Cole Perriman's Terminal Games Read Online Free PDF Page A

here? Nice place. Not your usual homicide scene, if you know what I mean.” He was trying to put her at ease, but she seemed to grow colder and more distant by the second. He wondered if he still had garlic on his breath from lunch.
    “Yes, I’m staying here,” the woman said. “Down the hall. I’m here on business.”
    “What did you mean when you said you’d seen something like that?” asked Nolan, gesturing toward the wall.
    The woman started to reply, then closed her mouth. Nolan reached out as if to touch her arm, to encourage her—a mistake, he realized too late. She drew back from him again and was quite composed now. This time she turned and faced the splattered wall.
    “Oh, it’s the design. I believe it’s Louis XIV. I saw something like it at Versailles, I’m sure. I’m an interior designer, so I notice these things. It’s shocking to see it … stained like that.”
    The elevator doors opened. “Excuse me,” the woman said, “but I’m late for an appointment.”
    Nolan nodded. She walked away from him.
    Can’t exactly take her in for knowing too much about wall decor
    With a straight back and a dignified step, the woman disappeared into the elevator. Nolan took out his small notebook and wrote down her name.

00010
OLICE LINE DO NOT CRO
    Marianne Hedison fled deep into the velvet-lined elevator, slipping into a space behind several people. She watched the open doorway warily, but the detective did not follow her. The handful of people faced front in doll-like silence as the doors slid shut. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the elevator wall. The sun design with its dark blotch kept exploding in her mind like the afterimage of a flashbulb.
    That morning, when Marianne had followed the porter out of the elevator on her way to her room, she had laughed when she spied the ornamented wall. She knew that the emblem of the Sun King was copied from His Majesty’s very bedroom doors. Even then, another significance to that design had teased at her thoughts, but her attention was quickly deflected by the small demands of finding her room and settling in.
    She had seen only one of the garlanded suns that morning, however. The other wall had been blocked with a screen. Something gold. Yes, three gold panels with a crane and a bonsai tree. One of the elevators had been out of service. And a yellow tape bearing the warning POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSShad been stretched diagonally across part of the corridor, preventing access to the screen or the elevator. Marianne hadn’t found the tape particularly ominous—just a reminder that she was back in L.A.
    But just now, the Japanese screen had been moved aside and a long strand of the yellow plastic tape lay tangled on the floor. Fragments of the message surfaced here and there among its coils …
    … OLICE LI ... ROSS POLI ... INE DO NOT CRO ... OSS POLICE LI …
    And now that police detective was standing there in the hallway. He had been staring directly at the stain—a stain that Marianne had not seen that morning. The larger splatter was placed across the garlands and the rays of the sun, the smaller splashes bloomed like terrible flowers on the face of the sun, and the line of a drip followed a curved edge.
    That stain was exactly like …
    But no. She wouldn’t complete that thought. The implications of that precise stain on that precise design were intolerable.
    Marianne struggled to bring her thoughts under control. The elevator stopped at another floor, and two more people got on. At each stop, everybody on the elevator shuffled slightly backward. The rhythmic sliding of the doors, the familiar rituals of the people—their polite distances, their quiet apologies to one another, their contractions of boundaries to accommodate those whose presence they would not again acknowledge—these small protocols eased Marianne’s alarm. She couldn’t believe she had so nearly panicked right in front of that detective.
    What did I think he was going