Blood Score (4 page)

“
Interesting analogy. Basically you’re saying if anyone’s gonna screw this up, it may as well be us.” After she shrugged, he grinned and made every muscle in his face ache. “If you want this, Angel, I’m with you. Give me five to shower, but you might consider waitin’ outside the locker room.”

She raised an eyebrow and gave him the once over.
“Why? What’s to see out there?”

***

“What kind of sick loser kills in a city park with Dorothy and Toto looking on? This’ll be a damned circus,” Cronan said over his shoulder to Angel as he walked past a statue of the Scarecrow. “Keep your eyes open for flying monkeys. At night they’re damned hard to see.”

“
Just so you know,” Angel said. “There are times when I’m convinced you’re a total nut job.”

He pursed his lips and nodded.
“I can live with that.”

They headed for a crowd of gawkers in a park located at the intersection of Halsted and Webster. He hated working a crime scene as exposed as this one. Parked at the curb, the Mobile Crime Lab had flashing police cruisers around it. That should’ve been a deterrent. Instead it attracted the lunatic fringe. Yellow tape didn’t make much of a barrier in a wide-open park. Beat cops would have a hard time keeping intruders out, especially with news crews huddled along the perimeter.

Camera floodlights cast eerie shadows into the dark as reporters used the backdrop of the crime scene to broadcast live. With the odd looking Scarecrow statue in the damned shot, the TV coverage made the murder seem like an absurd joke.

“
I’ve got a theory about reporters,” he muttered to his partner as they walked.

“
Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“
Whenever there’s more than one, they mutate and multiply. It ain’t pretty. They leave a slime trail.”

“
Detective Cronan,” A blonde female TV reporter shoved a mic in his face and kept pace with her camera crew in tow. “Can I have a word with you about the murder?”

Without breaking stride, he said,
“Yeah, have two. No comment.”

Cronan flashed his detective’s badge to the uniformed cop at the tape and saw Angel do the same. That’s when the reporter called it quits. The woman waved a hand across her throat, telling her camera crew to cut the live feed. Cronan saw more lights deeper into the park and knew the forensics investigators and evidence technicians were hard at work.

A shadow crossed his path before he caught a glimpse of the body.

“
Well, if it ain’t Angel Gabriel, come to show us the light and grace us with their presence,” a gravelly voice called out. “How did you two get lead without even being on call? One of them immaculate receptions?”

Cronan grimaced when he heard the nickname given to him and Angel after they’d first been assigned together. Few said it to his face anymore and before that, no one had called him Gabriel since his days in foster care. Although the name had gotten him into more than his share of fights as a boy, he was stubborn enough not to change it. His name had been given to him—the last connection to his family. Fighting over it had been worth every busted lip.

“This assignment keeps getting better,” he said to Angel.

A man’s face, backlit in floodlights, got swallowed by shadows, but Cronan recognized the voice and the shiny bald head under wisps of a gray comb over. Larry Schumacher had the job of senior forensics investigator with the ET-North mobile unit. His short stout body looked the polar opposite to that of his number two man, the guy standing next to him. Tall and lanky, Sam O’Brien looked more like a human coat hanger.

“Lay off the angel crap, Schumacher,” Cronan said. “If this were my slice of heaven, you wouldn’t be here, and Jessica Biel would have the hots for me.”

“
Not with that face, she wouldn’t. What the hell happened to you?” O’Brien asked. “Your mug looks like it’s been through a meat grinder.”

“
Try a chainsaw.” Cronan walked past the two forensic guys and focused on the corpse.

A woman’s dead body lay sprawled on the grass. A flowerbed near the base of a gnarled tree almost hid the body. Only her legs were visible from the sidewalk. She wore a dark skirt, pale top, and dress shoes. With her blouse open and skirt hiked up, the encounter looked as if it had been for sexual reasons, except that she still wore panties. The ME would have to determine if there had been penetration and DNA evidence left behind. She appeared to be in her early twenties. She must have been gorgeous, a young blonde woman beautiful enough to be on the big screen.

Cronan stepped closer to the dead woman and noticed the look of terror on her face. Her mouth hung open, and her eyes stared into a hell only she had seen. Her shocked expression still held an edge of pain from her last moment as she bled out.

The victim’s pink blouse was stained with blood spatter from a wound to her stomach. A pool of blood glistened on the ground under her belly. Within minutes of leaving the body and after the heart stops, blood stagnates and clots and turns into gel. The dark thick ooze looked more ominous at night.

“Fill us in,” Cronan said as he slipped on latex gloves. “Did the ME give you TOD?”

“
Body was found around ten,” Schumacher said. “By the time the scene got secured, only limited rigor had set in on the face and neck. The ME estimated TOD sometime between seven and nine, give or take. Lividity is consistent with the positioning of the body, so she wasn’t moved. The ME’s ready to bag her. Gurney should be here soon.”

Cronan knew the ME would have to consider the body being exposed to the evening air in order to determine time of death. Dead bodies lost heat at a rate of 1.5 degrees per hour until they reached ambient temperature, but the muggy night air would have jacked with that timeframe. The ME could measure liver temp to get the core body heat and work off that to narrow the gap. Whatever time the victim died, they could confirm the estimate by piecing together her final hours before she took her last breath.

But in order to compile a time line, they’d have to know her name.

“
You find any ID? Do we know who she is?” Cronan asked.

“
No, not yet. We haven’t found a purse, so robbery could have been a motive. If we don’t find her ID soon, we’ll clean her up and have the ME take a picture. That’ll give us something to show potential witnesses when we canvass the neighborhood again with the stores open.”

“
Who found the body?” Angel took out her notepad.

“
A late night jogger made a cut through the park. He found her and called 9-1-1,” Schumacher said and gave her a name. “He was down here on business and lives in Madison, Wisconsin. A damned cheesehead.”

“
What did the guy say?” Angel asked.

As Schumacher filled Angel in on the man who first discovered the body, Cronan looked closer at the corpse. He leaned in and stared at the dead woman’s face, taking in every detail.

Her blue eyes had turned filmy white, giving her a ghostly appearance. Not much more than a translucent wax statue. Tiny dark specks covered her pale neck and her cheek. Blood spatter. Bugs crawled near her eyes, and a swarm of mosquitoes and flies hovered over the body. Cronan shifted his gaze from her face down to the wound that had killed her.

Up close, the entry wound looked to be caused by a knife. She’d been stabbed below the sternum. He knew from other murders that with one strong upward thrust, the killer could avoid ribs and cut into the heart to sever a major artery. He recognized the low velocity spatter pattern.

The killing hadn’t been the work of dumb luck. The murderer knew how to take a life with one well-placed thrust. Whoever did this could hide any blood on their clothes in the dark. It wouldn’t have been the cleanest way to kill, but it would have been quick and efficient. In seconds, the dead woman would have been incapacitated and drowning in her own juices—a miserable way to die.

“
I’m gonna find out who did this to you,” Cronan whispered with the commiseration he reserved for the dead. “I promise.”

In a louder voice, he said,
“You guys done with photos?”

“
Yeah. She’s all yours,” Schumacher said.

Gabe pulled the dead girl’s blouse over her chest to cover her. The techs had their evidence. He saw no point to leaving her exposed.

The cop part of his brain worked the scene as a darker side of his nature emerged. Cronan sensed the audacity of the murderer to come in close enough to plunge a knife into the woman’s heart. If the objective had been robbery, why take the risk to kill with a blade? Using a knife usually indicated the kill had been personal, but the stab had been clean. Death from only one thrust usually meant the work of a pro, except that most hit men would have used a gun. This murder didn’t feel like a robbery.

“
According to the cheesehead, it was a lucky break he found her. He had cut through the park on his run and almost missed her. Pretty dark in this section at night,” Schumacher said.

“
Lucky for us. Not so much for him,” Angel said. “You find any other witnesses?”

“
Not so far.” O’Brien shook his head. “You know how it is.”

“
I see shopping nearby, but what was she doing here in the park?” she asked. “She wasn’t dressed for a stroll, not with those heels. Why did she come through here?”

“
Drug deals have been known to happen in parks after dark, but I’ve never heard that kind of activity happening here,” O’Brien told her. “If you’re thinking robbery as a motive, we didn’t find any discarded shopping bags and no purse.”

“
Well, keep looking. They could be in a nearby Dumpster by now.”

“
Sure thing.”

Angel watched her partner from the corner of her eye. She’d seen him tug at the girl’s blouse to cover her and pull down her skirt. That gesture never failed to touch her, but Gabe was far from done.

Cronan had his mojo working now. She’d witnessed his hocus pocus before. He honed in on the body as if he were doing a Vulcan mind-meld on the corpse. She didn’t know what he got from his ritual. He never really talked about it, but he
did
talk to dead people—every single one of them. Thankfully, she never witnessed any of the dearly departed chatting back, but it had taken her a while to get used to Cronan’s way.

Her husband Manny joked that his best friend only felt comfortable around one kind of woman—
a dead one
.

When Cronan’s hoodoo paid off, that made it easier for her to forget she worked with a lunatic. Although she had heard rumors about what had made him that way, with him being her partner, she cut him slack. The guy could be weird if he wanted to. He’d earned the right and who was
she
to call him on it.

Her husband had loved Gabe Cronan like a brother, but she had another reason to feel a close bond to her partner. If Cronan hadn’t introduced her to his best friend, she would never have met Manny, the man who had changed her life and taught her how to love.

Feeling a special bond with Gabe allowed her to forgive his strange idiosyncrasies, like when he worked the case as if he was the only cop running the investigation. Eventually he talked things out with her when he got ready. The way his mind worked—real out-of-the-box stuff—it had been good for her to see. He listened to her theories, and their process had made her a better detective. Other homicide cops had made fun of Cronan’s strange ways until his clearance rate surpassed theirs.

That’s when the smack talk stopped.

“The way this park is laid out, it’s easy to see why we may not find a witness,” Sam O’Brien said. “There’s a narrow road behind those trees. North Howe Street. It winds through the park and has blind spots where the road curves. It’s an easy in and out. With all these lights on now, you can’t see it very well from here, but I’ve got people walking it, looking for anything suspicious. At night, that road probably doesn’t get much traffic.”

“
So someone that knew about it could have driven into the park, accosted our victim, and left without being seen. Is that what you’re saying?” Angel asked.

“Yep.” O’Brien shrugged. “A guy could’ve been in and out of this park PDQ
.”

“
But to stage that scenario, how would they know she’d be here?” she questioned, without expecting an answer. “This could be a random act of violence, a crime of opportunity, but I still don’t understand why she was here.”

Although Angel understood O’Brien’s assessment of the park layout, his reasoning behind his ‘one guy’ theory had been a leap in logic she wasn’t ready to make. Sure, men committed most violent crimes, but there were always exceptions. A strong woman could have committed the murder. Or more than one person could have done the deed. Keeping an open mind at this stage of the investigation worked best. She had a bigger question in her mind. Why had the victim been in the park in the first place?

“Any surveillance cameras?” she asked.

“
Yeah, there were, but don’t get your hopes up. Life ain’t that easy.” O’Brien grimaced. “None of them were working in the park. Idiots vandalized them. The city has a work order to fix ‘em, but that’s been on the books for over a year. Damned budget cuts. But we’ll check other cameras in the area. We might get lucky.”

Angel took a deep breath and let out a sigh.
“You know, that jogger was damned lucky. If he had come through the park with the killer here, he might have had a real reason to run, and we’d be working two bodies.”