Blood Score Read Online Free Page B

encounter looked as if it had been for sexual reasons, except that she still wore panties. The ME would have to determine if there had been penetration and DNA evidence left behind. She appeared to be in her early twenties. She must have been gorgeous, a young blonde woman beautiful enough to be on the big screen.
    Cronan stepped closer to the dead woman and noticed the look of terror on her face. Her mouth hung open, and her eyes stared into a hell only she had seen. Her shocked expression still held an edge of pain from her last moment as she bled out.
    The victim’s pink blouse was stained with blood spatter from a wound to her stomach. A pool of blood glistened on the ground under her belly. Within minutes of leaving the body and after the heart stops, blood stagnates and clots and turns into gel. The dark thick ooze looked more ominous at night.
    “Fill us in,” Cronan said as he slipped on latex gloves. “Did the ME give you TOD?”
    “ Body was found around ten,” Schumacher said. “By the time the scene got secured, only limited rigor had set in on the face and neck. The ME estimated TOD sometime between seven and nine, give or take. Lividity is consistent with the positioning of the body, so she wasn’t moved. The ME’s ready to bag her. Gurney should be here soon.”
    Cronan knew the ME would have to consider the body being exposed to the evening air in order to determine time of death. Dead bodies lost heat at a rate of 1.5 degrees per hour until they reached ambient temperature, but the muggy night air would have jacked with that timeframe. The ME could measure liver temp to get the core body heat and work off that to narrow the gap. Whatever time the victim died, they could confirm the estimate by piecing together her final hours before she took her last breath.
    But in order to compile a time line, they’d have to know her name.
    “ You find any ID? Do we know who she is?” Cronan asked.
    “ No, not yet. We haven’t found a purse, so robbery could have been a motive. If we don’t find her ID soon, we’ll clean her up and have the ME take a picture. That’ll give us something to show potential witnesses when we canvass the neighborhood again with the stores open.”
    “ Who found the body?” Angel took out her notepad.
    “ A late night jogger made a cut through the park. He found her and called 9-1-1,” Schumacher said and gave her a name. “He was down here on business and lives in Madison, Wisconsin. A damned cheesehead.”
    “ What did the guy say?” Angel asked.
    As Schumacher filled Angel in on the man who first discovered the body, Cronan looked closer at the corpse. He leaned in and stared at the dead woman’s face, taking in every detail.
    Her blue eyes had turned filmy white, giving her a ghostly appearance. Not much more than a translucent wax statue. Tiny dark specks covered her pale neck and her cheek. Blood spatter. Bugs crawled near her eyes, and a swarm of mosquitoes and flies hovered over the body. Cronan shifted his gaze from her face down to the wound that had killed her.
    Up close, the entry wound looked to be caused by a knife. She’d been stabbed below the sternum. He knew from other murders that with one strong upward thrust, the killer could avoid ribs and cut into the heart to sever a major artery. He recognized the low velocity spatter pattern.
    The killing hadn’t been the work of dumb luck. The murderer knew how to take a life with one well-placed thrust. Whoever did this could hide any blood on their clothes in the dark. It wouldn’t have been the cleanest way to kill, but it would have been quick and efficient. In seconds, the dead woman would have been incapacitated and drowning in her own juices—a miserable way to die.
    “ I’m gonna find out who did this to you,” Cronan whispered with the commiseration he reserved for the dead. “I promise.”
    In a louder voice, he said, “You guys done with photos?”
    “ Yeah. She’s all yours,” Schumacher