Cruel Doubt Read Online Free PDF Page A

Washington. He fell asleep almost immediately and slept almost all the way home, until they reached the outskirts of Washington and had to wake him to ask directions to his house.

 
    2
    John Taylor was twenty-six years old, a slender and dark-haired man with a neatly trimmed mustache who spent most of his waking hours with a toothpick in his mouth. His real name was Haskell Taylor, Jr., but he’d been called John almost all his life, nicknamed after the Jimmy Dean song “Big Bad John.”
    Born in California, he had moved to eastern North Carolina at the age of twelve. He’d worked as an electrician and then for Texas Gulf, before joining the Washington police department in 1984. For the past two years, he’d been a detective. He liked to think he knew the town, knew who was who among its residents. But as he stood in Lieth Von Stein’s bedroom, taking pictures of the bloody body on the bed, he had to admit that the name was not one with which he was familiar.
    Taylor had seen crime scenes more gross, but none that seemed such a personal intrusion. Whoever he had been, Von Stein had met a terrible end. Clubbed and stabbed to death in his own bed, after having apparently been awakened from sleep for just a startling, savage moment.
    Taylor moved to his right, stepped over a stack of
Wall Street Journals
that lay on the floor beneath a personal computer, and bent down to take another photograph. The poor bastard. Whoever had done it hadn’t taken any chances. Taylor leaned over the blood-soaked mattress and took a picture from directly above.
    Von Stein. Von Stein. John Taylor was certain: it was not a name he’d ever heard before. Guy didn’t look old. Maybe early forties, a little overweight. Kind of balding on top, there where he’d been smacked with the club. Had a little beard that might have looked reddish in color if it hadn’t been for all the blood.
    The wife had been taken out before Taylor arrived. Rushed to the hospital, still alive, but unconscious and bleeding heavily from the chest.
    Taylor backed up against a wall and tried a shot that would show the body’s position on the bed.
Christ, there was a lot of blood
. It was six A . M ., just starting to get light. It would be another very hot and humid day: one of the sad facts of life in North Carolina in July.
    As he continued to photograph the body, John Taylor decided he might be more comfortable if the bedroom were just a little bit cooler, so he stepped to the thermostat and turned up the air-conditioning.
    He spent about another twenty minutes in the bedroom, then brought his camera downstairs, where one of the other officers told him they’d finally collected all the cats.
    Strangest thing he’d ever seen: thirteen cats at a murder scene. Thirteen cats and a
rooster
. When Taylor had first arrived, terrified cats were running all over the house. It had taken three officers, plus the daughter and a couple of her friends, to round them up and put them in carrying cases so they could be taken to a veterinarian’s office. The daughter said her mother was a member of the Beaufort County Humane Society. She also said the rooster was a pet.
    Taylor walked through the kitchen and into an enclosed porch area that led to the backyard. There, he photographed a green, canvas, Army-style knapsack that lay on the floor, near the door. The knapsack appeared empty.
    He also photographed the only signs of damage he could see. A hole had been smashed in a large, double-paned plate-glass window adjacent to the back door. Shards of glass lay on the floor, near the knapsack and door. Stepping through the open doorway, Taylor saw that a screen outside the plate-glass window had been slashed twice, each cut about twelve inches long.
    Inside the house, except for the contents of a purse scattered across a kitchen counter, nothing appeared to be disturbed.
    To John Taylor, it didn’t look like a burglary. It looked as