Ice Blue Read Online Free PDF Page A

at Hetheridge, eyebrows
still raised.
    “I don’t like to see my junior team members
treated with disrespect,” Hetheridge said, “male or female.”
    “Not sure it had anything to do with me being
female, at least not this time,” Kate replied in the cheeky tone
that came so naturally to her. “Not when you swept in with that
voice and that ice-blue glare, Lord Hetheridge himself, scaring the
hell out of everyone, and in a tuxedo, no less. Of course, poor
little DS Sod-All faded right into the woodwork.” Fitting the smart
phone’s stylus into its slot, Kate tucked the device into her coat
pocket. “I’ll take thorough notes on everything, I promise. But
first I want to see the scene, you know, really see it, without
trying to distill it into words at the same time.”
    Hetheridge nodded, hiding his approval. He
wanted to see how Kate functioned without influencing her actions.
Expression neutral, he gestured once again for her to enter first,
then followed her into the library.
    Both the library’s lamps were still burning.
One, an amber-shaded banker’s lamp, cast a wedge of light across a
roll-top desk swamped with papers. The other lamp, a tall, golden
Art Deco torchiere, illuminated the center of the room. On either
side of the torchiere, two leather wingback chairs were placed,
facing a brass-screened fireplace. The fire, wood rather than
electric, had guttered down to sullen red embers. Crumpled before
those embers was a man’s body, on its knees before the long marble
hearth.
    The victim, Comfrey, looked as if he’d died
while flailing out of the chair. The victim’s hands, loose at his
sides, were bloodied and scored with black streaks. Similar marks
marred his throat, and black marks scored his shoulders, where his
shirt had offered only slight protection. Comfrey was propped
against the chair, his head thrown back. Ordinarily a corpse in
such a position would fall forward, pulled down by the head’s dead
weight. In this case, the weapon that had dealt those injuries to
Comfrey’s hands, chest, and neck, a brass poker from the hearth’s
collection of fire irons, had been driven into his right eye. The
poker had been shoved into the skull with enough force to leave it
sticking out of the eye socket. And the poker had sufficient heft
to keep Comfrey’s head thrown back, maintaining his body in the
kneeling position, hands loose at his sides like a supplicant.
    Hetheridge, absorbing the details of the
corpse, nearly missed the soft sound beside him. Glancing over, he
took in Kate’s ashen face and tight mouth, and knew she had never
been exposed to such a crime scene before. Beads of sweat had
broken out across her upper lip, and her hands were clenched
awkwardly in front of her.
    “I need assurance this wasn’t a home
invasion,” Hetheridge snapped, in a tone that suggested Kate had
been seriously delinquent. Immediately, her hands unclenched, and
her gaze shot to him, startled.
    “Examine the balcony. Check behind those
curtains and see if the windows have been disturbed. Then go
downstairs and inspect the ground beneath the balcony. Determine
what tools or physical skills would have been necessary for an
intruder to enter from that balcony.”
    Nodding, Kate moved toward the balcony. It
was several paces away, and Hetheridge hoped the fresh air wafting
in through the still-open French doors would be enough to steady
her. Violent death was hard enough to view, to catalog, to study.
But it was the smell of it, the blood and the shit and the piss,
that brought such a death home to Hetheridge – that gripped him
viscerally, making him imagine he might actually die the same
death, if he contemplated it long enough.
    Hetheridge wandered slowly around the room.
He kept to a tight path, taking no extra steps and – despite the
blue gloves – touching nothing. Until CID finished with the scene,
he was hesitant to do anything that might compromise their efforts.
Instead, Hetheridge visually