The Next Accident Read Online Free PDF Page B

the jackals appeared and in front of the uncaring bull elephants, jumped on the overwhelmed newborn and methodically ripped him to shreds.
    Rainie awoke with a start. The plaintive sounds of the dying baby's cries were still ringing in her ears. Tears washed down her cheeks.
    She got out of bed unsteadily. She walked through her darkened loft to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of water and took a long, long drink.
    There was no sound in her loft. Three A.M., still, dark, empty. Her hands were trembling. Her body didn't feel as if it belonged to her.
    And she wished…
    She wished Quincy was here.

3
    South Street , Philadelphia
    Elizabeth Ann Quincy had aged well.
    She'd been raised being told that a woman should always take care of herself. Plucked brows, coiffed hair, moisturized face. Then there was flossing, twice a day. Nothing aged you as fast as bacteria trapped in the gums.
    Elizabeth had done as she was told. She plucked and coiffed and moisturized. She put on a dress to run errands. Off the tennis court, she never wore tennis shoes.
    Elizabeth prided herself on playing by the rules. She'd grown up in an affluent family outside of Pittsburgh, riding English-style every weekend and practicing her jumps. By the age of eighteen, she could dance
Swan
Lake
and crochet a tea cozy. She also knew how to use beer to set her dark brown hair in curlers and how to use a flatiron to straighten it out again. Girls today considered her generation frivolous. Let them stick their heads on ironing boards first thing every morning, and see if they still thought the same.
    She had a tough streak. It had taken her to college when her mother had disapproved. While there, it had drawn her to a man quite outside of her family's experience – enigmatic Pierce Quincy. He was from New England originally. Her mother had liked that.
(Mayflower
maybe? Does he still have ties to the motherland? He didn't. His father ran a farm in Rhode Island, owning hundreds of acres of land, and apparently few words or sentiments.) Quincy was pursuing a doctorate in psychology. Her mother had liked that, too. (An academic then, nothing wrong with that. Dr. Quincy, yes very good. He'll settle down, open a private practice. There's a lot of money to be had in troubled minds, you know.)
    Quincy had been drawn to troubled minds. In fact, it was his years on the Chicago police force that had convinced him to pursue dual degrees in criminology and psychology. Apparently, even more than the guns and testosterone inherent in police work, he was fascinated by the criminal mind. What made a deviant personality? When would the person first kill? How could he be stopped?
    She and Pierce had had long talks on the subject. Elizabeth had been mesmerized by the clarity of his thoughts, the passion in his voice. He was a quiet, well-educated man and positively shocking in his ability to step into the shoes of a killer and assume his path.
    The darkness of his work gave her a secret thrill. Watching his hands as he talked of psychopaths and sadists, picturing his fingers holding a gun… He was a thinker, but he was also a doer, and she had genuinely loved that.
    In the beginning, when she had still thought they'd marry, settle down, and lead a normal life. In the beginning, before she'd realized that for a man like Pierce, there was no such thing as normal. He needed his work, he breathed his work, and she and their two little girls were the ones who became out of place in his world.
    Elizabeth was the only member of her family to get a divorce, be a single mom. Her mother had not liked it, had told her to stick it out, but Elizabeth had found her tough streak again. She had Amanda and Kimberly to think about, and her daughters needed stability, some sort of sane suburban life where their father was not buzzed away from soccer games to look at corpses. Amanda, in particular, had had difficulties with her father's career. She never did understand why she only saw