Reversible Errors Read Online Free PDF

wider. Judson's body was right there, one leg in the doorway. Harold pointed out his shoes, both soles brown with blood. The tread patterns matched the prints in the trails upstairs. In their rubber gloves, Painless and his team were working on the far side of the freezer.
    "After Mr. Judson had pulled the bodies into the food locker, he was bound with an electrical cord, gagged with a dish towel, and shot, execution style, in the back of the head." Harold's silver pen glided through the air like a missile indicating each point of interest. The force of the shot had driven Judson over on his side.
    "And then, I guess to celebrate, our hero sodomized Ms. Remardi' s b ody." One of the pathologists moved aside, fully revealing Luisa Remardi s remains. Following the preliminary exam, they'd repositioned her as she'd been found, bent face-down over a stack of fifty-pound bags of frozen French fries. Above the waist, she was clad in Trans- National's rust-colored uniform. The exit wound in her back had made a neat little tear in the fabric, almost as if she'd merely snagged the vest, and the halo of blood Larry had seen vaguely imprinted on the side of the booth upstairs was enlarged there, darkening the fabric like a tie-dye. Her matching skirt and her red panties had been jacked down to her ankles and, beneath the starched tails of her white blouse, the melonish rounds of her buttocks were hiked in the air, penetrated by the dark ellipsis of her anal sphincter, which had been distended at the time of death. Somebody had worked her over down there -there was redness, meaning, if Harold was correct, this had occurred right after her death, while a vital reaction was still possible.
    "Rape kit is negative, but you find the top of a condom wrapper here in her drawers, and what appears to be a lubricant track around the anus." At Greer's instruction, a younger pathologist directed a flashlight to illustrate the last point. The gel had failed to evaporate in the cold. Rapists these days worried about AIDS-and had heard of DNA. There was no accomplice, Larry thought. Not if that was the story. Necrophiliacs and backdoor boys didn't perform for an audience. Even creeps had shame.
    Harold covered a few procedural orders, then headed upstairs. Larry remained in the freezer and asked Painless if he could look around.
    "Don't touch," Painless told him. Painless had worked on the Force for two decades and knew to a moral certainty that the next cop was clumber than the one before.
    Larry was the first to say he was a little witchy about the entire process of investigation, but he wasn't alone. Half the murder dicks he knew confessed, after a couple of whiskeys, to occasionally feeling the guiding presence of ghosts. He couldn't claim to understand it, but evil on this scale seemed to set off some kind of cosmic discord. For whatever it was worth, he often started with an instant of solemn communion with the victims.
    He stood over Gus for a minute. Not counting gangbangers, who were suspects one day and murdered the next, it was rare for Larry to be acquainted with a vie. He hadn't known Gus well, except for enjoying his wild immigrant routine and the omelettes, always on the house. But Gus had that gift, like a good teacher or priest-he could connect. You felt him.
    I'm with you, compadre, Larry thought.
    The gunshot had penetrated the occipital plane at the back of Gus's skull, blowing away tissue and bone. Positioned as he'd been found, Gus's face was laid out on a box of beef patties, his mouth open. Dead fish. They all looked like dead fish.
    As always, at this moment, Larry was intensely aware of himself. This was his profession. Murder. Like everybody else, he thought about buying a new garden hose and the line on tomorrow's hockey match, and how he could get to both boys' soccer games. But at some point every day, he snuck into the mossy cave of murder, to the moist thrilling darkness of the idea.
    He had nothing to apologize for.