Let the Devil Sleep Read Online Free PDF

now I’m the only tenant.”
    “You’re
alone
there?” said Madeleine, wide-eyed. “You’re a lot braver than I am. I’d get out of there so fast—”
    There was a flash of anger in Kim’s eyes. “I’m not running away from that little jerk!”
    “You’ve reported these incidents to the police?”
    She uttered a bitter little laugh. “Sure. The blood, the knife, the sounds in the night. The cops come to the house, they poke around, they check the windows, they look bored to death. When I call and give them my name and address, I can picture them rolling their eyes. It’s pretty clear they think I’m a paranoid pain in the ass. An attention seeker. The crazy little bitch with the exaggerated boyfriend problems.”
    “I assume you’ve had the locks changed?” said Gurney mildly.
    “Twice. It hasn’t made any difference.”
    “You think Robby Meese is responsible for all this … intimidation?”
    “I don’t think it. I
know
it.”
    “What makes you so sure?”
    “If you heard his voice—the calls he made to me after I threw him out? Or saw the looks on his face when we’d pass each other on campus? Then you’d know. It was the same
weirdness
. I don’t know how to explain it, but the stuff that’s been happening? It’s creepy, the same way Robby is creepy.”
    In the ensuing silence, Kim wrapped her hands tightly around her coffee cup. It reminded Gurney of the way she was standing at the door earlier, her palms pressed against the glass. Emotion and control.
    He thought about her program idea, her slant on the pain created by murder. There was truth in what she said. In some cases the wound inflicted by a killer tore a hole through a family—left spouse, children, parents desolate—filled their lives with sadness and rage.
    In other cases, though, there was little grief, little emotion of any kind. Gurney had seen too many of those cases. Men who lived ugly lives and died ugly deaths. Drug dealers, pimps, career criminals, teenage gangbangers playing video games with real guns. The human devastation was breathtaking. Sometimes he had a dream, always the same, with an image from the concentration camps. A bulldozer pushing half-skeletonized bodies into a broad trench. Pushing them in like mannequins. Like rubble.
    He sat gazing at the intense, dark-eyed young woman who was still grasping her lukewarm mug, leaning toward it, her shining hair hiding most of her face.
    Then he glanced over at Madeleine with a question in his eyes.
    She gave a tiny shrug, a hint of a smile. It felt like a nudge in the direction of action.
    He looked back at Kim. “Okay. Let’s return to the basic issue. How can I help you?”

Chapter 4
Like a Coffin
    W hat she wanted was for Gurney to follow her back to her apartment in Syracuse, where she kept everything related to her project. That way he could see it all firsthand—her correspondence with potential interviewees, the two initial interviews she’d conducted and submitted as part of her proposal, her plans for the interviews yet to come, her contract with Rudy Getz at RAM-TV, the general positioning and promotional copy she was preparing for the series. He could see everything, get a feel for it, tell her what rang true, what didn’t.
    He had as little appetite for driving to Syracuse as he’d had for any activity in recent months, which was close to none. But it struck him as the quickest way to discharge whatever obligation he felt toward Connie Clarke. He’d go, he’d look, he’d comment. Duty discharged. “Huge favor” granted. Then back into his cave.
    The Google directions to Kim’s address that he’d printed out in the event they got separated estimated a journey of one hour and forty-nine minutes from Walnut Crossing, but there was almost no traffic on the two interstates that constituted most of the trip, and the little Miata ahead of him rarely descended to anywhere near the speed limit.
    In a better mood, Gurney might have enjoyed the