Cavanaugh Cold Case by Marie Ferrarella Page A

pulp,” he promised.
    It was no secret that she was all but walking on air these days. “Alex makes me very happy and you know it.”
    â€œWell, just in case,” Malloy told her, doing his best to maintain a dead serious expression. “You know where to come.”
    â€œUh-huh.” She was already back to the search she had been conducting when Malloy had walked in with his request.
    â€œAnd thanks for this!” he called out, raising the sheet she’d handed him in the air on his way out.
    â€œJust go!” Valri ordered her brother. “I have work to do.”
    â€œLike I said, you’re the best!” Malloy told her just before he crossed the threshold.
    â€œGlad you finally figured that out,” Valri answered, talking half to herself under her breath. “Certainly took you long enough.”
    * * *
    He lost no time getting back to Kristin with the victim’s name.
    â€œDoesn’t your phone work at all?” she asked him when he came bursting into the morgue. She silently upbraided herself for not being more annoyed to see him invading her space again.
    The problem was, she wasn’t really annoyed at all—and that sincerely worried her.
    â€œSure,” he told her, crossing over to her. “You called me on it earlier, remember?”
    Her eyes narrowed. “That was a rhetorical question, Detective.”
    â€œMalloy,” he prompted. “We agreed that you’d call me Malloy, remember?”
    She needed to hold on to her bearings at all times, because the man had the ability to completely bury her in rhetoric. “Technically, you agreed. I didn’t agree to anything.”
    He flashed her that same smile she was positive had undone many a woman and was steadily getting to her, as well.
    â€œI figured you were just being shy, Doc.” And then he got back to the reason he’d hurried back so quickly. “This is the kind of thing I figured you’d want to hear in person. We’ve got a name,” he told her, taking the paper Valri had given him and holding it out to Kristin. “A name to go with that prosthetic you discovered.”
    She surprised him by not immediately reaching for it. Instead, she said quietly, “The first person to transition from ‘Jane Doe’ to an actual person.”
    He caught the note of sadness in Kristin’s voice. So, she wasn’t as removed from all this as she was trying to appear.
    â€œMakes it more real somehow, doesn’t it?”
    â€œYou do surprise me, Detective—Malloy,” Kristin corrected herself. She felt that since he had brought this back to share with her rather than just running off and claiming the breakthrough as his own, she owed him that much.
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œYou’re insightful as well as sensitive.” She was getting carried away. Kristin admonished herself and walked her comment back a little. “Both very good traits for a Boy Scout.”
    Malloy laughed and shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
    â€œDidn’t make the grade?” she guessed. He must have been one hell of a handful as a boy. Tom Sawyer on steroids. No scout master in his right mind would have taken him on.
    â€œDidn’t bother to apply,” he told her simply. “So, do you want to know her name,” he asked, once again offering her the printed paper, “or just go on thinking of her as Jane Doe number seven?”
    He was right. Knowing the woman’s name took the victim out of the realm of the anonymous and brought her into the real world. Once she had a name, there was a very good possibility that the broken-up skeleton on her table became someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, sister, lover, mother, a person who had once had a life that had been cut terribly short by some maniacal monster who fancied himself a god with the power of life and death over some unfortunate victim.
    It was a lot to