The Secret Friend Read Online Free PDF

work together on this. If you don’t want to, then by all means keep playing the passive-aggressive victim. It’s your choice.’
    Bryson didn’t answer. Darby left him standing in the hallway.
    Darby arrived at the lab and hung Judith Chen’s wet clothes inside the drying chamber where they would stay during the weekend. She wasn’t holding out hope of finding anything significant. All that time spent underwater had, as with Emma Hale’s clothing, washed away anything of value.
    Sitting on her desk was a cardboard box containing copies of the murder books and pictures. Darby wanted to get caught up but wanted to read without being distracted. She decided to go home. Coop stayed behind at the lab to work on the statue. He promised to call her later.
    By the time she reached her Beacon Hill condo, a good foot of snow had already covered her street. Darby opened the door, placed the box on her couch and deactivated her alarm. She took a long shower, standing under the hot water until it ran cold, and then dressed in jeans and her father’s old U-Mass sweatshirt.
    Inside the kitchen, she poured herself a generous glass of Booker’s bourbon. Her windows faced Suffolk University. The college was directly across the street. Last fall, Judith Chen had been attending classes inside that building. Now her corpse was lying inside the cold room waiting to be autopsied.
    Darby took a long sip of bourbon. She refilled the glass and carried it to her office.
    The former occupants had used the space as a nursery; one wall was still painted a light blue with clouds. She had only lived here for three months, and during that time, she had purchased an L-shaped desk for the corner, a bookcase and comfortable leather chair she set up by the window overlooking her back porch and the neighbour’s tiny backyard.
    Darby grabbed the box from the couch, set it up on her desk and removed a copy of Emma Hale’s murder book.

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    Darby took out the autopsy pictures and crime-scene photographs and tacked them to one side of the wall. On the other side she tacked the pictures she had taken of Judith Chen along with the copies ID had given her. Chen’s murder book was incomplete. Tim Bryson was at the station filling out the report.
    Vaginal and anal swabs for Judith Chen had tested negative for semen. All that time spent underwater had washed away trace evidence and DNA – if there was any DNA to be found. There was no way to tell for certain if Chen’s abductor had sex with her. With floaters, the usual evidence – tearing and abrasions – was gone, devoured by decomposition.
    The good majority of crimes involving women more often than not contained some underlying sexual component. If that was the case here – and from a statistical point of view, it should be – then why did he sew a Virgin Mary statue in their pockets?
    Maybe this wasn’t about sex. Maybe these two college girls were chosen to fill some psychological need. Darby grabbed the murder books and settled into the chair with her bourbon, the dead women hanging on the wall behind her, looking down, watching.
    Judith Chen was nineteen, the youngest daughter of a middle-class family from Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Her father was a plumber. She decided to attend Suffolk University because the college had offered the best financial aid package. Boston was an expensive city to live, and with student housing tight, Judith Chen and a roommate rented one half of a duplex in Natick – a forty-minute commute by train. She took out a college loan and paid for her living expenses with the money she earned from her two jobs – the first as a waitress at a Legal Seafood restaurant in Boston’s theatre district, the second job as a sales assistant at the Abercrombie & Fitch store at the Natick Mall.
    Emma Hale was also nineteen, the only child of Jonathan Hale, Boston’s top real-estate developer. Emma lived in a multimillion-dollar Back Bay penthouse with its own parking garage for her