Blood Innocents Read Online Free PDF Page A

any hot numbers. That’s how I used to get most of my dates.”
    A breeze suddenly skirted through the park, driving small, noisy waves of dried leaves across the cement floor of the cage. Reardon turned up the collar of his overcoat and stepped inside the shed.
    Almost every square inch of the shed was covered with some kind of writing. Most prominent were the obscenities, references to various sexual acts or bodily functions. Interspersed with these were individual names, hundreds of them: Stanislas and Pedro, Betsie and Wilhelmina. There were also attempts at poetry, bits of personal philosophy and expressions of occult religions. But what grasped Reardon’s attention was something else, something that stood out from the rest; most of the writing had been done with chalk or spray paint, but this one was written in a color Reardon had seen too often not to recognize.
    â€œMathesson!” he called. “Come in here a minute.”
    Mathesson came in and glanced about the shed. “What is it?”
    Reardon pointed to a rusty red scrawl on the ceiling of the shed. “Doesn’t that look like it’s written in dried blood?”
    Mathesson squinted up at the ceiling. “Yeah, it does. It looks like it could be.”
    â€œI think it is,” Reardon said. “It’s a roman numeral two.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œI want you to have that piece of tin cut out and sent down to the lab for an analysis. I think it’s blood of some kind. It may have come from the deer.”
    â€œA roman numeral two,” Mathesson said thoughtfully. “Jesus Christ. What the hell could that mean?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s just a tally.”
    â€œA tally? What do you mean?”
    â€œJust that it may be a tally and nothing else.” Reardon looked up at the roman numeral two. “You know, the number ‘two’ for two dead deer.”
    â€œOh,” Mathesson said. “Yeah, maybe.” He looked at the number, then outside at the two tarpaulins lying heavily over the bodies of the fallow deer. He shook his head. “A tally.”
    A tally, Reardon thought. Perhaps. But he was also thinking of another possibility. He had seen it more times than he liked to recall, and it had always begun with a terrible crime, one almost incomprehensible in its brutality: sex organs hanging from a doorknob or a severed finger floating placidly in a decanter of scotch or some other inhuman mutilation. And then that sudden, quiet, stunning touch of the human. The undeniable suggestion that even in the raving, animal cruelty of the crime, some touch of conscience remained. Sometimes it might be nothing more than a handkerchief too obviously left behind. Once, Reardon recalled, it was a telephone number tucked loosely under a doormat. But each time it had led to the killer, who had retained, even through the viciousness of the act, the certain knowledge that it was wrong and who was, therefore, determined to be caught.
    Or perhaps it was a tally, and nothing more.
    When Reardon got back to his desk in the precinct house, he found a note requesting him to telephone his son. He felt no desire to call but found himself dialing his son’s law office, anyway.
    â€œMr. Reardon’s office,” the secretary said.
    â€œThis is his father,” Reardon said.
    â€œHe’s in conference at this time.”
    â€œThis is his father,” Reardon repeated. He had sat through too many conferences in his life to be awed by the word.
    There was a pause. “Uh, just a moment, sir. I’ll see if he can be interrupted.”
    Reardon waited for a moment, thinking of the fallow deer with more than a trace of pity, then of a small dog he had once owned. It had been run over by a car. The driver had stopped, gotten out and very sadly offered his apologies and some money. Reardon had declined, and they had shaken hands. Whenever Reardon felt some need for