Marie Ferrarella - Cavanaugh In The Rough

It was a little after six in the morning and the sun had already staked out its position in the sky, so Chris knew his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. That his mind wasn’t doing creative things with the night’s leftover shadows. There were no shadows, only two teenage boys running from a strip mall as if their very lives depended on just how far away they could get and how fast they could do it.

Braking abruptly—and silently grateful that there was no one behind him—Chris did a creative U-turn and drove into the strip mall, instantly going in the same direction the boys were running—or fleeing, if that turned out to be the case. Part of his gut instincts—inherited from a family tree enormously populated by law enforcement agents—told him that “fleeing” was the more likely description.

Within a heartbeat, Chris brought his vehicle to a screeching halt right in front of the taller of the two teenagers. The youth fell, then quickly scrambled back up to his feet.

Fear and confusion were in both teens’ eyes.

They stared at him, not like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, but like two deer that had seen something really, really awful.

Chris rolled down the window closest to the teens.

“Something wrong, boys?”

Neither answered him, not because they were trying to be evasive or difficult, but because neither one of them seemed able to speak. They were both struggling to catch their breath, their lungs all but bursting from their effort to put as much distance between themselves and whatever it was that they had either seen or encountered within the empty department store.

Making a judgment call, Chris turned off his engine and got out of his vehicle.

His eyes swept over the two teens, making a quick evaluation of any potential threat they might pose. This was Aurora, CA, deemed to be a normally safe city. But no place was perfect, and as his mother, Maeve, was fond of saying, even paradise had its serpent, as Adam and Eve sadly discovered.

Shorter and of slighter build than he was, the two teens didn’t seem to pose any sort of a threat. Wearing light windbreakers that had flapped wildly as they ran, the duo didn’t look to be carrying any weapons, either, concealed or otherwise.

“Take your time,” Chris told them patiently. “Catch your breath and then tell me what has you both so spooked.”

Still gasping, the shorter one pointed frantically behind him to the building he and his friend had just vacated like two fledgling bats out of hell.

Chris took the opportunity to attempt to fill in some of the blanks and coax the story out of the breathless, frightened teens.

“Kresky’s,” he said, identifying their point of exit.

The duo nodded vigorously in response, but still didn’t seem to be able to form any actual words.

In its day, Kresky’s had been an upper-end department store, a chain of shops owned and developed by a wealthy East Coast-based family more than eighty years ago. At its zenith, the stores were located in major cities in almost every state in the country. They offered everything from clothing to cookware to toys. Prices were reasonable and customers were plentiful—until they weren’t.

Once it stopped being the place where everyone shopped, the stores grew fewer in number until there were almost none left at all. The one in Aurora was among the last to give up the ghost and had just recently—four months ago, if Chris recalled correctly—held its going-out-of-business sale, before permanently closing its doors.

“What about Kresky’s?” Chris asked, following that question with another one. “And what were you two doing in the store? It’s been cleared out for months. Why would you want to break in?”

As far as he knew, that final sale had included virtually everything in the place, including the fixtures. Only the plumbing and the walls were left, a sad testimony to a once thriving store where he had accompanied Sally Howe, the love of his life his last year in high school, to pick out her senior prom dress.

Neither teen in front of him seemed to have sucked enough air into his lungs to attempt to explain why they would break into an abandoned department store. Instead, the taller of them had only two words, barely audible, to offer.

The moment Chris heard them, he realized that he wasn’t being told why they had entered the building, but why they had exited it in such a huge hurry and why their complexions had turned so pasty white in the process.

“Dead body!”

Chapter 1

Sean Cavanaugh was accustomed to being the first one in the crime lab each morning. As the day shift crime scene lab manager, he liked getting a jump start on the day, as well as any work that might have been left over from the night before.

He had a top-notch, highly skilled crew that needed no hand-holding or close overseeing, beyond what might have been deemed necessary from a general organizational standpoint.

However, he could no longer lay claim to being the first one in each morning, not since his newest crime scene investigator had transferred in from out of state a little over nine months ago. Susannah Quinn, affectionately referred to by the people who worked with her as Suzie Q, seemed to always be somewhere on the premises no matter what the hour. She came in before anyone else, and no matter how late Sean stayed, she frequently stayed even longer. She also pulled double shifts on occasion and thought nothing of covering for her fellow CSI agents if they called in sick or took an unexpected vacation day.

The fact that she didn’t rust in the occasional California rain was just about the only thing that convinced Sean the newest addition to the team wasn’t a robot.

Walking into the lab on the way to his office, Sean, father of seven, uncle of countless more, many of whom were on the Aurora police force, stopped by Suzie’s work area and set down a large covered cup of coffee he had picked up on his way in to work.

“Good morning. What’s this?” she asked her superior, nodding at the container.

He’d picked up a smaller container of black coffee for himself. Sean liked his coffee the way he preferred his cases: simple. Young people, he’d discovered, liked creative coffee.

“I’m told it’s the latest in fad coffee,” he told her.

“And you bought it for me?” Suzie asked uncertainly.

Was he doing it in order to soften a blow? she couldn’t help wondering. She’d come to like Sean Cavanaugh a great deal, since taking this position at the crime lab, but she had paid a painful price to learn to take nothing—and no one—at face value.

Sean nodded. “I knew you’d be here.” After removing the lid from his own coffee, he paused to take a sip of the black liquid, savoring the heat as it wound through his veins and kick-started his system. “You know, Suzie,” he went on, snapping the lid back on the container, “indentured servitude was abolished in this country about four centuries ago. People who get paid for what they do for a living get to keep regular hours—at least most of the time. That means—in most cases—they come in at a reasonable hour in the morning and then go home at a reasonable hour at night.”

She smiled at him. It was a sunny smile that lit up a room and was meant to put whoever was speaking to her at ease. For the most part, it did, but every so often Sean had a feeling there was something behind the smile that no one was supposed to see. A secret that only Suzie was privy to.

Since he was a firm believer in other people’s privacy, Sean made no effort to push through the barriers. He did, however, do what he could to make it clear to Suzie that if she ever needed to talk about anything—and that included subjects that had nothing whatsoever to do with work—she could always talk to him.