A Quiet Vendetta Read Online Free PDF Page B

maybe five-eleven. There were no hairs or fibers that couldn’t have come from the back seat or the floor of the trunk, nothing there worth mentioning. You’ve got the killer’s blood type, if that was in fact his blood, and that’s pretty much all you’re gonna get out of me on this one.’
    Verlaine had listened intently, nodding every once in a while as he tried to digest everything Cipliano was telling him.
    ‘You get a make on your prints?’
    Verlaine shook his head. ‘Gonna go check again now.’
    ‘Christ, that crew of yours are a lazy bag o’ smashers, eh?’
    Verlaine smiled.
    ‘So you got any smartass questions for me?’
    ‘Ritual or psycho, whaddya reckon?’
    Cipliano hesitated. ‘This is criminal psychology you’re talking here. I’m a coroner, but from what I can see—’ He shook his head. ‘This is not my field. I can’t give you anything other than a hunch.’
    Verlaine nodded. ‘So give me a hunch.’
    Cipliano shrugged. ‘I’d say you have someone who did this for someone else maybe—’
    ‘Why for someone else?’
    Cipliano was quiet for a moment. ‘There’s a mentality, a thinking pattern, always some sense of motivation back of these things. If they run into a serial there’s always a common thread, and usually it’s not until the third or fourth killing that you find it. Then you look back and see that common factor right the way through, like it’s an embryonic thought, something that grows, like he’s testing something out, putting something there, getting whatever kick he gets out of his own reasoning. He gets a bit adventurous, embellishes the original idea, really makes it obvious, and that’s when it comes to light. That’s when you have the trademark. This one . . . well, this one’s different. If you had a psycho working for himself he’d have maybe left the vic where he killed him, perhaps cut the body up and distributed it someplace. The psycho thing is all about showing everything for the world. Here he wants the thing seen, but he hides it first. He wants it known, but not immediately . . . almost like it’s a message to someone perhaps.’
    Cipliano scratched the back of his head. ‘The majority of actual psychopaths, serial killers, they have the desire for others to share in what they’ve done, for others to understand, appreciate, sympathize. It’s an explanation. The killing is an explanation for something – guilt, sadness, rejection, desperation, anger, hate, sometimes just as simple as getting mom and dad’s attention. Your man here, he beat the shit out of the vic because he wanted to, but I think the heart was something else entirely. I think the heart was cut out and then left in the chest because he wanted someone to know something. Then you have this shit with the quinine. I mean, what in fuck’s name was all that about?’
    Verlaine shook his head.
    ‘You gotta understand, I don’t really know a thing about this, right?’ Cipliano grinned and winked. ‘All of that I just told you could be complete bullshit and I’m just making out I’m smart. You go check on your prints, and let me know who he was, okay?’
    Verlaine nodded. He turned and started towards the door.
    ‘Hey, John.’
    He turned back to Cipliano.
    ‘Thing to remember, however bad it might get, is it’s never as bad for you as it is for these poor suckers.’
    Verlaine smiled. It was a small mercy indeed.
    The image of the constellation drawn on the victim’s back haunted Verlaine’s thoughts as he drove back to the Precinct House. It was a twist, perhaps significant in the fact that quinine was used, perhaps in the constellation itself. It would all start to open up with the identification of the body. And, figuratively speaking, that was where it had ended as well.
    He pulled into the car lot back of the Precinct and went up the steps into the building. Duty sergeant at the desk told him the captain was away for the rest of the day; also told him there’d been