Death's Savage Passion Read Online Free PDF

sleep,” he said. “Dream about Lizzie Borden. You aren’t going to get personally involved in any more murders.”
    It was about five in the morning when Phoebe called to tell me Verna Train was dead.

FOUR
    N ICK HAD TO BE there because he was Phoebe’s lawyer, and Amelia’s lawyer, and even Caroline Dooley’s lawyer—at least he’d been Caroline Dooley’s lawyer when she got her divorce, which was the only time she’d needed a lawyer. I didn’t have to be there, but I was. Maybe it was Phoebe’s voice, sounding so oddly uneven over the phone. Maybe it was the thought of Sarah English, ending her first night on the town in New York in a tangle of police and hysterical women.
    They were in the Lexington Avenue subway station at Twenty-third, and none of them was hysterical. Dana and Caroline were sitting on a bench, doing their best to look like Good Businesswomen and Good Citizens. Sarah was sitting on the bench with them, mildly drunk and very, very curious. Amelia was lecturing the police. Phoebe was standing just a little to the side of the one open entrance, waiting for us. I noticed the out-of-place first. Max Brady was standing alone in the middle of the platform, looking pugnacious and panicked at once.
    Phoebe and Sarah ran up to us as soon as we came off the stairs. It was odd to see Phoebe in floor-length velvet and forty pounds of jewelry at nearly dawn. Her topknot had come undone. Her wiry hair fell around her face in undisciplined wisps, making her look like an electrified ghost.
    Sarah smiled when she saw me, then frowned, then looked near tears. “It isn’t the way I expected it would be,” she said. She made a mighty effort at cogitation. “Of course, it isn’t a murder.”
    Phoebe ignored her. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said. “They got the train out of here, but I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now.”
    “Train?” I half thought she was talking about Verna. We had been drifting in the direction of Amelia and the police. Nick put a hand on my arm and stopped me.
    “I don’t think you ought to go over there,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these, but I have, and it’s going to be a mess.”
    “It is a mess,” Phoebe said.
    “It’s like something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Sarah said sickly. “There was so much blood.”
    “What’s a mess?” I said. “What does this have to do with a train?”
    Phoebe blinked twice, decided I wasn’t being willfully perverse, and said, “That’s what happened. Verna fell off the platform and got hit by a train. The Lexington Avenue local.”
    I stepped back, a jerky, involuntary, instinctive reaction that did nothing to calm the sudden, violent churning in my stomach. There had been a subway accident scene in a god-awful Z movie Nick and I had seen in Times Square, a scene full of blood and metal and hanging intestines. I looked over my shoulder at the tracks. Through the knot of police I could see a smear of blood on the far wall, nothing else. I didn’t need anything else. If I could have made myself move, I would have been sick.
    “I’ll go over and talk to them,” Nick said. “Sit down, for God’s sake.”
    We didn’t sit down. We stood watching him cross the platform. Then we turned away and stared at the graffiti on the wall behind the bench. I got a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket, extracted and lit one. I have never been able to decide if smoking is legal on New York subway platforms, but at that point I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except not having to look at the tracks again.
    “It would have been different if it was murder,” Sarah said. She sounded as if she’d convinced herself.
    “It all happened so fast,” Phoebe said. “First we were standing around talking about how no mugger was going to mess with a whole crowd of women, and then there was the train.”
    “Who’s here from the police?” I asked her. “Could we get