Mission: Cavanaugh Baby. Marie Ferrarella
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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