Body Of Truth Read Online Free PDF Page B

instant replay.
    He knew his family and most of the cops he worked with thought he was crazy for living in the neighborhood. Hell, half the building thought he was nuts. Even on a cop’s salary he could afford to live somewhere where the morning wake-up call wasn’t a siren from a squad car chasing down some low-life in the street. If he had a wife or kids to worry about, he wouldn’t consider it, but for himself alone, it did just fine.
    If he was lucky, April might have called, signaling she’d gotten over being angry with him. April wasn’t very demanding of his time, but he’d stood her up on her birthday to run down a lead on the case he’d been working on. Not even a low maintenance woman like April would tolerate that without complaint. Maybe he should call her and try to apologize again.
    As soon as that thought entered his mind he knew he wouldn’t do it. For as accommodating as April was, he knew she was better off without him. His job as a homicide detective working out of the 48 provided all the complications he needed in his life; he’d never allowed any woman to be more than a distraction. He didn’t intend to change now.
    He stripped out of his clothes and showered off the grime of his day. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he padded barefoot to the kitchen at the front of his apartment. The refrigerator yielded nothing more appetizing than some three-day-old chicken and a couple of beers. He’d have to settle for that as he wasn’t in the mood to cook, nor did any of the places that delivered offer any fare worth the price of indigestion later.
    He ate the chicken in the kitchen but took the beer out onto the fire escape outside his living room window. The night was warm, sultry in a way you only found in New York. The breeze off the river, heavy with humidity, brought the scent of other dinners cooking on other people’s stoves. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed, but closer to home, Usher’s voice blared “Yeah,” accompanied by the laughter and shouted conversation of teenagers.
    Once upon a time, this had been a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, populated by some of the city’s largest ethnic groups: Jews, Poles, Irish and Italians. In the 1970s, a combination of white flight and financial incentives to move to the kinder, gentler North East Bronx decimated the population of the neighborhood. Unlike Harlem that had burned, paving the way for today’s renewal and gentrification, the South Bronx had been abandoned to the new ethnic groups that moved in: Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Jamaicans and other groups struggling to eke out a decent living amid crime infested streets.
    Every now and then, some politician would make noises about taking back the South Bronx, the Grand Concourse in particular. The only strides he’d seen in this regard were the opening of the Concourse Plaza shopping mall over a decade ago. At least the locals now had a few decent stores in which to shop.
    He took a long pull on his beer before retrieving the photograph he’d tucked in his back pocket. He scanned the image of the woman’s battered face. “Who are you, sweetheart?” he whispered. As of yet, fingerprints hadn’t come back yet, the bum in the alleyway couldn’t tell them anything and so far the neighborhood canvass had yielded the usual chorus of “I didn’t see nothing.” The coroner’s office wouldn’t be getting to the body until some time tomorrow. He’d have to wait until then to discover if the corpse held any secrets to her identity or her attacker’s. Meanwhile, they’d faxed the information they had to missing persons. Maybe they’d come up with something, but he doubted it. The only distinguishing sign on her body was a small birthmark on her left shoulder. Not much to go on considering her facial features were unrecognizable.
    Jonathan rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle