Charisma

Charisma Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Charisma Read Online Free PDF
Author: Orania Papazoglou
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense
For the next fifteen minutes he didn’t notice much of anything, not even if Conran and Deaver were right about the hit. What he noticed when he got to the body was the clothes.
    In the time he had been talking to Deaver, the wind had risen. It was blowing down the hill at him, unobstructed, forging streams of ice under his hair. He stopped just outside the chalk outline and looked down.
    The boy was delicate, small-boned and fine, the kind of boy who had trouble in school playgrounds and on the rougher city streets. He was blond and small and gentle, even covered with blood and broken into pieces of bone. He had no coat.
    What he did have was a heavy wool sweater and a button-down cotton shirt and a pair of corduroy pants, all perfectly matched, all taken straight out of an ad for Ralph Lauren Polo for Boys. Expensive clothes, but the wrong kind of expensive clothes, the kind that made you feel the kid had been dressed up as a preppy for a round of trick or treat. There was only one place in this city where the boys wore this kind of clothes and wore them new and always neat. The words that came into his mind and that he couldn’t get rid of were: hooker’s clothes.
    It took him a while to understand why he was so sure of the hooker part, even though it was right in front of him. The clothes had been a little tight. When the kid had been bent over to take the hit, his pants had ripped along the seam. Now the seam was gaping. Through it, Pat could see a pair of bikini underpants.
    They were bright red silk, almost translucent, and stretched as tight as skin. On the hump of the boy’s right cheek, the logo winked through a thin film of blood and snow.
    It said CHRISTIAN DIOR .

Chapter Four
1
    S OMETIMES, BISHOP JOHN MARTIN Kelly thought he knew more than he ought to about schizophrenia. Sometimes he simply thought he had two souls operating in one body: the one he was aware of, and the one that sneaked up on him when he wasn’t paying attention. For the past thirty-six hours, he had been living with that other one. Now it was ten o’clock on the morning of the Thursday after the first Sunday in Advent and he was standing at his office windows, looking out over the city of New Haven, feeling dizzy and exhilarated and scared to death. Spread out in front of him was Yale, its spires and crenellated towers, its turrets and air of always being safe. When he’d first seen it, he’d thought he’d wandered into Oz. It was even better than the Jesuit seminary, maybe because it was older. And richer. There were people who talked about the great wealth of the Catholic Church, but John Kelly knew it couldn’t begin to compare with the wealth of the Protestant Establishment. Those people ran the world. Besides, being Catholic had its drawbacks. It could be dangerous. Being a Jesuit could be more dangerous still. It always surprised him that he hadn’t thought of that when he joined the order. In those days, he’d been very hardhearted about his search for security.
    His search for security. He got his cigarettes out of the long center drawer of his desk and lit up. He hadn’t slept at all the last two nights. His brain was reeling, and when it reeled it tended to give him flash-picture shows that made him unbearably uncomfortable. One minute, he saw pictures of the future: Bishop John Martin Kelly, a real bishop instead of just an auxiliary, plastered across television screens from one end of the country to the other. The next, he got pictures of the past, of the place he had left to accept the embrace of Holy Mother Church. That place had been a single two-bed room in a cheap motel on the outskirts of Elyria, Ohio. His father had just gone into bankruptcy for the fourth time.
    His cigarette had burned down to a long column of ash. He tapped it into the ashtray and took a deep drag. His father had been a man of enthusiasms, a manic without a depressive phase, and because of that John Kelly distrusted enthusiasm in himself. His
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