Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 4-6: Blood Brother, In the Blood, Little Girls Lost. J. Kerley A.
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Название: Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 4-6: Blood Brother, In the Blood, Little Girls Lost
Автор: J. Kerley A.
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780007535170
isbn:
“The Lieutenant missing an appointment?” I asked Waltz. “That unusual?”
“Not for Alice Folger,” Waltz said, frowning. “It’s unheard of.”
I closed the door. “Folger and I were talking a couple nights ago, Shelly. There’d been scratching at her door and she thought she saw a face at the window. She’d also felt like she was being watched the past couple weeks, but never saw anyone watching.”
“You and Folger were talking?”
“She’s easier on me these days.”
“Cluff’s in Tribeca showing Ridgecliff’s picture. I’ll get him to run over to Folger’s digs. Maybe she overslept.”
Waltz punched the speaker volume on his phone so I could hear. Cluff answered.
“Shelly Waltz here. You know where the Lieutenant lives?”
“Sure,” Cluff said. “I was at her Christmas party. She lives five minutes away. Why?”
“She missed a meeting this morning. How about you check it –”
“On my way,” Cluff said. The phone clicked dead.
I had the creepy-crawlies but didn’t know why. Waltz looked even less happy than usual. I tried small talk.
“How are things with the Pelham project?”
He raised three fingers. It took a second for the message to sink in.
“Three dolls?” I asked.
“Another arrived yesterday. No mouth, no prints, no nothing.”
“How many are in a grouping or whatever?”
He shrugged, not really caring at the moment. “Five or six.”
I wiped my damp palms on my jeans, checked my watch. When I looked up I saw Shelly was doing the same. Six minutes crept by, then seven. Waltz said, “Cluff’s got to be there by now. I’ll call and see what’s –”
The phone sounded. Waltz’s hand hit the button mid-ring, cobra speed. The line crackled as the connection wavered. Followed by Cluff’s voice in full gasping wheeze.
“Jesus, Shelly … it’s a bloodbath over here. She’s … on the floor. I called for the medics, but … Folger’s dead, Shelly. She’s been torn apart.”
We were outside Folger’s house in minutes, running to the door. The ME’s van was rolling up, the bus – ambulance – already there. Cluff was at the door, shaking his head, his voice labored, squeezing past pain.
“I got here … the front door was open about an inch, I called inside. Nothing. Then I stepped in, found …”
I stuck my head through the door. Blood. On the floor. On the walls. The air was thick with its reek. I saw Folger’s body on the floor, clothes awry, legs splayed, red with blood. The head was still attached, but the rage had been cut deep into the flesh. What remained of the face was turned toward the door, the teeth pink with blood and clenched in the rictus of misery.
There was nothing to be done.
“Get back,” a voice said. “Coming through.”
Two technicians from the Medical Examiner’s office pushed into the room, one stripping the wrapping from a new thermometer. I grimaced as he plunged it beneath Folger’s ribs, deep into her liver, the temperature helping to determine time of death.
Shelly was beside me, wanting to run to Folger, his cop instinct holding him back, letting the techs work before the dicks took over. I heard him sucking air, hard, as if hyperventilating.
“Steady, Shelly.”
“I can’t take much more,” he whispered. I turned to him, saw faraway eyes in a ghost-white face.
“Shelly? Are you all right?”
His eyes rolled up and his knees collapsed. I managed to grab around his chest and slow his fall to the floor. “Need help over here!”
A paramedic appeared beside me, fingers against Waltz’s neck, ear tight against Shelly’s chest. “Pulse is reedy but steady. No arrhythmia. I think it’s syncope, fainting. Probably stress and anxiety.”
Waltz’s hand whipped by my face, trying to push away my shape. He was disoriented, but returning. Tears poured into his eyes and he smeared his sleeve across his face, leaving tears and spit and mucus across his cheeks.
“It’s a nightmare,” he moaned. “A fucking nightmare.”
“Just rest, Shelly. Stay calm.”
He covered his face with his hands, muttered, “… all a nightmare,” and lay still, gathering himself.
I sat back and watched the tech pull the thermometer from the liver. A breast slipped from beneath a torn strip of what had been a blouse. I stared at it, heavy, the aureole large and brown. I rose, stepped around the red pools. My foot slipped in a patch of excrement and I slid sideways, grabbing the shoulder of the tech, nearly tumbling across the corpse.
“Easy,” the tech said.
I lowered myself to a crouch and gently lifted a clot of blood-soaked hair, the head following like a puppet. I slipped my gloved fingers under the chin and spun the face to mine.
I turned to Waltz. It would later haunt me that a person’s death could give so much relief.
“It’s not Folger, Shelly. It’s someone else.”
Within twenty minutes a dozen detectives and evidence techs filled Folger’s house. The usual banter was gone, replaced by brutal efficiency, as if a fuse was burning. Or a clock ticking on a bomb.
The front door opened and Bullard entered. “I just heard. What’s the word?”
Waltz put his hands in his pockets, walked to Bullard. Something in Waltz’s eyes set off an alarm in my head and I followed.
“It’s just a woman’s moment,” Waltz said to Bullard.
Bullard was confused. “What you talking about, Waltz?”
“It’s what you said when she didn’t show up at your meeting this morning. She was having a ‘woman’s moment’. You know, Bullard, one of those times when things aren’t real clear.”
I stepped closer. Re-thought things. Stepped back and put my hands in my pockets.
“You’re babbling,” Bullard said.
“Folger was having her period, you said. That’s why she СКАЧАТЬ