She sighed. “We really need to get to the bottom of this,” Cassandra said to the two detectives in the car as she turned in her seat to look first at her cousin, then back at Danny. “First thing I’m going to do once we reach the office is to call Valri to see if she’s made any headway compiling that list of people that the victims were in contact with just before they summarily went missing.”

  She pressed her lips together, thinking. “Maybe that’ll point us in the right direction so we can actually begin solving this thing and finally find that serial killer.”

  “Maybe you should make that the second thing,” Travis said. “Don’t forget, our computer wizard is three hours behind us timewise. She probably feels exactly the way that I do right now—punchy and sleepy.” Cassandra’s cousin punctuated his statement with a huge yawn.

  “Punchy,” Cassandra repeated. “Is that by any chance the name of Snow White’s eighth dwarf?” she asked, humor curving the corners of her mouth. “In any case,” she told her cousin more seriously, “Valri’s not like the rest of us. You know that,” she insisted. “The woman runs on batteries and can multitask better than all the rest of us put together,” she said, reminding Travis. “At any rate, the sooner we get our hands on this list once she puts it together, the sooner we can begin finding and investigating these people. And that, in turn, gets us closer to finding this fiend and putting him away. Permanently,” Cassandra said, stressing that last word with feeling.

  “You know, it might not be a man,” Travis said.

  He was wrong there, she thought. This could not have been the work of a woman for one good reason.

  Cassandra smiled to herself. “If it’s a woman doing this, then it’s a woman who is capable of bench-pressing at least two hundred pounds, if not more. These are not skinny, underweight little men who are being hauled out and done away with,” she said. “From the photographs I saw in the files, every one of the victims were all full-sized men. Dragging them out of sight, picking their bodies apart and then burying them—most likely quickly—required strength,” she told her cousin. “A lot of it.”

  Listening to the conversation, Danny finally pulled his vehicle into the parking structure beneath the precinct. He parked it in his customary spot, pulled up the handbrake and then turned off the engine.

  Staying in his seat, the detective turned around to glance back at Travis.

  “This is the one time that I’m throwing my vote in with your cousin,” he told Travis. Pausing, he cleared his throat, then continued. “Meanwhile, we track down any leads, however slim, however minor,” he informed the detectives from California. “There has to be something that we’re missing, something that will get us closer to an answer.”

  He saw Cassandra smiling at him as she got out of his car. That had to mean something.

  “What?” Danny prodded, even as he caught himself thinking that maybe he really didn’t want to know what was on her mind.

  “Nothing,” she denied, then went on to tell him, “You know, that’s actually a very positive attitude.” Her smile deepened. “I’m just surprised—and pleased—to hear those words coming out of your mouth, Detective.”

  She paused for a moment. There was a sparkle entering her eyes as she looked at him. “It looks like maybe I’m rubbing off on you,” Cassandra told him.

  Danny looked at her as they walked through the precinct’s front doors and made their way to the elevator. The New York detective caught himself thinking that he would have welcomed having the woman actually rubbing off on him.

  Or just simply rubbing, Danny mused for a moment.

  The next moment, he managed to rouse himself again and focus on something more serious.

  The New York detective cleared his throat.

  He would have probably found himself getting slapped for the direction his mind was taking.

  He attempted to berate himself but just couldn’t get his mind to go that route. Instead, he couldn’t stop smiling as he thought about the woman who had been assigned to his division.

  This was not the proper attitude for an investigator of his caliber to assume, he told himself again, doing his best to pull back.

  Danny could see Cassandra looking at him. Her expression was rather bemused. For a fleeting second, the detective thought that with his luck, the woman was probably a mind reader.

  Drawing himself together, Danny quickly took refuge in the comment Cassandra had just made about rubbing off on him. “I guess maybe you are at that,” he said, then commented, “Lucky me.”

  “Now that just sounds like sarcasm,” Cassandra told the detective.

  His mouth quirked just a little as his eyes washed over her almost in slow motion. “Well, you’re a detective,” he reminded Cassandra. “I’m guessing that you have the tools to figure that out.”

  He had just sent a definite warm shiver down her spine with that look of his, she realized. “I’ll get back to you on that,” she heard herself responding, uttering the words almost in slow motion. She cleared her head and went on to say, “Right now, I want to see if Valri came through with something.”

  With that, she all but marched into the office.

  “Let me know if she has anything worthwhile to tell us,” Travis requested, calling after his cousin.

  “Will do,” Cassandra promised, tossing the words over her shoulder.

  At that point, she realized that she was not going to the conference room alone. She found that she was being shadowed by Danny.

  She glanced at him just as she crossed the threshold. “Is there something you forgot to tell me?” Cassandra asked him.

  Danny shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Then we just happen to be heading in the same direction at the same time?” she asked Danny skeptically.

  Danny inclined his head. “Sure looks that way.” And then he grew more serious. “Look, I want to know what you know as soon as you know it. Don’t forget,” the detective reminded her, “this was my case before you ever stepped one foot onto the scene.”

  Well, if he wanted to play it that way, she thought, she had something to counter him with. “Yes, but he was my cousin before he ever disappeared in your city.”

  Though she didn’t have any knowledge of him. It was like saying she was distantly related to Anne Boleyn. Sure, she could claim a personal need for information, but the case would officially belong to the authorities.

  “Tell you what,” Danny proposed. “Let’s stop playing tug-of-war and just see what this brilliant cousin of yours can tell us about our serial killer.”

  She inclined her head. “Well, I certainly can’t argue with your wording.”

  Walking into the conference room, she noticed that one of the members of Danny’s team was already in the room, going over one of the files, most likely for the umpteenth time if one went by the papers that were all spread out on the man’s side of the table.

  Danny gave the burly man, Murphy, a dismissive look. “We need the room for a few minutes, Murphy,” he told the sergeant.

  The man rose from the table. “I think I’ll go get some coffee,” Murphy told them. “Can I bring back one for either of you?”

  Danny reacted with total disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding. I wouldn’t drink that stuff if I was dying of thirst.”

  “That was a little drastic, don’t you think?” Cassandra asked as the other man left the room.

  Danny looked at her knowingly. “You’ve never tasted the coffee here at the precinct, have you?” It really wasn’t a question.

  “No,” Cassandra agreed, “I haven’t.”

  “Let’s just say that I just saved your life,” the New York detective told her. There was a laugh in his voice.

  The man was steadily growing more animated, Cassandra thought, and that, in her mind, was a good thing. She could definitely deal with animated. Animated made the man more human in her book, and more human was always a good thing.

  You need to stop focusing on the man and focus on the bigger picture, she told herself sternly. Heaven knew Detective Doyle was already stirring her in ways that she felt were not appropriate on the job—or off the job, for that matter, in her case.

  She didn’t have any time for all those stirrings that she had heard her friends talk about. At least no time while she was working, she thought—which seemed to be all the time.

  And yet, here she was, reacting to being around the man. Reacting to the sound of his voice. Reacting even to the thought of their being together, and not just as a working couple.

  Knock it off, Cavanaugh. You have a job to do. Just do it, she ordered herself.

  Cassandra became aware that the detective was watching her. Blowing out a breath, she forced herself not to focus on the fact that his eyes were on her.

  Picking up her cell phone, Cassandra called the number that she had used so often that it was all but permanently burned into her brain.

  The phone rang a total of six times as she waited for Valri to pick up. She thought it was going to ring again. But then she heard a voice on the other end responding.

  “Cavanaugh,” Valri announced in a very clipped tone of voice.

  Cassandra guessed that meant the computer wizard was already swamped at this early hour. Well, she knew that couldn’t be helped as she drew back her shoulders.

  “Hi, Valri. I’ll make this fast,” she promised the computer wizard.

  “My mistake, I thought this was Cassie,” she heard Valri saying to her.

  “You know it’s me, Valri. I was just trying to be thoughtful,” Cassie told the computer wizard in all sincerity.

  “Hence my confusion,” Valri told her with a laugh.

  “Is this a little preamble before you tell me that you unearthed something good in your search, or are you trying to entertain me before you pull the rug out from under me and tell me you have nothing to give me that would count as helpful?”

  “Which would you like to hear, Cass?” Valri asked.

  Cassandra instantly read between the lines and had her answer. “Okay, you have something,” she declared happily.

  Valri hedged her response. She never liked bragging. “Nothing great, but better than nothing.”

  She had forgotten that Valri never built things up and definitely did not like tooting her own horn. Out of all of them, Cassandra recalled, Valri was considered to be the most conservative one.

  “I’m listening,” Cassandra said quietly, waiting.

  “Okay, I’m going to text you a couple of pictures.”

  Cassandra looked down at her phone screen. The images were not all that clear. “Who am I looking at?”

  “Guys who were last seen in the company of some of the men who went missing shortly thereafter,” Valri told her.

  Cassandra continued to stare at the two photographs on her phone. “Valri, is it my imagination, or...”

  She heard her cousin laugh. “So, you see it too I take it?”

  Danny couldn’t pretend not to be listening to this conversation any longer. He looked over Cassandra’s shoulder at the photographs that had been sent to her phone. “What is it that you’re looking at?” he asked.

  The question was no sooner out of his mouth than he realized what the two women who were talking had meant.

  He saw it as well.

  There was a very strong similarity between the two people in the two photos that had just been sent.

  Cassandra raised her eyes to Danny’s face. “They could be one and the same person,” she said.

  “Or they could just be related,” Danny said. “Working this job, I’ve met a lot of brothers who looked as if they were the same person,” he told her.

  Cassandra got back to asking her cousin questions. “Do you have names for these guys, Valri?”

  “Do I have the names?” Valri repeated incredulously. “Are you doubting me this far into our relationship?”

  “Nope, not me. I wouldn’t dream of it,” Cassandra told her cousin innocently.

  “Good. Sending you those names now, but I don’t have addresses yet. The first guy did give one, but following it would put him in the middle of the East River,” she said. “Unless we’re dealing with a comic book hero, that just isn’t possible,” she told Cassandra.

  “Agreed, but send me anything you do have. I’ll make sense of it as we go along. When were these two photos taken?” she asked Valri.

  “As near as I can place it, about a couple of years apart. I’m still working on connecting other people who might have been associated with your missing hunks.”

  “Come again?” Cassandra asked.

  “It has to have hit you by now,” Valri said. “All these dead guys could have been used in an old-fashioned movie about gorgeous guys. Maybe even singing and dancing ones,” she added with a laugh.

  Cassandra exchanged looks with Danny. In typical Valri fashion, the computer wizard had put her finger directly on the most salient point, the main connecting factor.

  Chapter 15

  “Well, actually it did,” Cassandra said to the computer technologist. “I just didn’t want to sound as if I was being shallow.”

  “Nothing shallow about being accurate,” Valri told her. “To my way of thinking, I’d say that this is a very unique case,” the Aurora Police Department’s computer wizard said. “Okay, I’m in the process of exploring more names. Right now, there’s just the two of these guys—and maybe not even that many,” she said, still entertaining the possibility that this was one and the same man.

  “Why would you say that?” Cassandra asked her cousin, wanting to explore Valri’s thinking.

  “Because these two guys look eerily alike, and as far as I can tell, they were never captured at the same time in the same place. I find that a little bit suspicious, but I could be totally wrong. However,” Valri said, continuing on, “I haven’t given up. There still might be more offenders on the list. Plus, these two could just look eerily alike.

  “If there are any breakthroughs,” Valri said, “I’ll get back to you immediately.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Cassandra told her cousin. “Meanwhile, please say hi to the rest of the family for Travis and me.”

  “Will do,” Valri promised. And with that, the call ended.

  Cassandra turned off her cell phone and put it away. She turned her attention back to Danny. “Call in your troops, and let’s see if either one of these two guys can be found in the greater New York area,” she told the detective. “I think it might be time to hit the bricks instead of sitting here and breathing in all this dust.”

  “Hit the bricks?” he echoed. “Is this an old Humphrey Bogart movie?” he asked, amused. He raised his hand as she began to answer him. “Doesn’t matter. You’re not going to get an argument out of me. Though I myself prefer Jerry Orbach in the original Law & Order.”

  “That works for me too,” Cassandra said.

  “Like him, I actually prefer talking to people one on one,” he told her.

  Cassandra looked at him in surprise, but if he noticed, he gave no indication. He just continued with his explanation. “Looking into their eyes helps me see just how honest—or dishonest—they are being.”

  “Well, we certainly agree on that too,” she told the detective. “I like hitting the bricks. A lot better than I like sitting in an office, pushing papers around and getting cross-eyed.” She looked down at the address of one of the two suspects that Valri had given her. “Let’s see what Rick Allen has to say about his friendship with Pete Wilson and if he has any feelings about the man disappearing the way that he suddenly did ten years ago.”

  * * *

  They found Rick Allen at home. The man lived in a one-bedroom walk-up that had seen far better days but was not as run-down as it could have been. From all indications, Rick Allen hadn’t been able to hold a steady job since Pete Wilson had abruptly disappeared the way he had.

  Suspicious at first of the two detectives’ appearance on his doorstep, it soon became obvious that he was more than happy to talk about the missing man he claimed was his best friend.

  “I can’t tell you what a great heart Peter had. Maybe a little too great,” Allen said sadly.

  “Could you tell us what you mean by that?” Cassandra asked.

  Rather than answer her question directly, Rick Allen seemed to only want to talk to Danny. “Well, if you ask me, Peter was far too trusting,” he told the New York detective. “He felt that he could tell everyone anything and that they would be receptive of his words and honest in their response,” Peter Wilson’s so-called friend stressed.

  “I kept telling him that someday he would wind up regretting being so damn trusting. Hell,” Rick Allen said, frowning at the memory, “this is the big city, not some little farm in the countryside.”

  “According to our information,” Cassandra told the older man, referring to her notes, “your friend was born and bred right here in the heart of New York City.”

  Rick Allen frowned darkly at her, then went back to looking at the detective who had come to conduct the interview with her. It was obvious that Allen preferred Danny, but this often happened in interviews with witnesses or persons of interest.

  “That doesn’t change the fact that Peter was way too trusting,” he told her gruffly, then turned his attention back to Danny.

  For a moment, Cassandra was about to say something about keeping a civil tongue in his head. But then she decided there was nothing to be gained by putting this bitter older man in his place or on the defensive. Not to mention, her role was to listen, observe and ask questions, not scold.

  The man’s behavior just gave her that much more insight into his character.

  “Did you ever talk to him about that?” she asked. “About his being so trusting?”