Blood Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

keeping Shorty up, absorbed this new information with another sick twist of his stomach.
    Stoic, Marc said, “So the vic
was
a woman.”
    “Hard to tell without the…relevant parts,” Shorty said, “but Teresa thinks so. Me too. We found the tip of a finger with a polished acrylic nail still attached. A pinky, I think.”
    Jordan retired to the bushes again.
    Shorty looked after him briefly, then directed his attention back to the sheriff’s expressionless face. “My excuse is five years of morgue duty in Atlanta,” he said. “What’s yours?”
    “Rage,” Marc Purcell said.
    “Ah. You wear your mad like a shield. I’ve known other cops could do that.” Shorty nodded, studying the sheriff openly. This fairly rural county tended to see few murder cases, and most of those were the domestic or grudge type, where the killer was as obvious as the victim was, as like as not still standing over the body, looking bewildered, smoking gun or bloody knife in hand.
    Not so hard to solve, those cases.
    In the two years Shorty had been with the Prophet County Sheriff’s Department, this was the first real murder scene he had worked with Purcell.
    Interesting guy, Shorty thought. Born here, raised here. Went to a top university in North Carolina, earned a law degree, and returned to Venture to practice. Word around the department was that he’d always been slated to hold some kind of elected office, that it was a family thing going back generations, but everybody seemed a bit surprised he’d chosen law enforcement over other political opportunities.
    Shorty wasn’t surprised. He’d spent his entire adult life around cops, and this guy was a cop down to his bones. There were some like that, maybe with an innate sense of justice or just outrage—as Purcell had admitted—that the world was chaotic and needed somebody to at least try to impose order. Somebody to wear the white hat and fight the good fight.
    A lost cause, Shorty thought, because the bad guys these days were well funded and had access to way too many dangerous toys. But, hey, there were sure as hell worse things to live your life in pursuit of. He was quite aware of that, since his own ambitions usually went no further than a warm and willing piece of ass for the upcoming weekend.
    Apparently oblivious to the scrutiny, the sheriff said, “Am I wrong in thinking she was killed here, not just butchered here?”
    “There’s some arterial spray over there by the pool, so, yeah, I’d say so. Dunno if she was conscious, but I think she was alive for quite a while from the time she first started bleeding.”
    “You’re saying he tortured her?”
    “I’m saying he wanted her to bleed, Sheriff. And from all the bloody drag marks, he moved her around while he was doing it.”
    “Why, for Christ’s sake?”
    “Maybe he was painting a picture for us.” Shorty grimaced when the sheriff stared at him. “Sorry. But I’m not being flippant about that. Most of the drag marks show she was a deadweight—no pun intended—when he was moving her around.” He gestured to one area of the stamped concrete nearest them that even a layman would have defined as a bloody drag mark.
    “Like that one. And the one on the other side of the pool. I’m no profiler, but I’ve seen more than my share of bloody murder scenes and this one is…really, really weird.”
    “I wish you’d just said grisly and horrible.”
    Shorty looked at him curiously and then offered a shrug. “Like I said, I’ve seen bloody crime scenes before. But most of ‘em, they’re the result of somebody getting pissed beyond belief and going nuts. If a knife is the weapon, they stab, they slash, they chase after the vic as long as he or she is still moving. But the only reason they move the body afterward is to get rid of it.
    “This guy, either he couldn’t make up his mind where he intended to leave the body or…or he was just having fun. Maybe posing her. Cutting off a piece of her here and