Shadow Dancers Read Online Free PDF

That’s what I call the leap of faith.”
    “Good Christ,” Mooney fumed. He snapped off the light. “Now she’s into theology. Forget I asked you.”
    “If you don’t care for ‘leap of faith,’” Fritzi continued, “call it hunch or educated guess.”
    Mooney smoldered silently in the dark for a moment.
    “Okay. So what’s your best educated guess? Who’s who? Which is which? Who’s the shadow and who’s the dancer? Tell me.”
    “Well, just from what you’ve been reading me here, for as I can tell it goes something like this.” She flopped on her back and clasped her palms on her chest as though she were praying. “We re agreed we’ve got two guys. Right?”
    “Agreed,” Mooney fumed.
    “We’ve got two sets of descriptions. One is a darkhaired guy with a crooked smile. Medium height. Medium weight. We’ll call him ‘Blackie.’ The other is a fair-haired boy. Medium height and weight. We’ll call him ‘Whitey.’”
    “Get on with it, will you, for Chrissake?”
    Fritzi ignored the tirade and bore down harder on the puzzle. “We know Blackie and Whitey both prefer detached or semi-detached residences, although one of them is not entirely opposed to working out of doors, as we saw.”
    “Keep going.”
    “We know both of these boys like sex, because they both appear to make use of the ladies in that way. Both like to draw naughty pictures on the walls, scrawl little messages. But one of them, only one of them, adds numbers to the little pictures and messages. Oh, by the way, what about the handwriting?”
    “We spoke to a couple of experts.”
    “And?”
    “One says it’s two different guys. The other’s not so sure.”
    “That’s experts for you.”
    Mooney sighed. “Keep going. Keep going.”
    “Both work the early hours of the morning. Generally between two and six A. M. Both claim the knife as weapon of choice but occasionally will strangle their victims.”
    “Keep going.”
    “Finally, while sex appears to be a principle motive in both M.O.‘s, theft appears to play a role in just one.”
    “That’s right.” Mooney said. “You got it all right. So what do we have so far?”
    “So far, that’s only the P. P.‘s.”
    “Okay. So what about these IP’s of yours? This ‘leap of faith’ thing? Which of these guys is which?”
    She’d lapsed into a silence and for a moment he thought she’d fallen asleep. “You still there?” he asked.
    “I’m here. I’m thinking.” Again she propped herself up on an elbow and peered at him through the dark. “Where we’ve got eyewitness descriptions of the guy, it appears it’s Blackie who uses both pictures and numbers. Whitey just does the pictures.”
    “Okay. So what does that say to you?”
    “That says to me that Blackie is the hardheaded pragmatist and Whitey is the daydreaming romantic. That says to me that Whitey is the guy who steals nothing. Only some love. Blackie is the entrepreneur. He grabs stuff. He’s in it for both fun and profit. How am I doing so far?”
    “Okay. Okay,” he snapped impatiently. “Keep going.” For the first time since she’d started her disquisition, he appeared to be interested. “So of both of these nutsos, which, if you will, is the copycat and which the original?” Fritzi laughed lightly. “That’s easy. Just check the chronology in your notes.”
    “You mean just because the first entry I’ve got fingers a dark-haired guy, he’s the chief architect?”
    “Figures, doesn’t it? There’s no description of a blond type till you get down to your fifth or sixth M.O.”
    “Sixth,” Mooney confirmed. “I’m afraid that’s a bit too easy, Fritzi. How do you know this hasn’t been going on long before we observed the similarities of the two M.O.‘s and started to track them? We’re still carrying unsolved homicides on the books that go back for years and are very similar in type to these. How do we know when they really started and which guy started it?”
    “We