Delusion in Death Read Online Free PDF

contacted Feeney as she walked out of the hospital. “Anything?”
    “We’ve got people going in, coming out, normal as you’d expect on the door cam. Female suit, mid-thirties, exits at seventeen-twenty-two. Two women entering ten seconds later. We got a man and a woman—pegged them as mid-late twenties, come out arguing, looks like a hot one. She storms off. He calls after her, starts to go back in the bar. Changes his mind and heads in the same direction she took. That’s logged at seventeen-twenty-nine. Seventeen-thirty-two a couple of suits walked out, split off, one north, one south.”
    “We’ll run face recognition on all of them.”
    “We’ll do that. On the ’links we’re processing, we get a lot of people going off, some starting out easy then screaming or swearing. We’ve got some audio, and it ain’t pretty. It doesn’t tell us much.”
    “I’m heading to the morgue, maybe Morris has something. Bring everything you find to the briefing. We’ll sort through it.”
    “It’s hit the media, Dallas. Too many people, cops, medicals, bystanders, to keep the lid tight. Nobody has real details. Right now it’s coming over as a possible gang hit or bar fight gone seriously south.”
    “We stick to ‘no comment’ until we know the direction, and we keep leaks plugged tight in EDD and Homicide.”

    “You got that. Your man’s got us a list of employees, and who was on. He’s working their electronics himself.” Feeney paused, glanced over his shoulder as if checking if any ears were close by. “Nobody’s saying the one thing everybody’s thinking.”
    Terrorism. She nodded. “Then let’s not say it yet. I’ll check back.”
    Facts first, she told herself as she drove. Evidence, time lines, names, motives. Just work the case, one step at a time.
    CiCi Way and friends, party of four, having cocktails and bar food. Women visit the bathroom, go back. And CiCi’s work pal turns into a demon and stabs her boyfriend in the face with a fork.
    Brewster, party of one. Comes in, takes his usual table, consumes nothing, and his waitress turns into a giant bee.
    An entire bar of office drones and suits turns into a battlefield of makeshift weapons for—given current data—approximately twelve minutes. Result: over eighty dead.
    Both survivors interviewed reported a sudden headache, and both came to with blurry memories, but no signs of continued hallucination.
    For now, she decided. No telling if whatever had caused it to happen would reoccur.
    She walked into the morgue. The long white tunnel, usually quiet, thrummed and echoed with activity. She saw lab coats and protective gear, harried faces, hurrying feet. She could smell the death, still fresh, still bloody as she made her way to Morris’s autopsy room.
    He had three on tables, and she assumed more stacked somewhere. He wore a clear work cape over his sweater and pants, and had something soft and sorrowful playing on his speakers. Blood coated his sealed hands.
    “Busy night,” he commented. “We love our work, you and I, inour strange and twisted way. But this? This tests resolve, even dedication.”
    Delicately, he laid a brain on a scale, programmed for analysis.
    “So many dead,” he continued, “and by whose design? What would cause someone to want so many people, strangers, surely many of them strangers, to slaughter each other?”
    “Is that what happened? You can confirm it?”
    “Our number two—” He gestured. “She has flesh under her nails, in her teeth—not her own flesh. Number one, not all the blood on him is his own, and three? He has deep gashes in his palm, his fingers—right hand. Sliced there from a glass shard held this way.”
    Morris gripped his hand as if holding a knife. “His hand’s cut to the bone from it. I’ve people working with other bodies, and reports coming in of the same sort. Offensive and defensive wounds, claw marks, flesh and blood under nails, in teeth, bite marks, some of them savage.