Death Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

his choice.
    This tenant owned books. He had seen in the man’s face that he was a reader but couldn’t tell the kinds of books he was into.
    It would be fun to check out the titles, he thought. But he didn’t take unnecessary risks.
    He rummaged through the drawers and glanced at the walls but saw nothing worth taking. He crossed the hallway to the bedroom.
    Next to the unmade bed, a few feet from the door, was a garbage bag. There was something in it. It felt soft from the outside. He took hold of the bottom of the bag and carefully emptied it. A shirt and pair of pants fell out. Both of them looked like they had been dipped in something sticky that had now completely dried. I’m starting to see things, he thought. I’ve had enough for one day.

    Back home, the burglar had difficulty concentrating. Snowflakes danced outside his window, and he could feel a draft through the sill. Some children were picking up the snow as soon as it hit the ground, while his son stood there with a carrot in his hand. A nose for a snowman, he thought. Why does that remind me of Michael Jackson?
    “A penny for your thoughts,” his wife said.
    “What?”
    “You looked like you’d just discovered the theory of relativity.”
    “I was thinking about Michael Jackson.”
    “The singer?”
    He kept his eyes on the children. The lower part of the snowman’s body was done. No legs, of course. A snowman with legs—that was a new concept.
    “You meant the singer, right?” she repeated.
    “What did you say?”
    “Hello, anybody home?”
    He turned and looked at her. “Yes, Michael Jackson. Kalle’s got a carrot in his hand, and he’s waiting for them to put a head on the snowman so he can give it a nose.” He glanced back at the children. “Michael Jackson had a nose operation or something a year or two ago.”
    “That’s news to me.”
    “It’s true. Is there any more coffee?”
    She got up and took the coffeepot from the counter.
    “So what did you do all day?” she asked after he had poured some milk in his cup, followed by the coffee, and taken a few sips.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You looked a little upset when you came home.”
    “I did?”
    “You weren’t your usual self.”
    The snowman had a head now, and Kalle had stuck the carrot into a blank surface that would soon turn into a face with pebbles for eyes and gravel for a mouth.
    “Did you have a bad day?” she persisted.
    “No.”
    “I thought you were in a better mood the last few days.”
    “The caseworker at the employment office always looks right past me,” he said finally.
    “Past you?”
    “She sits there, and we talk and talk, but her eyes are on the window behind me. Like some job was about to climb in. Or she feels like jumping out.”
    “A job will climb in soon. Take my word for it.”
    She knows me through and through, he thought, but she hasn’t guessed anything yet. When the hauls get a little bigger, she might suspect something, but that won’t be anytime soon. Maybe I’ll get a regular job first. Bigger miracles have happened. But by then I might not want it anymore.
    He couldn’t get the bloodstained clothes out of his mind. When he had stood and stared at them, they seemed to be beckoning to him, or screaming something for his ears only.
    He would never know how he had managed to get the clothes back in the garbage bag, and he could only pray that he had left the bedroom in the same shape as he’d found it. Why hadn’t the idiot just burned them? I haven’t seen anything, he told himself.

4
    THE MUFFLED SOUNDS OF WINTER FOLLOWED THEM INTO POLICE headquarters and lingered in their clothing as they rode the elevator to the fourth floor of the homicide division.
    The corridors were lined with tile. For most of the year, noises that made their way in from the street bounced dissonantly off the walls. Now they just rolled by like loosely packed snowballs. A circle of silence surrounds everyone and everything, Winter thought as he