Mission: Cavanaugh Baby (14 page)

He and Ashley got out of his sedan practically at the same time. Shane went ahead and knocked on the door. The house looked as if it was just a few years younger than the church whose shadow it stood in.

Getting no response, Shane knocked again. He knocked a total of three times before the door to the narrow, two-story wood-framed building finally opened.

A somewhat heavyset man with a cloud of pure white hair came out. He had on the traditional minister’s collar and an untraditional frown as he looked them over critically. The minister pointed to something in the distance just before he began to speak. “The main road is three miles due east. Follow it, and it’ll take you to the freeway—eventually.”

The man obviously thought they were looking for directions. “We’re not lost, Reverend,” he told the man gently, working his way up to what he had to say. And the questions he wanted to ask.

Impatience creased the overly high forehead. “Then who are you, and what are you doing here?” the minister asked.

He and Ashley took out their badges and IDs at the same time, holding them up as he told the minister their names.

“As to what we’re doing here,” Shane continued, “I’m sorry to have to be the one to have to tell you this, but your daughter Monica is dead.”

“Yes, she is,” the minister said flatly with no emotion.

Stunned, Ashley stared at the man. “Wait, you know she’s dead?” There was no way he could have found out. The story was being kept from the local news media pending the next-of-kin notification. All details had been concealed.

Had the story leaked? All the way up here?

Rather than appearing stunned or deliberately controlled, the minister looked angry. “I said so, didn’t I?” he snapped.

“Would you mind telling us how you happen to know that, Reverend?” Shane asked.

It was obvious that the man was struggling to keep his temper under wraps, but he looked on the verge of lashing out.

“She is disobedient, she is a fornicator and she is with child,” he stormed, enumerating each point harshly. “That makes her dead to me, to the community and most of all, dead to the Giver of Life to us all.”

“She is also dead to everyone else, sir,” Shane told the minister. He was doing his best to keep his contempt in check. Not for the daughter, but for the father who seemed so indifferent to the daughter he was being told he’d lost. “As in, without any vital signs. Someone killed your daughter, Reverend.” He watched the man’s face as he spoke. “She was found butchered on her kitchen floor.” With each word he added, Shane intently studied the minister’s expression. It only seemed to harden more.

How could a man call himself a father and listen to something that should be heartbreaking without displaying an inkling of any real emotion?

“As is to be expected from a fornicator,” the minister declared. “The Lord’s justice is swift.”

Shane’s eyes narrowed.
What a coldhearted bastard. No wonder your daughter ran off as soon as she could.
“You mind us asking where you were Monday night through Tuesday morning?”

The reply came after several moments. It was obvious that the minister did not care to have to volunteer his whereabouts. “Tending my flock, as always.”

Yeah, right.
“Can any of your ‘flock’ verify this, Reverend?” Ashley asked.

The minister turned on her, a look of pure anger in his eyes. “Are you accusing me?”

“Let’s just say we’re trying to rule you out,” Shane answered, deliberately moving his body between the minister and Ashley. The man didn’t look above striking out at someone weaker than he was.

“The Lord will punish you, too, for this,” the minister railed at them.

“No doubt,” Shane agreed glibly. “But in the meantime, I still need the name or names of any of your ‘flock’ who can vouch for your whereabouts.”

“This is outrageous!” the reverend shouted.

“No, this is procedure, sir,” Ashley countered, her tone as mild as his was loud. She sensed that it goaded the man. “The names?” she prompted, waiting.

Condemning their “godless souls to eternal damnation”—the reverend failed to see the irony in that—he wrote down the names of several people, then thrust the paper at Shane. He refused to even look at the woman with him. “They were all at the prayer meeting. The last one’s my wife.”

Shane glanced over the names. “We’ll be speaking to all of them,” he assured the minister.

“When?” the minister demanded.

“Now,” Shane replied. “Before anyone can talk to them.”

The man’s face turned an intriguing shade of red. “You’re questioning my word?”

“We’re the police. We question everything,” Ashley told him glibly. “By the way,” she added as they walked out of the building, “we’re very sorry for your loss.” She knew the words were useless in this case, but she said them, anyway. For the dead woman’s sake.

The next moment she regretted making the effort.

“It’s no loss,” the minister snapped.

“Whatever you say,” she replied, then pressed her lips together to keep from saying anything further—or telling the man what she thought of him.

“Don’t you even want to ask about the baby?” Shane inquired.

The minister shrugged. “I’m assuming it perished with her. Just as well,” he concluded, turning away. “It’s the devil’s spawn.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Shane said to Ashley. “The air smells pretty putrid in here.” Then he looked back at the minister. “We’ll let you know when you can come for your daughter’s body. The medical examiner hasn’t released it yet.”

The minister looked at him as if he couldn’t understand why he was being given this information. “Tell him to do whatever he wants with the body,” he ordered them. “I have no daughter.”

Shane knew he should just ignore the angry minister and walk away. But he couldn’t let the man’s words go without some sort of comment. “It’s easy to see that she certainly had no father.”

He walked away with the minister sputtering indignantly in the background. Being around someone like that made him appreciate his family even more. Out of the corner of his eye, Shane saw that Ashley was smiling. It softened her features, transforming her into a far more approachable, not to mention alluring, young woman.

“You know what?” Ashley said to him the moment they got away from the toxic minister.

“What?”

“At least the minister did one good deed,” she said as she stood beside the sedan.

He had no idea what she was talking about. “How do you figure that?”

“For the first time in my life, my childhood doesn’t seem so bad,” she said, punctuating her words with a dry laugh.

Chapter 13

“I
’m beginning to think that Monica’s father is far more likely to have killed Monica than that worthless boyfriend of hers,” Shane commented as he opened his door.

Ashley had to agree with him. Of the two men, the minister struck her as the more heartless one. “Could be Reverend Phillips heard the words of God whispering in his ear, telling him to punish Monica for her transgressions.”

Shane nodded. “That sounds like something he would say. Let’s find out if the good reverend’s alibi holds up,” he said pragmatically.

“It might hold,” Ashley admitted. “But there is definitely nothing good about the reverend.”

“Amen to that.” And then he grinned when he saw the way Ashley rolled her eyes. “No pun intended.”

“Yeah, right.” Getting into the sedan, she buckled up and then waited for him to get in on his side and do the same. “There’s just one problem with all this,” she said once Shane was in the car.

“What?”

“What did he do with the baby? Given the way he feels about the fact that she got pregnant, why would he bother separating it from his daughter’s body?” That bothered her. She would have thought that if the reverend had killed his daughter, he would have left them together, not being able to stomach the sight of his daughter
or
her child.

“That’s something to look into once we establish whether or not his alibi checks out. My guess is that since he considered the baby the devil’s spawn, he either buried it or threw it somewhere where it could never be found.” He started up his car. “Okay, let’s see if the reverend even knows
how
to tell the truth.”

* * *

Three hours later they discovered that not only did the minister know how to tell the truth, but apparently he had. According to several members of his faithful flock, Reverend Phillips was indeed at the prayer meeting as he’d claimed. He was the one conducting the meeting, expounding on the evils of a thankless child.

“Bet Christmas was a barrel of laughs in the Phillips’s household,” Shane commented. They’d already discovered that the reverend’s wife, Monica’s mother, had left him shortly after their daughter had run away from home.

The moment the words were out of his mouth, Shane realized that the woman with him had no yardstick to go by when it came to what could be regarded as a good Christmas, and that his reference probably just drove that home for her.

“Sorry,” Shane apologized quietly.

“For what?” Ashley asked. As far as she was concerned, he hadn’t said anything he needed to apologize for, at least not recently.

Shane spelled it out for her as he put the church and the community behind them. It was a shrinking image in his rearview mirror. “For forgetting that you don’t have a frame of reference when it comes to Christmas.”

She surprised Shane by contradicting him. “Sure I do.”

All right, he was officially confused now. Ashley had good memories when it came to the holidays, but she hadn’t experienced something as personal as a birthday celebration? That didn’t make any sense to him.

“I don’t understand,” he told her. “You said you had no family.”

She stared straight ahead, out the window. “I didn’t. I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a frame of reference. I have
It’s A Wonderful Life,
and I watched
Home Alone
at least half a dozen times. Just because I never had one of my own, I still know what the right kind of Christmas is supposed to be like.”

Ashley thought for a moment. “There was this one year that this Marine came to the group home,” she recalled. “He was dressed as Santa Claus, but he was using padding and a fake beard and you could see that underneath all that, he was actually a young guy. The padding had moved by the time he was finished,” she recalled with a fond smile on her face. “The other kids in the room all believed he was the real deal, and I was going to say something to set them straight.”

“Did you?” he asked.

Ashley shook her head.

“Why not?” Given the fact that she was exceedingly keen on following the straight and narrow path, he would have bet that she would have felt she was striking a blow for truth by exposing the fake Santa Claus. And yet she hadn’t; she’d allowed the myth to continue.

Why?

If she closed her eyes, Ashley could almost see the scene unfolding before her. “Because Santa looked into my eyes, and at that moment, I realized that if I said anything, I’d be ruining Christmas for a bunch of little kids who needed hope, not truth, so I didn’t say anything. That was
my
Christmas present to them.”

Shane laughed and shook his head. “You were a complicated person even then, weren’t you?”

Ashley shrugged. She’d never thought of herself as being particularly complicated. She just was who she was, a woman with no pretenses.

“I had a lot of time on my hands. I had to entertain myself somehow. Now what?” she asked, deftly changing the conversation back to the reason they were way out here in the first place. “Since her father has an alibi and wasn’t carrying out the wrath of God, that takes us back to square one for a second time. How many times can we keep doing that?”

“As many times as we need to until we get it right,” he told her pragmatically. “We haven’t interviewed Monica’s coworkers yet. Maybe she confided in one of them, mentioned something about being followed or, more specifically, being stalked.”

“A stalker?” Ashley questioned, turning the idea over in her head. “You think a stalker did this to her? Is that what you’re going with?”

“Until something better comes along,” he answered. “But I take it by your tone that you don’t.” There was a tanker truck in front of them. He sped up to get around it before the road narrowed and he was stuck behind it for the next forty or fifty miles. “Okay, what do you think happened?”

She really didn’t have a working theory yet, and that frustrated her. “I think that Monica Phillips had a terrible childhood, and then just when things looked to be turning around for her, she came to a tragic end.” Hence the adage that life wasn’t fair, she thought, blowing out a breath. “Whoever did this to her, if they had to kill someone, it should have been her father, not her.”

“Agreed,” Shane responded. “But not exactly the viewpoint we’re supposed to embrace,” he pointed out, although he had to admit that he found her position somewhat amusing as well as unorthodox.

“Sorry,” she murmured more to herself than to him, “it’s all I’ve got at the moment.”

“Which is why we’re going to talk to Monica’s coworkers,” he told her. “Maybe they can shed some light on the situation, help us put together the pieces of her life. Tell us if they knew if there was anyone new in the picture.”

* * *

It turned out that Monica had worked at Baby Mine, the exclusive boutique that had provided most of the baby furniture and stuffed animals that she had in her apartment, rather than shopped there. Abigail Reynolds, the manager, was a warm, maternal-looking woman who had a gift for immediately making anyone who walked through the doors of her charming little baby boutique feel welcomed.

Mistaking them for a couple shopping for their first baby on the way, the woman immediately backtracked when they told her their purpose for being there. She looked genuinely appalled when they gave her the real reason that Monica hadn’t showed up for work the past three days.

Abigail looked around her shop, shaking her head.

“I don’t know how I’m going to break the news to the girls. They all loved her.” Her eyes misted over as she told them, “Nicole was going to throw her a baby shower next week.” She paused for a moment, trying to get herself under control. “They were all just as excited about that baby as Monica was. Hard to say who was more eager for it to be born, Monica or the rest of the girls who work here.”

“And she wasn’t resentful?” Shane asked, carefully watching the woman’s face to see if she was telling the truth.

“‘Resentful’?” the woman echoed, then laughed sadly. “There wasn’t a resentful bone in that girl’s body. The baby was all she talked about—and I mean
all
. Every penny she made, if she didn’t use it to buy food or pay her rent, she would put toward buying something for the baby. I was at her apartment just last week, and I swear that it looked like an annex for the store,” the woman told them, gesturing around the show room for emphasis.

“Even with the employee discount, that must have totaled up to a pretty penny,” Ashley intoned. She’d glanced at a price tag or two. These were not bargain-basement prices.

“I’ll say,” the manager readily agreed, “but Monica said she wanted this baby to have everything that she didn’t.” Abigail moved in closer so that she could lower her voice, mindful of being overheard by the customers. “She didn’t talk too much about her childhood, but I gathered her father wasn’t the kind people voted Father of the Year.”

“Not even if he was the only father left standing,” Ashley assured the older woman. She saw the look that Shane gave her and knew she had perhaps spoken out of turn. She didn’t care. After the way the reverend had talked about his own deceased daughter, she wasn’t concerned about tarnishing the man’s precious reputation.

“Would you know if she’d recently seen her father or anyone she knew from her childhood?” Shane asked. Alibi or not, he wasn’t a hundred percent certain that the reverend didn’t have a hand in his daughter’s murder.

Abigail shook her head. “As far as I knew, her father didn’t even know where she lived, much less that she was pregnant.”

“He did,” Ashley told her. “The words he used weren’t very flattering.”

“From what I heard, I gathered that her father was some kind of religious fanatic,” a second woman said, joining them at the side of the store. “Is this about Monica?” the woman whose name tag read Dorothy asked. “Is she okay? She hasn’t been answering her phone.”

“Monica’s dead,” the manager told her. “Someone killed her.”

Dorothy looked horror-stricken. She covered her mouth to muffle the cry of protest that rose to her lips.

“Was she particularly close to anyone here?” Shane asked the two women.

“She was friendly with everyone,” the manager told them. “But I don’t think she was closer to one person more than another.”

There were tears sliding down the younger woman’s cheeks. “She always had a smile and a good word for everyone.”

Abigail nodded to confirm the other woman’s statement. “I had customers coming in, asking specifically for her because she seemed to take such a personal interest in them.” She pressed her lips together to control a momentary loss of composure. “If you ask me, the poor thing was hungry to connect with people, with families.” She looked at the other woman as she said this. Dorothy nodded in agreement.

Maybe there was something to go on here, Shane thought. “Would you mind giving us a list of your clientele? Just the ones who would ask for her.”

A somewhat skeptical frown furrowed the manager’s brow. “Nothing personal, and I would really love to help find whoever did this terrible thing to Monica, but I can’t have my customers thinking that I allowed them to be harassed. They’ll stop coming here if they believe that,” she explained.

Shane was about to say something to try to convince the woman to change her mind, but Ashley was faster. “If these customers specifically asked for Monica, then they had to really like her,” she pointed out. “And they would want to find whoever did this to her, don’t you think?”

The manager exchanged looks with Dorothy. The latter nodded vigorously, agreeing with what had just been said. Abigail relented, won over by the argument.

“I guess you have a point,” she agreed. “All right. Wait right here, and I’ll get the names from our computer and print them up for you,” Abigail promised.

“That would be great,” Ashley told the woman. She retreated, with Dorothy following quickly in her wake, still looking shell-shocked.

As they waited, she could feel Shane looking at her. The moment they were alone, Ashley met his gaze. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked.

“No, on the contrary, you did something very right,” Shane answered with an enthusiasm he didn’t try to hide. “I was very impressed. You’ve got good instincts and the makings of a really good detective, Ashley.”

Compliments weren’t something she was acquainted with or comfortable receiving. For the most part, if anyone addressed a comment to her, it was usually criticism, not praise. As a result, she didn’t know how to respond to positive comments—or to Shane.

So she did what she usually did when she felt out of her depth. She mounted a defense.

“Is this where I’m supposed to insert the words
thank you?
” she asked him flippantly.

Instead of answering her or ending the conversation, Shane turned the tables on her and countered with his own question. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?” she challenged, digging up anger to use as a layer of protection.

“Why do you get sarcastic or defensive whenever I say something nice to you?” he asked her. “If you’re having trouble recognizing it, I’m trying to give you a compliment.”

“Don’t try,” she retorted, zeroing in on the word and pretending to find it offensive. “I don’t need compliments.”

He wasn’t buying it. “Everyone needs compliments,” Shane told her. “Because everyone needs to feel that they’re appreciated.”

She lifted her chin. “I don’t.”

Then, to put some distance between them, thinking that he couldn’t follow her, she wandered through the store, glancing at the various items. The price tags were enough to give her sticker shock.

Contrary to what she’d thought, Shane
was
following her around. He shook his head in response to her denial. “You might be fooling yourself, Ashley, but you’re not fooling me. I’d say that you need to feel appreciated more than most people because you’ve never felt that anyone did appreciate you.”

She frowned but continued to try to put distance between them. It proved to be fruitless. Shane just kept on following her. “I think you should stick to solving the case and leave the armchair psych 101 stuff to someone else.”