Unless he missed his guess, she was probably having second thoughts about going along. “But I wouldn’t mind a little moral support accompanying me,” he added, hitting the ball into her court.

Ashley nodded, understanding his meaning. He was asking her to come along without actually
asking
her to come along. “One dose of moral support coming up,” she promised.

“Now I just need the address—” He never got a chance to finish.

“Way ahead of you,” she announced, holding up the page she’d printed a few minutes before he’d walked into the squad room.

He took it from her, glancing at the address she’d tracked down, thanks to the DMV. “Lake Ellsinore?” he said. That was more inland, to the east of where Aurora was located.

“I guess to someone from there, Aurora’s like the big city,” Ashley mused, one side of her mouth going up in a half smile. The elevator brought them to the ground floor and opened. They walked toward the rear exit and the larger parking lot. “One helpful thing. According to what I could find out, her father’s a minister.”

He didn’t quite see her reasoning. “Why is that especially helpful?” He truly wanted to know.

“Well, if her father’s a man of the cloth, his religion will help him through this—or at least, it should. That in turn should make our job—your job,” she amended, “a little easier. You know, God’s will and all that.”

They walked out of the building. The morning sky looked ominous and the air smelled like rain, which was highly unusual, given that it was September, when the devil winds blew in from the desert and everything felt as if it was on the verge of possibly bursting into flames. This was ordinarily the worst part of the fire season.

“We’ll see,” he told her.

She found that rather a strange answer, given that he seemed like the optimist in this partnership. “You don’t think it will?” she asked as they went down the back steps.

Shane had come across a few less than kindhearted men of God. “Let’s just say that all men of the cloth were not created equal.”

“Don’t care for them?” Ashley ventured, following him to where he parked his sedan.

“I didn’t say that,” he pointed out, correcting her impression. “I’ve got an uncle who’s a priest and one of the finest men I know, but there’s no cookie cutter out there, turning out ministers and priests with Uncle Adam’s qualities.”

She was far from an expert on the members of the Cavanaugh dynasty, but she thought she would have picked up on this fact. “I didn’t know there were any Cavanaughs in the priesthood,” Ashley said, surprised.

“There aren’t,” he told her. “Uncle Adam is a Cavelli.” Stopping at the sedan, he glanced at her as he opened the driver’s-side door. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the story about my father.” It seemed to him that
everyone
at the precinct had heard it, quite possibly everyone in the state since the circumstances were rather unusual and it had been carried as a human interest story in some of the local papers.

“Okay, I won’t tell you,” she replied cavalierly. “But just so you know, I had no idea which Cavanaugh your father was before yesterday. I don’t follow the news much,” she admitted.

At least she wasn’t trying to dazzle him with her familiarity with his family, he thought, which was a point in her favor. Too many people inside the department tried to make it appear that they knew everything there was to know about his family members, both new and old. Nothing turned him off faster than that.

“My dad was accidentally switched at birth in the hospital with another infant whose first name was Sean and whose last name was Cavelli—same first three letters,” he pointed out. “Story goes that the nurse who was responsible for the switch was grieving over the death of her fiancé and didn’t realize her mistake.”

“So you grew up thinking you were part of one family when you were actually part of another?”

She certainly had a gift for summarizing things, he thought, amused. “That’s it in a nutshell,” he told her. “The whole thing came to light when people kept mistaking Dad for the former chief of police.”

“At least you always had a family around you, no matter what their name was,” she concluded.

Shane wondered if she knew that she sounded wistful. He didn’t need to be told how lucky he was; he knew. “Look, I didn’t mean to sound like I was bragging—”

“You weren’t,” she told him, cutting short any apology he thought he owed her. “You were just answering questions I was asking. Guess I’m just trying to sharpen some of my investigative skills,” Ashley quipped. Getting into the vehicle, she buckled up. “This is a change from my usual day. There’s no one to talk to in the van when I’m driving around. I spend most of my time looking for strays and skittish animals that darted into the street at the wrong time.” She flashed a half smile at him, summarizing the difference in their work for the department. “You keep the streets safe, I keep them clean—someone’s got to pick up the roadkill,” she pointed out when he looked at her quizzically.

He raised a shoulder, executing a half shrug. “Never thought about it that way,” he admitted.

“Most people don’t.”

There was no belligerence in her voice.

* * *

The trip to Lake Ellsinore was hypnotically tedious. Part of the trip was on a winding, two-lane road.

While Shane drove, she continued researching the Reverend Horace Phillips on the tablet she had unofficially “borrowed” for the road trip. Among other things, she found out that the Church of the Sacred Way was a weathered-looking building still standing on the spot where it had originally been constructed close to eighty years ago. Its congregation was small but fiercely devoted, and Monica’s father had been its only shepherd for the past thirty-one years.

Ashley relayed each find to the man in the driver’s seat as it came up.

“Amazing what you can get off the internet these days,” she commented.

“Especially since the homes in the area look as if they’re lucky to have running water,” Shane observed. He was surprised she was getting a signal on the electronic device. The houses they’d passed in the past four miles looked like they belonged to a farming community—without the farms. He glanced in her direction, nodding his head at the houses they were passing. “I get an eerie vibe. How about you?”

She looked up from the tablet and focused on the immediate area they were traveling through. She doubted that the town where the victim’s parents lived had more than three hundred people.

“All I can say is that it’s lucky for me I’m not into this zombie craze that’s going around lately, but yes, this place gives me the creeps,” she said succinctly. There was a woman standing in the doorway of a house as they passed, just staring as they drove by. “It’s the kind of place they must have used to film
The Children of the Corn
.”

The reference took him completely by surprise. “You an old movie buff?” he asked.

“Not so much of a buff,” she countered—she couldn’t quote lines or anything like that, “but I watched a lot of old movies when I was growing up. Not much to do when you have no friends,” she said offhandedly.

Did she have any idea how isolated that sounded? “Why didn’t you have any friends?”

She stared straight ahead, trying to focus on the terrain around them and not on the past. But it felt as if the past was always hovering over her, like a slick mist she couldn’t escape.

“Hard to make friends when you don’t know if you’re going to be someplace a week from now,” she told him. “Easier all around if you just keep to yourself.”

“Must have made having a birthday party hard,” he commented, thinking back to the friends he’d had as a kid, the parties he’d attended.

The shrug was careless, the tone deliberately distant. “I wouldn’t know.”

“You never had a birthday party?” he asked, surprised. A birthday party, no matter how small, was something he’d taken for granted as being a right for every kid, no matter how poor. One of his favorite gifts had been a sweater his mother had made for him. He’d worn it until it completely came apart at the seams. It was the love behind the parties and the gifts that counted, not the actual presents themselves.

Open mouth, insert foot
,
he upbraided himself.

“I never had a birthday,” she told him in the same distant voice.

Okay, now she was exaggerating. “Everyone has a birthday—unless you’re an immortal,” Shane said with a laugh.

She turned toward him then, her eyes meeting his. “If you have no identity, you can’t have a birthday,” Ashley said simply. “And social services never found out who I was.”

That didn’t make any sense. “But they had to have. You’ve got a last name,” he pointed out.

The corners of her mouth curved in an ironic smile. “St. James? Like it?” she asked. Then, not waiting for a response, she told him, “I made it up. James was inscribed on the back of this watch they found on me. I figured it belonged to my father and that James was his name. Anyway, St. James sounded kind of special, and there was nobody to say that it
wasn’t
my name, so I kept it. I made it legal when I turned eighteen.”

From the little he’d learned about her, not searching for her roots seemed against type. “Weren’t you ever curious about your background?”

“Sure.”

That was more like it. “And?” he prompted.

“And nothing,” she said flatly. “I gave it a shot, went to the local newspapers, asked to look into their archives, went on the internet, all that good stuff.” There was a mocking note in her voice as she recalled the enormous frustration she’d dealt with. “Had a few false leads that took me nowhere and finally decided I could spend my time better. So I stopped beating my head against dead ends and put my energy toward improving my marketable skills.”

“What sort of ‘marketable skills’?” He wanted to know, finding himself more and more curious about the woman fate had had cross his path. More and more attracted to her, as well, and not just her looks, but also the character that was emerging out of these ashes he kept encountering.

“I can tie a knot in a cherry stem with my tongue,” she said, a deadpan expression on her face. Then, when she saw the incredulous look on his face, she had to laugh. “God, you should see your face.”

She was having fun at his expense, Shane realized. He shrugged, supposing that maybe he deserved that. “I take it you’re kidding.”

“Oh no, I can do it,” she assured him with a toss of her head. “But I’d have to be really simple-minded to count that as a skill. I made myself more marketable by taking a few criminology courses at the local two-year college. Thought maybe someday, when I moved on from Animal Control, those courses might come in handy.

“This must be the place,” she commented as they pulled up to the church. It looked even worse for wear in reality than it did on the internet. “According to the address from the DMV, it looks like Monica’s parents live behind it.”

She said parents, but in actuality, all she’d found so far was information about the victim’s father. Not a single word about her mother. Could the woman be gone? Dead, perhaps? If she was, that would have given her something in common with the victim, Ashley thought grimly. They’d both been motherless.