The Judas Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

opposite; she wore fire-engine-red lipstick on her twisted mouth. When he understood this as defiance, he liked her better.
    He was staring at the scar when he asked, “How did you get that?”
    Her eyebrows arched and a small delicate laugh came out in a surprised puff of air. Now she was as patronizing as any woman confronted by a small child, a dog, or a man. “That nasty wound on your ring finger? You got that when you were nine years old.” She lightly touched the back of his hand. “You had an accident during a skating party for the children’s choir. But I’ll never tell anyone. The history belongs to you.”
    His own scar was not visible beneath the heavy gold ring, a legacy from his late father. “We’ve never met. So how—”
    “Are you sure about that, Rouge? I remember you. ” She sipped her drink slowly and drove him crazy for all the seconds that slipped by before she said, “You broke a lot of hearts when you went away. Did you like the military school better than St. Ursula’s?”
    She couldn’t have attended St. Ursula’s Academy. He shook his head. “I would have remembered you.”
    “I don’t think so,” she said, with the vague implication that he was only half bright, and thus she did not expect much from him.
    Women were so good at this.
    She touched her damaged right cheek. “You never saw this.” When she turned to look up at the television set, the scar was hidden on the other side of her profile.
    Rouge’s own photograph was framed in the bright screen above the bar. The woman and her scar turned back to him. “So you’re the crack cop who broke the case of the purple bicycle.”
    Was there sarcasm in her voice? Definitely. “No, that was another cop.” He might be falling in love, and perhaps the feeling would last for another round of drinks. “I only happened by in time to carry the bike back to the station.”
    “A coincidence? You were just in the right place at the right time?”
    He shrugged. It was hardly a coincidence. He always checked Miss Fowler’s place on his way home from Dame’s Tavern—every night of the week. Since his ex-piano teacher lived on the main street, he could go nowhere in Makers Village without passing her house.
    “Well, Rouge, I guess the cameras liked you best. Oh, there you are again.” She pointed at the screen. “I saw that piece of film this morning. You do the stoic silent routine very well.”
    Yeah, he might be falling in love with the left side of her.
    “Still—quite a coincidence,” she said. “Your sister was killed by a kidnapper, and now you catch one.”
    He pulled back as though she had pointed a gun at his face. “He’s not a kidnapper—he’s a bike thief. And the kids are runaways.” Or that was the State Police Department’s line to the press. Was this woman—
    “Gwen’s mother doesn’t seem to agree,” she said, pointing to a shot of the lieutenant governor descending the stairs and bearing down on the spokesman for the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. “And your sister was snatched right before Christmas vacation, too. That would have been a few months after you were sent away to military school.”
    He turned to the pyramid of wineglasses and the twenty small portraits of Susan, each one a study in shock. “The man who killed my sister is in jail. Are you a reporter?” The State Police investigators had made a point of telling the village cops not to talk to the press.
    “And all three kids went to the same private school.” She drained her glass.
    Please stop.
    “There’s no connection between my sister and those runaways. Are you a—”
    “No, I’m not a reporter.” She held her glass up to the bartender and raised one eyebrow to ask him for a refill. She was watching the television when she said, “But I do read the papers. Those two little girls were the same age as Susan.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “You wouldn’t remember it, Rouge. My family moved out of town when I was in