Blood Score (5 page)

“
Like I need another excuse not to exercise.” Schumacher smirked and rubbed his belly.

“
You find the murder weapon?” Cronan asked the forensics guys.

“
Not yet,” O’Brien said. “But we’ll let you know if something turns up.”

“
Good. Thanks.” Her partner stood and got her attention with a nudge of his chin. When he moved closer, she knew he’d be ready to talk.

“
No defensive wounds, and she’s still wearing her pearl necklace and a ring. This doesn’t feel like a robbery, although someone might have wanted it to look that way by taking the purse,” Cronan said. He kept his voice low so the media wouldn’t pick up a sound bite. “She’s also got manicured finger nails, perfect teeth, and flawless skin. Her clothes aren’t cheap either. I smell greenbacks.”

“
Don’t tell me you didn’t notice her breasts look augmented.” Angel raised an eyebrow. “Those cost money, too.”

“
Yeah, I noticed, but you shouldn’t have brought that up.” He looked over his shoulder at the forensics guys. “Not with those two around.”

Schumacher didn’t disappoint.
“Hey, you mean those bodacious tah tahs aren’t for real?”

Angel didn’t respond to the obvious ploy to get a rise out of her, but when Cronan looked at her sideways, she said in a low voice,
“What is it with guys and boobs?”

“
Oh, it’s purely a biological imperative. We really have no choice. It’s completely…out of our hands.” Cronan waggled his gloved fingers and grinned.

“
But doesn’t it bother you when they aren’t real?” she persisted.

“
Well, I know the Easter Bunny isn’t real, but I still like the taste of chocolate eggs,” Cronan said with a straight face.

“
Okay, you win. I’m out.” Angel conceded the argument and changed the subject. “So you think our vic comes from money?”

Her partner was a card carrying cynic, world class. He couldn’t resist flaunting it.

“That’s my guess. That means the chief will be an even bigger pain in the ass. Having money shouldn’t buy you justice, but that’s reality.”

Not on Cronan’s watch
, Angel thought. Her partner believed everyone deserved a voice. His obsession in finding justice for
any
victim had made his investigations personal. His open cases haunted him until he officially closed the file. The dead weren’t mere case numbers, and Angel liked that.

“
Wait a minute. What’s that sound?” Cronan cocked his head. “It’s like…a hum.”

“
I don’t hear anything.” Schumacher shrugged.

Cronan listened for the noise.
“There it is again. You hear it now?” He pointed. “It came from over here.”

People carrying a rabbit’s foot for good luck made no sense to Cronan, considering what happened to the rabbit. He didn’t think of himself as a lucky man, but he did believe a guy made his own damned luck if he paid attention. When he stepped away from the body to search the ground around the twisted tree, he felt like a fortunate man. Given the noise of a crime scene, it had been a stroke of good luck that he’d heard the sound at all.

He knelt by the massive root system and took out a Kel-lite from his pocket. He flashed its beam into the shadows near the roots. Something shiny caught his attention. He reached in with a gloved hand and pulled out what he’d found to show his partner.

“A cell phone,” Angel said. “Sweet.”

The phone looked new—slick and black—like it hadn’t been outdoors and exposed to the elements.

“
That phone could belong to our murder victim,” she said.

“
Or the killer,” Cronan said. “Either way, we got a lucky break.”

He flipped open the phone and held it up in his gloved hand for Angel to see.

“The voicemail message alert is set to vibrate,” he said. “That was the humming I heard. Maybe we’ll find a name in here.”

His partner leaned over his shoulder and watched him examine the cell phone for the registered owner information. He hit the keys using the tip of his pen. When he found what he searched for, he looked her in the eye.

“We’ll have to confirm this, but it appears our vic’s name is Olivia Davenport,” he said. “And she’s got mail.”

Cronan punched up the voice mail message and hit the speaker button for Angel to hear a man’s voice on several messages.

“He knows her well enough not to leave his name. It sounds like she missed a dinner date,” he said. “We’ll definitely want to talk to this guy.” After playing the last message, he searched Olivia Davenport’s directory of contacts to match the phone number with the caller’s name. “All she has listed for him is the name Ethan, but let’s see who answers.”

He hit the call back button and the phone rang until it rolled into voice mail. He ended the call without saying anything after he heard the outgoing message. ‘
At the tone, you know what to do
.’ No name given, first or last, but it was the same voice as the caller named Ethan.

“
With a name, we can run a background check on our vic to find next of kin and locate an address through DMV.” Angel stared down at the body. “I hate being the messenger, but with the media on this, we’ve got to locate and notify the family ASAP. There’s no telling what these reporters will show on TV in the morning or run in the papers. If it bleeds, it leads.”

Angel jotted a note and added,
“She doesn’t look the type who’d ride a bus here. DMV will give us a vehicle description to look for.”

“
Yeah, I hear that,” Cronan agreed. “You’re way ahead of me.”

“
I’ll take that.” Schumacher held open a plastic evidence bag and waited for him to drop the cell phone into it. “I’ll let you know what we find out and put a rush on it.”

“
Yeah, thanks.”

The phone would be processed for fingerprints and examined for other evidence. The contact information for people that the victim had listed would be downloaded. They’d need a warrant to obtain Olivia Davenport’s phone records to help them build a case and pin down her whereabouts prior to the murder.

But for now, they had a potential ID on the victim and a phone number to trace for a guy named Ethan. Between any calls the victim might have made while she was still alive and Ethan’s ‘
where are you
’ messages, the time stamp for the calls would help narrow the timeline of what happened before she died.

“
We’ve got a name and a place to start. Have you seen enough?” he asked his partner as the ME’s assistant rolled up a gurney with a black body bag draped over it. “We should head for the station and get a jump on it.”

“
Yeah, but gimme a sec.”

Angel talked to Schumacher and the ME’s assistant one last time before she joined him again. They shoved through the media line without incident, and as they walked back to their vehicles, his partner didn’t say much until—

“Why do you talk to them?” she asked.

“
Schumacher and O’Brien? Good question.”

Angel stifled a smile.
“You know what I mean. You talk to dead people, Gabe. That doesn’t exactly make you a spokesperson for the Mental Health Association. Do the dead ever have anything worthwhile to say?”

“
More than Schumacher and O’Brien. Trust me.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and kept walking. He felt comfortable in the silence between them. “Talking to the dead reminds me they were a daughter or a son. Or someone made love to them, or they had childhood fights with a sister or brother. They aren’t just stiffs, you know?”

“
Yeah, I can see that.”

When she got to her ride, Angel didn’t get in right away. She leaned against her vehicle and waited for him to say more. Like a good cop—and an even better partner—she knew he hadn’t told her everything.

“You’re not letting me off the hook, are you?”

“
Would you?” She cocked her head and smiled.

“
Good point.”

He looked down and kicked a stone, unsure what he’d say. Lying about his past came too easily. With most people he didn’t care, but lying to Angel felt wrong, like Manny would look over her shoulder and call him on his bullshit. He couldn’t see staring into her eyes and yanking her chain, not about this. He’d felt closer to Angel after she married Manny, as if she were family.

In the end, he resorted to the truth.

“
When I was eight, my parents were murdered. I came home from school and found them. It was brutal, Angel. One of the bloodiest crime scenes I’ve ever seen, and that’s sayin’ something.”

No matter how straightforward he made it sound, the words had always been hard to hear, especially coming from his own mouth. The anger he felt was never far from the surface, even though he’d worked hard to disguise it. He’d certainly found ways to release the rage. The fight club was only one. His life had stopped that day, and the stigma had always been a part of him. There was no getting around that.

“After my family was butchered, I learned not to get too attached to anything, especially people.” He stared into the dark, unable to look at her. “Whatever life a kid is supposed to have, I got that taken away, and the system never helped.”

His mind flashed back to when his world had been ripped apart. What had happened to his mother and father had been vicious and perverted. The suffocating stench of their crime scene and the horrified looks on their faces had ripped his heart out. The torture they had endured before they died enraged him, even now. No human being deserved to die like that. When he worked crime scenes as a cop, some murders were worse than others for him, but he had never told a partner about his family until now. Telling his story to Angel made it different.

“You know…I want to believe there’s more to all this,” he said. “I wake up some nights with a knot in my belly, thinking ‘
what if this is all there is
.’ My parents were cheated of their one chance. Some animal stole their lives, and the bastard got away with it, but that wasn’t good enough. He took me down too. I got a life’s sentence.”

It never took much to tip him over the edge when he talked about what had happened. His breathing went out of control, and his heart thumped harder like on those awful nights when he’d wake up in a cold sweat. But when he looked at Angel, he suddenly remembered where he was and knew he’d been an inconsiderate moron. He hadn’t given one thought to what she’d been through with Manny until he saw the tear run down her cheek, and the urge to apologize hit him hard.

“I’m sorry. I should never have—”

“
No, I’m the one who brought it up. I had no idea. That must have been terrible.” She reached out to touch his arm. “I’m sorry, Gabe.”

The intimacy shocked him, especially coming from her. If he were a better man, he wouldn’t have wanted more.

“I don’t know about life after death, but I do feel Manny with me,” she confided. “In the little things. I’ll do laundry and start to hum a song that we used to like, out of the blue. Or when I’ve turned out the lights and am lying in bed, waiting to fall asleep, I can sometimes smell his skin. Is that weird?”

“
No, you miss him.” He shrugged. “It’s natural.”

Although he missed Manny too, his cynical side didn’t believe the dead truly communicated with the living. His parents never did, or at least he never opened his mind to the possibility. As a kid, he felt detached from everything and everyone. All he had was the shock of his profound loss and a deep-rooted rage that never went away. If that was the dead reaching out to the living, he could do without the constant reminder.

“They never caught who killed your parents?”

“
No. It’s a cold case.” He shook his head. “I didn’t have any other relatives, so I was raised by the state. That’s where I met Manny. He got me through a really dark time. He became like family to me. I miss him, too.”

“
Yeah, he told me about how you two met. He said it took a while for that chip you had on your shoulder to drop off.” She smiled.

“
No, he knocked it off. We didn’t exactly see eye to eye at first.”

“
But it didn’t take long for you two to become inseparable.”

“
More like insufferable.” He grinned.

“
But just so you know, he never told me anything about your parents. Guess he took that as private between you.”

Cronan nodded.
“Yeah, Manny was good at keeping secrets. But after what happened to my folks, I take each murder case real personal, probably more than I should. That’s why I don’t talk about it.”

“
Is that your subtle way of telling me to keep my mouth shut?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “Don’t worry, partner. This Ramirez knows how to keep a secret too. No one will hear your story from me.”

He stood on the curb under a streetlight and waited for her to get into her vehicle, but Angel had something more to say.

“Thanks for confiding in me, Gabe. I know that wasn’t easy.”

Cronan shrugged and forced a smile.
“You’re my partner, Angel.”

“
For better or worse.” She waved and got in. “See you at the station.”

After she pulled from the curb, he said,
“Yeah, better for me. For you? Not so much.”

Cronan headed for his vehicle and stuck to the shadows. The darkness helped him think—and remember.

***