Kill and Tell Read Online Free PDF

unknown blood donor, who may or may not be dead. Another body may turn up somewhere, though I don't see the logic in carrying one body away and leaving the second one here, unless the perps just didn't have enough time to grab the second body."
    "Perps? Not one guy, then?"
    "He would have to be pretty damn strong to pick up a dead guy. You know how it is. They flop all over the place."
    "Plus they're dead weight," Shannon said, his face straight. Marc hid a chuckle, turning it into a cough so the television cameras wouldn't pick up the image of a callous cop laughing over the body. Cops had to laugh, otherwise they wouldn't be able to bear the carnage they saw.
    "Maybe the blood donor walked away under his own steam," Shannon suggested. "There's not much blood."
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    "Neither is there a blood trail that I can see, though drops would be hard to spot on a wet sidewalk in the dark. What did he do, administer first aid to himself quickly enough, cleanly enough, that not even one drop hit the ground?"
    Shannon shook his head in answer to Marc's question. Even a cut finger tended to drip before the blood could be staunched. "So… you think there were two or more perps, and the missing guy was loaded up and carried away."
    "You catch on fast."
    "What do you think it was, a drug deal gone bad or some bums arguing over a cardboard house?"
    "I don't know. There would be at least three parties involved, and that doesn't feel right. Our victim, who was armed, didn't get a chance to protect himself, so that means he was taken by surprise. There aren't any witnesses, any weapons, any known motive."
    Shannon glanced at the crowd. "So what do we do?"
    "Go through the motions." It was a hard fact of life, but no police department in the country would expend a lot of effort on catching the murderer of a street bum. Marc was ruthlessly pragmatic; the city's resources were limited, so the money and effort should be spent where it would do the most good, protecting the normal, law-abiding citizens who worked and paid taxes and went to their kids' ball games. "If he's ex-military, the way we think, at least we should be able to ID him."
    "Yeah." Shannon stood. "Too bad it had to be tourists who found him." Without the tourists, this would all have been handled without fuss. With the pressure on to keep the murder rate down, there were occasional rumors that a body had been quietly taken across the river to Jefferson Parish and dumped there, so the murder wouldn't show up on New Orleans's statistics. Marc had personally never done that, never asked, so he couldn't say if it really happened or not. In New Orleans, anything was possible. It was just as possible that the rumor was the result of someone overhearing a couple of cops saying they wished they could dump a body somewhere. But the rumor added to New Orleans's reputation and, true or not, had become part of the local lore.
    "The fuss will die down," he said briefly. "The press will make a big deal of it on the morning news, we'll identify him as homeless, there'll be a mention of it on the evening news, and then it's history." Shannon shrugged, accepting reality as readily as Marc did. He looked around at the shabby old buildings. "You live in the Quarter, don't you?"
    They walked back to the body. "Yeah, I've got a house on St. Louis."
    "How'd you manage that, man?"
    "Inherited it from my grandmother."
    "No shit? So you're from one of those old Creole families?"
    "My grandmother was. My father was shanty Irish." Marc didn't add that he had grown up in the house on St. Louis; he didn't flaunt his background. Making a big deal of his heritage would be stupid. Besides, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    there was nothing to flaunt. His father hadn't been able to keep a job, so, rather than see her daughter and grandson live in progressively worse dumps until they were finally