Page 10 of Craving Vengeance
Chapter Five
Spinelli’s phone buzzed. He pulled it from his hip to find Walker’s face staring back at him. He tapped the screen. “Spinelli here.”
“Are you about done with your lunch date?”
Some lunch date.Little did Walker know, he hadn’t even had a chance to take Shannon to lunch because she was too busy feasting on someone else’s mouth. Spinelli shook the vision from his head.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“You’re not going to believe this, but we’ve got another one.”
“Another dead cupid?”
“Yep, downtown at the Morgan Bank building.”
Spinelli was already headed downstairs by the time he and Walker finished their conversation. He and Walker headed to the crime scene.
They took the elevator up to the sixth floor of the bank building to find several uniformed officers securing the area. Nearly the entire sixth floor had been gutted and was under major reconstruction. At least twenty somber-looking construction workers milled about the site.
The Police Sergeant stood off in the corner talking to a large man wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. His white hardhat looked squeaky clean, and his boots looked new, probably the job Foreman. The Sergeant waved them over. He gestured toward the beefy construction guy. “This is the project supervisor, John Buhr. He found the vic when they returned from their lunch break.”
Buhr’s head turned in the direction of the EMTs and the ME who’d just arrived. Spinelli could see a blurry rendition of them through the heavy sheet of plastic lining a small framed out room. Piles of sheetrock were stacked between where he stood and the room, preventing him from seeing anything below their shoulders. He and Walker headed in that direction with the sergeant and Buhr in tow.
They stepped around the sheetrock and peeked through the opening in the plastic. There he laid, cupid number three, naked as a jaybird with the exception of his white transparent wings. They looked like they were made out of a wedding veil and molded with large pipe cleaners. Spinelli had seen better wings.
The vic’s stiff body rested up against bags of plaster powder. His bow and quiver of arrows lay next to him on the floor. Dried puke crusted in a line from the corner of his mouth, over his chin, down his neck, and onto his chest.
“Poisoned?” Spinelli asked Debra, the ME.
“Yeah, if I had to guess. The distinct smell of almonds kind of gives it away. Maybe by the time I get back, I’ll have the pathologist’s report from Bethany for the first two cupids. I’ll go see her right away. This is turning out to be quite the Valentine’s Day.”
Spinelli shifted his gaze to the floor. “You can say that again.” Visions of Shannon kissing the strange man played through his mind.This is what I get for letting my guard down. I knew there was no such thing as true love, and this just proved it. What in the hell was I thinking? Never again.He glanced at the dead cupid.And look at you lying there on the floor. What in the hell happened to you? A woman? Had to be.
Buhr shuffled his feet, snapping Spinelli back into reality.
Spinelli shifted his gaze to meet Buhr’s. “How and when did you find the victim?”
Buhr’s eyes shifted from Spinelli to the victim and then back to Spinelli. He ran his hand over his large round face. “It was after lunch— about 1:00.” He pointed toward the opposite corner of the large gutted room. “We’d been working over there since we got here this morning. There was no need to come over here. Anyhow, we broke for lunch at noon. We ate at the diner across the street. When we got back, I came over here to get some supplies, and I found poor Chad just lying here. I thought it was a joke at first, but it didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t.”
