Victims Read Online Free PDF Page B

familiar face, a neighbor, a friend of his mother-in-law. “Mrs. Ferris? What’s wrong with Mary?”
    “Billy, come into the other room. Come, please.”
    He walked with her, focused on her so intently that others milling around Mary Hynes’s living room were background.
    “She told us she was going to Florida, Mrs. Ferris. Why is she here? Who did this to them, to Annie and Mary?”
    “Billy. Mary didn’t want you kids to know. She...”
    “To know? To know what? What?”
    “She had some... cosmetic surgery done yesterday morning.”
    “Cosmetic surgery?” He repeated the words carefully, phonetically, as though he had never heard these words before. They made no sense.
    The neighbor went on. “She was going to go down to Florida next week and then come home and you’d see how good she looked. Rested. She wasn’t going to say anything. She had the surgery yesterday morning. That’s why she’s bandaged like that.”
    “But... but... Annie? Someone hurt my wife, out there, right out there, in front of Mary’s apartment.”
    He turned abruptly to the triple windows, pulled back the filmy curtains, raised the narrow-slatted blinds. The crowd on the sidewalk turned and looked up at him.
    “There. Right out there. It doesn’t make sense. Why was Annie here? Did she know Mary was home? Did Mary see... out the window... Did...”
    For a split second, he thought he saw his brother’s face, out there, on the sidewalk, in the crowd, and then, time whirling, spinning into an incomprehensible sequence, his brother was in the room, beside him, wrapping his arms around him, holding him. His eyes closed tight. He knew it was all a mistake. He was at the scene of a fire; the room was gutted and charred and black and the corpses were strangers. All he needed was a whiff or two of oxygen and he’d be fine.
    But no one seemed to realize that, and for the first time in his life, Bill Grace passed out.

3
    C APTAIN WILLIAM O’CONNOR, SQUAD commander of the 112th Precinct detectives, rubbed his eyes. It was 10 A.M. and he had been on duty since he was called to the crime scene at 1 A.M. He was alert and sharp, but his eyes ached. It was the new glasses. He couldn’t see with them and he couldn’t see without them. He opened the top drawer of his desk and found his old scratched glasses. They didn’t have sharp focus, but they were comfortable and familiar.
    Detective James Dunphy brought him a mug of hot coffee, set it down carefully on the desk blotter.
    O’Connor took a cautious sip, smiled and said, “See, there are compensations working with a girl. Your little lady out there make us a fresh pot or what?”
    He was kidding. Everyone was careful these days about what women should or should not do around the squad room. No one even suggested they take their turn at the coffeepot. Hell, who wanted to hear from their damned indignant female lawyers yelling male chauvinism?
    Dunphy jutted his chin toward the report on the captain’s desk.
    “Hell, I’m grateful the girl likes to type. And is good at it. My brother John, at the Forty-sixth, in the Bronx, he got a woman partner, first thing she says to him, first thing, she tells him, ‘I been a secretary for five years, buster, and I don’t type anything anymore for anybody except myself.’”
    The men had been friends for twenty years, had gone through the Police Academy together and had watched the changes take place not just in the outside world, but within the Department. They agreed, however, and without discussing it at any great length, that Dunphy had gotten lucky. If he had to work with a female, he couldn’t do better than Miranda Torres. She was good; she was tough; she didn’t make waves; she didn’t hold back information; she understood the partner relationship. In short, Torres seemed to be a stand-up-guy kind of girl.
    The only mystery surrounding her was who the hell was her rabbi. She’d been on the job six years. She had a degree in criminal