The Colour of Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

the dog-eared document from Fox and replaced it on the shelf, then beckoned him to follow her back to her study.  “As Alzheimer’s took Howard from me I found his paper comforting.  It felt like my last link to his healthy mind.  The more times I read it the more I wanted to use my knowledge of science to back up its bizarre premise.  I wanted to prove that his paper contained the last flash of his brilliance and not the first signs of his madness.”
    In her office she handed Fox a freshly typed document with the same title.  “So I rewrote his paper, trying to underpin his theories with hard science.  The concept of archaeosonics has been around for decades but with our growing knowledge of quantum physics and state-of-the-art acoustic technology we could soon explain and unlock these trapped echoes.”  Reading the skepticism in his face, she smiled.  “I know it sounds nonsense, Nathan, but read it first, then tell me it’s rubbish.  Be as ruthless as you like.”
    Fox didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to realize his aunt’s reworking of Howard’s paper owed more to love than hard science.  “It’s not exactly my area.”
    “I don’t care, Nathan.  You have an excellent mind and I’d value your opinion.”  She kissed him again then waved him away.  “Now go to work.  I know you’re busy.”

 
    Chapter 5
     
    Two hours later Nathan Fox found himself in the Oregon wilderness, eyeball to eyeball with a suspected killer.  “What is it with you shrinks?” George Linnet spat.  “You think you can know me just by asking me a few questions and seeing where I live.  You don’t know me.  You don’t know me at all.”
    “I’ve no interest in knowing any patient, George.”
    “I’m not one of your sicko, psycho patients, you Limey asshole.”
    “No, you’re the prime suspect in multiple homicides,” Fox said evenly.  “You’re a puzzle to me.  Nothing more.  I don’t need to know you, George, just solve you.  So I can discover what you did with the girls.”
    “I told you already.  I knew nothing about the girls those perverts were stashing in that property.  They paid their rent on time and that was all I cared about.”
    “The Russians say they gave you girls to keep you quiet.”
    Linnet glared at him.  “You calling me a liar?”
    Fox allowed himself a smile.  “I think I’m calling you a lot worse than that.”  Dressed in check shirt and corduroy trousers, Linnet looked more like one of Fox’s colleagues at Oregon University Research Hospital than a killer but after meeting him and looking around his hunting lodge the psychiatrist was beginning to get the measure of the man.  He had interviewed enough psychopaths in his time to know there was more to Linnet than met the eye.  After finding nothing in Linnet’s impersonal apartment, offices and rental properties in Portland the police had driven Linnet to the one place they hadn’t looked:  his remote hunting lodge.  Standing in the kitchen, Fox registered the immaculate granite worktops, porcelain floor tiles and Smeg cooking range.  Though obsessively neat and over-specified for a basic lodge, everything fitted the profile he was building of the owner.  He might profess not to know Linnet but Fox already knew him better than he knew his own neighbors in north-west Portland, which probably said as much about him as it did about Linnet.  As Fox glanced around the lodge the idea of hunting and killing for pleasure mystified him.  A city boy at heart, Fox cherished the illusion of order and civilization that man’s footprint brought to the world.
    He turned his attention to the crime scene investigators, CSI emblazoned in big yellow capitals on the backs of their blue boiler suits.  He watched as they closed the kitchen blinds and prepared their spray guns of Luminol.  Within seconds of spraying the chemical around the darkened room, hitherto invisible traces, copious traces, of scrubbed-away blood