Cavanaugh Justice: Cold Case Squad
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Marie Ferrarella
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16,4K
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27
Prologue
You never thought that I would ever amount to anything, did you, Aunt Lily? the man asked sharply, his voice as taunting as he had once felt his aunt’s had sounded. An ugly smile curved his mouth. Well, I certainly fooled you, didn’t I? The kid you always referred to as being such a big loser didn’t turn out to be a loser after all, did he?
Jon Murphy regarded the face of the woman in the picture on his desk.
He felt that the face was actually looking back at him. He could almost read her thoughts.
It was a big deal for him, keeping that framed photograph right there in front of him. There were times when he would have been a lot happier just hurling it, frame and all, across the room—if not into the garbage altogether.
But he knew that he needed the photograph. One, because he didn’t want to answer a lot of questions about what had happened to it—people were incredibly nosy—and two, because it reminded him of his purpose and what he was doing here in the first place. Not in the classroom, but on earth.
His handsome face darkened as he thought about it. However, for once, he was at peace staring at the image of his late aunt.
For now.
For now because his appetite had been satisfied. But Jon Albert Murphy knew better than anyone that, at best, this was an extremely fleeting set of circumstances. His insatiable appetite to kill another woman would be back in full force before he could come to terms with it. It always ate away at him long before he was ready to eliminate the source of his anger.
A day lecturer, Murphy was sitting in his cubbyhole of an office—an insult to his honor as far as he was concerned—with the door closed. Even so, the lecturer was carrying on the discussion with the photograph entirely in his head. It wasn’t the sort of “conversation” that he could risk having out loud, not when there was a chance that one of his students—or any student, really—could come walking into his office and overhear him.
For the most part, the students who attended Aurora Valley College were a rude bunch of wet-behind-the-ears kids, he thought angrily. Not at all like he had been at their age. He had learned early on, thanks to Aunt Lily, to keep to himself. And to never speak unless he was spoken to—and at times, not even then, because he might find himself the target of someone’s unabashed wrath.
But then, the people who frequented the lecture hall where he spoke and the classroom where he taught hadn’t been raised by his mother’s aunt Lily. Aunt Lily who had used her razor-sharp tongue to create countless bleeding holes in his self-esteem from the very moment she had become his guardian.
Murphy remembered how stunned he had been when he discovered that his white trash mother had decided that she didn’t want to be saddled with him any longer. That was when Aunt Lily had stepped up to take over.
At the time, he had been too naïve to understand why Aunt Lily had volunteered to do that. He had just thought that the woman was being kind to him. But he had learned all too quickly that that wasn’t the case.
It had been his last innocent thought.
And then, for a moment, the lecturer smiled to himself. Murphy was more than willing to bet that, in the end, Aunt Lily wound up regretting the decision she had made to be his guardian. Things hadn’t exactly turned out the way she had planned.
Murphy sighed, resigned, as he looked back at the paper he had half-heartedly been attempting to read. These so-called “students” who attended Aurora Valley College, they were all a bunch of hopeless illiterates. Sometimes he couldn’t help wondering why he bothered wasting his time with them.
But then, he thought, he knew exactly why he was doing this. Not to be dazzled by the magnitude of someone’s brain. That was definitely not the reason why he had applied to Aurora Valley College for the position of lecturer in the English Department when it had come up.
He had come to the two-year college for an entirely different reason—a different agenda.
He had come here looking for another sort of gratification. One that Aurora Valley College had been able to provide him with.
Several times over, Murphy recalled with an eerie smile that would have unsettled anyone who looked at it.
Shifting, Murphy tried to make himself comfortable in the hand-me-down office chair he had inherited along with the desk. It was an impossible task as far as he was concerned. Another insult in his eyes.
The chair creaked as he leaned back in it and continued to read the incredibly dull paper. He could almost feel his eyes closing.
Talk about boring, he thought in disgust.
Murphy was surprised that he could read it and somehow still manage to remain awake. It was really a constant battle just to keep his eyes open.
Little by little, he forced himself to shift his mind to the events he was anticipating happening later on this evening, after classes were over. Later this evening was when he was supposed to get together with Mrs. Lauren Dixon. The vivacious older blonde had asked him for help with her next paper. She had told him that she anticipated problems. Right.
As she made the request, the restaurant waitress had even blushed a little.
Like he didn’t even know what was going on.
The corners of his mouth curved as he thought about meeting the woman in some little-frequented, off-campus location. Now all he had to do was decide if tonight was going to be the night when he made his move, or if he was going to put it off until some later date, anticipating the way it would feel.
Sometimes, he told himself, waiting for that final moment was half the fun.
Anticipation, Murphy thought as his pulse sped up and his smile widened, could be everything.
He finished reading the paper he was holding quickly, then decided to award it a giant C plus, far more than the execution was worth in his opinion. Who knew, he might want to cultivate some goodwill with this student at a later date as well.
No stone unturned, he decided with a wicked smile.
