Page 4 of Craving Vengeance
Now for the hard part. Spinelli sucked in a breath and let it out as he captured Cindy’s gaze. “Ms. Carter, we received a call early this morning about a homicide down on Water Street. I’m sorry, but the victim fits your brother’s description, so I’m going to need you to come with me.”
“No,” Cindy whispered and covered her mouth. Tears instantly ran down her rosy cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut and rocked back and forth in her chair for a few moments before she opened her eyes and swiped her hands across her cheeks. She stared forward at the three of them.
“Ms. Carter, we need to know for sure. I need you to confirm the victim’s ID. Can you come with me to do that?” Spinelli asked.
Cindy nodded slowly before she placed her trembling hands on the table to steady herself as she stood to follow Spinelli.
Chapter Three
Spinelli had just deliveredCindy Carter to the front door of the precinct when his cell phone rang. Walker’s mug flashed across the screen.
“Spinelli here.”
“Hey, you need to get back here. We gotta go.”
“Why, what’s up?”
“We got another one.”
“Another dead body?” Spinelli inquired.
“Not just another dead body but another freaking dead cupid.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“Nope. Hurry up.”
Spinelli met Walker in the parking lot where they climbed into their unmarked police car. He’d instructed Marsh to hang back to work on gathering and analyzing information about Carter. Perhaps he’d find something useful in Carter’s financial records, or maybe one of the people on his contact list would be able to shed some light on what he was up to and what went down.
The morning traffic was terrible. It took them nearly thirty minutes to arrive at the crime scene.
A uniformed officer approached them the second they entered the bar. He pointed at a distraught older woman talking to another officer as they stood at the opposite side of the room near the entrance to a long hallway. “That’s Gail Boyd. She’s the cleaning woman. She found the vic in the office when she arrived at 8:00 a.m. The office is down the hall on the left, just past the bathrooms.”
“Okay,” Spinelli acknowledged as he studied the woman who looked to be in her late forties. She was of healthy size. She wore faded jeans and a dark gray sweatshirt. Her sleeves were pushed up to her elbows. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she’d been crying for a while.
He and Walker headed toward the office and stopped in the doorway to take a look. Sure enough, there was another cupid sprawled out on the desk buck-naked. His thin, pillowed, satiny wings pressed between his body and the surface of the desk. The quiver full of arrows lay on the floor next to the bow. Just like the first dead cupid, this one was also a tall muscular man with dark hair.
