Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 4-6: Blood Brother, In the Blood, Little Girls Lost. J. Kerley A.

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      I pursed my lips, blew silently. “There’s a grateful councilman on your shoulder? No wonder you could call the Chief direct.”

      He shrugged. “That and a few other successes have given me a reputation for dealing with cases like your PSIT handles, the psychological stuff. I’m allowed latitude others don’t have. An input role.”

      A thought about Shelly’s clout hit me. “Were you one of the supporters responsible for Alice Folger’s jump to the major leagues?”

      He waved it away like it was no big deal. “I saw talent, I passed her name upstairs.”

      I figured Waltz had seen a bright spark in Alice Folger and decided to drop it into an oxygen-laden environment to see if it would blaze or burn out. Judging by the veiled admiration in his voice, Folger had blazed bright.

      I said, “Where do I go from here?”

      “I’ve arranged you a hotel room nearby. Check in, get whatever you need and you’ll be reimbursed. You can come in to the department, or I’ll send reports to your hotel. I simply want you to see if you can add anything.”

      “That’s all?”

      “It’s what the lady wanted, it’s what the lady gets.”

      Lady wanted, I thought, not victim wanted. Good for Waltz.

      Waltz offered to drive me to the hotel, but needing to clear my head I started walking. I ducked into the continuing mist, my mind swirling into the events that had slammed my life into Dr Evangeline Prowse, with repercussions that would forever echo in my soul. Events I had not, could not, tell Sheldon Waltz.

      The Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior housed an average of fifty criminally insane men and women. It had become one of the more enlightened such institutions under the stewardship of Dr Prowse, who had made a career-long study of psychopathy and sociopathy. It was claimed no doctoral candidate in abnormal psychology could write more than five pages without citing Vangie.

      In one of her cases, a sixteen-year-old boy had murdered an abusive father, disemboweling him with a knife, a slow and hideous death by vivisection. The homicide was so savage that the local police did not suspect the boy, an intelligent and gentle soul, barely questioning him.

      Starting two years later, five women were murdered in a grim, violent and symbolic manner. After the third mutilated victim appeared, the FBI gave the case material to Vangie. She studied the bizarre and ceremonial crime scenes, detecting signs of a tormented child. The police finally turned their eyes toward a twenty-six-year-old man whose father had died in the woods years before. He confessed, was ultimately pronounced insane, and Dr Prowse petitioned for him to be brought to the Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior.

      I was in college at the time of the killer’s capture. Dr Prowse and I had met through that case, and had been bound by it for years.

      The father was my father. The killer was my brother, Jeremy.

       “Get back here, Jeremy, you little coward … stop that squealing … I’ll give you something to squeal about …”

       “Don’t, Daddy, please don’t, Daddy …”

      Though my father, Earl Eugene Ridgecliff, functioned as a respected civil engineer, he was diseased with anger. As children, my brother and I lived with the fear that anything – a word, a glance, a misperceived gesture – could explode into horror. My brother, older than me by six years, became the focus of our father’s physical rage, and I still awoke in cold sweats with my brother’s screams razoring through my home.

       “Help me, Mama, help me, Mama … Daddy’s trying to kill me …”

      I had never used the word murder for my brother’s actions against our father, preferring “attempted salvation”. Had Jeremy been caught and tried he might be free today, a jury figuring anyone suffering such agony had little recourse but to kill his tormentor.

      But years of abuse had planted a seed of madness inside my gentle brother. Even as we built our neighboring forts in the oaks, signaling to one another with torn sheets like ship’s flags, fished for catfish in the slow Southern creeks, or lay in the summer grass and stared at clouds, the seed grew into vines that wrapped and strangled his soul.

      My mother was a beautiful and emotionally fragile woman twenty years of age when my father, eighteen years her senior, passed through her small country town on an engineering project. Married within two months, my mother expected a storybook life. Instead, she found herself embroiled in a hellish drama so far beyond comprehension her only recourse was retreating to her room to practice her sole skill: the sewing of wedding dresses, white and flowing waves of satin and tulle.

      The mutant seed within my brother caused him to believe our mother could have intervened in the nights of terror at the hands of our father. She could have more easily stopped the tides with her fingertips.

       “The Alabama State Police today announced a suspect in the bizarre and brutal killings of at least five women …”

      So deep was my brother’s belief in our mother’s complicity in his suffering that a few years after killing our father, Jeremy began killing our mother. I speak metaphorically: To actually kill her would have consigned me to a foster home – and he would not have done that – so surrogates fed his unfathomable need. Shamed by my brother’s actions, I changed my name, hid my private history behind veils of obfuscation, and refused to visit him.

      It was Vangie – with input from Jeremy – who tracked me down and convinced me to reestablish a relationship with my brother. Jeremy and I had even collaborated – if that’s the word – on several cases where his unique insights helped me understand the crimes. He was so finely calibrated for madness he once boasted he could walk through a mall and point out a half-dozen people “either convinced Martians are reading their minds, or thinking things so dark they’d make Torquemada retch”.

      My brother was not only insane himself, he was a Geiger counter for insanity in others.

       Chapter 3

      The desk staff at the mid-town hotel were expecting my arrival and treated me with deference though I was in sodden clothes and my shoes squeaked footprints across the marble floor. They directed me to a nearby shop where I secured denim jeans, three cotton dress shirts, a white linen sport coat, a pair of upscale walking shoes plus underwear and socks.

      Finally in my hotel room, a third-floor double dressed in somber monochrome – black, gray, gray-white – I showered, then snapped on a muted CNN to add color and distraction to my world. I unwrapped my new dress shirts and rinsed them in the sink to remove the creases and factory starch, squeezing them as dry as possible. In the cool and arid air conditioning they’d be set to iron in the morning. I did the same to the tees.

      The phone rang, the desk advising me a package had just been delivered. A small Hispanic gentleman brought an envelope to my room, NYPD stamped on top left corner, the information Waltz had promised. As he had noted, it was spare, the investigation barely off the launching pad.

      The prelims from the forensic teams in Vangie’s room featured all the No’s: СКАЧАТЬ