The Devil's Scribe Read Online Free PDF Page A

before he could bring himself to talk to another doctor about what had happened. He chose old John Mueller, a pragmatic GP who was known for delivering calves for his rancher neighbor. Mueller had given him a skeptical look, as though he suspected Luke might have been drinking. Twitching of fingers and toes, yeah that happens, he’d said, but fifteen minutes later? Musculoskeletal movement? Mueller eyed Luke again, as though the fact that they were even talking about it was shameful. You think you saw it because you wanted to. You didn’t want her to be gone.
    Luke knew that wasn’t it. But he wouldn’t raise it again, not among doctors.
    Besides, Mueller had wanted to know, what difference does it make? So the body may have moved a little—you think she was trying to tell you something? You believe in that life-after-death stuff?
    Thinking about it now, four months later, still gives Luke a slight chill, running down both arms. He puts the Sudoku book on the side table and works his fingers over his skull, trying to massage out the confusion. The door to the lounge pushes back a crack: it’s Judy. “Joe’s pulling in up front.”
    Luke goes outside without his parka so the cold will slap him awake. He watches Duchesne pull up to the curb in a big SUV painted black and white, a decal of the Maine state seal on the front doors and a low-profile light bar strapped to the roof. Luke has known Duchesne since they were boys. They were not in the same grade but they overlapped at school, so he’s seen Duchesne’s narrow, ferretlike face with the beady eyes and the slightly sinister nose for more than twenty years.
    Hands tucked into his armpits for warmth, Luke watches Duchesne open the back door and reach for the prisoner’s arm. He’s curious to see the disorderly. He’s expecting a big, mannish biker woman, red-faced and with a split lip, and is surprised to see that the woman is small and young. She could be a teenager. Slender and boyish except for the pretty face and mass of yellow corkscrew curls, a cherub’s hair.
    Looking at the woman (girl?), Luke feels a strange tingle, a buzz behind his eyes. His pulse picks up with something almost like—recognition. I know you, he thinks. Not her name, perhaps, but something more fundamental. What is it? Luke squints, studying her more closely. Have I seen her somewhere before? No, he realizes he’s mistaken.
    As Duchesne pulls the woman along by the elbow, her hands tied together with a flexicuff, a second police vehicle pulls up and a deputy, Clay Henderson, gets out and takes over escorting the prisoner into the emergency ward. As they pass, Luke sees the prisoner’s shirt is wet, stained black, and she smells of a familiar blend of iron and salt, the smell of blood.
    Duchesne steps close to Luke, nodding in the pair’s direction. “We found her like that walking along the logging road to Fort Kent.”
    “No coat?” Coatless in this weather? She couldn’t have been out for long.
    “Nope. Listen, I need you to tell me if she’s hurt, or if I can take her back to the station and lock her up.”
    As far as law enforcement officers went, Luke’s always suspected Duchesne of being heavy-handed; he’s seen too many drunks brought in with lumps on their skulls or facial bruising. This girl, she’s only a kid—what in the world could she have done? “Why is she in custody? For not wearing a coat in this weather?”
    Duchesne gives Luke a sharp look, unaccustomed to being mocked. “That girl is a killer. She told us she stabbed a man to death and left his body out in the woods.”

    Luke goes through the motions of examining the prisoner, but he can barely think for the strange pulsing in his head. He shines a penlight into her eyes—they are the palest blue eyes he’s ever seen, like two shards of compressed ice—to see if her pupils are dilated. Her skin is clammy to the touch, her pulse low and her breathing ragged.
    “She’s very pale,” he says to