Trail of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

guy. Not cruel, loved his wife despite his big talk about women, a good father. He would be right behind James against any criminal element…if only James felt comfortable enough to turn his back.
    Now his partner leaned forward as if he might pat James’s hand. “It’s an election year, Jimmy. Guys say stuff like that every election year. Once the votes are counted it will be a different story. He can’t throw out the whole entire force, so he’ll concentrate on the big shots, fire a few captains to make it look good, and things will go on as before. Guys like you and me will always be here.”
    He wiped his mouth with a napkin and got up; no need to wait for a check that wouldn’t come. James examined his pockets—sixty-five cents. He left five of them on the table as a tip for the waitress, or a hedge against completely giving in, the best he could do in the fight for his soul.
    Then he followed his partner’s broad back out to the car, thinking:
There is no you and me. There is no me and anybody. There’s just me.
    Walter used one of the blue call boxes, placed on every other street corner, to check in. As rookie detectives, they didn’t warrant one of the new radio cars. They could have gone back to the station but Walter preferred to stay out and about rather than hang around the smoky, cramped building. So did James.
    Fall had come but no scent of dead leaves made it past the gasoline fumes and market stands. A horn blared. James watched a particularly pretty girl step off the curb and cross the street, her skirt brushing the backs of her calves. Funny how hemlines went back down after the flapper dresses of the last decade. He would have preferred they kept going up. Had the crash sobered the country? Did Americans believe that because of their loose ways in the twenties they had somehow brought the Depression on themselves?
    One year ago, a woman—or rather,
parts
of a woman—had washed up on the beach over in Euclid, a different precinct. Now and then Walter would wonder aloud what kind of pervert she must have been keeping company with to wind up like that, and the victim had never been identified, nor the case solved. If the city’s police force didn’t need Eliot Ness, why couldn’t it solve such a brutal crime? No, the modern age had arrived, and James wanted to ride its crest instead of dragging his feet trying to hold it back.
    Then Walter threw himself into the car with more than his customary enthusiasm. “You are not gonna believe this.”
     
     
     

Chapter 5
     
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
PRESENT DAY
     
     
    The bizarre circumstances of James Miller’s death did not automatically confer top billing at the Medical Examiner’s Office. He had not been the only citizen found dead during the previous twenty-four hours, so Theresa spent the morning with clothing examinations on two unrelated suicides and then returned to the lab to set up the spectrometer to run the gunshot residue analyses. The lab felt comfortable, for a change, now that the summer heat had faded. Once the snows came the building would always be either too hot or too cold, depending on how the furnace felt like working that day, but for these few weeks they could achieve a happy medium.
    The notebook in Miller’s pocket had not been cooperative, its pages fused together with decomposition fluid. She had placed it in the fume hood with a little humidity; if that could unstick the pages, then the alternate light source might be able to see the writing underneath the staining.
    Theresa swallowed the dregs from her coffee cup, booted up her computer, swiveled to the other counter, and mounted the crumbling shirt fibers on a glass slide. It took her approximately two seconds to decide the shirt fibers were cotton.
    Theresa swiveled back to her microscope to make some notes on the cotton fibers.
    “That from your long-lost Torso victim?” The DNA analyst, Don Delgado, hitched one long leg over the corner of her workbench. Dark eyes