Marie Ferrarella - Cavanaugh Vanguard

He didn’t see what that had to do with anything, but he answered her. “Going on six years now.”

“Six years,” she repeated, as if she was rolling the information over in her head. “Don’t take much of an interest in the city’s history, do you?”

Jackson looked at the woman. Like so many other members of the police department he had run into, she was part of the Cavanaugh family, a legend throughout the precinct. Cavanaughs, he’d found, set the bar high, each and every one of them.

“Not particularly,” he answered. “Why?”

“Well, if you did know a little of the city’s history,” she told him, “you’d know that initially this was all farmland that belonged to one family. The Aurora family.”

“All right,” he allowed, still waiting to hear where she was going with all this.

Out of the corner of her eye, Brianna saw the ME, Kristin Alberghetti-Cavanaugh, wheeling another one of the newly unearthed victims out of the hotel. She stepped to one side, never missing a beat of the story she was telling Jackson.

“George Aurora was the original patriarch of the family. He started taking the money the family made selling their crops and investing it. The investments were solid, so he decided to use some of the profits to build a small town, which he named after himself.

“Everything in and around Aurora belonged to the Aurora family. Including the Aurora Hotel,” she pointed out, adding, “which, it turns out, Winston Aurora, George’s oldest grandson, recently sold to the city so that Aurora could continue to expand.”

“Winston’s the one who throws all those fund-raisers, raising money to build that new children’s hospital and new schools for the city, right?” Jackson said, recalling things that he’d heard.

“One and the same,” Brianna confirmed. “No one wants to risk getting on the wrong side of the man or his two brothers if they don’t have to, so I’m told that major crimes was called in to treat this whole thing—and the Aurora family—with kid gloves.”

The strained smile on her face as she concluded told Jackson just what she thought of that idea, seeing as how he was the one the major crimes lieutenant had chosen to represent the division.

Jackson read between the lines. “Are you saying you think Mr. Fund-Raiser is responsible for the dead bodies?”

“I’m saying we’re supposed to look at everyone else first before we even so much as think of pointing a finger at him or anyone else in his family. Having major crimes join homicide in the investigation is supposed to be the police department’s way of being thorough,” Brianna told him. “That means crossing every single t and dotting every single i. And if I recall correctly from the last couple of times you and I worked together, you are not exactly known as Mr. Diplomacy, so maybe I should be the one to talk to the Auroras.”

“Are we going to be questioning the Auroras first?” Jackson asked.

“No, not in the way you mean,” Brianna answered, thinking he was referring to interrogating the family. “We’re just going to inform them of what the construction crew discovered when they started knocking down the walls.”

Brianna paused for a moment. She’d been told more than once that she had a habit of taking over and leaping into the heart of things before others around her had a chance to digest what was happening. Since she and Muldare were going to be working together on this, she knew she had to do her best not to come on as strong as she had a tendency to. “Unless you have a different idea on the matter,” she added tactfully.

Jackson lifted his wide shoulders then let them fall again in a careless shrug. “My only thought is that maybe we should hold off talking to Mr. Fund-Raiser or anyone in his family until we have a final body count.”

She supposed that Jackson did have a point, but there was a problem with this idea. She glanced over toward where Sean and his team were working.

“I’m not sure how long that would take,” she said honestly. “The building only has three stories, but it’s unusually wide. Consequently, there are a lot of walls to take into account.”

“You really think there are more bodies in them?” Jackson questioned.

She wouldn’t have thought that there were any bodies in the walls, but that certainly hadn’t turned out to be the case.

“You think there aren’t?” Brianna countered.

“Sounds a little unbelievable, don’t you think?” Jackson asked, getting out of the way as another gurney with a body bag was being wheeled out.

“I think finding a single body buried inside a hotel wall is unbelievable, but according to what I’ve been told, they’ve uncovered six,” Brianna answered.

“Seven,” Sean called out.

Brianna and Jackson both turned in the man’s direction.

“Seven?” Brianna asked, stunned.

Sean nodded. “Destiny just told me that the team pulled out another body,” he replied, referring to his top CSI investigator, his son Logan’s wife.

Brianna closed her eyes for a moment, trying to absorb the information and ignore the effect the discovery was having on her stomach.

What kind of a monster had they just stumbled across? And, more important, was that monster still walking among them, or was this the work of someone who had vanished?

Best-case scenario was that the killer was dead. But what if the killer wasn’t dead and hadn’t vanished? What if the killer had just moved his desire to kill to another location?

“You okay?” Jackson asked. He saw his new partner shiver. It definitely wasn’t cold in the room, despite the fact that there was one wall missing.

“I will be,” Brianna answered with zeal. “Once we find the SOB responsible for this.”

Chapter 2

Jackson silently agreed with the detective he had been temporarily partnered with. “Then I guess we’d better get started,” he told Brianna.

Nodding, she turned toward Francisco Del Campo. Transferred to homicide a little over six months ago, the personable detective was still learning the ropes and had no problem taking orders from a woman.

“What would you like me to do?” Del Campo asked.

“Find out exactly when the hotel closed its doors and see if you can get your hands on the hotel’s guest ledger up to that point,” Brianna said. She felt that at least it was a start.

Del Campo furrowed his brow. “How far back do you want to go?”

“Since we don’t know how many bodies are in the walls and how long they’ve been there, why don’t you see how far back you can go,” Jackson told the younger man.

Rather than getting right on it, Del Campo shifted his eyes toward Brianna, waiting for her confirmation. He knew Brianna. He didn’t know Jackson.

She nodded. “What he said,” she told Del Campo, hoping that, at least for the time being, they could all work harmoniously. “I also want you to get all the construction workers’ names. We’ll need to question them if they saw anything unusual. Right now, we don’t know where those bodies came from or who put them there.”

“You got it.” Del Campo was already on his way out of the partially gutted dining room.

The moment Del Campo left, Jackson turned toward the woman on his left. “You know, this is going to go a lot easier if I don’t need your stamp of approval every time I say something.”

Brianna smiled at the major crimes detective. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

Jackson pressed his lips together and kept his comment to himself.

They made their way out of the hotel, weaving around various members of the police department and crime scene investigators. Once outside, Brianna paused for a moment and took a deep breath.

The air smelled sweeter away from the combined odors of death and dust. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Jackson looking at her. “You want to drive?” she asked as she started to walk again.