Sigma Curse - 04 Read Online Free PDF Page B

again, and because they hadn’t yet managed to sell the house, Venn was back living there. Beth, on the other hand, continued to rent an apartment, this one in the East Village. She’d made it clear she wanted to move back in, but they were taking it slowly. So she visited, three or four nights a week, and stayed over. Except visiting was an odd term, because she jointly owned the house.
    Venn saw from the lights on through the upstairs windows that Beth was there. He let himself in, didn’t call out in case she’d nodded off. But she was awake, lying in bed, her eyes sleepy but welcoming.
    “Hey,” he said, marveling once again at the rush of delight he felt whenever he saw her. Whenever he grasped that she was back with him, that he hadn’t lost her forever.
    “What time do you call this?” she murmured, with a smile. He saw she’d been reading by the light of the bedside lamp: one of the medical journals she always seemed to have her nose buried in.
    Venn slung his jacket over the back of a chair and kicked off his boots. He perched on the bed beside her, reached out his hand. She took it.
    “New case,” he said. “Looks complicated.”
    Beth propped herself up on the pillows. “Tell me about it.”
    Her movement dislodged the counterpane. She was wearing a negligee made of something that looked like gauzy silk. Venn’s eyes dropped, then quickly went back up to her face.
    “Jeez,” he said. “Talk about distraction.”
    He did tell her about the case. Eventually.

Chapter 5
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    S ally-Jo opened the door of her apartment and knew, without doubt, that Frank was there.
    She didn’t see him, didn’t hear his movements. But she could feel his presence all the same, immediately.
    Her apartment was small, a garret more suited to a starving artist type, which she wasn’t. Located in an achingly trendy street, it had been going for a surprisingly low rent when she’d been scouring the ads in the Village Voice, and she’d been thrilled to discover that she was the first person to call the landlord about it. He’d been an amiable Italian man and seemed to like her at once.
    That was four months ago. She’d been there ever since, and it suited her just fine.
    She dropped her purse on the coffee table in the small living room and hung her overcoat behind the door. The central heating had kicked in several hours earlier and the place had a snug, toasty feel. She’d have liked a grate with a fire, but she supposed in an apartment of this size it was too much to ask. Maybe, one day when she bought her own place...
    Her arms ached, and there was a stiffness in her neck she hadn’t been able to ease away while at work. If anything it had gotten worse as the day progressed. The aches and stiffness were new to her, and she’d need to remember to do some regular exercises to limber up.
    The clock on the wall told her it was five after midnight. Which meant twenty-one hours had passed since she’d killed Dale Fincher.
    All day, at work and in the coffee shop she went to at lunchtime, and in the subway home, she’d burned. Burned with the conviction that what she’d done was written all over her, tattooed on every inch of exposed skin like a bizarre kind of public confession. How could the man who stepped aside for her on the steps of the subway station not smell the guilt on her? How could the couple of middle-aged evangelists who approached her on Broadway to ask if she’d given her soul to the Lord not feel the sin radiating off her?
    But she’d been through this before. Had learned to handle the crushing weight of fear, the dread of imminent discovery, and to accept that it was a normal part of the process. If she held her composure, it would float on past, and before long it would be gone. And sure enough, by the middle of the evening, she felt more able to relax, as if the tension of the day had uncoiled itself like a snake and slipped away.
    Usually, after a long day at work,