The Cold Blue Blood Read Online Free PDF

Jeep in hopeful silence. As dawn came, the first to show was that black male with the white patch on his face and paws. Big Willie, Des had dubbed him. He was her kind of guy. Skinny. One ear bloodied. One eye, the left, half shut. She thought they might get him today. He actually crept to within two feet of the cage, the closest he’d come since they’d started staking out his Dumpster. And then he was just one foot from the cage. He was very hungry. Also very skittish and suspicious. His head was actually in the cage … Des tensed, poised to slam it shut behind him … But at the last minute he went skittering away into the brush and was gone. They waited an hour more but none of the others showed.
    By 6:00 A.M. Des was back home in the spare bedroom that she had turned into her studio, seated before her easel with her 18-by-24-inch Strathmore 400 drawing pad and her sticks of soft vine charcoal. A pair of high-intensity desk lamps cast light on her subject, which was affixed to the easel at eye level with a bulldog clip. Not exactly ideal studio conditions. Natural light would have been vastly preferable. But Des had no choice. It was vital that she draw for at least an hour every morning before she left for work. The studio was Des’s sanctuary. Here, she found wholeness and meaning. Here she found peace. These things she found nowhere else.
    Always, she drew still lifes. Always, her subjects were taken from photographs.
    Always, Desiree Mitry drew dead bodies.
    They were crime scene photos. Gruesome photos. Horrifying photos. They were photos of what she had seen on the job. Des had seen things that most people never do and never should have to. Des had seen too much.
    And so she drew.
    On this particular morning, her subject was one Torry Mordarski, a young single mother who had been found in the woods near Wadsworth Falls shot twice in the face. One shot had glanced off her forehead. The other had caught her over her left eye, which was submerged under a coating of congealed blood and brain matter. Her right eye was staring straight at the camera. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in the frozen death rictus.
    Draw what you see, not what you know.
    Des drew, stroking boldly as she had been taught to. Although she did not handle the soft charcoal in the preferred manner. She gripped it tightly, not loosely, and she held it between her thumb and middle finger, digging the tip of her index finger into the side of the stick. But it worked for her. Her strokes were sure and precise, her passion boundless. Always, she kept in mind the rule that a drawing teacher had drummed into her years ago. For Des, it had become a mantra.
    Draw what you see, not what you know.
    Des drew what she saw. What she saw were lines and contours, shadows and highlights. Nothing more. She started Torry Mordarski’s face very dark, then began to pull the light away from the shadows with swipes of her kneaded eraser. Finding Torry’s features. Giving contour and value to the shadows, texture to the highlights. Line by line, shadow by shadow, highlight by highlight, Des deconstructed the image of Torry Mordarski from her memory. Expunging the visceral impact. Neutralizing the horror. Abstracting the painful reality—stretching it, contorting it, injecting it with fearsome emotional power. Until the image was no longer a photographic memory but a haunting, mesmerizing work of art.
    Her drawings gave Des chills up and down her spine. They gave her comfort as well. When she drew, Des was alive and free. She was the person who she wanted to be. In a perfect world she would have quit her job and drawn full-time. But it wasn’t a perfect world. So she brought copies of crime scene photos home. No one knew she did this. No one had ever seen her drawings. She did not display them. She did not talk about them. Once a drawing was completed, she would store it away in a folio book and never look at it again.
    No one knew. Not even Bella.
    When she