The Holiday Killer Read Online Free PDF Page A

him, almost falling over in the muck.
    The boy was slashed neck to pelvis, his entrails dragging up on shore behind him. Countless fish and other aquatic wildlife had been at him, judging by the state of his intestines.
    "Anyone notify the parents?" she asked, looking at the sergeant as she stood up, resisting the impulse to wipe her marsh-mucked hands on her pants.
    "We don't know who he is—don't know who to notify." Bill looked her in the eye. "Are you alright, Liz?"
    "Why wouldn't I be?" she asked, looking away from the young boy.
    "We didn't even hear about this one going missing," the young man beside her said, looking up from the boy's wrinkled hands at her. "It doesn't fit."
    Liz nodded a little, thinking. The killer had threatened to take Jamie when she refused to get off the case, but he hadn't. And now this boy was here, dead, eaten by fish. He wasn't displayed for the cops to find, he was barely mutilated, and most of what had been done to him could easily have been done by the marine life.
    Could this be a Holiday Killer murder, or was there another murderer loose in this poor town? Was this boy a replacement? Did the killer attack him when he realized that Liz wouldn't let him get at Jamie? Was this a frustration murder, and that's why he was dumped on the bottom of the river?
    Was it Liz's fault the kid was dead?
    Or was this boy the victim of a completely different killer? Was he a homeless kid the killer had picked up on the side of the road, hitchhiking across the country? Was there someone out there who would miss him?
    The questions circled around in her head, making her feel a bit dizzy.
    "Who found him?" she asked Bill, ignoring the forensics boy.
    "A bunch of divers working overtime. This is the crayfish-harvesting area." He waved at a pair of men in rain boots and rain jackets. "He was attached to one of the crates. The boys say they got the best haul in that crate. Then they saw the body, dropped it back into the water, and called us. Figure the crayfish were … dining, so to speak."
    "No use trying to catch those crayfish," Liz mused, carefully picking her footholds and making her way down to the body. His eyes had been removed, though she couldn't tell if that had been the killer or the fish. "Or the other critters feasting on him." She gently lifted one of his arms, looking at his wrist.
    His hands and feet were heavily wrinkled, indicating he'd been in the water for at least a few hours, maybe more. The kid could have been in that water for a couple of days, at least, the gasses released during decomposition sifting into the water through the hole in his stomach as they formed, preventing his body from rising. His skin was alternately blanched and blotched, blood pooling in his extremities where he'd rested on the bottom, face down. Around the slash in his torso, the blood was leeched from the skin, turning it a deep, translucent white.
    "Did we recover the restraints?" she asked, peering closely at the rope burn marks on his wrists.
    One of the forensic divers pulled off his mask as a medical examiner descended on the boy, to find out what he could before the body became too unstable to examine. "There weren't any with him. Just a couple of rocks in his coat pockets to hold his body down. If there were restraints, they were removed before he went into the water. He's too fresh for the lobsters to have eaten through them."
    "Which means he was likely dead or unconscious before he was thrown in." Liz put the boy's hand down and looked at his mouth. She opened it and pushed down gently on his chest. A thin, filmy substance welled in his mouth, filled with silt from the river bottom, the bruises of his struggle showing across his shoulders and his upper arms. "Unconscious, but he struggled at the end. He drowned as he bled out."
    "The fish couldn't have helped." The sergeant pointed at a fish flopping about in the mishmash of intestines, and grimaced. "And the crayfish. I think we might find a few