Blood Royal Read Online Free PDF Page B

and child pornographers.
    He reached the entrance to Henry VII’s chapel and paused, crouching down to make a smaller target. The whole damn place was dark, but the blackest pool was the left side of the chamber. He had to get across that murky sea and into the tombs beyond. When he got out of this mess— if he got out in one piece —he was going to pay Howler a visit. The guy had fed him dirt for years without ever raising doubt as to his credibility, but this was a corker.
    Howler was no ordinary tipster about bodies—he knew a lot about the dead. Howler had started on the slippery slope of addiction two decades ago when he found that he got no satisfaction from cocaine—and graduated to heroin. In between trips to hospitals when he overdosed and jail cells when he got caught buying and selling, besides his work at the morgue to re-create people, he got occasional work from Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum—reconstructing victims of infamous crimes for the Chamber of Horrors section.
    The coroner and the Chamber of Horrors, not very pleasant work either way. Gruesome, was how Dutton thought of the man, gruesome in appearance and in the workings of his mind. If he wasn’t cast as part of the living dead, he’d have done well in the role of the psycho motel manager in Hitchcock’s most famous thriller. Dutton had heard that of late Howler had developed another quirk—weenie-waving. He liked to stand at the glass doors of tube trains and open his raincoat, exposing his dick as the train rolled into a crowded station.
    Howler had sold him information about morgue cases for years. His gruesome, inside details on the Little Red Riding Hood Murders got Dutton’s lurid stories on the front page of the tabloid for ten editions. His information was always as accurate as it was macabre.
    This time Howler called and told him that he had evidence of an even bigger royal scandal than the princess shooting the Prince of Wales.
    Dutton had laughed when Howler said it. Nothing less than bona fide proof of the end of the world would be bigger than the princess blowing away the heir to the throne on national TV. But what the hell, Howler probably had something big even if it couldn’t be that big.
    He had refused to say what Dutton would find in the Abbey other than his cryptic hints about the body of the crime. A royal cover-up, was how Dutton took Howler’s innuendos and inferences. But a cover-up about what? And what could Westminster, England’s holy of holies, have to do with it?
    Now I’ve fallen to burglarizing churches, he thought. How the mighty have fallen. He was once a highly regarded journalist, a gonzo newspaperman—outlaw reporting, writing unrestrained stories about the dark streets of London, the ones tourists—and the police—rarely tread. His stories were full of unusual characters, street people, and often carried a social impact. In those high-flying days, he’d won the British Press Award and What the Papers Say Award. But he fell from grace with respectable reporting after a news source, a woman, was murdered due to his negligence. Racked with the pain of guilt, like Howler, he didn’t tumble from his perch in life, but had belly-flopped into the gutter, clutching a bottle of cheap booze with him. It had taken six years to dry out enough for him to write hack articles for a tabloid.
    The moon came and went again and did little to illuminate any of the demons Tony Dutton’s endless imagination could conjure. There was only one way he could get across that black pool—get up and walk across it. He hadn’t brought a flashlight because it would risk having him discovered, but right about now he was willing to risk a little discovery over bumping into God knows what in the dark.
    He stood up, took a deep breath, and briskly walked into the chapel. He took ten steps when he stumbled over something and went crashing to the ground.
    Music suddenly erupted. Dutton’s heart almost jumped out of his