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