Rough Draft Read Online Free PDF Page A

the photographs. He went through the stack slowly. There were five. He lingered on the last one, then slid them to Andy Barth.
    Barth had a piece of Danish in his mouth when he peered at the top photograph. He flinched, didn’t swallow and didn’t chew as he suffered through the rest.
    â€œI’m sure you’ve all witnessed autopsies as a part of your training,” the senator said. “And you have strong stomachs for this sort of thing. But you should remember as you look at these photographs that this girl, my daughter, was alive only seconds before this was done to her. This carnage. She was laughing. She was red-cheeked and brimming with life.”
    Impassive, Helen Shane took her look and passed the photos on to Frank.
    The girl was sixteen. Though if Frank hadn’t known her age already, he wouldn’t have been able to tell from the photos. She had dark curly hair and plump cheeks with a short upturned nose. But her face was spattered with gore and whatever her final expression might have been was now concealed by the mask of blood.
    Her head was tilted back into a depression of snow. Around the rest of her body the snow was shadowed with blood. In the second and third photographs, the injuries were visible. The fourth and last were close-ups of the gaping wounds in her chest.
    â€œThis wasn’t any skiing accident,” said Sheffield.
    â€œThat’s right, Frank,” said Pettigrew. “That was only the cover story.”
    â€œTell him,” Ackerman said. “Tell him what this animal did.”
    The light was buzzing in the senator’s eyes.
    Helen Shane leaned forward in her chair, rested her forearms on the edge of the table.
    â€œHe was hiding in the trees on the edge of the ski slope. As Joanie passed by, he stepped out, clotheslined her, dragged her ten yards into the underbrush.”
    â€œMy forensics are a little weak,” Frank said. “What’re these wounds?”
    â€œAfter he strangled her,” said Helen with the lilt of a schoolroom recitation, “Joanie was alive but unconscious. That’s when he tore open her parka and made a crude incision directly below the xiphoid, a triangular cartilaginous mass at the base of the sternum. Once he’d broken through the skin, he apparently widened the laceration with his fingers, and when the breach was large enough, he inserted his hand into Joanie’s chest cavity, took her heart in his fist, and crushed it.”
    Sheffield felt a light-headed swirl begin to form behind his eyes. The silence thickened, a breathless interlude.
    â€œThis is why we’re here,” the senator said, staring at Sheffield. “Because some man in his jungle mansion was unhappy with Joanie’s father. Unhappy that I ordered a napalm strike on his coca fields. Unhappy that I approved a half-dozen separate guerrilla operations that caused him great financial losses. This unhappy man in his jungle mansion hired a monster that you people refer to as Hal to retaliate for his losses.
    â€œUntil my daughter was slaughtered, I was not aware that such a monster existed. Nor did I know that your Bureau has been pursuing this beast for the last ten years without success. But now that I do know, now that I’ve seen what complete incompetence has been operating here, an incompetence which has led to this, this atrocity, I have made it my mission to change that. And I will not rest until this mission is complete.”
    Out in the hallway, a man laughed, and a woman’s high cackle answered back. The intrusion seemed to push Ackerman deeper into his rage.
    He raised his huge fist and hammered it against the table,then pushed his chair back a few inches from the table as if he meant to hurl himself at the whole incompetent group of them.
    Helen lifted her eyes and gave the senator a serene half smile as if the two of them shared some secret.
    â€œHis name is Hal Bonner,” Helen announced. Then