Free Cavanaugh or Death by Marie Ferrarella Page B

‘someone,’ he didn’t specify who. Did you hear him specify who?” she asked, turning toward first Riley then Conrad.
    â€œNot us,” Riley denied for both of them as they worked carefully to lower the coffin into the grave without damaging it. “Didn’t hear him say a name. No. How about you, Conrad?”
    The more heavyset man shook his head. “Nope,” he answered.
    â€œJust put everything back the way you found it—and that means every shovelful of dirt!” Weaver instructed before he walked angrily away.
    â€œWell, that went well,” Moira muttered under her breath.
    Davis was looking down at the coffin that was being reburied.
    â€œYeah,” he agreed, more to himself than with her. He sounded even less happy about the outcome than the woman he’d been thrown together with.

Chapter 7
    D etective Davis Gilroy was a man who liked silence more than most people did. The absence of noise allowed him to clear his mind and to think more clearly. Occasionally he might put on the radio as he was driving, but for the most part, silence suited his purposes quite well.
    But as he drove them back to the precinct, the silence inside his car struck him as unnatural. Not because of the silence itself but because there was silence in his car while Moira Cavanaugh was in it.
    As each minute passed the effect of this silence only grew more discomforting.
    Finally, unable to endure the tortured absence of sound any longer, Davis glanced at the other occupant in his vehicle as he slowed at a red light.
    â€œSo now what?”
    Moira leaned back against her seat and sighed. “Now I take this back to Carver and try to convince him to let me keep working on it. Technically, I still have more than twenty-four hours left.”
    â€œWork on what ?” Davis asked. “That was the only grave that was disturbed and it looks like whoever disturbed it did so just for the hell of it.”
    Frustrated, Moira shrugged. Gilroy wasn’t helping, she thought. But she couldn’t deny that he was just asking questions that she knew Carver would ask. She needed an answer for the lieutenant, but what?
    â€œI don’t know,” she responded, irritated. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they were missing something. “Stake the place out. Wait for something else suspicious to happen.”
    The expression on Gilroy’s face told her he thought she was really reaching now.
    â€œI don’t know about your department,” he told her, “but mine doesn’t exactly go around begging for work. We’ve got enough cases to keep all the people who work there busy.”
    Moira sighed. Much as she hated to admit it, he had a point. One she didn’t know how to discount, especially since she knew Carver would say the same thing. “Mine, too.”
    If she believed that, then what was the problem? “So what makes you think your boss—or mine—is going to sign off on more time devoted to this wild-goose chase?”
    Moira sighed again. He was right, and yet she just couldn’t let go of it. “Because at times, I still believe in Santa Claus—or want to at any rate.”
    There was something akin to pity as well as exasperation in Gilroy’s eyes as he told her, “You just go on believing, Cavanaugh. Me, the second your lieutenant says, ‘Case closed,’ I’m back in Major Crimes.”
    She knew he meant it. “Give me a chance to talk Carver into it,” Moira requested. “You never know, just maybe when...”
    But Davis had never been one to build castles in the sky. Not since just before he turned thirteen. “From what I hear about the man, I think the phrase you might be looking for is ‘when pigs fly.’”
    She looked at Gilroy, wondering what he’d been like as a child. Had he been born with that dour look on his face? “You never believed in Santa Claus at all, did