seat, then pulled out the seat belt and secured it. “Never cared much for driving in traffic.”
Kendra frowned as she started up the vehicle. So far, Abilene seemed to be going out of his way to come across as agreeable. But she wasn’t about to be lulled into a false sense of security. Joe had tripped her up several times before they’d found their work rhythm. Since he was her first partner after she’d been awarded her gold shield, she had nothing to compare the older man to and assumed that all male partners were going to challenge her straight out of the box until she proved herself capable.
After being on the job for over two years in the Homicide Division, she found it more than a little annoying to be sent back to square one. But that was the price she had to pay for being a woman—and for being related to the brass. Because her father was head of the CSI lab, she was acquainted with accusations of nepotism. But now that she was connected to the Cavanaughs, she had a feeling that she would never know a peaceful moment again.
She spared Abilene a glance as they took off. Nope, she thought. Never again.
The five-story apartment building where Lt. Holmes had sent them was located in the more well-off—although by no means rich—section of Aurora. Leaving the unmarked Crown Victoria parked in a space intended for deliveries, Kendra made sure that the police light was visible before she and Abilene went up the four flights in the elevator to the scene of the crime.
“What, no stairs?” Abilene asked, amused when she opted for the elevator.
“I thought I’d let you save your energy in case there’s a need for some heavy lifting,” Kendra told him without missing a beat.
“Thoughtful,” he quipped as they got off.
The forced smile came and went in a blink of an eye. “I try.”
“Yeah, me, too,” he said, looking at her significantly.
Something in her gut undulated for half a heartbeat. She banked it down and walked faster.
The apartment in question wasn’t hard to find. The immediate area directly before the crime scene was crowded with curious people. Apparently people from the building’s other apartments, as well as an influx of others drawn by word of mouth, were gathered about the hallway in clusters like bees circling a hive.
The yellow tape strung across a doorway must have attracted them, Kendra couldn’t help thinking.
The superintendent, when they finally located him, appeared rather young, inexperienced, and seemed completely distraught. Every few minutes he kept nervously repeating that this was his “first dead body” and that viewing it wasn’t nearly as “cool” as he’d thought it would be. He seemed genuinely disappointed about that.
Kendra called the slight man a few choice names in her head, but for now kept them to herself. She glanced in Abilene’s direction and guessed by his expression that perhaps a few of the same names for the super had occurred to him as well.
Maybe they weren’t that different after all, she mused.
Getting down to business, Kendra went directly toward the body. Lying facedown in the middle of the living room, the victim was completely covered with a king-size blanket that appeared to have been taken from the lone bedroom. No limbs were peeking out at either end, but a pool of angry dark red blood haloed the blanket, bearing silent testimony to the fact that someone had indeed died in this apartment. No one ever lost that much blood and survived.
Squatting down beside the victim, Kendra raised a corner of the blanket and got her first view of the dead woman. Her reaction was always the same. Her heart would feel as if it was constricting in her chest as sympathy flooded through her.
The victim, a woman most likely in her twenties, was lying facedown on what had been a beige rug. The back of her head had been struck hard and was apparently the source of all the blood on the floor. Kendra’s first guess was that the blow to the head appeared to be the cause of death.
Dropping the blanket back over the dead woman, Kendra rose carefully to her feet, ignoring Abilene’s extended hand, offering her aid.
“Our killer knew the victim,” she commented, more to herself than to Abilene. She wasn’t quite ready to talk to him just yet, at least not in the role of her partner. She regarded him more as a casual observer. Baby steps, she counseled herself. “And apparently he felt remorseful enough to cover her up so he wouldn’t have to look at her after he’d ended her life.”
“Or she,” Abilene interjected.
Caught off guard, Kendra stopped and looked at him quizzically. “What?”
“Or she,” Abilene repeated. “The killer could have been a woman. Doesn’t take much to pick up that statue and swing it hard enough to do some major damage at the point of contact.”
Abilene nodded toward what appeared to be a rather cheap bust of Shakespeare lying on the floor not that far from the prone body.
Kendra stared down at the faux bronze bust. Shakespeare, no less.
You just never knew, did you?
Her first thought would have been that someone who’d gone out and bought something like that would have been mild-mannered and cultured. So much for being a profiler.
“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed.
Moving over to the bust, she squatted down for a better look at it. It was the murder weapon, all right. There was a thin red line of blood at one corner. The killer had obviously come up behind the victim and hit her when she hadn’t been looking.
A lovers’ quarrel? Or calculated, premeditated murder?
Too bad the bust couldn’t talk.
More than four hundred years after the fact and the bard was apparently still killing people off, Kendra thought cynically. Except now they didn’t get up for a final bow once the curtain fell.
With a suppressed sigh, Kendra rose to her feet again.
And then, just as she turned back to look at the prone figure lying on the floor beneath the ginger-colored blanket, one of the crime scene investigators who had arrived earlier came over to bag the ancient-looking bust.
“That comment about the killer knowing the victim,” Abilene began.
For one tension-free second, she’d actually forgotten about him. Too bad that second couldn’t have lasted a bit longer.
Abilene’s remark, hanging in midair like that, had her looking at him sharply, anticipating some sort of a confrontation regarding her thought process.
Was he going to challenge something else she’d said? Already?
Kendra eyed the man she knew her sisters would have thought was a living, breathing hunk, trying to see past his chiseled exterior. She waited for the verbal duel to begin.
“Watch a lot of procedural television, do you?” he asked.
“I don’t have to.” Although she did, she silently admitted. The shows intrigued her. But he didn’t have to know that. She debated saying anything further, then decided to go ahead. “My father’s
