The Day Trader Read Online Free PDF Page A

morning.
    Standing on the front stoop are two men wearing plain slacks and sport coats, the top buttons of their shirts undone and their ties pulled down. Both of them are sweating in the intense heat, and one mops his forehead with a white handkerchief.
    “Augustus McKnight?” the nearer one asks, pulling a gold badge from his jacket and flashing it at me. He’s the older of the two, and he has a look in his eyes like he’s incapable of being surprised by anything.
    “Yes.” I gaze at the badge. “That’s me.”
    “I’m Detective Reggie Dorsey of the Washington, D.C., police department. I’m sorry to inform you,” he says without emotion, “but your wife is dead.”

 
    CHAPTER 3
    Melanie’s body was discovered facedown in a trash-strewn alley in a crime-ridden section of Washington less than a mile from the Capitol. Her pocketbook lay a few feet away containing several hundred dollars and all of her credit cards, so Detective Reggie Dorsey ruled out robbery as a motive for her murder right away.
    Despite having already matched the photograph on her driver’s license to her blood-spattered face, Reggie requested that I come downtown with him immediately to make a positive identification. He said he had to have it at some point, and that I might as well get it over with as soon as possible. He said the longer I waited, the harder it would be. I figured he knew what he was talking about, so I agreed.
    So here I stand beside the stainless steel gurney supporting my wife’s naked body. I’m shivering in the morgue’s cold, the odors of formaldehyde and death filling my nostrils. The images of toe tags and ashen fingers dangling from beneath sheets are fresh in my mind after I walked all the way through the place to get to this room. As I watch, an elderly man dressed in a long white lab coat slowly pulls one end of the shroud covering Melanie’s body down from her forehead to her chin. He holds it tightly to the pale skin of her cheeks with latex-encased fingers so I won’t see the horror of the hastily sutured ear-to-ear throat wound that, Reggie thoughtfully informed me, almost decapitated her. When I can no longer bear to look at Melanie’s face, I nod at Reggie and bow my head. Then I cry. As an adult I’ve never cried in front of anyone, but I can’t help it now. The thought that Melanie is gone forever overwhelms me—and I crumble.
    During the drive downtown in Reggie’s unmarked cruiser it didn’t sink in that Melanie was actually dead. I had no reason to doubt Reggie’s information, delivered on my front stoop with all the tact of an infantry assault. I assumed he wouldn’t have told me that way if he wasn’t certain of her identity. However, the events of the past thirty-six hours had anesthetized me. I hadn’t yet fully grasped the notion that Melanie was divorcing me, so the idea of her death seemed even further from reality.
    But seeing her stiff form sprawled on the silver gurney makes it sickeningly real. I realize there will be no divorce; no Frank Taylor invading the sanctity of my home. Now I face something much more terrible. The woman I always believed I would grow old with is dead.
    I fleetingly touch Melanie’s cold fingers—hanging from beneath the sheet—then Reggie takes me to a small office where he leaves me alone to face my grief. It takes me thirty minutes to get myself together. When my mother died last Christmas I shed a few silent tears after her breathing stopped and I gently closed her eyelids. But by the time a nurse entered the room a few minutes later, I was back in control. Death seemed natural in my mother’s case, almost comforting. Not in Melanie’s.
    An hour later Reggie and I are heading south back to my house in Springfield.
    Reggie is a barrel-chested black man of about fifty who projects a no-nonsense, confident attitude. At five-ten he’s of average height, but he’s still a mammoth and forceful presence, weighing well over two hundred pounds. His