Dust to Dust Read Online Free PDF

you’re full of. You’re not having a heart attack.”
    The second floor of the house had probably been open attic space at one time, but had been nicely converted to a master suite. Joist beams had been left exposed, creating a loft effect. A lovely, private place to die, Kovac thought, taking in the scene at a glance.
    The body hung from a traditional rope noose just a few feet beyond the four-poster bed. The rope looped over a ceiling beam and was tied off somewhere at the head of the bed frame, that end of it hidden by the bedding. The bed was neatly made, hadn’t been slept in or even sat upon. Kovac noted these things in the back of his mind, his concentration on the victim. He flashed on the photographs he’d turned over on the dresser in Mike Fallon’s bedroom the night before: the handsome young man, the star athlete, the fresh-faced new cop with Mike beaming proudly beside him. He could see that same academy graduation photograph sitting on Andy Fallon’s dresser.
Good-looking kid
, he remembered thinking.
    Now the handsome face was discolored, distorted, purple and bloated, the mouth frozen in a kind of sneer. The eyes were half-open and cloudy. He’d been there a while. A day or so, Kovac guessed from the apparent lack of rigor, the tautness of the skin, the smell. The sickly sweet aroma of beginning decay commingled with stale urine and feces. In death, the muscles had relaxed, bladder and bowel discharging on the floor.
    The body was nude. His arms hung at his sides, hands curled into fists held slightly forward of the hips. Dark spots dotted the knuckles—lividity, the blood settling in the lowest levels of the extremities. The feet, no more than a few inches off the floor, were swollen and deep purple as well.
    Kovac squatted down, took hold of an ankle, and pressed his thumb against the flesh for a moment, then let go. He watched for the skin to blanch, but nothing happened. The blood had clotted long before. The leg was cold to the touch.
    An oak-framed full-length mirror was propped against the wall some ten feet in front of the corpse. The body was reflected fully, the reflection distorted by the angle of the mirror. The word
Sorry
had been written on the glass with something dark.
    “I always figured these IA guys for kinky.”
    Kovac looked to the two uniforms standing ten feet away, smirking at the mirror. The cops were a pair of buzz-cut no-necks, the bigger one having a head as square as a concrete block. Their name tags read “Rubel” and “Ogden.”
    “Hey, Dumb and Dumber,” Kovac snapped. “Get the hell outta my death scene. What the fuck’s the matter with you? Tromping all over the place.”
    “It’s a suicide,” the uglier one said, as if that mattered.
    Kovac felt his face flush. “Don’t tell me what’s what, Moose. You don’t know dick. Maybe in twenty years you’ll have a right to an opinion. Now get the fuck outta here. Go downstairs and secure the zone. I don’t want anyone coming closer than the street. And keep your big fat yaps shut. Where there’s a corpse, there’s newsies. I read one word about this,” he said, pointing to the reflection in the mirror, “I’ll know who gets reamed new ones. You got me?”
    The officers glanced at each other sullenly, then headed for the stairs.
    “IA rat offs himself,” the ugly one said under his breath. “So what’s the crime? Looks like a service to everyone, you ask me.”
    Kovac stared at the body. He could see Liska snooping around, making notes of every detail, sketching the room, the placement of the furniture and of anything that might be deemed significant. They took turns at that job—keeping the notes at the scene. It was his turn to shoot the preliminary Polaroids.
    He started with the room itself, then slowly moved in on the body, photographing it from all angles. Each flash burned an imprint on his memory—the dead thing that had been Mike Fallon’s son; the beam from which the noose hung; the