Dreams in the Key of Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

the small-town police force for thirty-two years.
    That morning, he stood on my porch, hat in hand, and said, “I’ve heard of you, Dr. Frank. In fact, I read one of your books,
Crime Reconstruction and Personality Profiling.
”
    I assumed it was a social call. “Come in. We can talk over coffee.”
    The chief shook his head. “We don’t get too many murders here,” he said as he stood on my porch, fidgeted with his navy watch cap, and shifted his ample weight from one lug-soled boot to another. “When we do, we get good support from our state people. This situation has stretched all of us pretty much to the max. We don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with.”
    I raised an eyebrow and waited for him to latch on to a coherent thought. He didn’t.
    “Chief, I’m afraid I’m not following you,” I told him.
    “It’s been all over the TV.”
    Jaworski’s tone and facial expression communicated pure astonishment. How could I not know something that had been defined as reality by the tube? If Tom Brokaw says it is,
it is.
    “I don’t watch much TV,” I told him. “There isn’t one here.”
    “Well, I talked it over with some folks in Augusta.They checked you out, said there wouldn’t be any harm done if I could get you to take a look at this.”
    The chief’s circumlocution amused me, but I figured it was time to put him out of his misery and get to the point.
    “Just what have you got?”
    I never should have asked.
    I DRAGGED OVER A CHAIR, SAT, AND STARED IN HORROR at two bloodstained beds.
    In every other way, the room resembled any room occupied by college students. The twin beds were separated by a scarred oak desk. A second desk, with bureaus on both sides of it, squatted against the opposite wall. Both desks held computers, stacks of books, papers, and spiral-bound notebooks.
    But this room wore rust-colored smears on its walls, and there were coagulated pools of black blood in the bedding. The students, now and forever to be known as victims, had departed in zippered bags.
    They left as packaged people,
I thought.
    Technicians carried vials and plastic Baggies in and out of the apartment. Uniformed cops measured and sketched.
    “Give me the photographs,” I said, reaching behind me, never allowing my eyes to move from the evidence of the carnage that someone committed there.
    “Susan Hamilton, twenty years old,” Herb Jaworski said, placing a folder in my hand.
    I sat surrounded by the trace evidence of homicide, and examined the crime scene photos.
    “The medical examiner says seven perimortem and postmortem stab wounds,” Jaworski said.
    “While she was dying and after her death,” I mused. “The gunshot killed her.”
    “Twenty-two caliber, copper jacket.”
    I looked at the photo of the small hole in the young woman’s temple, then studied each of the remaining photographs in the series. Even gray and dead, Susan Hamilton appeared younger than her twenty years. Her face wore the expression of someone at rest. There was no paroxysm of pain. There was the small black hole, probably an immediate absence of consciousness, then death.
    “He pulled back the blanket and the sheet, then did his cutting,” I said.
    “That’s the way we figure it. No holes in the bedclothes.”
    “Then he pulled up the blankets, threw them over her.”
    “Even covered her face.”
    Was the killer ashamed? I wondered. Did he attempt to conceal the evidence of his havoc? If he could not see the dead girl, maybe she was not there. Perhaps he did not want Susan staring up at him.
    “What about the blood on the wall?” I asked.
    “Don’t make any sense.”
    I stared at the wall on my left, at the streaks of dingy red that originated three feet above where Susan’s head would have been and descended downward at a sixty-degree angle.
    “No prints apparent in the smear,” I said. “Probably wore latex gloves.”
    Like somebody playing with watercolors. Picasso gone wild with the sweep of a