Night-World Read Online Free PDF

and Hyams came back into the room. As he closed the door and moved up to seat himself again, Cole glanced at Karen.
    “You were saying—?”
    It was easy to pick up her story again at the point where she’d left Rita and driven south, easy to provide Cole with a timetable of her movements to jot down on his note pad. The stop for gas, the sandwich, the drive through the fog, her arrival here at the sanatorium.
    “Nine o’clock, you said?”
    “Approximately. Maybe a few minutes after.”
    Muffled footsteps again, this time overhead. Cole glanced quickly towards the ceiling, but said nothing. He nodded at Karen to continue.
    Now Karen found herself faltering, not because of any necessity to conceal, but with the painfulness of revelation.
    Cole’s questions guided her step by step through her drive, bringing her to the front door of the house. What happened after she rang the bell?—how did she discover the door was unlocked?—what was the first thing she noticed when she came in?
    His questions led her into the house itself. When did she see the nurse?—what was her reaction when she realized the nurse was dead?—did she consider trying to locate a telephone in another room to call the police?
    It was symbiosis, she told herself. He fed her the questions and she fed him the answers. But the questions were increasingly difficult to absorb, and she wondered if her answers were coherent.
    Karen told him about the smoke, and he wanted to know what she’d noticed first—was it something she saw or something she smelled? She mentioned her surprise at the sight of Griswold’s office, and Cole carefully drew from her a complete description of the room and its contents.
    Then came the worst part: the venture into the other room beyond and the discovery of Griswold’s body. Karen couldn’t stay in that room for long, not even in memory. The evocation of image and odor made her want to run away, and she rushed through her account so that she could reach the point where she did run away.
    Cole lifted his pen from the note pad and gestured her flow of words to a halt.
    “Excuse me, Mrs. Raymond. You say you turned and ran back through Dr. Griswold’s office to the hall?”
    “Yes.”
    “What did you do next?”
    “I went to the front door.”
    “Directly?”
    “That’s right.”
    Cole’s pen halted its progress across the page. He smiled at Karen. “You were quite upset by this time—is that correct?”
    “Upset? I was terrified—”
    Cole nodded. “Stop and think for a moment. Perhaps there’s something you haven’t remembered, something else that happened.”
    Karen shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
    “Did you go upstairs?” Cole murmured.
    “No.”
    “You say you were in a state of panic, almost shock. Isn’t it possible you might have done something without full awareness of your actions at the time?”
    Karen frowned. “I ran out of the house,” she said.
    “You’re sure you didn’t go upstairs earlier—or at any time before you left?”
    “Why should I?”
    Just then the door opened, and Montoya entered the study. Karen turned in her chair and saw him standing there as Cole glanced past her.
    “Sorry to interrupt you, Sergeant.”
    Cole nodded. “What is it?”
    “They’re finished with Griswold and the nurse,” Montoya said. “But before they wrap things up, they thought you might want to have another look at the other bodies upstairs.”

CHAPTER 6
    T he lights in the interrogation room were very bright. Karen could see the tiny droplets of perspiration forming at Sergeant Cole’s graying temples. She could see every wrinkle in the frowning face of the other officer, Lieutenant Barringer, who had joined them there.
    Strange. It’s the suspect who’s supposed to squirm under questioning, but now she felt quite calm. And they were the ones who were sweating it out.
    Not that she blamed them for it, under the circumstances. The nurse strangled at her desk, Griswold dead, and