Kansas City Noir Read Online Free PDF

cat got in the car at the same time Wilma did, to stay warm. And cats know how to get home.”
    Armand was thinking it over. The fact was, they had three victims. Three little dolls and three dead bodies. But no crime scene. The Dollmaker clearly hunted victims away from their homes, picked them out of crowds, met them in shopping malls or movie theaters, followed behind them on highways, cornered them in unfamiliar territory. He knew them well, had watched them, probably photographed them so he could make their dolls.
    And somehow he subdued them, injected them, played with them, loaded them in the trunks of cars, drove them elsewhere still, to odd corners of the city, to out-of-the-way parking lots where, after hours, his victims slowly recovered, then—from cold, from thirst, bound and unable to move or call out—died. To think of it made Armand tremble, made him hold the steering wheel a little tighter.
    This was where he was going: paralysis, then nothing.
    As if he could calm the cat, he patted the cardboard box. “Good cat,” he told it. “ Shhh .”
    Without a firm crime scene, they had no witnesses. If he knew where the victims had been abducted, he might find someone who had seen it happen, perhaps without realizing what he’d seen. But without witnesses, there was little to go on except the sodium thiopental and phenobarbitol, which led nowhere. And the dolls, which provided less than he’d hoped.
    Armand was no cat person, but his wife had been, and when she died her cat had lived on another four, five years. And one day, when he’d brought the cat to the vet, the vet had offered to have it chipped. And this is how Armand came to know that lots of cats—all those adopted from the SPCA, for instance—came with a little microchip the size of a grain of rice embedded in the skin between the shoulder blades. And if this cat was chipped, that meant it could be scanned for the owner’s address.
    And with an address, they had something close to a likely crime scene. And perhaps there they’d find a witness.
    It would be easier than following the damned thing through the streets of Kansas City, anyway.
     
    * * *
     
    It had begun with a strange, dull ache in his joints, as if he’d had too much exercise the day before, though Armand exercised rarely, and then only under pressure from his doctor or from Balls, his immediate supervisor, who insisted all of them, even sixty-five-year-old homicide detectives, achieve “a level of physical fitness.” And quitting smoking hadn’t been enough. And mostly laying off the drink hadn’t done the trick, either.
    But the ache remained, climbing up and down his legs, and then, a few weeks later, it was in his wrists. Sometimes it felt like handcuffs tightening over them. It was in his elbows, a sort of tingling pain, the sting of a bee. He’d grown unstable on his feet and, waking up in the middle of the night, had to hold the side of his bed to keep from falling while his legs attained their balance, while they caught up with the rest of him.
    And his regular doctor looked concerned, as did the first specialist. And the next, and the third, a young Vietnamese woman who told him it was not going to get better, she was so sorry to tell him this. They could slow the process a bit, they would take an aggressive approach, there were a number of clinical trials going on right here at the KU Medical Center. “People live for years with this,” she said, smiling, by which she meant that people went on , slowly losing the ability to move their arms and legs, unable, at first, to drive safely. And then to walk, or feed themselves, or change the channel, unable to do anything at all but lie in bed or look out the window at the snow, which swirled now around his car as he took another left, and another, driving around and around the Plaza, two days before Christmas, a cat in a box on the seat beside him. It was midnight now.
    He hit a bump and something rattled in the