As a Favor Read Online Free PDF Page A

hidden in the living room. And almost everything in the kitchen is out, waiting to be washed. There are some vegetables in the fridge, two place settings of bone china stacked away, clean, and the usual assortment of liquor.”
    Going to the étagère, I fingered through the varied collection of albums.
    Pereira followed. “Jill,” she hesitated. “I forgot to tell you that I let the lab crew go. Okay? The print man said they were in a hurry.”
    It was my case. Technically only I could release them. I said, “Did they finish everything?”
    “Oh, yes. You want what they got so far?”
    “Uh huh.”
    “Hendricks took samples of the blood—he’s sure it’s blood—but you know how long it’ll take to get a report from the lab.”
    I knew indeed—two to three weeks normally; in an emergency, three days or so.
    “There were prints, but they couldn’t say how clear. They didn’t know if any would be whole. And the purse, they checked…”
    “The purse!”
    “Right. It was under the sofa.”
    Now it sat on the table—leather, slightly used purse, an everyday bag.
    “There’s the usual stuff—aspirin, make-up, keys, wallet,” Pereira said. “No cash, but nothing else seems to have been removed. Her driver’s license is here and she must have ten credit cards.”
    I sighed. “A woman doesn’t leave home on her own and not take her wallet.” Glancing down at it, I looked at the credit cards, social security card, and a health plan card. Nothing unusual.
    “These were in the purse.” Pereira indicated three pieces of yellow paper—two scraps and one eight-and-a-half by eleven.
    “Did they check them for prints?”
    “Yes.”
    I picked up one of the smaller pieces. It was a list, but the writing was crabbed and slanted to the left, and the words virtually illegible.
    I held it out. Pereira stared and after a moment said triumphantly, “Spinach…eggs…you want me to go on?”
    I handed her the second paper. “No. Try this.”
    She stared harder, a line creasing her smooth forehead. Finally she said, “Er-men-tine. Ermentine Brown 20? What do you think Ermentine Brown 20 means? Age? Size? Amount?”
    “Could be anything.”
    The larger paper, a full-size notebook sheet, had been crumpled, then straightened and folded. Judging from the worn edges, it had been in the purse some days.
    Pereira and I surveyed it.
    “Theater on Wheels,” she said, pointing to the childish printing on the bottom. “It’d be a real challenge to identify the blob above that.”
    Take a look at the handbill on the bedside table. It’s the final product. What we have here must have been her first, very preliminary sketch for the Rhinoceros .”
    “My God, that’s a rhino!” Pereira rushed into the bedroom and a few moments later returned smiling. “It’s certainly a metamorphosis.”
    “Still, where does all this,” I gestured to the overturned chair, the blood, the disordered bedroom, “leave us?”
    “Fight. Spur of the moment?” Pereira offered.
    “Maybe. A kid turned in some clothes, probably bloodstained, torn. They were monogrammed—‘AMS.’ ”
    “Anne M-something Spaulding? Hmm. You think it’s a sex crime—I mean from the ripped clothes?”
    I leaned forward, tapping on the glass of the coffee table. “I hope this isn’t the first of a series, like that psycho last year, you remember, the guy…” I stopped, staring at the coffee table. My breath caught.
    Lying atop one of the chrome supports was a pewter pen, a pen not engraved but with the simple, elegant lines that typified a gift in Nat’s family. This might not be the pen Nat’s father had given him three years ago, but if it was not, it was its double. And when in two or three weeks, or three days or so, the lab report returned, Nat’s fingerprints on the pen would be mentioned. It was the only real clue in the apartment.
    I took a deep breath. The only clue pointed to Nat, Nat who had told me he’d never been in this place.
    Where