LITMIR.BIZ

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examiner, poking around inside of dead people, is really, really beyond me.” She looked at her daughter pleadingly. “Can’t you just go into private practice? Think of the good you could be doing.”

      “I am doing good, Mom,” Kristin told her mother. This certainly wasn’t the first time they had done this dance, but her mother seemed to refuse to remember her good reasons for choosing this route. She patiently repeated one. “I’m bringing closure to a great many families who need answers.”

      In response, Josephine rolled her hazel eyes dramatically. “Closure,” she murmured under her breath as if it was a dirty word.

      “Leave the girl alone, Josephine,” Sophia told her daughter sharply. The family matriarch smiled at her granddaughter. “She is happy closing things. It is her life.”

      “And she’s wasting it,” Josephine retorted. “How is Kristin supposed to meet anyone when she’s standing in the middle of a morgue, surrounded by dead people, for heaven’s sake?” she demanded.

      “Did you not hear her?” Sophia asked, the volume of her voice increasing as she made her point. At nearly eighty, Sophia Moretti’s voice was as strong and loud as when she first arrived in America at the age of twenty-eight. “She is closing things for families. Maybe one of those families has a son—”

      Kristin stared at her grandmother, grappling with a sudden feeling of betrayal. No matter what, her grandmother had always been on her side. “You, too, Nonny?”

      Sophia leaned over the food-laden kitchen table to pat her granddaughter’s hand. “I am just trying to—how you say?—humor your mama. Marry, don’t marry, it is all the same to me. Just be happy, little one,” she said to her youngest granddaughter. “The family has enough small people already.”

      “Easy for you to say,” Josephine pouted, not trying too hard to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You have lots of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

      Sophia pursed her lips together. “We are all family, Josephine. We share. You want some grandchildren? I will let you have some of mine.”

      “Listen to Nonny,” Kristin coaxed. “We all live in Aurora. You need short people to hug, you can go over to Theresa’s or Lorraine’s or Angela’s,” she said, enumerating her cousins, all of whom were married with at least two, if not more, children, “and hug one of their kids.”

      “I love those children,” her mother replied honestly, “but it’s not the same thing, and you know it,” Josephine complained. She looked at her own mother accusingly. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

      Sophia raised coarse hands that had been weathered by decades of hard work and pretended to push back her daughter’s words of rebuke. “I take no sides. I just sit and listen.”

      To which Josephine responded with a contemptuous “Ha!”

      Any response from Sophia Moretti was interrupted by Kristin’s ringing cell phone.

      Josephine sighed deeply as she watched her daughter reach into one of her pockets and take out the offending electronic gadget. To Josephine phones did not belong in pockets, and they certainly didn’t belong at a family meal.

      Holding her hand up for momentary silence, Kristin listened to the call. Her boss, Sean Cavanaugh, the chief of the crime scene investigation lab, was on the other end of the line.

      “Sorry to interrupt your personal time, Doctor, but I’m afraid we need you at a crime scene,” he told her, his deep voice rumbling in her ear. “We’ve found two bodies so far.”

      “So far?” Kristin repeated uncertainly, surprised at the way he’d phrased the news. “Are you expecting to find more?”

      “Unfortunately, yes,” she heard him respond wearily. “It looks like there might be quite a few.”

      How many were there in “quite a few?” Kristin wondered, a shiver threatening to slide up and down her spine. “That sounds like you’ve hit some kind of mother lode, sir.”

      “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he told her. “I’d appreciate it if you got here as soon as you could.”

      “Yes, sir. On my way,” Kristin told him quietly.

      Sophia lowered her voice as she leaned toward her daughter, taking care not to interfere with her granddaughter’s call. “What means this ‘mother lode’?” she asked.

      Josephine sighed as she rose to her feet and began to put away the food she had taken out the minute her daughter had walked through the door. Family mealtimes were treasured, no matter when they took place and how small the family unit at that particular moment might be.

      Timing-wise, this had to be a new record.

      She transferred Kristin’s serving onto a paper plate, then with a minimum number of movements, efficiently wrapped it all up in aluminum foil. “It means, Ma, that Kristin is leaving.”

       Chapter 1

      It wasn’t going to be one of his better days.

      He could just feel it in his bones.

      The road Malloy Cavanaugh was driving on was becoming almost dangerously hypnotic. He’d been on it for close to half an hour.

      His eyes felt as if they were burning—always a bad sign—and his eyelids kept threatening to shut on him. Thanks to the rather considerable charms of a young woman he’d met the other night with the not totally inaccurate nickname of Bunny, he had gotten very little sleep the past two nights.

      Hence, Detective Malloy Cavanaugh of the department’s Cold Case Division was not his usual energized self this morning.

      Catching up on a backlog of paperwork would have been far more to his liking at this point. At least, if he fell asleep at his desk, there was no danger of driving that desk into a ditch or off the side of the inclined road the way there was at the moment.

      Aurora, California, where he had moved several years ago with the rest of his family, was a work in progress, a city whose council worked hand in hand with its developers. Consequently—and aesthetically—that development progressed slowly.

      What that ultimately meant was, according to his uncles, Aurora had taken thirty-five years to go from a rural, two-lane, three-traffic-light town to the major thriving city it was today.

      That also meant that there were still large parcels of land that were generally undeveloped. Most of them were located on the outskirts of the southern perimeter of Aurora.

      That was where he was traveling right now, on his way to a crime scene, which, it seemed, had the dubious distinction of being both the site of a multiple homicide and the site of a cold case all at the same time.

      The bodies, according to the investigators who had been summoned by the first officer on the scene, had apparently been in the ground for years; the exact amount of time—as well as the exact number of bodies—had yet to be determined.

      Hell of a way to start a Monday morning, Malloy thought, stifling a yawn before it managed to momentarily make him shut his eyes.

      He took in a deep breath, trying hard to rouse himself. A better way to go would have been to drink some of the pitch-black, strong coffee that was riding next to him in his vehicle’s cup holder, but unless he pulled over—something, considering the narrowness of the winding road he was on, that was not advisable—he was not about to risk reaching for the tall container.

      For that to happen, the split second that his eyes might be off the road could just be enough to send him careening into an accident—or his demise.

      Notoriously happy-go-lucky and possessed of what some had referred to as a charmed life, Malloy was still not reckless enough to think himself above any and all accidents. Better safe than sorry had been an unspoken mantra in his family, courtesy of

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