“You’ll be able to do your job a lot quicker and get a lot more cooperation from people if you don’t make those people have to fight the urge to go after you with pitchforks and torches.”
“So you say,” he replied wearily, just wanting to put an end to this annoying discussion she seemed to feel duty bound to have with him. “You want me to drive to the morgue?” he asked Brianna.
He was missing her point about being nice to other people, but he was being polite to her—in a fashion. She took what she could get and hoped that would open the door to more.
“See, that wasn’t so hard now, was it, Muldare?” she asked.
Jackson shook his head, doing his best to hang on to the frayed ends of his temper. She had the ability to get under his skin and get him to lose his temper faster than anyone else he’d ever dealt with.
“You know, half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about, O’Bannon. The other half of the time, I wish I didn’t,” he told her wearily.
“And it only gets better with time, trust me,” a tall, dark-haired detective said to Jackson as he passed them.
Jackson turned to look at the detective quizzically. “Do I know you?” But the man just continued walking to the other side of the squad room.
“Nobody asked for your input, Ronan,” Brianna called out. “I don’t need you spooking my partner.”
“I take it that you know him,” Jackson assumed as they walked out of the squad room.
“Only vaguely,” Brianna answered, then after a beat, added, “He’s my oldest brother.”
“So why aren’t you working this case with him?” Jackson asked. It didn’t make sense to have him brought in from another department.
“I just told you why. Because he’s my oldest brother.” She flashed Jackson a smile. “The trouble with older brothers is that they still see you as being five years old—even if you’re a homicide detective with an excellent track record,” she added before Jackson could say anything further.
“You have another brother here, too, don’t you?” he asked.
“Two more, actually,” she answered. “And a sister. And before you ask, I have about a thousand cousins in the police department, too,” she told him as she got on the elevator.
“Damn, this really is a family business, isn’t it?” Jackson commented, less than comfortable with what that suggested.
The magnitude of what he had just said hadn’t fully hit him until just now. Jackson had always been vaguely aware, ever since he had transferred from Oakland and joined the Aurora police force, that there were Cavanaughs in practically every department. However, just how many Cavanaughs there were had never really sunk in before.
“Just keeping the city we love safe,” Brianna told him.
Jackson surprised her by asking her a question that no one else had ever raised. “Having all those relatives around, watching you, doesn’t that make you afraid of messing up?”
“You mean because I’m a Cavanaugh?” she questioned. “No. But because I’m a cop, yes,” she said. When he looked puzzled, she explained, “It doesn’t matter that I’m related to them. What matters is that cops aren’t supposed to mess up. We’re supposed to make things right.”
Unbelievable, Jackson thought, shaking his head as they went outside. “Damn, I didn’t know that I was working with Dudley Do-Right.”
Unlike his last out-of-the-blue comment about Hardy and Laurel or whoever, this was a reference she was familiar with.
“Dudley didn’t have curves,” she countered, recalling watching the less-than-stellar antics of the cartoon Mountie.
“I never watched the cartoon that closely,” Jackson replied drily.
“Obviously. By the way,” she said as they approached the rear parking lot, “you can drive us to the morgue—unless you’d rather I did,” she told him.
She was kidding, right? Given a choice, he would always opt to be behind the wheel. The truth was, he didn’t trust anyone else’s driving but his own. “I’ll drive.”
“Thought you might say that,” Brianna commented with a smile.
Chapter 7
Brianna felt almost overwhelmed the moment she and Jackson stepped into the city’s morgue.
Admittedly, Brianna didn’t come here very often. And when she did, it was usually when Kristin was on duty. Her main reason for dropping by then was to see if her cousin’s wife wanted to grab some lunch.
But she could not recall a single instance when the morgue had ever looked even half this busy.
Ordinarily there was only one medical examiner on duty. On occasion, there might be an aide on the premises to help assist the ME. This time, however, there were three medical examiners, counting Kristin, all carefully working over bits and pieces of remains that bore more resemblance to scattered chicken bones than to actual human bodies.
Brianna looked more closely. Not only were the medical examiners working to reconstruct badly decomposed remains, but there seemed to be more than the usual number of gurneys spread all throughout the morgue. Ten in all. And all the gurneys had greater or lesser piles of bones spread out on them waiting to be put together like macabre jigsaw puzzles.
She and Jackson had already walked across the large, temperature-controlled room and were almost at her elbow when Dr. Kristin Alberghetti-Cavanaugh, dressed in scrubs like the rest of her team, sensed their presence and looked up.
“Hi. Pull up a gurney and try your luck,” Kristin invited, referring to matching up the body pieces. She was only half kidding.
“Speaking of luck,” Brianna said, “have you or anyone on your team had any figuring out approximately when these victims were killed?” She assumed that they had to have met with some sort of foul play—there were just too many bodies for this to be anything else.
“Funny you should ask,” Kristin responded. Pausing for a second, she looked closer at the man who had come in with Brianna. “New partner?” she asked Brianna.
“Just temporary,” Jackson responded.
“Well, Just Temporary,” Kristin said, a smile curving her mouth, “welcome to the morgue. It’s not usually this crowded
