Murder Among the Angels Read Online Free PDF

her screen trademarks, along with her clipped Yankee accent and her long-legged stride. “A murder victim?” A murder case would explain Jerry’s ebullient mood.
    Jerry shrugged his broad shoulders, which pulled at the seams of the lightweight cotton sports jacket he wore over a blue chambray shirt. He had once told Charlotte that homicide detectives never wore wool jackets because the fabric absorbed the corpse reek, which would never come out. Though Charlotte didn’t imagine that Jerry would have had much contact with corpses here, she supposed he found it hard to give up his old habits.
    “I dunno,” he said, his Bensonhurst origins still evident in his accent. “But I’m gonna find out.”
    “Where did it come from?” she asked.
    “A woman found it in a local cemetery the day before yesterday when she was walking her dog. It was resting on top of a headstone.”
    “A grave robber?” she asked.
    “Could be. We get that kind of thing around here, especially around Halloween. It’s because of our proximity to Sleepy Hollow—the headless horseman and all that. But I doubt it. There weren’t any other bones, and no graves had been disturbed. Besides, there was something else.”
    Charlotte crossed her arms and awaited his explanation.
    “A bouquet of lilies of the valley had been placed at the foot of the headstone.” He went on: “We had another incident like this late last summer. A skull was found on a headstone in the cemetery at St. James’s.” He nodded in the direction of the road. “You probably passed it on your way up.”
    Charlotte nodded. She remembered seeing the Romanesque-style church as she was looking for the turnoff for the Zion Hill Road.
    “Also with a fresh bouquet of lilies of the valley,” he said.
    Charlotte arched an eyebrow.
    “The state forensic anthropologist, Leonore Herman, was able to connect that skull to some body parts that washed up by Fort Tryon Park.” Jerry sat on the corner of his desk and looked into the empty eye sockets of the skull, as if he hoped it would cooperate by providing him with its full name and address.
    “Any identification in that case?” prompted Charlotte.
    Jerry looked up. “Caucasian female; twenty-five to thirty years old; five foot six inches tall, plus or minus an inch; and weighing approximately a hundred and twenty pounds.”
    “Any missing persons fitting that description?”
    “Several hundred in the metropolitan area. Thousands if you take in the whole country. There were—and I quote Leonore—‘no other pathological or anomalous features.’ The county boys checked the description against the missing persons reports for Westchester County, but there wasn’t any point in taking it any farther than that.”
    “And what about the body parts this time?”
    He nodded. “We have body parts. We always have body parts. The Hudson is very good at turning up body parts. In fact, we have a partially decomposed lower torso—what Leonore calls a ‘butt’—of a Caucasian female, twenty-five to thirty years old; approximately five foot six inches tall; and weighing approximately one hundred and twenty pounds—that some shad fishermen netted near the municipal park early last week.”
    Charlotte grimaced. “I bet that was the end of their shad fishing days.”
    “I hope not,” Jerry said. “I’m fond of shad. To say nothing of shad roe.”
    A pause followed this comment, during which Charlotte suspected that Jerry’s thoughts had drifted to the same subject as hers: a plate of shad roe sautéed in butter and served on toast points.
    Jerry continued in a more serious vein: “A matching lower arm minus the hand turned up a couple of days later below the high tide line at the local yacht club. We think the butt and lower arm go with this skull, but there’s no way to prove it. Leonore estimated in both cases that the victims had been murdered ten days to two weeks beforehand.”
    “How did you prove the skull went with the