Black Notice - Cornwell Patricia (книги онлайн без регистрации txt) 📗

"Glad as hell to see you;" he said to both of us. "Thought you were on vacation," he added to Marino.

"Yeah. I got vacated, you're right."

We put on gloves, and Butterfield shut the door behind us. His face was tight, his attention going everywhere.

"Tell me about it," Marino said, eyes sweeping the foyer and zooming into the living room beyond.

"Got a nine-one-one call made from a phone booth not too far from here. We get here, and this is what we find. Someone beat the holy hell out of her;" Butterfield said.

"What else?" Marino asked.

"Sexual assault. Looks like robbery, too. Billfold on the floor, no money in it, everything in her purse dumped out. Watch where you step;" he added as if we didn't know better.

"Damn, she had big bucks, no kidding;" Marino marveled, looking around at the very expensive furnishings of Bray's very expensive home.

"You ain't seen nothing yet;" Butterfield replied.

What struck me first was the collection of clocks in the living room. There were wall clocks and hanging shelf clocks in rosewood, walnut and mahogany, and calendar and steeple clocks, and novelty clocks, all of them antique and perfectly synchronized. They tick-tocked loudly and would have driven me mad were I to live amidst their monotonous reminder of time.

She was fond of English antiques that were grand and unfriendly. A scroll-end sofa and a revolving bookcase with dummy leather book dividers faced the TV Placed here and there with no thought of company in mind, it seemed, were stiff armchairs with ornate upholstery and a satinwood pole-screen. A massive ebonized sideboard overpowered the room. The heavy gold damask draperies were drawn, and.cobwebs laced box-pleated valances. I saw no art, not a single sculpture or painting, and with every detail I took in, Bray's personality became colder and more overbearing. I liked her less. That was hard to acknowledge about someone who had just been beaten to death.

"Where did she get her money?" I asked.

"Got no idea," Marino answered.

"All of us been wondering that ever since she came here," Butterfield said. "You ever seen her car?"

"No,"- I replied.

"Huh," Marino retorted. "She takes a brand-new Crown Vic home with her every night."

"A damn Jaguar, fire-engine red. In the garage. Looks like a ninety-eight or ninety-nine. Can't even guess what that cost" The detective shook his head..

"About two years of your working ass," Marino commented.

"Tell me."

They talked on about Bray's tastes and wealth as if her battered dead body didn't exist. I saw no evidence that an encounter had occurred in the living room, or that anyone even used it much or bothered to clean it thoroughly.

The kitchen was off the living room to the right, and I glanced inside it, again checking for blood or any other sign of violence and finding none. The kitchen did not feel lived in, either. Countertops and the stove were spotless. I saw no food, only a bag of Starbucks coffee and a small wine rack holding three bottles of merlot.

Marino came up from behind and edged past me through the doorway. He opened the refrigerator with gloved hands.

"Doesn't look like she was into cooking;' he said, scanning sparsely stocked shelves.

I surveyed a quart of two-percent milk, tangerines, margarine, a box of Grape-Nuts and condiments. The freezer held no more promise.

"It's like she was never home, or ate out all the time," he said, stepping on a pedal to pop up the trash-can lid.

He reached inside and pulled out pieces of a torn-up Domino's pizza box, a wine bottle and three St. Pauli Girl beer bottles. He pieced together fragments of the receipt.

"One medium pepperoni, extra cheese," he mumbled. "Ordered last night at five-fifty-three."

He dug around some more and found crumpled napkins, three slices of the pizza and at least half a dozen cigarette butts.

"Now we're cookin'," he said. "Bray didn't smoke. Looks like she had company last night."

"When did the nine-one-one call come in?"

"Nine-oh-four. About an hour and a half ago. And it don't look to me like she was up making coffee, reading the paper or anything else this morning."

"I'm pretty sure she was already dead by this morning," Butterfield offered.

We moved on, following a carpeted hallway to the master bedroom in the back of the house. When we reached the open doorway, both of us stopped. Violence seemed to absorb all light and air. Its silence was complete, its stains and destruction everywhere.

"Holy shit," Marino said under his breath.

Whitewashed walls, floor, ceiling, overstuffed chairs, chaise longue were spattered so completely with blood it almost seemed part of a decorator's plan. But these droplets, smears and streaks weren't dye or paint; they were fragments from a terrible explosion caused by a psychopathic human bomb. Dried speckles and drips sullied antique mirrors, and the floor was thick with coagulated puddles and splashes. The king-size bed was soaked with blood and oddly stripped of its linens.

Diane Bray had been beaten so severely I couldn't have told her race. She was on her back, green satin blouse and black underwire bra on the floor. I picked them up. They had been ripped from her body. Every inch of skin was dried wipes and smears and swirls reminding me of fingerpainting again, her face a mush of splintered bone and battered tissue. On her left wrist was a smashed gold watch. On her right ring finger, a gold band was beaten into the bone.

For a long time we stared. She was naked from the waist up. Her black corduroy pants and belt didn't seem to have been touched. The soles of her feet and her palms were chewed up, and this time Loup-Garou hadn't bothered eradicating his bite marks. They were circles of widely spaced, narrow teeth that didn't look human. He had bitten and sucked and beaten, and-Bray's complete degradation, her mutilation, especially of her face, instantly screamed rage. It cried out that she might have known her killer, just as Loup-Garou's other victims had.

Only, he didn't know them. Before he showed up at the door, he and his victims had never met except in his hellish fantasies.

"What's wrong` with Anderson?" Marino was asking Butterfield.

"She heard about it and freaked."

"That's kinda interesting. That mean we don't got a detective here?"

"Marino, let me see your flashlight, please," I said.

I shone the light all around. Blood was spattered on the headboard and a bedside lamp, caused when the impact of blows or slashes projected small droplets away from the weapon. There were low-velocity stains as well, blood that had dripped to the carpet. I got down and probed the bloody hardwood floor next to the bed, and I found more pale long hairs. They were on Bray's body, too:

"The word we got was to secure the scene and wait for a supervisor," one of the cops was saying.

"What supervisor?" Marino asked.

I shone light obliquely on bloody footprints close to the bed. They had a distinctive tread and I looked up at the officers in the room.

"Uh, I think the chief himself. I think he wants to assess the situation before anything's done," Butterfield was talking to Marino.

"Well, that's tough shit," Marino said. "And he shows up., he can stand out in the rain."

"How many people have been inside this room?" I asked.

"I don't know," one of the officers answered.

"If you don't know, then it's too many," I replied. "Did either of you touch the body? How close did you get to it?"

"I didn't touch her."

"No, ma'am."

"Whose footprints are these?" I pointed them out. "I need to know, because if they aren't yours, then the killer hung around long enough for the blood to dry."

Marino looked at the officers' feet. Both men were wearing black crosstrainers. Marino squatted and looked at the faint tread pattern on the hardwood floor.