Confessions. JoAnn Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ Sherlock Holmes and advising citizens to Take A Bite Out Of Crime. Taped to the beige wall beside the poster were crayon drawings from a class of third graders, thanking the sheriff for a tour of the jail.

      On the opposite wall were FBI posters of most wanted felons who looked as if they’d come straight from central casting: a long-haired, tattooed biker, a wild-eyed Charles Manson lookalike and a sullen woman with a frizzy blond perm and four-inch-long black roots who looked like a poster girl for sexually transmitted diseases.

      “Nice photo collection,” she murmured. “And so much more original than the usual candid vacation snapshots of the wife and kids.”

      “I don’t have a wife. Or kids.” He gave the wanted posters a cursory study. “And sometimes, as clichéd as it might seem, the bad guys really do look like criminals.”

      “But not all the time,” she noted significantly.

      “No.” Trace frowned as he thought of the mild-mannered sixth grade science teacher and Boy Scout leader who’d strangled, then methodically dismembered five hookers before he and Danny had finally caught up with him. “Not all the time.”

      He gestured toward one of the chairs. “Have a seat. Nobody’s made coffee this morning, so I’ll have to get some from the machine down the hall. How do you take it?”

      “With cream. Two sugars.”

      He reached into a top drawer, grabbed a handful of change and left the office.

      Drained, Mariah sank down onto the seat he’d indicated. The wood-framed window offered an appealing view of the town square across the street.

      She watched as a young man threw a Frisbee to a remarkably talented springer spaniel who, from what she could tell, never missed. She envied both man and dog. They were playing on the fragrant green grass in the bright morning sunshine, oblivious to the horrors of the world around them.

      Had it only been yesterday that she’d been the same way? Until this morning, murder had always been an intriguing challenge. Fortunately, enough people shared her fascination with violent, unpredictable crime to have made her a very wealthy woman.

      Although she made her living thinking up innovative ways to kill people in the crime dramas she was best known for, her stories had always been born in the fertile ground of her imagination. She would painstakingly create her characters, weaving in enough sympathetic traits to win the audience’s empathy, then murder the victims in ways that occasionally inspired letter-writing campaigns to the networks and advertisers from religious and moral watchdog groups.

      The complaints never disturbed her. In Mariah’s world, any publicity you didn’t have to pay for was good publicity.

      And when the script was completed, she moved on to the next story, the next murder, never giving those deceased characters another thought. They weren’t real, after all.

      But, dammit, Laura was.

      Mariah lit another cigarette to get the smell of the autopsy room out of her nostrils. “It’ll probably taste like toxic waste,” Trace warned when he returned to the office. “And the cream is that nondairy stuff. But it’s hot.” He put a brown-and-white cardboard cup down in front of Mariah, then went around the desk, pulled an ashtray from one of the drawers and handed it to her.

      “Thanks.” She took a sip of the coffee, found it as bad as he’d predicted, but drank it anyway, willing the warmth to replace the ice in her bloodstream. “May I ask you a question?”

      The leather chair behind the desk creaked as he leaned back in it. “Shoot.”

      “Are you religious?”

      “Not particularly.” Trace grimaced as he took a taste of his own black coffee. But like her, did not put it down. Unlike her, he needed the caffeine.

      “Do you believe in God?”

      He stared off into the middle distance as he considered that. His eyes were the color of steel, set deep in his unshaven, hollow-cheeked face. “I suppose I believe in what AA would call a higher power. Why?”

      “I didn’t think I did. Not anymore, anyway.” She drew in on the cigarette, thinking that the fiery hell she’d been taught to fear during her catechism days was too good for the man who’d murdered Laura. “But I realized, down in that room, that I’m not nearly the agnostic I thought I was.”

      She took another drink as she tried to put what she was feeling into words. “It’s not that I want to believe Laura’s in some mythical wooded glen like all those near-death experiences people describe, visiting with all our dearly departed relatives, listening to some heavenly choir,” she stressed. “It’s just that what’s down in that room—her body—isn’t her.”

      She shook her head in mute frustration. “Does that make any sense?”

      Trace put his cup on the desk and locked his hands behind his head as he remembered an instance, during his days as a rookie cop, when he’d gotten into a similar theological discussion with a sergeant who, whenever he looked at all those bodies in the morgue, saw nothing but dead meat.

      At the time Trace had disagreed. He still did.

      “You look at the faces,” he said quietly. “And they’re empty.”

      “Exactly. Everything that made Laura who she was, everything that made her special is gone,” she stressed. “So where did it go? It couldn’t just disappear into thin air.”

      “All souls go to heaven?” Trace asked.

      Thinking that he was being condescending, she bristled. “Why not?”

      She’d expected a smirk. Instead he smiled and she was surprised to note that it held considerable charm. “Sounds good to me.”

      Mariah was in no mood to be charmed by some small-town, black Irish cop. Even if his firmly cut lips did remind her of a Celtic poet.

      “Callahan,” she murmured, “wasn’t that Dirty Harry’s last name?”

      He didn’t directly answer her question. “You know,” he mused out loud, “sometimes I think I should have become a chiropractor.”

      “A chiropractor?”

      “Or a dentist. Going through life as a cop with the name of Callahan isn’t always easy.” This time the smile reached his weary eyes, turning them a gleaming pewter.

      Even as Mariah found herself momentarily intrigued by their warmth, she shook off the feeling. “So, when are you going to question Alan?”

      “As soon as he’s out of surgery.”

      “Too bad you can’t do it while he’s still under the sodium Pentothal.”

      “Are you insinuating that the senator is a liar?”

      “He’s a politician, isn’t he? It comes with the territory.” Her gaze turned serious. “You realize, of course, that this is going to turn out to be a media circus.”

      “The thought had occurred to me.”

      “Are СКАЧАТЬ