Blood Score (22 page)

“Did you off yourself? Or did someone think the world would be a better place without you?”

Cronan wondered if Ethan knew about his neighbor’s obsessive interest in him. Had he any notion of how far his stalker had gone to become a part of the intimacy of his life? That backstage argument had to come from a history between Chandler and McFarland that now stretched to Rachel and Bryce and beyond.

As he paced the floor staring at McFarland’s secret compartment, an idea took shape in Cronan’s mind.

If McFarland’s death had been staged to look like a suicide—so Olivia’s real killer could point the finger at a dead man—how much did the murderer know about the man’s illegal surveillance of Chandler? McFarland’s room and his obsessive behavior felt secret. He couldn’t picture the guy sharing that with anyone, but if someone had a key to his residence and got a glimpse of his shrine to Chandler before a CPD investigative team had access to it, what could’ve been in plain sight and grabbed before Schumacher and company got there? Someone would’ve had time alone in McFarland’s place to plant the burner and check things out.

That missing key had more implications and had turned into a greater mystery, but Cronan’s gut told him that McFarland kept his video collection somewhere special—the lake house.

If evidence had been removed from McFarland’s residence, they may never know what had been worth killing over…or if the recordings had anything to do with Olivia’s death. But that also meant he and Angel would have an ace in the hole to draw out the real killer, if they played their cards right. With the possibility that more recordings were kept by McFarland at a recently inherited lake property, even a savvy killer might be curious enough to come out of hiding to find out.

Cronan unhooked the TV and closed up the slot that housed the surveillance gear, careful to leave it as he’d found it. Discovering the equipment felt like a breakthrough that could be parlayed into more.

If someone had killed McFarland and staged his death to look like a suicide, it had been a clever move to plant the burner phone to point the finger at McFarland for Olivia’s murder. But once the killer had his hands on McFarland’s key, he might’ve been surprised at what he found in his home. Whoever did that would have to leave the secret room in place to show McFarland as the stalker he was, to give the man a deeper motive. But if there were digital recordings of something embarrassing, or anything that led to another motive to kill Olivia, those recordings would be irresistible to the real killer, if Cronan’s theory held up.

“Yeah, McFarland had a secret stash somewhere else. It could happen.” Cronan left the crime scene and locked it up.

As he headed to the lobby, he thought about his next move. He liked the idea of drawing out a ruthless killer, but he had mixed feelings about the videos. He should’ve been happier, but he didn’t know how Angel would take the news that Ethan’s privacy had been invaded and there could be recordings of God knew what.

For Angel’s sake, Cronan wanted to give the musician the benefit of the doubt that he’d been telling his partner the truth about Olivia being the one into the rough stuff, but what if he’d lied about that and there was undisputed proof? Lying about his sex life didn’t make Chandler a killer. He could only be protecting his reputation, but Cronan had learned from many other cases that liars had more to hide.

Either way, he knew Angel wouldn’t like questioning everything she’d come to believe about Ethan Chandler.

***

After midnight

Angel lay in her bed in the dark, staring at the shadows of her ceiling. On her nightstand she had an iPod playing, and she listened to the faint strains of Ethan’s violin. She had the volume turned down so the seductive melody could be white noise to lure her to sleep, but whenever she closed her eyes she pictured Ethan’s powerful performance on stage. The passion on his handsome face as he played and the fluid grace of his strong fingers were impossible to forget.

With eyes shut, she thought of Ethan, but with her eyes wide open, another man kept her awake—Gabe Cronan. Two very different men.

Ethan wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met. He was twenty-five, a few years younger than she was and he was physically beautiful, but she felt that the challenges he’d face in his young life had blessed him with an ancient and worldly soul. He had a shy vulnerability that made her want to protect him, and when she imagined being with him in bed, she pictured him as a generous and giving lover.

It hadn’t been a stretch to hear Olivia had exploited his innocence by sexually experimenting with him. Angel had never been one for playing games. She didn’t have to with Manny. He satisfied her body, her mind, and her heart, but with Ethan she had to admit the thought of making him a fantasy lover had lingered. Angel knew it would be exploitive and would objectify him. She’d never go through with her dark desires, because they were nothing more than fantasies, but she could see how Olivia might’ve given in to her needs with Ethan. His boyish and idyllic beauty, his age, and even his blindness made him vulnerable to women who liked to take charge or had a secret desire to school a young lover.

Her partner was the complete opposite of someone like Ethan Chandler.

There was a potency and strength in Gabe, with an underlying element of danger that gave him edge. He was dark and brooding and closed off when he needed space. He had a wicked and devilish glint to his amazing blue eyes. She’d seen his eyes become intimidating weapons on the job, but she could easily imagine those eyes turning into irresistible lures to attract the right woman to his bed after dark.

He was a guy’s guy and a loner, but if he ever let a woman into his life, Angel knew he’d fall hard and completely like a wolf alpha male that mated for life. With Gabe, there was no middle ground. A woman would have to take the whole package—even his dark side—in order to love him body and soul, because that’s the way he would love her.

In bed there would be no coy games. Gabe would be the kind of lover who would satisfy a woman to her very toes. Why would any woman in her right mind want him to play another role? She smiled when she thought about tying him down so she could take her time with his body, but with Gabe, she would want him unleashed and free. That made her smile again, but her amusement came and went.

You’re being stupid, Angel
, she chastised.
It’s not like you get to order off a Chinese food menu, pick one from column A or B and you get fried rice and an eggroll.

If she
did
get to pick between Ethan and Gabe, her partner was the greater risk for her heart. He wasn’t a fling or a fantasy to try and leave behind. Although she had her job to think about if she ever crossed the line with her partner, loving Gabe would be a one-way trip. No retreat, only surrender. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for surrender.

When her iPod changed tracks and another song started, her cell phone rang and made her heart jump. A call this time of night for a homicide cop was never a good thing, but when she looked at the display screen, she recognized the phone number.

She answered the call as her face flushed with heat.

“
Hello?”

Her voice cracked.

“Angel?”

“
Yes,” she whispered.

Caller ID told her who was on the other end of the line, but she wanted to hear him say his name.

“This is Ethan.” His voice was soft and low. When he breathed into the phone, she heard the rustle of his bed sheets. “I couldn’t sleep…and I didn’t know who else to call. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

Angel shut her eyes and swallowed, hard. Ethan Chandler was a famous world-renowned violinist. With all the people in his life, she found it sad that he had to reach out to a virtual stranger when he needed to talk.

Had his dead girlfriend been that person for him? She didn’t feel like questioning Ethan’s motives for calling her at this hour, because she’d spent far too much time gazing into death’s never ending black mirror. She understood what it felt like to be lost and floundering in grief.

She remembered the suffocating paralysis of grief where days ran into nights in a mindless blur. When she was ready to come up for air, she often talked to anyone who would listen, because she needed to reach out and strangers didn’t judge her inability to move on.

“No, you didn’t wake me. I couldn’t sleep either.” She pulled her blanket over her breasts and nestled into her pillows.

“
Is that
my
music?” he asked.

He had a smile in his voice and the intimacy of that made it feel as if he were lying next to her. She’d left her iPod playing. He must’ve heard it.

“Yes.”

Angel knew she should have asked why he’d called her cell this time of night. He was still a suspect in his girlfriend’s murder. She should have insisted he stop reaching out to her like this, but the truth was…she
liked
it.

Chapter 14

Grand Central Police Station

The next morning

Cronan had heard from the chief that Charles Davenport wanted face time to hear the latest on his daughter’s murder case, but that wasn’t the only reason he was coming to the city. Olivia’s body had been released for the family to make burial arrangements for their only daughter.

Angel was on her commute to the station when Davenport showed early. After Cronan got a message that he had a visitor, he left his partner a message on her desk, telling her where they’d be. Olivia’s father paced the waiting area. Dressed in a sport coat, polo shirt, and slacks, he looked more suited to a country club than a police station. Cronan greeted the man and escorted him to a quiet interview room where they could talk.

“
Can I get you coffee?” he asked and waved a hand for Mr. Davenport to sit across from him.

“
No, thank you. I’d rather get this over with.”

Cronan didn’t have the heart to tell him that it would
never
be over. He knew that firsthand. The violent death of a loved one was a stigma that never went away.

“
I had to come, to see what progress you’ve made on your investigation. Are you getting any closer to finding Olivia’s killer?”

Charles Davenport looked out of place in the homicide interview room. His eyes darted from the observation window to the door. Cronan thought the quiet room would give them privacy for a grieving father to ask hard questions, but simply being at a police station made Davenport look uncomfortable. Cronan couldn’t blame him.

“We’re working through the evidence and looking into Olivia’s life to give us insight,” he told him what he could, but for an active case, he couldn’t say much.

Rumors of McFarland’s death being a possible suicide had hit the media. The only reason it got much play is because of where he had died—in Ethan Chandler’s building where reporters were already camped out. Cronan thought that the reason Charles Davenport pushed for an update on Olivia’s case had been due to hearing about McFarland. He expected the man to press him on how the death of Chandler’s neighbor was linked to Olivia’s murder, but when that hadn’t been the man’s first question, Cronan decided to see where the conversation went. With his theories on McFarland still fresh and unsubstantiated, he thought it was a good idea not to share his speculations with Olivia’s father.

“Have you thought of anything else that would help us?” Cronan asked. “Tell me about your relationship with your daughter.”

Gabe found it hard to read the man’s eyes. They had a dead quality to them. Maybe that’s how grief manifested in him. Either way, that made it difficult to read between his lines.

“Olivia and I had been close when she was a girl. We did everything together, but after she moved out, she cut me out of her life.”

“
Why do you think she did that?”

“
I can be rather opinionated, I suppose.” The man shook his head and avoided his eyes. “I’ve always treated Olivia as if she were my own child.”

“
Wait. She’s not yours?”

“
Not biologically speaking. I adopted her when she was a baby. Her real father died in a car accident. I met Elizabeth when Olivia was a toddler, and we were married a year later. I adopted her to solidify the family.”

Cronan thought it strange that Charles Davenport talked about the adoption as if it were a business merger, until he said…

“But I always loved her…” Davenport said. “…as if she were mine.”

Cronan had no doubt the man was close to Olivia. He’d seen the many pictures of their travels together, but those photos brought up different questions. His cop instincts pushed him to go down a path he hadn’t been prepared for.

“Was Olivia close to her mother?”

Mr. Davenport stopped short, fixed his eyes on Cronan, and said,
“Why do you ask?”

“
The photos I’ve seen of your family. It looked like you and Olivia shared similar interests, but your wife didn’t appear to feel the same. I wondered how that affected their relationship.”

“
Are you implying something?” The man looked insulted.

“
No. Just curious.”

It took a long moment for Charles Davenport to answer, but Cronan waited without a word. He’d learned that in any interview, silence could be used as a tool. People often filled the void in conversation, even when it was in their best interest to keep their mouth shut.

“Elizabeth didn’t share our enthusiasm for hunting and travel. It strained our relationship as a couple.”

“
How’s that?”

“
Olivia saw her mother as…a cliché. Whatever she could do to shock her sensibilities, she often did, until Elizabeth had enough. She asked me to stop giving Olivia money…to subsidize her…excessive lifestyle, as she put it.”

“
Did you?”

Charles heaved a sigh. Cronan knew what his answer would be before he even opened his mouth.

“No. I couldn’t. I saw too much of my spirited and adventurous influence in her. That made it hard to say no.”

“
Do you think your wife knew that you kept the financial support going?”

Gabe balanced his cop push for answers, anywhere he could find them, against his strong impulse to console the father of a murder victim. The puzzle of Olivia’s life, and the feeling that he didn’t understand something, forced him to dig in directions that seemed unlikely. How far would the Davenports go to protect their social standing from a daughter who pushed the boundaries on scandal?

“No. I made sure…” the man stopped. “Why are you asking about our relationship with Olivia?”

From the look in the man’s eyes, Cronan didn’t have to spell it out for him. Charles Davenport’s jaw clenched, and his face grew stern.

“You must work in a vile dirty world, Detective. I can only assume you’re asking these questions because you’re trying to determine if we had anything to do with the death of our only child.”

Davenport was right. His natural progression in questions would’ve led to him ask if Charles and Elizabeth had alibis for the night of their daughter’s murder. Everything he’d seen in photographs and heard of Olivia’s life from her parents and others made him question any close relationship she had. He hadn’t planned on pushing in that direction when he sat with Mr. Davenport today, but he let his gut feelings guide him.

Cronan had faced angry and offended family members before. It was never easy to turn off his natural compassion to look on the dark side of human nature. He had a job to do—investigating murders, building a solid case of evidence, and taking killers off the streets. Often his tactics looked callous to those outside the job.

If he could turn off the sympathetic side of his nature, it would make aspects of his work easier, but that wasn’t who he’d become. That side of his personality wasn’t what made him good at his job. After years of investigating countless murders and being exposed to the darkest of motives, Cronan had developed a thick skin and learned ways to insulate him from that kind of depravity.

He had to remain objective, for the sake of his victims, but that didn’t mean he was immune to feeling like crap when he crossed the line.

“
FBI statistics show over fifty percent of victims knew their killers,” he told Davenport, keeping his voice low and steady. “That means friends, loved ones, co-workers…people they should’ve been able to trust. Your daughter became my responsibility when someone took her life. She’s in my hands now, and I won’t let her down, but that also means if you had anything to do with her murder, I won’t have blinders on because you’re her father. I hope you understand.”

Davenport blinked and sat back in his chair, staring at Cronan. Eventually he gave him what he needed to know, without Cronan having to ask. He made note of the alibi, a charity fundraiser held at the Navy Pier on the waterfront, where Elizabeth and Charles were invited patrons. Cronan would have to confirm their alibi with the organizers of the event and find credible witnesses who remembered seeing them there, but in his ‘
vile dirty world
,’ it wouldn’t be hard to slip out of a large function without anyone knowing. Oz Park wasn’t a long drive from the Navy Pier.

Imagining a big game hunter like Charles Davenport using a knife to kill his adopted daughter made Cronan sick, but he’d seen the dark drama of a parent killing a child played out many times before. Cronan couldn’t imagine being anything other than a homicide cop. What had happened to his parents had driven him to it, but he stayed in it because he loved the rush. What did that say about him?

After Davenport left the interview room, Cronan sat in his chair and stared down at his notepad. He felt a presence in the room and looked up to see Angel gazing at him with her arms crossed. He had a hard time reading her expression, except he felt sure she had heard the interview from the observation window. Before she said anything, he got up to head back to his desk.

As he pushed by her, he said,
“Everyone’s a suspect until they get ruled out. That’s how it is.”

Angel only touched his arm as he walked by her.

***

Minutes later

After Angel grabbed a cup of coffee, she found Gabe staring at the white board of details on the Davenport killing. She sat at her desk and waited until he spoke up. She’d seen that intense stare before.

Dressed in a crisp white shirt, a tasteful blue pattern tie, and dark charcoal slacks, Gabe wore his Glock in a brown leather shoulder holster and had his suit jacket on a hanger by his desk. His shirt looked freshly pressed, but something in his eyes told her he hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d seen him haunted by a case before. The look wasn’t new, but it always shut her out, even as his partner. Gabe went to a place in his mind where no one else could follow. He was a good man doing a tough job. Every cop had their own way of dealing with the hard ones.

She liked talking through the case details, but when things got tough, Gabe internalized his process and ‘felt’ his way through until he was ready to hash it out again. Fortunately he never required a quiet place to think. He had such focus that a bomb could go off in the homicide detail and Gabe wouldn’t even blink. She called Schumacher to get a forensics update, while Gabe drew on his mental hoodoo.

When she got off the phone, Gabe asked, “What did Schumacher have? Anything new?”

“
Prints on the burner were McFarland’s only,” she read from her notes. “He said that for a cell phone, the print patterns were off. It was like the phone had been wiped clean recently. McFarland’s prints were definitely there, but not all over the surface like they would normally be on a cell.”

People cleaned their phone from time to time, to avoid the nasty germs that accumulated. McFarland could be one of those fastidious neat freaks, but most people used their cell too much, even in one day. She could see why Schumacher would’ve found the fingerprint pattern odd.

“The guy had two phones,” Gabe said as he swiveled his chair toward her. “Maybe he didn’t use the burner much. Did Schumacher find text messages on it?”

“
No. If there were any messages, they got deleted like Olivia’s. Dead end there.”

“
We have the phone number,” he said. “Can we track it against the sale of prepaid phones? We could get lucky with store surveillance…or a credit card hit.”

“
Yeah, I tried that. I ran the number through NCIC. The FBI has that number reported as part of a shipment of stolen phones. It hadn’t surfaced until now. That’s why it hadn’t come up at a retail store.”

Gabe winced like he had a headache.

“What about the knife?” he asked.

“
Because McFarland’s blood is all over the knife, he hasn’t found any DNA that links it to the Davenport killing, but the blade is consistent with the murder weapon.”

Gabe sighed.

“If someone set up McFarland to take the fall for Olivia’s murder, they did a bang up job. With our lead suspect dead, the circumstantial evidence could put a chill on the Davenport case. If our killer is as smart as I think, all they’d have to do is sit tight and do nothing. We can’t let that happen.”

Angel narrowed her eyes at Gabe.

“You don’t look like a guy whose staring at a dead end. What’s on your mind, partner?”

“
I went back to McFarland’s last night, and I found something interesting. It gave me an idea that I’d like to kick around with you.” Gabe crooked his lip into a lazy smile and said, “Let’s grab a Starbucks. I gotta get out of here.”

“
I’m with you,” she said.

***

Two hours later

In his mind and gut, Cronan had a hunch that Ethan Chandler had played a part whether he knew it or not. If they intended to draw out the killer, they had to start with the violinist. Angel had set up an appointment to meet Chandler at his home. She also made sure to request Bryce Peterson and Rachel Blevins were with him, since they had witnessed the backstage altercation with McFarland. All three were present when Cronan and Angel arrived and were ushered to the living room.