Mission: Cavanaugh Baby

It took her a few seconds to get her eyes accustomed to the interior of the apartment. A lot of light was not coming in, and consequently, a large portion of what she was trying to make out was shrouded in shadow.

Taking out her flashlight, she aimed it at the interior of the apartment.

She saw the dog first. It was a Jack Russell terrier, a breed of dog known to be high-strung and hyper. Clearly agitated, the small, wiry dog was running back and forth around something.

No, someone.

Oh, God.

Ashley’s mouth dropped open. She could see someone lying on the floor. The flashlight wasn’t enough to make out all that much. But there was definitely a person on the kitchen floor.

It was either a woman or a long-haired man. He or she was facedown on the vinyl in what looked like—

Blood.

Dear God, it was blood. Ashley’s stomach twisted. Her hand shook as she took out her cell.

Breathe, damn it. Breathe. You’ve seen blood before, Ash.

She heard a voice on the other end of the line. She wasn’t even sure what the voice said. She just launched into her request.

“Dispatch, this is Officer Ashley St. James.” She rattled off her badge number as proof of who she was, then said, “I need a bus sent to 198 San Juan. Apartments off Newport Avenue North. Not for an animal, it’s for a person,” she insisted. “And send backup! Fast!”

Obviously, Dispatch had pulled her badge up on the computer and would think she was asking for assistance with someone’s pet.

Agitated, Ashley barely heard the voice on the other end confirm her request. Terminating the call, she was vaguely aware of pocketing her cell phone. During the call, her eyes never left the figure on the floor.

The dog continued to circle around it, barking and growing progressively more and more agitated, as if it knew that its master couldn’t survive long, not with the kind of blood loss that the pool on the floor indicated.

Whoever it was, was bleeding out, Ashley thought. She had to do something. She couldn’t just stand there, waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

Her heart in her throat, Ashley raced back to the leasing office to get the manager.

The sign hanging on the closed glass door stopped her in her tracks. “Out showing apartments. Be back in twenty minutes.”

The person in the apartment didn’t have twenty minutes. He or she might not even have five.

She had to get in there, Ashley thought, desperately casting about for how. And then she remembered one of the kids she’d met growing up in the system. He’d taught her a few things that she would never be able to put on a résumé.

Making up her mind, Ashley ran back to the apartment. Scrutinizing the perimeter of the window, she went into action and popped out the left pane, lifting it up and out of the frame. The space was small, but just big enough to accommodate her.

Pulling herself up off the ground, Ashley went through the opening and tumbled into the apartment—into the kitchen sink, more precisely. She hit her shoulder against the metal faucet.

The unexpected jolt vibrated right through her. Entirely focused on the person a few feet away, the pain shooting down her arm barely registered.

The terrier ran toward her, barking furiously, as if to warn her away from the person he was guarding.

For a moment Ashley was certain that the frantic little dog was going to bite her.

“It’s okay, boy, it’s okay,” she told the dog in a low, soothing voice. “I’m here to help. Let me get to your master.”

In response, the dog ran back to the person on the floor, as if showing her the way.

“That’s it, boy, take me to—”

Ashley’s voice felt suddenly trapped in her throat as she quickly followed the terrier to where the person lay.

Horror filled her.

She didn’t remember crossing from where she was to the body, but she obviously had to have moved because the next thing Ashley knew she was dropping to her knees beside the victim, panic and a sense of urgency filling her at the same time.

The person on the floor was a woman.

Ashley knew all the rules about touching a victim and disturbing a crime scene. Each one of them began with the word Don’t.

But she was positive that she could make out just the faintest signs of breathing. The victim’s back was moving ever so slightly.

Amid all that blood, there was no visible wound in the back. It clearly had to be in the front.

If this woman had so much as a prayer of making it, Ashley knew that she had to find some way to stop the bleeding.

She began to talk to the victim as if the woman was conscious and could hear her. She talked to her the way she talked to a frightened, wounded animal. Slowly, soothingly.

“I’m with the police department,” Ashley said as she turned the woman to face her. “The ambulance is coming. Just hang in there—”

The rest of her words evaporated as she realized that the woman’s belly had been slashed open.

Everything began to grow dark, and Ashley struggled not to pass out.

Chapter 2

Exercising every last ounce of her self-control, Ashley fought against the darkness that was trying to swallow her up.

She knew that if she surrendered and passed out, she’d be of no use to the victim. Although it seemed almost improbable, she was positive she’d detected just the slightest movement of the woman’s chest. She was struggling to breathe, which meant that the woman was still alive, tethered to life by just the thinnest possible thread.

But any second now, that thread was going to break.

The slash across the woman’s abdomen was huge. Ashley stared at it and at the blood, vacillating between nausea and being utterly numb.

There was no way she could possibly manage to stem the flow of the victim’s blood using just her hands. She needed something to hold against the gaping wound before the blood completely drained out of the woman.

Quickly stripping off her jacket, Ashley threw it over the wound and pressed down as hard as she could, trying to cover as much of the savage wound as she was able.

In a matter of seconds her jacket turned from light blue to bright red. The blood just continued to ooze out.

“Hang in there,” Ashley repeated to the woman, raising her voice so that the victim could hear her. The terrier was still barking frantically. “They’re coming. The ambulance is coming. They’ll be here any second. Just don’t let go.”

God, but she wished the paramedics were here already. They were trained, and they’d know what to do to stabilize this woman’s vital signs and get her to stop bleeding like this.

She refused to believe that the situation was hopeless. Despite everything that she had been through in her short twenty-five years, there was still a tiny part of Ashley that harbored optimism.

Ashley’s heart jumped. The woman’s eyelids fluttered, as if she was fighting to stay conscious, but her eyes remained closed. And then Ashley saw the woman’s lips moving.

What was she trying to tell her?

“What? I’m sorry, but I can’t hear what you’re saying.” Leaning in as close as she was able, Ashley had her ear all but against the woman’s lips. She remained like that as she urged the victim on. “Say it again. Please, your dog’s barking too loud for me to hear you.”

She thought she heard the woman say something that sounded like “...stole...my...baby.”

Ashley couldn’t make out the first word for sure, and part of her thought that maybe she’d just imagined the rest of the sentence, but she was positive that she’d felt the woman’s warm breath along her face as she tried to tell her something.

And then it hit her. What had happened to this woman wasn’t just some random, brutal attack by a deranged psychopath who had broken into her apartment. This was done deliberately.

Someone had kidnapped this woman’s baby before it was even born.

* * *

Detective Shane Cavanaugh frowned at the piece of paper his captain had just handed him. On it was not only an address, but a confusing short summary of the call that had come in to Dispatch.

It didn’t make any sense.

“Am I reading this correctly, Captain?” Sitting at his desk, trying to come to terms with the pile of papers on his desk, Shane read what was written and looked up at the brawny, bald man who had recently been put in charge of the Major Crimes Division.

“I dunno, Cavelli— Sorry, Cavanaugh.” The captain corrected himself with a mocking grin. “What is it that you’re reading?”

“This call came in from someone with Animal Control asking for backup?” It was half a statement, half a question, but virtually all of him didn’t care for the captain’s attitude toward him.

Captain Owens’s tone was condescending. “That’s what it says.”

“What are we doing taking calls from Animal Control?” Shane wanted to know. “Is business around here that slow lately?”

It hadn’t exactly been jumping with cases, but there had been some criminal activity, enough to keep him busy at least since he’d found himself partner-less these past four weeks.

“Apparently, it initially came in as a ‘disturbing the peace’ call.” Owens shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe it escalated. The caller asked for a bus and backup,” he said, repeating what he’d written down.

“Just check it out,” the captain instructed, then added, “Unless, of course, you feel you’re too good for that now, given your new name and all.”

Paper in hand, Shane rose from his desk, giving no indication that the captain’s verbal jab irritated the hell out of him.

It had been difficult enough accepting the fact that his father, his siblings and he were not actually related to the family he had grown up believing was his, all because of an initial mix-up at the hospital where his father had been born. Suddenly they weren’t Italian, they were Scottish.

And now he found himself having to put up with snide remarks rooted in jealousy because when everything was finally cleared up, it came to light that the lot of them was not Cavellis, as they had thought, but Cavanaughs. Which meant, in turn, that he and the others were directly related to Aurora’s former chief of police and to the division’s current chief of detectives.

In addition, there was a large number of his “new” family who were attached in one capacity or another to the Aurora Police Department.

That made his siblings and him, in some people’s eyes, related to the reigning royalty.

It also made them, Shane was quickly learning, targets for verbal potshots.

While one of his brothers took each remark and the person who made it to task, Shane’s method was to ignore the sarcastic sentiment and move on as if he hadn’t heard it.

Eventually, he reasoned, those who felt compelled to make these remarks would get tired of the game and turn their attention elsewhere.

At least he could hope.

“I’ll get right on it,” Shane told the captain as he grabbed the jacket he had slung over the back of his chair and walked out of the squad room.

Getting on the elevator, he glanced at the note again and shook his head. He could barely make out all the words written on the paper. The captain had the handwriting of an illiterate gorilla—as well as the same physique, he added silently.

But he had managed to get the gist of it, although he still had no idea why someone attached to Animal Control would be calling in and asking for backup unless they’d encountered a pack of roving coyotes or something along those lines. Even in that case, wouldn’t this Officer St. James have called his own department? Why had he called this in to Dispatch, which then had decided to route the call to Major Crimes?

And why hadn’t the captain questioned this instead of passing it on to him?

Oh well, Shane thought with a careless shrug as he got out on the ground floor. He was happier in the field than sitting at his desk, staring down that mountain of paperwork.

Paperwork had always been the bane of his existence. It reminded him too much of homework, something he’d never really been good at. He’d always been a doer, not a recorder.

Locating his vehicle, Shane opened the dark sedan’s driver’s-side door and slid in behind the steering wheel. He buckled up, then, glancing into the rearview mirror, pulled out of the parking space.

He didn’t need to wait for anyone. He was checking this out on his own.

It still felt a little strange to be going anywhere without Wilson riding shotgun, smelling faintly of Old Spice and onions, going on ad nauseam about some recipe he’d seen prepared on one of the cable cooking channels that he was eager to try.

The only thing Wilson liked better than cooking was eating—which could account for why the man had no life outside the department, Shane mused. But Wilson had recently been approached about a transfer to Narcotics because they had a shortage of detectives in that section after two of their detectives had retired and another one had relocated to Dallas. He’d been debating saying yes when he’d been shot by a thief whose path they had accidentally crossed.

That had had not just one repercussion, but two. He’d temporarily lost his partner—and permanently lost his fiancée.

Better to find out now than later, he told himself not for the first time.

It still didn’t help.

Wilson would be back on his feet soon enough, Shane thought. Right now, he was going to just enjoy the fact that he was unencumbered in the car and that no one was chattering nonstop about the “rare herbs and spices” he’d used to prepare some exotic recipe and coaxing him to sample something that appeared better suited to a landfill than a plate.

Shane got to the apartment complex in less than ten minutes. The ambulance had beaten him.

Because there appeared to be no parking spot readily available in what was designated as guest parking, and all the regular spaces corresponding to the apartments were already filled, Shane decided to park his sedan behind the police department’s Animal Control truck. He had little use for people attached to the department who spent their days picking up roadkill.

A crowd was beginning to gather right outside the ground-floor apartment the captain had scribbled down on the paper.

“This must be the place,” Shane said to himself. Getting out of his vehicle, he crossed to the first patrolman he saw and issued an order. “Keep these people back until we know what we’re dealing with. Can’t have them trampling all over what might be part of the crime scene.”

The patrolman, a veteran of the department for twenty-two years, laughed softly to himself as he muttered under his breath. “Too late,” Shane heard him say as he was about to walk away.

Since his father, Sean, was the head of the day shift’s Crime Scene Investigation unit, Shane was exceedingly mindful of the preservation of any and all evidence that might pertain to the crime under investigation.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He wanted to know.

Rather than apologize or retract his comment, the officer explained his remark. “Dog’s been running through everything.”

Shane scowled, looking around the immediate area outside the apartment in question.

“What dog?” he asked. Before the officer could say a word, the incessant barking began again.

The officer Shane had confronted winced. “That dog,” he answered, pointing at the open door and into the apartment.

Taking a step to the side, Shane peered in and was stunned. The dog, so boisterous just seconds ago, had stopped barking. Instead of running around the way the patrolman seemed to indicate he’d been doing, the animal was now safely and silently in the arms of what appeared to be a policewoman.

Leaving the patrolman to herd the onlookers back behind the barricades that had been put up, Shane walked into the apartment to look around.

There was an absolute maze of red paw prints zigzagging all over the faded beige carpeting in the living room and the cracked vinyl kitchen floor.

Apparently the policewoman hadn’t been nearly fast enough scooping up the neurotic canine. It was obvious that the terrier had run through the victim’s pool of blood more than just a few times.

Someone from his father’s department was there already, taking copious photographs. The clicking shutter was just so much background noise as Shane made his way over to the body on the floor.

For the first time since he’d joined the force, Shane came dangerously close to revisiting his breakfast. The gaping wound in the woman’s abdomen was almost surreal.

No one could lose this amount of blood and live, he thought. He touched the side of her neck just to be sure. There was no pulse.

“This woman doesn’t need a bus any longer. She belongs to the medical examiner now.” Looking closer, he saw there was something about the way the blood was smeared on one side that didn’t look right to him. His field of expertise was mainly white-collar crime, but he knew a bit about blood patterns, thanks to his father. “Who moved the body?” He wanted to know.

“I did.”

The answer came from his right. Turning, Shane found himself looking at the officer who was holding the terrier. For the first time, as he focused on her, he realized that the perky-looking policewoman was covered with blood herself. Lots of blood. More, he thought, than he would have expected from someone checking out the crime scene.

“Why did you move her?” he asked.

“I thought she was only wounded,” Ashley explained. “I didn’t realize that someone had cut out her baby.”

His eyes narrowed. Aurora was supposed to be this peaceful little city. What the hell was going on? He studied the woman in front of him. “You saying she was pregnant?”

Ashley nodded. As the dog began to whimper, she rocked slightly to soothe the animal in the same fashion a mother would rock to soothe a cranky child.

“Yes.”

Was there more going on here than he’d thought? “Did you know her?”

Using small concentric circles to pet the animal she held against her, the policewoman shook her head. “No.”

Had she just gotten caught in a lie? “Then how did you know she was pregnant?”

“First thing that came to mind when I saw the nature of the wound,” she responded. “And then there were her final words—”

“She was alive when you first saw her?” he asked, surprised.

Ashley couldn’t figure out if the detective was mocking her or if he just didn’t have any people skills. For now, she gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“That’s why I called for an ambulance,” she told him. “I tried to stop the blood.”

She was supposed to be a professional, Ashley told herself. After all, it wasn’t as if she’d never seen blood before, or been around something that was dying or already dead. But what had gone down here this morning had her feeling as if she was walking in labored slow motion through a nightmare. A nightmare she should be able to wake up from.

“That would explain the jacket,” he commented, glancing down at the blood-soaked article of clothing. “As well as the bloodstains on your knees.” He looked at her for a long moment, then asked, “Where were you again this morning?”

There was no “again.” He hadn’t asked that question, Ashley thought. What was he trying to do here?

“I went to work this morning. My lieutenant gave me this address, said a complaint had been lodged about a dog in the apartment that wouldn’t stop barking. The caller said the dog had been barking off and on for several hours.”

Shane nodded at the almost docile dog in her arms. “That dog?”

Without fully realizing it, she closed her arms protectively around the animal. “Yes.”

“Seems pretty quiet to me,” he observed.

Ashley continued stroking the dog. “I have a way with animals. Besides, I think he’s emotionally tired out.”

He watched as she continued to stroke the dog. The animal seemed to be leaning into her, as if he thought he was safe.

“‘Emotionally tired out’?” Shane repeated rather skeptically.

His tone, she judged, was intended to get her to back away from her observation. She didn’t. “That’s what I said.”

“Dogs have emotions.” It wasn’t a question so much as a mocking statement.

Ashley forced herself to bite back a few choice words about the barely veiled sarcasm in his voice. She had a feeling that challenging the detective would only result in his becoming confrontational.

Nonetheless, she stood her ground. “All animals have emotions,” she informed him coolly.

“I’ll keep that in mind and try not to hurt his feelings,” he said, nodding at the terrier. Then his eyes shifted toward her. “Where were you before you came into work?”

Her eyes met his. She refused to look away. Only guilty people avoided eye contact. “Home.” She said the word almost defiantly.

“Can anyone verify that?” he asked.

There hadn’t been anyone to verify anything about her since she was four. For most of her life, until she’d turned eighteen, she had just blended into the woodwork or been invisible to the people around her.

“I’ve got two dogs, but they tend not to talk too much to strangers.” And then her flippant tone evaporated as she demanded, “Do you seriously think I had something to do with this?”

From where he stood, it wasn’t all that far-fetched, and until he had more details or knew otherwise, the woman made for a pretty decent suspect.

“A lot of times,” he told her, “the first one on the scene turns out to be the perp.”

Oh, come on, puh-lease! “What is that?” she asked. “A direct quote from Murder for Dummies?”

He did not care for her sarcastic tone. “You’ve got a smart mouth on you, you know that?” he challenged.

“Goes with the rest of me,” she replied with a careless shrug, as if to shrug off his entire statement and whatever off-the-wall theory he was spinning. Shifting the terrier to her other side, much like a mother would shift the toddler she was holding, Ashley asked him, “Are you really a Homicide detective?”

“I’m from the Major Crimes Division,” he revealed. “When you called Dispatch, you asked for backup and a bus,” he reminded her.

“That was because I wasn’t sure what was going on, and she was still breathing.” Seemed to her that they had already gone over this and established it.

“Which was why you moved the body,” he concluded.

This again, she thought, exasperated. What was this detective’s problem? “I just turned her so she was on her back. I found her facedown on the floor between the kitchen and the living room. I didn’t think to take a photo before I tried to find a way to save her life.”

A key phrase in her statement stuck out for him, and Shane commented on it. “Apparently you didn’t think at all.” Before she could retort, he asked another question. “When you got here, was the door opened?”

“No,” she told him, reciting the words stoically, “it was locked.”

He looked around for another person besides the precinct personnel, but there was no civilian in the apartment. “Then the landlord let you in.” It was an assumption on his part.

The next moment, the assumption was shot down as she answered, “No, he didn’t.”

His eyes narrowed. This wasn’t adding up—unless she was the perpetrator. “Then how did you get in?” he asked.

Hadn’t he noticed the pane of glass on the ground under the kitchen window? “I jimmied the kitchen window until I got a pane off.”

He was going to give her every chance—before she hung herself. “Why would you—?”

Anticipating his question, Ashley had her answer ready. “I heard the dog barking, and I looked in through the window. That was when I saw the victim lying facedown on the floor. I called it in and went to get the guy in the leasing office, but the office was empty. Whoever was on duty was out, showing a potential tenant one of the apartments.”

“So you jimmied the window and let yourself in.”