The Angel. Carla Neggers
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Abigail found the Public Garden a soothing, pleasant place to be, with its graceful Victorian walks and statues, its formal flower beds and labeled trees, its mini suspension bridge over the curving pond. Technically, it was a botanical garden—a refuge in the heart of the city of Boston.
Tonight, it was the scene of a bizarre, as yet unexplained death. Police lights and the garden’s own Victorian-looking lamps illuminated the scene as detectives, patrol officers, crime scene technicians and reporters did their work. By tomorrow morning, there would be virtually no sign of what had gone on here tonight. The swan boats, a popular Public Garden attraction for over a century, could resume their graceful tour of the shallow water.
Abigail stopped pacing, grateful, at least, that she’d worn flats to tonight’s reception. Trees, flowers and grass were still dripping from the downpour. Most likely, it had been raining, and raining hard, when Victor Sarakis ended up in the water. The medical examiner had already removed the body for an autopsy. Anything was possible. Heart attack, stroke, an unfortunate slip in the heavy rain.
Pushed, tripped, hit on the back of the head.
Abigail wasn’t ready to jump to any conclusions.
She glanced sideways at Bob O’Reilly, who’d decided, on his own, to interview the two students. Reinterview, Abigail thought, irritated. The responding officers had talked to the students. She’d talked to them. Now Bob was talking to them. For no good reason, either, except that he was a senior detective with decades of experience on her and presumably knew what he was doing. But she wished he’d go back up to Beacon Street and listen to his daughter play Irish music.
The students—summer engineering students from the Midwest—looked worn out. They could have gone back to their dorm a long time ago—they just didn’t.
They’d told Bob the same story, about cutting through the Public Garden from a bookstore on Newbury Street, hoping to beat the storm and get to a friend’s apartment on Cambridge Street. When the skies opened up on them, they debated going back to the bookstore or pushing on to their friend’s place.
Then they’d spotted a body in the pond.
“You could tell he was dead by looking at him?” Bob gave them one of his trademark skeptical snorts. “How?”
“I don’t know,” the thinner of the two students said. He had a scraggly beard and was shivering as his wet clothes dried in the breeze. “It was obvious.”
“He didn’t look like he’d been in the water that long,” his friend said. He was meatier, and he’d gotten just as wet, but he wasn’t shivering.
“Long enough,” Bob said.
The students didn’t respond.
“You didn’t see him before you noticed him in the pond?” Bob asked.
They shook their heads. They’d answered the same question before, maybe twice already. Abigail knew she’d asked it.
Bob gave them a thoughtful look. “How do you like BU?”
The skinny student didn’t hide his surprise—and maybe a touch of annoyance—at the personal question as well as his friend did. “What?”
“My daughter goes there. Music major.”
“We don’t know any music majors,” the meaty kid said quickly.
Abigail bit her tongue at the exchange, but Bob didn’t mention Fiona by name and finally told the students to go on back to their dorms. This time, they didn’t hesitate.
Bob turned to her. His red hair had frizzed up in the humidity and rain, and his freckles stood out on his pale skin. “You look like you want to smack me.”
“It’s a thought.”
He obviously didn’t care. She’d never met anyone with a thicker hide. She owned a triple-decker in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood, with him and a third detective, an arrangement that for the most part worked out well, but tonight, for the first time, she could see the potential for complications.
“Press is all over this one,” Bob said, nodding to a camera crew. “Some rich guy from Cambridge tripping on his shoelaces and drowning in the Public Garden swan pond.”
“We don’t know he’s rich, and, actually, it’s called the lagoon.”
“Lagoon? Lagoon reminds me of Gilligan’s Island. Why don’t they just call it a pond?”
“Maybe it’s a Victorian thing.” Abigail ran both her hands through her short, dark curls, noticing wet spots where water had dropped onto her head from leaves of the nearby shade trees. “And Mr. Sarakis was wearing loafers. No laces to trip over.”
“Figure of speech.”
Abigail said nothing.
“This is a straightforward death investigation, Abigail. Guy running in the rain slips or trips and goes flying, hits his head on the concrete, falls into the drink and drowns. A freak accident.”
“A good detective doesn’t let assumptions drive conclusions,” she said, adding with just a touch of sarcasm, “I wonder who gave me that advice when I decided to become a detective?”
“Don’t give me a hard time. I’m not in the mood.”
She didn’t blame him for wanting Victor Sarakis’s death to be an accident, considering his niece was the one who’d called 911.
Abigail kept her mouth shut. Normally she would appreciate Bob’s insight, his questions. He’d been in Boston law enforcement through some of its most difficult crime years. He wasn’t bitter and burnt-out so much as cynical. He’d seen it all, he liked to say, and not much of it had been good. But she didn’t want him around right now. It wasn’t just because of Keira’s involvement with the case, either.
“Never mind my bad mood,” he said. “You’ve been prickly for days.”
“So?”
He didn’t answer, and she felt him studying her in the same way he had when they’d first met eight years ago. He hadn’t believed she’d make a good police officer, much less a good homicide detective. She’d won him over slowly, despite what he considered a lot of baggage. Her father was the FBI director, a liability from Bob O’Reilly’s perspective because it brought attention to her. By itself, it was enough for him to rule her out as police officer material. But that wasn’t all. She’d quit law school after her husband was murdered four days into their Maine honeymoon, a case that had remained unresolved for seven years, until a break last summer.
Finally, she knew how Chris—her first love—had died, and who had killed him. For seven years, it was all she’d wanted in life. Answers. Justice. The lifting of the burden of not knowing what had happened that awful day.
But the break in the case had changed her life in a way she hadn’t anticipated. During her hunt for her husband’s killer last summer, she’d also opened herself up to falling in love again.
She could feel Bob’s eyes on her and brought herself back to the present. “There’s no evidence of foul play,” he said.
Abigail chose her words carefully. “So far, no, there isn’t.”
“He had his wallet in his back pocket.”
Indeed, the wallet had made identifying Victor Sarakis easy because it came complete with his driver’s license, ATM card, credit cards, insurance cards, bookstore frequent-buyer card and seventy-seven dollars in cash. No loose change, unless it had fallen out of his pants into the water or grass. If it had, the crime scene guys would find it.
But Abigail knew Bob had raised the point about the wallet because it played into his desire for Sarakis’s death to be an accident.
“What do you suppose he was doing out here in the rain?” she asked, knowing Bob wouldn’t like the question but refusing to let him bulldoze her.