Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dorrie. She wouldn’t have. That’s what she had me for.
    If—just saying if, just imagining—if you speculated that she’d been so upset over something that she’d killed herself in a white-hot rage of self-obliteration, an impulse so powerful that she couldn’t take the time to call me first, well then she damn well wouldn’t have spent an hour patiently feeding pages one by one into a shredder either. If she’d had the presence of mind and the patience for that, she’d have had the presence of mind and patience to call me. You couldn’t have it both ways.
    I finished with the address book and started on the calendar. There wasn’t much there, just her class schedule and, peppered around it, entries labeled “Appointment,” each showing a time and a set of initials, presumably of the person she was meeting. She had full days of appointments every Friday and Saturday, half-days on Sunday. Once in a while a nighttime appointment during the week. I wrote it all down.
    I did this with one eye on the clock. It wouldn’t take the police very long to connect my name to Dorrie’s. It was widely known that we’d been more than just classmates; people had seen us together. And of course my prints were on file. They might not launch an investigation, but they’d certainly be coming to talk to me. Which was fine—but not if they found her papers and her laptop in my apartment when they arrived. That might not be for a day or two, but you never knew.
    I had a suitcase in the bottom of my closet and I emptied it out, tossing the clothing it contained on the floor. Dorrie’s outfits and the dozen little bottles of lube and massage oil went in there, along with the phone and charger and the papers, both shredded and whole.
    Leaving the suitcase open, I booted up Dorrie’s laptop and quickly sifted through her home directory. It was pretty sparse—Dorrie hadn’t been a power user of the machine. There were a few songs stored in her “My Music” folder and a batch of word processor documents in “My Documents.” One folder was labeled “Kennedy” and contained various drafts of the assignments she’d turned in that first semester when we’d been in his class together and of the longer project she’d been working on for him ever since. I opened a few files at random. Along with some pieces I remembered discussing in class, there was a fragment titled “First Time” that I didn’t. As I read it, I could see why she hadn’t turned it in.
    The assignment had been for us to write a scene from the point of view of the opposite gender. As I recalled, Dorrie had submitted a piece about a young husband pacing in a hospital corridor while his wife was having a Caesarian in the next room—“Birth,” there it was in the folder, dated just two days later. She’d based it, she told us, on the experience of a cousin.
    But “Birth,” it seemed, hadn’t been her first stab at the assignment.
    FIRST TIME
“Undress anywhere you like,” she said, waving her hand in a little circle. It wasn’t clear what she meant by ‘anywhere.’ The whole apartment was one room, maybe nineteen feet one way and eleven the other, with a sectional sofa against one wall, a stereo and an incense burner against another, and a padded table covered in tan leather a few feet away from the third. There was also a short entrance hall and, off to one side, a lighted alcove that held a tiny kitchen. Maybe she meant it was okay to undress in the kitchen.
    She carried my money to a table in the hallway, counting it as she went. I watched her shoulders, tight and angular under the straps of her blue tank top, and I watched her legs, which were shaking just enough that you had to be looking for it to notice. Her hands moved quickly, darting into the handbag she pulled from a drawer in the table and coming out empty. The rest of her moved quickly, too. She chewed up the distance between us in three strides and then was past me, replacing the New