A Simple Act of Violence Read Online Free Page A

with her husband Zalman, talking about things only they could remember. Miller took the rear stairwell up to his apartment instead of his usual route through the deli itself. Such moments as this, wonderful people though they were, Harriet and Zalman Shamir would keep him up for an hour, insisting he eat chicken liver sandwiches and honey cake. Most other nights yes, but tonight? No, not tonight. Tonight belonged to Catherine Sheridan, to finding the reason for her death.
    Miller let himself in, kicked off his shoes, spent an hour outlining his initial observations on a yellow legal pad. He watched TV for a little while before fatigue started to take him.
    Eleven, perhaps later, Harriet and Zalman locked up and went home. Harriet called him goodnight from the stairs, and Miller called goodnight in return.
    He did not sleep. He lay awake with his eyes closed and thought of Catherine Sheridan. Who she was. Why she had died. Who had killed her. He thought of these things and he longed for morning, for morning would bring daylight, and daylight would give distance between himself and his ghosts.
     
     
     
     
    U se a knife. Knife killings are personal. Almost invariably per Multiple stab-wounds to chest, stomach, throat - some shallow, glancing off the ribs, others deep, sufficient to leave oval bruises where the blade ends and the shaft begins. Suggest uncontrollable rage, the fury of hatred or vengeance. Such things to confuse, to muddy the waters and cloud issues of forensic pathology, criminal psychology, profiling. Everything needs to appear as if something else.
    Did you know that less than half of all rapes are actually resolved by the police? And this despite the fact that in the vast majority of cases the perpetrator is someone well-known to the victim? That less than ten percent make it to the Crime Lab? In only six percent of those cases is DNA recovered and tested. With the total tests running at something in the region of a quarter of a million cases per year, do you realize only fifteen thousand victims will ever find justice?
    There are people who know this stuff. You can find it on the internet. It ain’t rocket science. On the almighty world wide web you can find a hundred different ways to cover up the crime. Household bleach will remove fingerprints, saliva, semen, DNA. Wear gloves for God’s sake, and not leather ones with a grain. Wear latex gloves like a doctor, a surgeon, an orthodontist. They’re not hard to find. Cost next to nothing. Don’t wear your own shoes. Buy new sneakers. Cheap ones. Don’t go out killing folks in three hundred dollar Nikes, for with all physical objects you have two basic characteristic: class and individual. A cheap sneaker has class characteristics. It’s a mass-produced item. There are millions of them in circulation, and to all intents and purposes they are absolutely identical. The more expensive the sneaker the more unusual the tread, and the fewer the people who have them. And before you go out, check those treads yourself. Treads pick things up. Carpet fibers, bits of crap from the street, from your own apartment. Like I said, it ain’t rocket science. Some objects, car tires for example, have both class and individual characteristics. The class is the basic shape of the tire, the indents and grooves and patterns. Then you have different elements and angles of wear dependent upon the type of vehicle and the kind of terrain it has traversed. These factors can sometimes create a uniqueness that can be attributed to one car, and thus one driver. That’s your individual. Watch those guys on TV - CSI, you know? - and it looks like they have all this stuff down cold. Do they, fuck. You just have to be careful. Use your common sense. Think the thing through. Don’t get complex. The more complex you get the more things can go wrong. Trick is to look at it from the end back to the beginning. Get what I mean? Look at the aftermath, the scene as someone else will find it,