The Tunnel Rats Read Online Free PDF Page B

face in disgust. 'What sort of sick bastard would do that?' he whispered.
    'Black magic?' said Reid. 'Some sort of Satanic ritual?'
    Wright shook his head. 'There'd be symbols. Candles. Stuff like that. This guy's been tortured to death.' He took a step closer to the body. There was something impaled on the knife. A playing card. Blood from the man's, face had trickled down over the card. Wright reached out his hand.
    'Don't even think about touching that!' boomed a voice.
    Wright looked around. The grey-haired man in overalls was standing behind Wright holding a polythene evidence bag.
    'I wasn't going to touch anything,' said Wright defensively.
    'Who are you anyway?' asked the man. 'Gerry Hunter's already been over the crime scene.'
    'I'm Nick Wright. This is Tommy Reid. British Transport Police.'
    'Been at many crime scenes, have you, Mr Wright?'
    'What?'
    The man sealed the evidence bag. Inside was a cigarette packet. 'Standard procedure is for detectives to wear gloves and shoe covers before they go trampling over a crime scene.'
    'Yeah, well, we'll watch where we put our feet,' said Wright. 'And it's Sergeant Wright. What about the victim's clothes?'
    'No sign of them. Assuming he didn't walk in naked, the murderer must have taken them with him.'
    Wright put his hands in his pockets and turned to look at the body again. He peered at the playing card. 'Ace of spades,' he said. 'Now what the hell's the significance of that?'
    'Bridge game got a bit nasty, do you think?' said Reid.
    'It must mean something, Tommy. Someone went to a lot of trouble to stick that on his chest.'
    Kristine Ross opened the UPS package, taking care not to damage her blood-red fingernails. Inside was a manila envelope, with the senator's name and 'private and confidential' typed across it. She picked up the UPS wrapper and looked at the name of the sender. Max Eckhardt. It wasn't a name she recognised. The address was an apartment in London, England. The space for the sender's telephone number had been left blank. She clicked her mouse on the logo for the senator's contacts book and entered the name Eckhardt. Nothing. She scrolled through the Es, just to be on the safe side, but there was no name that was even remotely similar. It wasn't unusual for members of the public to mark their mail private and confidential in the hope of reaching the senator's desk unopened, but it was Kristine's 28 STEPHEN LEATHER job to make sure that he made the maximum use of his time. Whoever Max Eckhardt was, he wasn't known to the senator and so his envelope was fair game. She slit open the envelope and peered inside. All it contained was a Polaroid photograph. Kristine closed the envelope and tapped it on her desk, a tight feeling in her stomach. She doubted that it was a wedding picture. There was no letter, no card, just the photograph, and the fact that it was a Polaroid meant that it probably wasn't the work of a professional photographer.
    People sent strange things to the senator. His mail was scanned before it reached Kristine's desk,\but X-rays couldn't weed out all the nasty surprises. In the twenty-two months she'd been working for Senator Dean Burrow she'd seen pornographic pictures of housewives offering themselves to him, hatemail written in crayon, obscene drawings, and on one occasion a small bottle of urine from a woman who said that the FBI were trying to poison her. Anything threatening was passed on to the Secret Service; anything obscene went into the shredder. Kristine sighed through pursed lips and tilted the envelope so that the Polaroid slid out, face down. She turned it over. For a second or two she stared at the image, unable to believe what she was looking at, then she felt her stomach heave.
    'Oh, sweet Jesus,' she whispered.
    Tommy Reid dropped Nick Wright at the door to Battersea police station and went looking for a parking space. Wright waited until the grey-haired duty sergeant had finished taking details of a stolen bicycle from a