Winter of frozen dreams Read Online Free PDF

he could have taken the kids sledding or ice skating or had some excuse, any excuse, not to sit in and drink. The hurried cup of coffee when the call came to report to work—pronto—didn't hint at sobering him up.
    Hanrahan, the detective who directed the search, told the cop to stay on the couch and not throw up on anything.
    None of the crew was exactly sober. The other three hadn't started drinking as early as their compatriot. Their eyes weren't road maps of red and white yet; they could still read, write, conduct the rudiments of a search. One of them could also hear, for he hollered at the others to hush.
    "What's the fucking roar?"
    "I thought it was inside my head," called a cop from the kitchen.
    Hanrahan laughed. The roar was the bathroom fan. They were all so tight the fan sounded like a turbojet, and each man thought it was his own head blasting from booze, the cold, and a homicide investigation that demanded work on Christmas Day.
    The air conditioner fan was activated too, Hanrahan noted. Why would a person turn on the a-c fan, which sucked in cold air, and the bathroom fan, which sucked out air, and at the same time burn the boiler at seventy-nine degrees?
    One thought was all his headache permitted. The incongruity was jotted down, then forgotten.
    The apartment was dusted for latent prints and

    checked for signs of blood, with no success. Due to the parameters of the search warrant, the most curious items uncovered in 306 were not confiscated. But they were fun.
    In the second drawer of the bedroom dresser, tucked under two plaid blouses, was a box containing flesh-colored rubber dildos of varying size, shape, and thickness, lace panties with a slit in the crotch, and an electric vibrator. A shoe box under the bed held photographs—snapshots of women making love with women—in beautiful Kodachrome. The acts and positions were explicit, and one woman—Barbara Hoffman—along with one or two or three different partners, appeared in every photo.
    In the living room Detective Ken Couture knelt at a brick bookshelf half buried by houseplants and remarked that Hoffman's kinky tastes extended to her reading material. Interspersed with the textbooks on chemistry and microbiology were tomes on aberrant sexual practices and clinical studies on deviant psychosexual behavior, sexual taboos, and the sexual revolution of the sixties. There was one volume on poisons and toxic substances. There were also books on autopsies and forensic pathology. None of the books in this strange collection were corralled as evidence, because they weren't covered by the search warrant.
    What was collected seemed a paltry haul: an address book, a bag of soiled laundry that could be tested for blood, a few latent prints. There was no indication of a struggle in the apartment—nothing broken, no glass shattered, no liquid soaked into a rug. The apartment was spotless.
    Two cops trudged outside to the snowbank adjacent to the Dumpster and searched for traces of blood or hair. Immediately their sweat froze and the wind shivered their flesh. It was a tedious and frigid task. A layer of snow one inch deep was scraped, sifted, and discarded. In the twenty-below-zero afternoon thirty-five inches of snow were tediously removed before the shovel scraped blacktop. No hair, no blood—just snow and frozen fingers and icy curses.

    The incinerator pipe on the roof was checked for hidden clothing or a weapon and was found to be nailed shut and undisturbed. The basement was checked. The gas furnace showed no signs of having been used to destroy clothing or any other evidence.
    Finished, the cops woke their inebriated cohort, who had been snoring on the sofa, and sealed the premises. An ominous sign warned that the apartment was under police investigation and that anyone making unauthorized entry was subject to arrest and prosecution.
    Hanrahan shrugged. They had found nothing of importance. At least none of them had deposited their Christmas joy on