Cavanaugh Rules. Marie Ferrarella
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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 the head of the Crime Scene Lab.”
“Boy, you sure have every angle covered, don’t you, Good?” he laughed.
Kendra bristled. “I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”
Now that was definitely amusement in his eyes. “Would you rather I called you Bad?” It was clearly a teasing remark and perhaps under other circumstances—before life had trampled all over her heart—she might have picked up the banter, even enjoyed it. But she was what she was and there was no going back.
Still, it didn’t stop her from noticing that the man had the kind of smile a woman could get lost in—even a sensible woman.
But not her, of course.
Still, she wished the chief hadn’t picked him to be her partner. Going it alone—even with an increased workload—would have been better for her in the long run.
“What I’d rather was that my old partner was still around.”
He surprised her by leaning in and whispering, “Lemonade, Good. When life throws lemons at you, you make lemonade.”
Her eyes held his for a long moment. Until she found herself sinking into them. She backpedaled quickly. “I don’t like lemonade.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” he murmured before turning back to the murder scene.
Chapter 3
“Hey, Abilene, what do you—”
Kendra stopped abruptly. She’d assumed that the detective was behind her, but when she turned around, she only saw the crime scene investigators in the room.
“Great,” she muttered. “Now he’s wandering off.” Biting off a few ripe words, she went to look for him.
She found her new partner in the bedroom. Abilene stood before the narrow mirrored closet. The sliding door was in the open position and he was staring into it.
Glancing over his shoulder, Kendra saw nothing that would have captured his attention so intently. Was she missing something, or was he one of those people who stared off into space as he pieced things together in his mind?
“So, what do you think?” she finally asked him.
If she’d surprised him by coming up behind him, Abilene gave no indication. Turning from the closet, he looked at her as he lobbed her question back to her.
“You’re the expert.”
Did that mean he was unwilling to state an opinion, or that he was giving her her due? So far she really had no idea how to read this man and that bothered her. More than that, it annoyed her.
Hell, everything about this man annoyed her, not the least of which was that he seemed to be getting under her skin and this was only day one of their temporary partnership. What was she going to be like a month into this ordeal? She didn’t want to think about it.
Kendra was aware that learning to pick up signals from this man would take time, but she’d gotten more impatient in this difficult past year and it made her less willing to wait. Jason’s accident and subsequent suicide had made her want to seize things immediately, solve crimes yesterday. It was hard regaining her stride when all she wanted to do was run, not walk and certainly not stroll.
Abilene was still looking at her. Waiting for her opinion—or at least pretending to. Either way, she gave it to him.
She glanced back toward the living room, then said, “Looks to me as if Ryan Burnett and his girlfriend got into a fight—cause unknown at the moment—and in a fit of temper, he hit her with that bust. When he realized what he’d done—and that she was dead—he apparently got scared and took off.”
“Stopping to pack?” Abilene asked.
He indicated the cluster of bare hangers in the closet. Off to one side of the tasteful, small bedroom was a black lacquered bureau. Several of its drawers were hanging open. From the disarray left behind, it was obvious that some items had been hastily grabbed from there, too.
She shrugged, amending her theory to fit the scene. “Maybe Ryan decided to take off permanently. Man’s going to need more than a toothbrush if he’s starting a new life somewhere else.”
“That shows clear thinking,” Abilene protested. “It doesn’t jibe with a supposed crime of impulse,” he pointed out.
Kendra saw no contradiction. “The man’s an accountant. He’s supposed to be a clear thinker. It’s the nature of the beast.” She glanced at the bed. It had no comforter or blanket