Cavanaugh In The Rough. Marie Ferrarella

       Prologue

      A host of thoughts, mostly fragmented, were playing ping-pong in Detective Christian Cavanaugh O’Bannon’s head as he drove to work. He was just a tad punchy, having gotten virtually no sleep. His goal was to go in early so that he could leave early and get his life back on track.

      For now, that was the plan.

      Last night’s revelry was still clinging to him like the light scent of expensive perfume that sold by the fraction of an ounce. Perfume worn by the woman he’d been trying to corner at the party he’d attended. She’d been friendly and warm, and just when he thought he was finally getting somewhere, he’d turned around and she was gone.

      He’d stuck around, thinking their paths would cross again, but they hadn’t. There’d been other single women there, just as attractive in their own way, but somehow he couldn’t work up the enthusiasm about any of them the way he had about the one who “got away.”

      Consequently, he was still somewhat frustrated, as well as just the slightest bit slow, rather than energized, the latter being his usual state.

      This was why he’d almost missed them. Missed the two boys, barely in their teens, running as if one of those zombie creatures was after them.

      What caught Chris’s attention, other than the fact that the teens were all but flying, was that the two looked paler than vanilla ice cream buried beneath a three-day snowfall.

      Intrigued and definitely curious, Chris stopped going over just what had gone wrong with his fail-safe strategy last night, and became instantly alert and focused on what was happening right now.

      It was a little after six in the morning and the sun had already staked out its position in the sky, so Chris knew his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. That his mind wasn’t doing creative things with the night’s leftover shadows. There were no shadows, only two teenage boys running from a strip mall as if their very lives depended on just how far away they could get and how fast they could do it.

      Braking abruptly—and silently grateful that there was no one behind him—Chris did a creative U-turn and drove into the strip mall, instantly going in the same direction the boys were running—or fleeing, if that turned out to be the case. Part of his gut instincts—inherited from a family tree enormously populated by law enforcement agents—told him that “fleeing” was the more likely description.

      Within a heartbeat, Chris brought his vehicle to a screeching halt right in front of the taller of the two teenagers. The youth fell, then quickly scrambled back up to his feet.

      Fear and confusion were in both teens’ eyes.

      They stared at him, not like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, but like two deer that had seen something really, really awful.

      Chris rolled down the window closest to the teens.

      “Something wrong, boys?”

      Neither answered him, not because they were trying to be evasive or difficult, but because neither one of them seemed able to speak. They were both struggling to catch their breath, their lungs all but bursting from their effort to put as much distance between themselves and whatever it was that they had either seen or encountered within the empty department store.

      Making a judgment call, Chris turned off his engine and got out of his vehicle.

      His eyes swept over the two teens, making a quick evaluation of any potential threat they might pose. This was Aurora, CA, deemed to be a normally safe city. But no place was perfect, and as his mother, Maeve, was fond of saying, even paradise had its serpent, as Adam and Eve sadly discovered.

      Shorter and of slighter build than he was, the two teens didn’t seem to pose any sort of a threat. Wearing light windbreakers that had flapped wildly as they ran, the duo didn’t look to be carrying any weapons, either, concealed or otherwise.

      “Take your time,” Chris told them patiently. “Catch your breath and then tell me what has you both so spooked.”

      Still gasping, the shorter one pointed frantically behind him to the building he and his friend had just vacated like two fledgling bats out of hell.

      Chris took the opportunity to attempt to fill in some of the blanks and coax the story out of the breathless, frightened teens.

      “Kresky’s,” he said, identifying their point of exit.

      The duo nodded vigorously in response, but still didn’t seem to be able to form any actual words.

      In its day, Kresky’s had been an upper-end department store, a chain of shops owned and developed by a wealthy East Coast-based family more than eighty years ago. At its zenith, the stores were located in major cities in almost every state in the country. They offered everything from clothing to cookware to toys. Prices were reasonable and customers were plentiful—until they weren’t.

      Once it stopped being the place where everyone shopped, the stores grew fewer in number until there were almost none left at all. The one in Aurora was among the last to give up the ghost and had just recently—four months ago, if Chris recalled correctly—held its going-out-of-business sale, before permanently closing its doors.

      “What about Kresky’s?” Chris asked, following that question with another one. “And what were you two doing in the store? It’s been cleared out for months. Why would you want to break in?”

      As far as he knew, that final sale had included virtually everything in the place, including the fixtures. Only the plumbing and the walls were left, a sad testimony to a once thriving store where he had accompanied Sally Howe, the love of his life his last year in high school, to pick out her senior prom dress.

      Neither teen in front of him seemed to have sucked enough air into his lungs to attempt to explain why they would break into an abandoned department store. Instead, the taller of them had only two words, barely audible, to offer.

      The moment Chris heard them, he realized that he wasn’t being told why they had entered the building, but why they had exited it in such a huge hurry and why their complexions had turned so pasty white in the process.

      “Dead body!”