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

another in the course of a day. Hell, if some men needed to pay to have a woman touch them and some women were willing to take the money, fine. If they both left feeling a little degraded by the experience, well, they didn’t have to repeat it. I’m no crusader. I hadn’t tried to talk Dorrie into quitting the job.
    But now I couldn’t help wondering, would it have made a difference if I had? Was it one of her customers who’d done this to her, some crafty sociopath observant enough to spot Final Exit on her shelf and mirtazapine in her medicine cabinet?
    I shut down the word processor and opened a Web browser. Nothing stood out on her list of bookmarks, the Web pages she visited most often, except for Craigslist, the site where all the city’s sex workers ran the classified ads that drew in their customers. In the old days, brothels and massage parlors would advertise in broadsheet rags sold under the counter at newsstands—or if they were the classy, upscale sort, they’d advertise in coded language in the back pages of New York magazine. You still saw some of that, but this was the Internet age, when a DSL connection was as indispensable to the sex trade as a pack of condoms, and most of the business had migrated online. Craigslist was sort of the eBay of sex. Anything you wanted, you could find, more or less anytime you wanted it. Horny guys could try to find it for free first under “Personals—Casual Encounters,” and when that failed, they could find it for a price under “Services—Erotic.”
    Which is where I went. There was a search box, and I typed into it the name Dorrie had told me she worked under: Cassandra. Fifteen links came up, quite possibly none of them hers. There was no shortage of Cassandras on Craigslist. All I could do was take them one at a time—
    I heard it out of the corner of one ear first, the faint clickclick, clickclick of my busted doorbell.
    My fingers hung over the keyboard. I didn’t move.
    Clickclick.
    Then the brisk rapping as a fistful of knuckles landed against the surface of the door.
    “Mr. Blake?” It was a man’s voice, nasal and sharp. “We’d like to talk to you. This is Patrolman James Mirsky of the NYPD.”

Chapter 4
    Mirsky looked like a cop, and it wasn’t just the uniform. On his day off, standing at a hibachi in shorts and a polo shirt, he’d still have looked like a cop, getting ready to interrogate the burgers.
    The younger man with him was clearly a rookie, barely old enough to shave, it seemed. But old enough to carry the gun riding in a holster on his hip, apparently; and as for looking like a cop, he’d grow into it. They all did.
    They both stood there, uniform caps in their hands, scanning the room thoroughly. That didn’t mean anything, of course. They taught you in the academy to scan rooms that way. You walk into a bathroom, you take it all in first, left and right, before you unzip.
    They saw the bear and the bird and my bed and my desk, and my computer on my desk, but they didn’t see Dorrie’s computer or my suitcase. While Mirsky and the rookie were looking in either direction, I pushed it further under my bed with my heel.
    “Mr. Blake, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you,” Mirsky said, the formality of the diction sitting uneasily in his mouth. They’d trained him to talk this way to grieving relatives; left to his own devices, he’d have talked like a teamster. “Wouldja care to sit down?”
    “That’s okay,” I said, trying to decide how surprised I should act when he sprang the news on me. I’m a lousy actor. “What is it?”
    “You know a woman named Dorothy Burke?”
    “Sure, I know Dorrie.”
    “Sit down, Mr. Blake, why doncha?”
    “I don’t want to sit down. What’s going on with Dorrie? Has she done something?”
    “Looks like it,” Mirsky said. He worried his hat between his fingers absently. He didn’t like this part of his job, standing in crowded, stuffy tenement apartments, telling people