than explain why he’d arrived late, Jackson merely said, “I got held up in traffic. What are we looking at?”
“The stuff nightmares are made of,” she told him. “You ever been here before?”
“You mean to the hotel?” he asked. When she nodded, he told her, “I didn’t grow up in Aurora. And I’m guessing the place would have been a little out of my price range if I had grown up here.”
Brianna looked around, trying to envision the hotel the way it used to be in what she’d heard referred to as its “glory days.” It made her sad to see the way time had ravaged it.
“It was a hell of a showplace in its time. I saw pictures in a magazine once,” she explained. “Aurora was celebrating its fortieth anniversary of being incorporated as a city and the magazine article was a then-and-now kind of retrospective. I really doubt that anyone would have ever suspected that this highly regarded showplace was where someone was hiding bodies.”
“Hiding bodies?” Jackson echoed.
Brianna nodded, repeating what she’d heard from the nauseated first responder. “They were in the walls,” she told him. “The wrecking ball uncovered them.”
The macabre revelation had Jackson staring at her in disbelief. “You’re kidding.”
Brianna turned toward the major crimes detective. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of his reaction. The tall, dark-haired man seemed woefully uninformed about the nature of the crime scene he had entered. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”
“Cohen just said to get my butt out here,” Jackson answered. “Look, I’m with major crimes,” he pointed out even though he knew that she knew that. “And while this is all pretty gruesome, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here.” He looked at Brianna. “Way I see it, since you’re with homicide, this case is right up your alley.”
“You’ve been with the police department for how long now?” she asked him, her voice almost mild and deceptively conversational.
He didn’t see what that had to do with anything, but he answered her. “Going on six years now.”
“Six years,” she repeated, as if she was rolling the information over in her head. “Don’t take much of an interest in the city’s history, do you?”
Jackson looked at the woman. Like so many other members of the police department he had run into, she was part of the Cavanaugh family, a legend throughout the precinct. Cavanaughs, he’d found, set the bar high, each and every one of them.
“Not particularly,” he answered. “Why?”
“Well, if you did know a little of the city’s history,” she told him, “you’d know that initially this was all farmland that belonged to one family. The Aurora family.”
“All right,” he allowed, still waiting to hear where she was going with all this.
Out of the corner of her eye, Brianna saw the ME, Kristin Alberghetti-Cavanaugh, wheeling another one of the newly unearthed victims out of the hotel. She stepped to one side, never missing a beat of the story she was telling Jackson.
“George Aurora was the original patriarch of the family. He started taking the money the family made selling their crops and investing it. The investments were solid, so he decided to use some of the profits to build a small town, which he named after himself.
“Everything in and around Aurora belonged to the Aurora family. Including the Aurora Hotel,” she pointed out, adding, “which, it turns out, Winston Aurora, George’s oldest grandson, recently sold to the city so that Aurora could continue to expand.”
“Winston’s the one who throws all those fund-raisers, raising money to build that new children’s hospital and new schools for the city, right?” Jackson said, recalling things that he’d heard.
“One and the same,” Brianna confirmed. “No one wants to risk getting on the wrong side of the man or his two brothers if they don’t have to, so I’m told that major crimes was called in to treat this whole thing—and the Aurora family—with kid gloves.”
The strained smile on her face as she concluded told Jackson just what she thought of that idea, seeing as how he was the one the major crimes lieutenant had chosen to represent the division.
Jackson read between the lines. “Are you saying you think Mr. Fund-Raiser is responsible for the dead bodies?”
“I’m saying we’re supposed to look at everyone else first before we even so much as think of pointing a finger at him or anyone else in his family. Having major crimes join homicide in the investigation is supposed to be the police department’s way of being thorough,” Brianna told him. “That means crossing every single t and dotting every single i. And if I recall correctly from the last couple of times you and I worked together, you are not exactly known as Mr. Diplomacy, so maybe I should be the one to talk to the Auroras.”
“Are we going to be questioning the Auroras first?” Jackson asked.
“No, not in the way you mean,” Brianna answered, thinking he was referring to interrogating the family. “We’re just going to inform them of what the construction crew discovered when they started knocking down the walls.”
Brianna paused for a moment. She’d been told more than once that she had a habit of taking over and leaping into the heart of things before others around her had a chance to digest what was happening. Since she and Muldare were going to be working together on this, she knew she had to do her best not to come on as strong as she had a tendency to. “Unless you have a different idea on the matter,” she added tactfully.
Jackson lifted his wide shoulders then let them fall again in a careless shrug. “My only thought is that maybe we should hold off talking to Mr. Fund-Raiser or anyone in his family until we have a final body count.”
She supposed that Jackson did have a point, but there was a problem with this idea. She glanced over toward where Sean and his team were working.
“I’m not sure how long that would take,” she said honestly. “The building only has three stories, but it’s unusually wide. Consequently, there are a lot of walls to take into account.”
“You really think there are more bodies in them?” Jackson questioned.
She wouldn’t have thought that there were any bodies in the walls, but that certainly hadn’t turned out to be the case.
“You think there aren’t?” Brianna countered.
“Sounds a little unbelievable, don’t you think?” Jackson asked, getting out of the way as another gurney with a body bag was being wheeled out.
“I think finding a single body buried inside a hotel wall is unbelievable, but according to what I’ve been told, they’ve uncovered six,” Brianna answered.
“Seven,” Sean called out.
Brianna and Jackson both turned in the man’s direction.
“Seven?” Brianna asked, stunned.
Sean nodded. “Destiny just told me that the team
