Blood Innocents Read Online Free PDF Page B

with a ferocious brutality and the other with one devastating blow. Perhaps the killer had been repelled by his slaughter of the first deer and then had impulsively killed the other one out of some deranged fear of leaving any witness, even an animal. Or perhaps the approach of a human witness had frightened him, causing him to cut short the slaughter he had intended for the second deer. If he had bolted from the park someone might have noticed him. And Reardon knew he must have been drenched with blood after the first killing. A slashing killing sent geysers of blood in all directions; spurting vessels, the arcs of the weapon in its rise and fall, the thrashing about of the victim — every act in a slashing killing left a trail of blood. But no amount of blood caked on a killer or oozing from between his fingers would matter if there were no one around to see it. And as yet there were no witnesses. Reardon had already recorded that intolerable fact succinctly in his notebook: “Wit.: 0.”
    The crime had taken place at about three-thirty in the morning. Still, Reardon’s experience had taught him that eyes watched the streets constantly, that in a large city in a public place there were almost no unrecorded acts. He remembered the Ruiz case. If anyone had ever expected to kill invisibly in a city it was Paco Ruiz. Dressed in a business suit although he was a blue-collar worker, Ruiz had escorted a teenage boy to the depths of the city’s largest park and in one of its many narrow ravines of granite and underbrush he had soundlessly strangled him to death. It had happened about two hours before dawn on a moonless night in the heart of a supposedly deserted and isolated park, and two separate people had seen it. One was another teenage boy who had run away from his home that afternoon, fleeing the alcoholic rage of his father. The other was a thirty-five-year-old painter who all his life, he told Reardon, had been looking for the darkest place in the world in order to get some understanding of the nature of light. Each witness had been unaware of the other, but both of them had watched Ruiz and the boy approach from the distance, and both had sat in horrified astonishment and watched, from two widely separate angles, a large muscular man strangle a small-framed boy to death.
    In any event, Reardon thought, it was too early to tell if there were any witnesses to what had happened in the cage of the fallow deer between three and three-thirty in the morning. Sometimes it took a very long time for witnesses to come forward. Sometimes they never did. Reardon did not intend to become impatient.

3
    Reardon arrived at his son’s apartment at exactly seven-thirty. He did not want to spend any more time there than he had to. He had admitted to himself some years ago that he did not like his son very much anymore, or his son’s wife or children or friends. They lived in one of the more fashionable areas of the city, where every door had a doorman, and Reardon always felt an intense discomfort at having a man his own age, gray and rather used-up and dressed clownishly in an absurdly ornate uniform, open the door for him, smile artificially and blurt, “Good evening, sir.” But this was evidently what his son wanted; it had propelled him to win his Ivy League scholarship, perform masterfully in college, and then seek out and secure a position in what Reardon was told was one of the city’s most prestigious law firms. But in the process of all that, Reardon thought, Timothy had lost the ability to distinguish between the things that really mattered in life and those that only seemed to.
    Abbey answered the door. “Well, hello, papa,” she said.
    She was young; that was the most significant thing about her. She had borne two children but still managed to retain a kind of teenage ebullience. Everything she said, she said with enthusiasm; every gesture had a synaptic energy of its own. Her lithe