The Frailty of Flesh Read Online Free PDF

cut the call. Why the hell had his stepmother given a reporter his cell-phone number?
    There was no time like the present to find out. He flipped the phone open and dialed.
    Six rings later Craig snapped the phone closed. There was no answer.
    “If it had just rained today. I never let the kids out in the rain. Shannon wanted to walk to school early, to meet friends…It’s the Lower Mainland, it’s December, it should be raining. Shouldn’t it be raining?” Mrs. Reimer looked up from where she stood on the front sidewalk, her dull eyes suddenly wide, as though she’d just had a sudden revelation, received a flash of insight. Her lawyer spoke in hushed tones as Mr. Reimer locked the front door to the house, then hurried down the steps. He took his wife’s arm, turning her away from Ashlyn and Tain.
    Ashlyn knew grief did strange things to people. It derailed reason and made the mind latch on to the most trivial things. Like, If only Bobby had let me give him one more hug, he wouldn’t have been running across the street at that second and been struck by that speeding car. Or, If I’d just let Sally take the jeep she never would have been walking to the bus stop… And sometimes the mind obsessed on one key point the person couldn’t let go of. Some trivial detail about the crime, the events, or a ridiculous question born out of desperation and false hope. Her personal favorite: Do you think he suffered? The eyes pleading with you to tell them it was quick, that the victim likely didn’t even know what was happening. No, ma’am. Being murdered didn’t hurt. Probably hardly noticed.
    Today it was about blame. If it had just rained today. I never let the kids out in the rain. As though the weather were responsible. Your child goes out to play because it isn’t raining. Your child is murdered. If it had been raining your child wouldn’t have gone outside. They’d still be alive. Therefore, it was the weather’s fault. The mind’s weird way of trying to make sense of the senseless, to apply logic to madness.
    It took more than a break in the rain to create a murderer. Ashlyn knew that. Even days of going stir crazy with cabin fever from being stuck inside because of the constant winter downpour didn’t make a person run outside and beat someone to death.
    People tried to find something they could pin it on so that they assign blame without confronting anything too uncomfortable. Blame the weather or the hugs or a split-second decision, but don’t blame the killer. Don’t acknowledge that there are bad people in the world who aren’t guided by the same moral compass as the rest of us.
    People who would kill a child.
    Ashlyn wondered if this was the product of some twisted form of karmic logic. Put good out into the universe and it comes back to you, so if bad things happen you must have done something to deserve it so it must be your fault… right?
    With her job it just wasn’t possible to buy into that. Crime could touch anyone. Some people were at risk, and the average person comforted himself with the thought that the victims had done something to deserve it, that it made sense they’d been raped, mugged or murdered because they shouldn’t have been in that part of town at night or been doing drugs or having a drink in that kind of bar.
    Bringing reason into it to assume control. What they were really saying was It couldn’t happen to me because I don’t live like that. Using faulty logic to convince themselves they weren’t vulnerable when sometimes crime is as unpredictable as a tornado that reduces one home to a pile of rubble and leaves the house next door intact. Why one and not the other? Why this street and not the next?
    In her relatively short time with the RCMP Ashlyn had learned one thing for certain: When it came to murder, why was usually pretty damn irrelevant. Oh, it mattered to her as a cop. It was a question she usually had to answer to solve a case. But knowing why wouldn’t bring