Cavanaugh's Secret Delivery

“Very good, detective. I can have an ambulance out there within the next ten minutes. Will you be there, as well?” she asked.

“Got nowhere else to be,” he answered, still looking at the woman and the baby he had helped to bring into the world.

“Fine. Ten minutes,” the woman repeated, then ended the call.

“Are you coming with me?” the new mother asked, looking at him above her mewling baby.

“Unless you’d rather end our beautiful friendship right here,” he said, giving her the option.

“No,” she answered. And then, in words that had been entirely unfamiliar to her these last few years, she said, “I’d like you to come.”

“Then I will,” he told her. Cocking his head, he listened for a second, then said, “I think the ambulance’s already coming. Must be a slow night,” he told her with a wink.

Just then, as the baby began to cry, he felt his phone ringing. “I think I spoke too soon,” he said as he took out his cell phone and looked at the call number on the screen. “Yup, I spoke too soon.”

The number on the screen was one he knew very well.

Chapter 2

“Dugan Cavanaugh,” Dugan said as he answered the phone.

“We’ve got a problem, Cavanaugh,” the voice on the other end of the line told him. It was the detective he’d been partnered for over the last year and a half, Jason Nguyen.

Dugan watched as he saw the ambulance pulling up into the alley. “Now?”

“No, tomorrow,” Jason answered. “Of course now. Look, tell the honey you’re with you’ll get back to her as soon as you can, but that something’s come up and you need to go.”

“For your information,” Dugan informed the other detective, “I’m not with a ‘honey.’”

“Good, then that’ll make it easier for you to get over here,” Jason said. Dugan could hear noise in the background, but he refrained from asking what was going on. Jason had a habit of leaving no detail untold if he could possible help it.

“Look,” Jason was saying, “I don’t like getting up out of a dead sleep, either, but you need to have gotten your tail out here at least five minutes ago.”

The ambulance had arrived and the paramedics were getting out. Dugan silently waved the two men over toward the woman’s car even though he was still on the phone.

“Why?” he asked, asking Jason. “What won’t keep until tomorrow morning?”

“Mitch Gomez was just fished out of the lake twenty minutes ago,” Jason answered flatly.

“That’ll do it.” Dugan didn’t have to ask if the man was dead. Nguyen wouldn’t be calling him if he wasn’t. “Where are you?” He paused as the other detective rattled off the address. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Dugan said grimly.

He terminated the call and put the phone back in his pocket.

Meanwhile, the two paramedics were bringing around the gurney. “You the father?” the paramedic closest to him, Jeff, asked.

Still in the vehicle, the woman cried, “No, he’s not!”

Dugan shook his head. “Just a Good Samaritan in the right place at the right time,” he told the paramedic.

“Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll get you and your baby to the hospital quickly,” the other paramedic, Nathan according to his tag, was saying to the woman. Before he tried to get her and her baby out of the car, he looked back toward Dugan. “Are you coming with her, Good Samaritan?” he asked.

The next moment, he handed the baby over to his partner and then he took the woman gently into his arms. With a minimum of effort, he transferred her carefully to the gurney.

“Something I have to do first,” Dugan answered the paramedic. When both the new mother, now on the gurney, and the paramedic looked at him, Dugan explained, “I’m a cop. Something’s come up.” Turning his attention toward the woman he’d just aided, he told her, “But I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding.

Dugan had a feeling she didn’t believe him, but there was nothing he could do about that right now. All that mattered was that she was in safe hands and that was all that really counted, anyway.

“I’ll see you later,” he told the new mother as he watched the paramedics place her gurney in the back of the ambulance.

“Right, later,” she replied, then added, “Don’t worry about it.”

Dugan frowned. He should have called his aunt’s ambulance, he thought as he watched the paramedics close the doors and then round to the front of the vehicle. He knew all the drivers there. But there was nothing he could do about that now.

Dugan sprang into action. He quickly closed up the woman’s car and then, finally, ran to his own a block away.

Starting it up, he took out the detachable light and stuck it on top of the roof. He didn’t like doing it to the Mustang, but the situation was dire and he needed to get there ASAP.

He still couldn’t believe that Gomez was dead. He’d only managed to finally talk the guy into being his confidential informant less than a month ago.

* * *

“I don’t think he ever knew what hit him,” Jason said as he stood there, looking down at the sprawled-out body lying before him.

Dugan had managed to get there in record time. Luckily, at this time of night, most of Aurora’s citizens were asleep and traffic was close to non-existent except for a few hotspots. As it was, this had happened near the lake that was located in the next town. By the time he had gotten there, Mitch Gomez’s body had not only been fished out, it was now about to be taken away by the medical examiner.

Dugan had arrived just in time to see the ME begin to zip up the black body bag. Stopping the man, he looked down at Gomez’s lifeless face.

“Three shots to the back of the head,” Jason told him. “Execution style.”

Dugan blew out a breath. “Damn. Any chance we can get jurisdiction over the body?” he asked.

The medical examiner didn’t answer him. Instead, he just finished closing up the bag, then with the help of his assistant, he took it away.

Jason was left to answer the question. “Hey, it happened here, away from Aurora, but I don’t think they’re going to fight you for it if you want to claim the body as ours. Just remember, it becomes our unsolved murder,” the detective told Dugan. “Not exactly brownie points for that as far as I can see if we don’t solve it.” He looked at Dugan closely. “You sure you want to do this?”

“He was my CI,” Dugan said, looking at the body as it was being taken away. “Hell, he wasn’t even old enough to legally drink,” he added, shaking his head. The next moment, he went after the ME and said, “Leave it here. We’ll take the body.”

The medical examiner shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourself. I’ve got more than enough bodies in the morgue as it is,” he told Dugan. “Leave it,” he said to his assistant.

“He wasn’t legally old enough to do any of the things he did, but that didn’t keep him from doing it,” Jason told his partner. “Hey, it’s not your fault,” he said, seeing the look on Dugan’s face.

“I know that. But it still seems like a huge waste. I can’t help but feel being my CI was what got him killed,” Dugan murmured. He took out his phone in order to call their medical examiner and tell her that they had another body.

“Yeah, well, he knew what he was doing,” Jason argued.

“Doc? Sorry to get you up at such an ungodly hour, but we’ve got a body for you.”

“Flowers would have been nicer,” the voice on the other end of the line mumbled. He heard another voice in the distance asking something. “I think it’s one of your cousins,” Kristin, the head medical examiner said, answering the other voice. “He’s trying to cull my favor with a body.” Returning to phone, she said, “Okay, give me the address. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Dugan gave the woman the address then terminated the call. Tucking the phone away, he looked back at the body, hidden now beneath the black body bag.

He had caught the one-time college student on a possessions charge and managed to flip him when Gomez said he had current intel he could trade. It turned out to be good information. Better than Dugan had thought, at first. So good, apparently, that it had wound up costing his confidential informant his life.

“I don’t think he did know what he was doing,” Dugan said thoughtfully, referring to what Jason had said before he called Kristin. “I think that he thought it was all going to go his way and turn out the way he wanted in the end.”

Looking at the black body bag, Jason shrugged. “Nothing we can do about it now.”

“Except catch the son of a bitch who killed him,” Dugan pointed out, saying the words with such a passion it caused Jason to look at him uncertainly.

“Yeah, there’s that, too,” Jason agreed, trying to lighten the mood. “Hey, I really didn’t roust you out of the arms of some nubile young woman?” Jason asked, curious.

“Actually, I had just finished delivering a baby when you called me,” Dugan answered, turning away from the body.

Rather than say anything, Jason just started to laugh. “Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m serious. When you called, I had just finished delivering this woman’s baby and there was an ambulance on its way to take her to Aurora Memorial,” Dugan said, mentioning the name of the closest hospital to that particular place, which was also known as the best one in the county.

Jason began to laugh again, but this time, his laughter was very short-lived. He paused, looking at his partner. Dugan wasn’t even smiling. Dugan usually smiled by now if he was putting him on.

Jason eyed his partner. “You’re serious.”

“You already asked me that,” Dugan pointed out. In the back of his head, he couldn’t help thinking that one life had just ended while another life had just started. He supposed that was what real life was all about, but somehow, it still didn’t really feel like things equaled out.

“Yeah, but I didn’t think—damn, a baby,” Jason repeated, shaking his head and grinning. “So? How did it feel?” he asked.

“Well, it all happened so fast, I didn’t have time to think or feel anything,” Dugan admitted. “And by the time I could, I was already on my way to the scene of the crime.”

“And she’s no relation? Not a girlfriend or a...?” Jason let his voice drift off as he looked at Dugan, waiting for the other detective to fill in the blank about the woman’s relationship to him.

“No, not a girlfriend or a...” Dugan repeated. “I was going toward my car when I heard this unearthly scream. I looked to see where it was coming from. This woman was sitting in her car, looking like she was about to pop at any second.”

“So you delivered the baby?” Jason asked, as if he was trying to wrap his head around the whole scenario.

“Well, I started out to do that,” Dugan answered. “But she actually wound up delivering the baby on her own for the most part.”

“Wow.” Jason shook his head, envious of the experience. “All I did after I left the bar tonight was finish up the puzzle I was working on for the last week and a half,” he admitted quietly. “You going to go there now? To the hospital?” Jason prompted when Dugan just looked at him blankly.

“No, not until we file all the paperwork on this,” Dugan answered. “He was my CI.”

“Nobody else knows that yet,” Jason pointed out. “You don’t have to do that part right now.”

“I know that,” Dugan said pointedly. “But I will. It’s only right.”

Jason sighed, shaking his head. “Are all you Cavanaughs such sticklers for honesty when it comes to crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s?” the other detective asked. “Don’t any of you ever kick back?”

“Not where it counts,” Dugan answered, then added with a grin, “Lucky for you.”

Jason laughed. He saw the point. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Okay,” Dugan said, taking a breath and telling himself that they were going to need a fresh start here. “Let’s see what we can find out about this murder. Before homicide starts horning in on our case.”

Jason looked almost hangdog. “So much for going home tonight.”

Dugan paused to look at the other detective. “Hey, you called me, remember?”

Jason looked resigned—for now. “I guess I’ve got nobody else to blame but myself for being here,” he replied. Then his eyes glimmered a little. “But even so, I can still try to put the blame on you for my sleepless night.”

Dugan laughed. “Okay. Whatever floats your boat, Nguyen.”

* * *

Dugan didn’t get to the hospital that morning. Nor did he managed to get there the whole day. The investigation into Gomez’s murder kept him and Nguyen busy.

It wasn’t until the following morning that he finally managed to scrape together a little time for himself. He used it to swing by the hospital.

On his way over to Aurora Memorial Hospital, he decided to give himself a total of fifteen minutes there. Twenty at the most.

Despite the fact that it was only eight in the morning, finding somewhere to park was a bit of a challenge—at least, if he wanted to park somewhere close to the front. The hospital always seemed to be busy.

He wound up parking toward the very back of the lot. Because he was short on time, he decided to sprint. He told himself that a quick sprint would be good for him. It was either that or drive around a few times until someone decided to free up a spot and leave. He didn’t have time for that.

The city had too many people, he thought, getting out of his car. Used to be, according to his uncles—at least, the ones who had been born in this city—that Aurora was so small it hardly warranted a hospital at all, much less two.

It had been a huge deal when the second hospital, Aurora Memorial was finally opened. At the time, the hospital was half the size it was now and there had been empty beds on occasion. But that was because the city hadn’t done all the growing that it had of late. Back then, it was more like a one-horse town than a city.

He smiled to himself. According to his uncles, there’d been three lights down the main drag. One at one freeway, one at the other and one that was halfway in between.

There’d been cows here instead of all these people, and crime had been almost nothing. Now the cows were gone and crime was on its way up, although he and the rest of the Aurora Police Force were definitely trying to do something about that.

Okay, this is supposed to be your downtime, Dugan, remember? No shop talk, just a nice, quick visit. Something to remind you that you’re capable of doing good deeds once in a while and you’re not just a police detective, but a human being as well.

Approaching the main doors, Dugan waited until they sprang open. He preferred opening his own doors, but progress seemed to have other ideas, so he waited. Once the doors had pulled apart, slowly, he walked into the hospital.

The last time he had been here, everything had looked different. But the hospital had gone through a new wave of building again, or modernizing, as it were. For one thing, the lobby didn’t look the way it used to.

It took him a moment to get his bearings. Looking around, he finally spotted the information desk. Relieved, he approached the two people who were sitting there—a man and a woman—looking more than a little bored. They both came alive when they saw him.

“May we help you?” the attendants asked almost in unison.

“I need to get to the maternity floor,” Dugan told them.

“That would be the third floor,” the young woman said, smiling at him.

As he began to walk away, the male attendant called after him. “If you give us the patient’s name, we can tell you which room she is in. It’ll make it go faster for you.”

“Okay.”

Backing up, Dugan returned to the desk and then looked for a way to say this that didn’t make him look like some kind of mindless fool.

“Well, this is a little awkward because I just know her first name.” He saw the two attendants exchange looks and he could almost guess what they were thinking. “No, it’s not like that,” he assured them. “I’m a cop. She went into labor in her car. I happen to be passing by so I helped her give birth.”

“All right,” the male attendant, Dale, said guardedly. “What’s the woman’s first name?”

“Her name’s Scarlet,” Dugan told him.

Dale skimmed down the screen, then looked up, a slightly dubious expression on his gaunt face. “I’m sorry but there’s no one named Scarlet registered at the hospital.”

“Look again,” Dugan instructed, feeling exasperated. “She was admitted with her baby a little after midnight two days ago. The ambulance brought her here.”

Looking really skeptical at this point, Dale skimmed over the names a second time. “Sorry,” he announced. “No Scarlet.”

“Let me look,” the second attendant, Rita, said, taking over the screen. Her superior attitude vanished quickly. Looking up, she shook her head. “I’m sorry but he’s right. There is no one named Scarlet on the maternity floor.”

Dugan frowned at the two attendants at the reception desk. “That doesn’t make any sense. Maybe she had complications and she was admitted to another division,” he suggested. “Look to see if there was anyone admitted to any other section of the hospital by the name of Scarlet.”

“That is highly irregular,” Dale informed him, taking umbrage. However, the look that Dugan shot at him had the attendant quickly skimming through the records. Finishing, he shook his head. “No, I’m sorry. There was no Scarlet admitted to the hospital in the last two days on any of the floors.”

“All right, maybe they made a mistake with her name,” Dugan said. “Was there anyone admitted a little after midnight two days ago to the maternity floor? She had a newborn daughter.” He knew that at least that much was right.

Glancing at the screen, Rita did a quick search and then announced, “Yes.”

“Finally,” Dugan cried. He needed to get away from these two people before he lost his temper. “What room is she in?” he asked as he began to walk to the elevator.

“She’s not,” Dale called out after him. “She checked herself out yesterday.”

Chapter 3

“You’re serious?” Dugan asked the attendants. This just wasn’t adding up. “She just had a baby,” he said. “Aren’t you people supposed to keep them here for at least three days?”

“This isn’t a prison, officer,” Dale told him, obviously taking offense at the implication that they or the hospital had failed in some way. “Patients are free to go home at any time.”

“What about the doctor?” Dugan asked. “Wouldn’t he or she have ordered against something like that? And by the way, it’s detective, not officer,” he said, pointedly correcting the man.

“Well, detective,” Dale said with an exaggerated bow of his head, “the doctor can make a recommendation, but if the patient chooses to disregard that recommendation, the patient is free to just sign herself out and leave whenever she wants to. Unless, of course, if she’s being restrained,” he added, glancing toward the woman beside him to make sure he was right. Rita nodded. “But that’s a whole different story.”

“Bottom line, detective,” Rita told him in a far more polite voice than Dale was using, “the woman you’re looking for isn’t here any longer.”

Dugan blew out a breath, then shrugged. “Well, I tried,” he said, addressing his words to the woman. He’d already used up the twenty minutes he’d allotted himself. He needed to be getting to the precinct. “That’s all a man can do.” Dugan offered her a smile. “Thanks for your help.”

And with that, he turned away and walked out of the hospital lobby.

He had no doubt that the woman wasn’t there anymore. There was no reason for either of the people, even the irritating idiot, to have lied to him. What bothered Dugan was why the woman from the other night wasn’t there any longer.

And why she had given him—or the hospital—a phony name.

Not your problem, Dugan, he told himself as he made his way back toward his car. You gave it your best shot, which is more than a lot of other guys would have done. And apparently, for whatever reason, the woman had no desire to stick around longer than she has to.

Still, he had to admit as he crossed the lot, the detective in him was really curious about why someone like Scarlet—or whatever her real name was—would just leave the hospital so quickly after having given birth. The experience had to have exhausted her. Wasn’t a stay at the hospital supposed to help her get back on her feet?

Maybe, Dugan thought as he finally reached his vehicle and got into it, it was just a simple matter of not having any insurance coverage. She couldn’t pay her bill, so she gave them a phony name and decided to pull a disappearing act before anyone in the administration office had a chance to check her out.

But if that was the case, then why hadn’t she tried to talk the hospital into letting her pay her bill off over time? People did that sort of thing. Sometimes the hospital would just write off a patient’s charges.

“You’ve got a legitimate case to work on,” he told himself out loud. “You don’t have any time to try to figure this out.”

Pushing the thought out of his mind, he started up his car. Puzzles were for people who had time on their hands to try to solve them. He, on the other hand, had a dead CI whose murder he was trying to solve. Someone obviously felt that Mitch Gomez had known too much and that was the mystery that took precedence over everything else, not some missing mama who had checked out of the hospital too early.

A missing mama with a gun, he reminded himself as he drove to the precinct.

When he’d first attempted to come to her aid, he recalled that the woman had tried to reach for a gun. Had she not been tied up in knots because of those contractions, he had no doubt that she probably would have shot him.

What—or who—was the woman afraid of? Dugan wondered.

“Later, damn it,” he ordered himself sternly. “Think about this later. Not now.”

The rest of the way to the precinct, he did the best he could to push all the other thoughts aside. He was a detective first, a man with a mystery woman to pursue second.

A far second he reminded himself.

The answer didn’t satisfy him, but for now, it was going to have to do.

* * *

They were getting nowhere.

Eight weeks later they were no closer to finding out who had put that bullet into Mitch Gomez’s head than they had been when the body was first found.

He and Jason had canvassed the area, talking to more people in the last two months than he probably had in the last six months, and still nothing. People talked, but in the long run, they said nothing.

Oh, he had a few suspicions about who might have been responsible—Michael Oren, a higher-up who represented the Juarez cartel in California—but suspicions had never won a case.

Not only that, but now he was currently down a partner, as well. Jason had broken his tibia and it looked as if he was going to be sidelined for the next few weeks if not longer.

“Tripping over your eighteen-month-old daughter, who does that?” Dugan demanded when he went to see Jason at his home to see how his partner was coming along.

“Apparently I do,” the detective answered almost morosely. Fighting with his crutches, he managed to make it over to an easy chair. The whole adventure had left him exhausted. Three days and he still hadn’t gotten the hang of maneuvering the crutches.

“I mean, she’s not that tiny a baby. How could you have missed seeing her?” Dugan asked, shaking his head.

“Believe me, when you’re not looking for an eighteen-month-old baby, they’re easy enough to miss—and trip over,” Jason grumbled.

His mother-in-law, who was babysitting the little girl, looked as if she was less than thrilled to also act as a part-time nurse for Jason. The look on his face showed that he felt the same way.

Jason lowered his voice so that only Dugan heard him. “Look, I’m sorry that this leaves you high and dry right now. I should be able to get around with crutches pretty soon.”