The Naked Face Read Online Free PDF

are you going to leave her like this?” Judd asked angrily.
    “They’ll take her away now,” said Angeli. “The coroner and the Homicide boys have already finished.”
    Judd turned to McGreavy. “You left her like this for me?”
    “Yeah,” McGreavy said. “I’m going to ask you again. Is there anything in this office that someone could want badly enough to”—he indicated Carol—”do that?”
    “No.”
    “What about the records of your patients?”
    Judd shook his head. “Nothing.”
    “You’re not being very cooperative, Doctor, are you?” asked McGreavy.
    “Don’t you think I want to see you find whoever did this?” Judd snapped. “If there was anything in my files that would help, I would tell you. I know my patients. There isn’t any one among them who could have killed her. This was done by an outsider.”
    “How do you know it wasn’t someone after your files?”
    “My files weren’t touched.”
    McGreavy looked at him with quickened interest. “How do you know that?” he asked. “You haven’t even looked.”
    Judd walked over to the far wall. As the two men watched, he pressed the lower section of the paneling and the wall slid open, revealing racks of built-in shelves. They were filled with tapes. “I record every session with my patients,” Judd said. “I keep the tapes here.”
    “Couldn’t they have tortured Carol to try to force her to tell where those tapes were?”
    “There is nothing in any of these tapes worth anything to anyone. There was some other motive for her murder.”
    Judd looked at Carol’s scarred body again, and he was filled with helpless, blind rage. “You’ve got to find whoever did this!”
    “I intend to,” McGreavy said. He was looking at Judd.
    On the windy, deserted street in front of Judd’s office building, McGreavy told Angeli to drive Judd home. “I’ve got an errand to do,” McGreavy said. He turned to Judd. “Good night, Doctor.”
    Judd watched the huge, lumbering figure move down the street.
    “Let’s go,” Angeli said. “I’m freezing.”
    Judd slid into the front seat beside Angeli, and the car pulled away from the curb.
    “I’ve got to go tell Carol’s family,” Judd said.
    “We’ve already been over there.”
    Judd nodded wearily. He still wanted to see them himself, but it could wait.
    There was a silence. Judd wondered what errand Lieutenant McGreavy could have at this hour of the morning.
    As though reading his thoughts, Angeli said, “McGreavy’s a good cop. He thought Ziffren should have gotten the electric chair for killing his partner.”
    “Ziffren was insane.”
    Angeli shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it, Doctor.”
    But McGreavy hadn’t, Judd thought. He turned his mind to Carol and remembered her brightness and her affection and her deep pride in what she was doing, and Angeli was speaking to him and he saw that they had arrived at his apartment building.
    Five minutes later Judd was in his apartment. There was no question of sleep. He fixed himself a brandy and carried it into the den. He remembered the night Carol had strolled in here, naked and beautiful, rubbing her warm, lithe body against his. He had acted cool and aloof because he had known that that was the only chance he had of helping her. But she had never known what willpower it had taken for him to keep from making love to her. Or had she? He raised his brandy glass and drained it.
    The city morgue looked like all city morgues at three o’clock in the morning, except that someone had placed a wreath of mistletoe over the door. Someone, thought McGreavy, who had either an overabundance of holiday spirit or a macabre sense of humor.
    McGreavy had waited impatiently in the corridor until the autopsy was completed. When the coroner waved to him, he walked into the sickly-white autopsy room. The coroner was scrubbing his hands at the large white sink. He was a small, birdlike man with a high, chirping voice and quick, nervous movements. He