Cut and Run Read Online Free PDF Page B

Markowitz’s personal assistant. Against the university’s bylaws—unpaid personal assistants—but fairly common practice, especially for the emeritus types like Markowitz. He did consulting for Princeton, Markowitz did. Consulted all over the place. We’re collecting that information now.”
    â€œDid or does?” Larson sought to clarify the tense.
    â€œYou catch on quickly.”
    â€œYou wanted me to see Emerson Brighton Doyle in person. I don’t get that.”
    â€œA picture wouldn’t have done it,” Rotem said.
    â€œAromatherapy?”
    â€œCome around this side.”
    As Larson stepped across the pale log of a khaki-clad leg, Rotem continued. “The moment they move him, disturb him, some or all of this will be ruined. He’s going to come apart like an overcooked brisket. You’re right about me wanting you to see this. But it’s not as if I’d wish this upon anybody,” he said, displaying what was for him a rare moment of humanism.
    â€œThen why?” Larson asked, as it turned out, a little prematurely. For by then Rotem had pointed toward the head, which looked more like a horrific beach ball. Larson backed off a step, his back now pressed against the coolness of the wall between the corner sink and toilet, his left arm on the roll of toilet paper like an armrest. That chill found its way through the blazer and shirt and into his skin and bored down into him like a dentist’s drill. Rotem was right, moving the body would have likely destroyed it. At first blush, it looked like nothing more than another of the series of chins—Larson counted nine or ten of the folds despite the heavy bloating. But the pink one just below the man’s right earlobe was more than a tear or a split. It was too precise, the slight smile of a curve that started at the ear. Too intentional.
    â€œBenny the bus driver,” Larson finally said. “Christ almighty. The Romeros?” Hope rose in his thoughts again. Hope and her long history with the Romeros.
    â€œWe can’t be sure,” Rotem said, but his heart obviously wasn’t in it.
    The medical examiner had written up Benny’s sliced throat as a precision cut intended to sever the trachea while simultaneously laying open the carotid arteries. An extremely efficient cut for someone wishing to both silence and kill a man. Benny had bled out while drowning in his own blood, his larynx cut and inoperable. Larson hadn’t seen anything like it in the past six years.
    â€œCan’t call it a signature cut,” Rotem continued.
    â€œCan’t we?”
    â€œBut I wanted you to see it.”
    â€œScott, maybe I’m punchy because it’s four-thirty in the morning, or maybe it’s from all the chitchat with the two wonderful conversationalists you sent to abduct me, but I’m squatting by this pile of stink looking at what it is you brought me here to look at, and I’m telling you it is a signature cut, which must be exactly what you want to hear, or why would you bring me? So if you know something else, would you just fucking say it?”
    Larson wanted out of there. He wanted to find Hope—tell her the Romeros were on the move again.
On the move?
They had Leo Markowitz!
Good God
.
    â€œLeopold Markowitz wrote the code for
Laena
.”
    Larson had assumed as much.
Laena
was the name given to WITSEC’s master witness protection list, the most carefully guarded database in the Justice Department. Larson’s insides did another little roll. Anything and everything to do with the identity and location of Hope Stevens was contained in
Laena
.
    â€œ
Laena
became inoperable yesterday afternoon at around four, eastern. They can’t open it; they can’t access it.”
    â€œSo they’ve got the list,” Larson said.
    â€œThe list, but maybe not the names
on
the list.” Seven to eight thousand people, including