Cavanaugh's Secret Delivery. Marie Ferrarella

Jason. “What won’t keep until tomorrow morning?”

      “Mitch Gomez was just fished out of the lake twenty minutes ago,” Jason answered flatly.

      “That’ll do it.” Dugan didn’t have to ask if the man was dead. Nguyen wouldn’t be calling him if he wasn’t. “Where are you?” He paused as the other detective rattled off the address. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Dugan said grimly.

      He terminated the call and put the phone back in his pocket.

      Meanwhile, the two paramedics were bringing around the gurney. “You the father?” the paramedic closest to him, Jeff, asked.

      Still in the vehicle, the woman cried, “No, he’s not!”

      Dugan shook his head. “Just a Good Samaritan in the right place at the right time,” he told the paramedic.

      “Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll get you and your baby to the hospital quickly,” the other paramedic, Nathan according to his tag, was saying to the woman. Before he tried to get her and her baby out of the car, he looked back toward Dugan. “Are you coming with her, Good Samaritan?” he asked.

      The next moment, he handed the baby over to his partner and then he took the woman gently into his arms. With a minimum of effort, he transferred her carefully to the gurney.

      “Something I have to do first,” Dugan answered the paramedic. When both the new mother, now on the gurney, and the paramedic looked at him, Dugan explained, “I’m a cop. Something’s come up.” Turning his attention toward the woman he’d just aided, he told her, “But I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

      “Okay,” she said, nodding.

      Dugan had a feeling she didn’t believe him, but there was nothing he could do about that right now. All that mattered was that she was in safe hands and that was all that really counted, anyway.

      “I’ll see you later,” he told the new mother as he watched the paramedics place her gurney in the back of the ambulance.

      “Right, later,” she replied, then added, “Don’t worry about it.”

      Dugan frowned. He should have called his aunt’s ambulance, he thought as he watched the paramedics close the doors and then round to the front of the vehicle. He knew all the drivers there. But there was nothing he could do about that now.

      Dugan sprang into action. He quickly closed up the woman’s car and then, finally, ran to his own a block away.

      Starting it up, he took out the detachable light and stuck it on top of the roof. He didn’t like doing it to the Mustang, but the situation was dire and he needed to get there ASAP.

      He still couldn’t believe that Gomez was dead. He’d only managed to finally talk the guy into being his confidential informant less than a month ago.

      * * *

      “I don’t think he ever knew what hit him,” Jason said as he stood there, looking down at the sprawled-out body lying before him.

      Dugan had managed to get there in record time. Luckily, at this time of night, most of Aurora’s citizens were asleep and traffic was close to non-existent except for a few hotspots. As it was, this had happened near the lake that was located in the next town. By the time he had gotten there, Mitch Gomez’s body had not only been fished out, it was now about to be taken away by the medical examiner.

      Dugan had arrived just in time to see the ME begin to zip up the black body bag. Stopping the man, he looked down at Gomez’s lifeless face.

      “Three shots to the back of the head,” Jason told him. “Execution style.”

      Dugan blew out a breath. “Damn. Any chance we can get jurisdiction over the body?” he asked.

      The medical examiner didn’t answer him. Instead, he just finished closing up the bag, then with the help of his assistant, he took it away.

      Jason was left to answer the question. “Hey, it happened here, away from Aurora, but I don’t think they’re going to fight you for it if you want to claim the body as ours. Just remember, it becomes our unsolved murder,” the detective told Dugan. “Not exactly brownie points for that as far as I can see if we don’t solve it.” He looked at Dugan closely. “You sure you want to do this?”

      “He was my CI,” Dugan said, looking at the body as it was being taken away. “Hell, he wasn’t even old enough to legally drink,” he added, shaking his head. The next moment, he went after the ME and said, “Leave it here. We’ll take the body.”

      The medical examiner shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourself. I’ve got more than enough bodies in the morgue as it is,” he told Dugan. “Leave it,” he said to his assistant.

      “He wasn’t legally old enough to do any of the things he did, but that didn’t keep him from doing it,” Jason told his partner. “Hey, it’s not your fault,” he said, seeing the look on Dugan’s face.

      “I know that. But it still seems like a huge waste. I can’t help but feel being my CI was what got him killed,” Dugan murmured. He took out his phone in order to call their medical examiner and tell her that they had another body.

      “Yeah, well, he knew what he was doing,” Jason argued.

      “Doc? Sorry to get you up at such an ungodly hour, but we’ve got a body for you.”

      “Flowers would have been nicer,” the voice on the other end of the line mumbled. He heard another voice in the distance asking something. “I think it’s one of your cousins,” Kristin, the head medical examiner said, answering the other voice. “He’s trying to cull my favor with a body.” Returning to phone, she said, “Okay, give me the address. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

      Dugan gave the woman the address then terminated the call. Tucking the phone away, he looked back at the body, hidden now beneath the black body bag.

      He had caught the one-time college student on a possessions charge and managed to flip him when Gomez said he had current intel he could trade. It turned out to be good information. Better than Dugan had thought, at first. So good, apparently, that it had wound up costing his confidential informant his life.

      “I don’t think he did know what he was doing,” Dugan said thoughtfully, referring to what Jason had said before he called Kristin. “I think that he thought it was all going to go his way and turn out the way he wanted in the end.”

      Looking at the black body bag, Jason shrugged. “Nothing we can do about it now.”

      “Except catch the son of a bitch who killed him,” Dugan pointed out, saying the words with such a passion it caused Jason to look at him uncertainly.

      “Yeah, there’s that, too,” Jason agreed, trying to lighten the mood. “Hey, I really didn’t roust you out of the arms of some nubile young woman?” Jason asked, curious.

      “Actually, I had just finished delivering a baby when you called me,” Dugan answered, turning away from the body.

      Rather than say anything, Jason just started to laugh. “Yeah, right.”

      “No, I’m serious. When you called, I had just finished delivering this woman’s baby and there was an ambulance on its way to take her to Aurora Memorial,” Dugan said, mentioning the name of the closest hospital to that particular place, which was also known as the best one in the county.

      Jason began to laugh again, but this time, his laughter was very short-lived. He paused, looking at his partner. Dugan wasn’t even smiling. Dugan usually smiled by now if he was putting him on.

      Jason eyed his partner. “You’re serious.”

      “You already asked me that,” Dugan pointed out. In the back of his head, he couldn’t help thinking that one life had just ended while another life had just started. He supposed that was what real life was all about,