Cavanaugh Or Death. Marie Ferrarella
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to visit them now that the conversation would only be one-sided.
The only people he had one-sided conversations with these days were his parents: James and Martha Gilroy. It was their mutual grave he’d come to visit, as he did at least once a month, more often if he got the chance. For the most part his life consisted of work and sleep—and work kept him pretty busy. Coming here was his only deviation from that narrow path.
Davis stood in front of the double headstone. It was a wide, expensive marble piece that had taken him months to save up for—putting aside every cent he could out of his paychecks—until the tombstone was finally paid off and in place over his parents’ grave instead of the meager one his uncle had put there.
They were together in death just as they had been in life. His father had taken pride in the fact that it had been love at first sight for both of them. As he’d gotten older, Davis had pretended not to listen, though he’d never tired of hearing the details.
He’d been almost thirteen the day they died. They had been together in the car that Sunday, but only he had survived.
That still haunted him.
Davis was kneeling over their grave, the bouquet of fresh white roses—his mother’s favorite—placed just beneath the headstone. Spring had been part of the terrain for a good month. His mother had always loved spring.
He felt the sting of tears smart at the corners of his eyes and was glad no one was around to see him.
Here, alone with his parents, away from other inquisitive eyes, he was free to be himself the way he wasn’t in his daily life. Six-foot-two, thirty-four-year-old men didn’t get emotional or shed tears about events that had happened more than two decades ago.
But there was no one here to judge him.
“Sorry I haven’t been around lately—had a case that wasn’t easy to solve. But I’m here now and that’s what counts, right, Dad?”
His father had never bothered berating him for time that had been lost; he’d only pointed out that there was time ahead to be used—until there wasn’t any time ahead left.
“Can you believe it?” Davis asked, addressing the two people beneath the tombstone. “It’s been almost twenty-one years now. Twenty-one years since you and Mom relocated here.”
That was as specific as he allowed himself to get, even when “talking” with the two people who had been ripped out of his life by that fatal car accident. An accident that had taken them from him and subsequently thrust him in with his father’s older brother, John. Being the only family member he had left, John had begrudgingly taken him in.
The reluctance had faded when John—Davis could never bring himself to call him Uncle John because that was far too warm a title for a man who never smiled, never asked him how he was doing—had discovered that there was a substantial insurance policy to be held in trust for his nephew until his eighteenth birthday. His father had named John the executor of the trust.
John had turned out to be a rather resourceful man when it came to finding ways to siphon off some of that trust fund money to pay for the “expenses” involved in raising an orphan from the age of thirteen to eighteen. It eventually came to light that John had taken advantage of every loophole he could find or fabricate.
There was a coldness in John’s house that never abated; a coldness that seemed to set the tone for the rest of his own young life. Davis never felt any resentment toward his father’s older brother. He never felt anything at all. All he had wanted from the moment he had entered the man’s house was the freedom to leave it. That freedom came on his eighteenth birthday.
He’d taken whatever money was left in the insurance policy—precious little—and put it toward his education, becoming what his father had been before him: a cop. But first his father had wanted him to get his college degree. It was the only stipulation his father had ever placed on him.
“I miss you guys, but then, you already know that, don’t you?” Davis murmured. He sighed. “Well, I just wanted to come by, make sure that they’re keeping the weeds off your plot and—”
Davis stopped abruptly, certain that he’d heard a noise out of place in the eerie quiet that enshrouded the cemetery at this hour.
Cocking his head in the direction of the sound, he listened closely.
Intently.
Davis could have sworn it was the sound of a shovel accidentally hitting stone.
At this hour? Nobody buried anyone before the sun came up.
Either his imagination had gotten the better of him, or—
“Later,” he promised the pair who remained eternally young, eternally smiling, in his mind. “Something sounds off. You know what I mean, Dad.”
And with that Detective First Class Davis Gilroy silently hurried in the direction he could have sworn he’d heard something out of keeping with the sleepy rhythm of the cemetery.
When it came to hunches, Davis was hardly ever wrong.
The next moment, as he turned a corner, he thought he saw something moving in the shadows.
Two somethings moving in the shadows.
As he gained ground, zigzagging and sprinting around headstones, Davis realized that the shadows were actually people. Two people, dressed entirely in black. Black pullovers, black slacks, black boots and black ski masks pulled down over their faces.
They looked like second-story cat burglars—except that they were here in a cemetery, hovering around one of the tombstones.
“Hey, you!” Davis called out. “Stop!”
The two dark figures did the exact opposite.
They bolted.
Every morning, halfway through her run, Moira Cavanaugh asked herself the same question: Why am I doing this?
The answer she’d arrived at some time ago, and that still held as of this morning, was that if she didn’t put her running shoes on, throw on a sweatshirt and shorts, then pound on the pavement for a good hour, she would be moving around at half speed for the rest of the day. Not to mention that she’d spend the rest of the day feeling guilty for slacking off. Because of what she did for a living, she needed to be at the top of her game all day, every day.
So here she was, a police detective like most of the rest of her vast, sprawling clan, sweating and breathing progressively harder in the predawn light, counting off the seconds until she was nearing the end of this self-inflicted torture. And fervently wishing that she was more like her older brother, Malloy, who rolled out of bed, hit the ground running, was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by the time he drove into the Aurora Police Department parking lot.
But she wasn’t like Malloy. To be in peak condition, she needed to jump-start her day, and running seemed to be the only thing that accomplished that for her. Varying her route caused her to remain wide-awake instead of merely going through the motions.
By choosing a different route each morning—one of ten or so she’d marked down for herself—she had to stay alert to take the right path home. She only had twenty minutes once her run was over to get ready and be in the car, on her way to work.
The only thing Moira hated more than being sluggish was being late.
Jogging first thing in the morning before she was even fully awake kept both from happening—even though it felt like hell while she was doing it.
This morning’s route was the creepy route—especially since the street lamp in front of the cemetery had picked today to go out and there was only a half-moon up in the sky to guide her past the tall, imposing, black wrought-iron gates.
Cemeteries didn’t