A Simple Act of Violence Read Online Free Page B

and more than likely you’ll remember the cigarette you smoked at the end of the street, the butt you flicked into the shrubbery, the gum wrapper, the foil that’s smooth and shiny and great for prints . . . You getting the drift now? You understand where I’m coming from?
    And if you don’t want blood, then strangle them. Choke them to death. No weapon better than your own hands. Then disappear. Disappear fast, ’cause if they can’t find you they can’t find the weapon.
    Could run a seminar. How about that, friends and neighbors? Run a seminar at George Washington University. Mayhem and Murder 101.
    Bitch of a thing.

TWO
    Life is so much tougher when you know you should be dead.
    It was like a line from a song. There was a cadence and a rhythm to it that made it difficult to forget. It started somewhere in Miller’s mind, and once it had started it just seemed to keep on going. Like the flat-nose .22s the Mafia used. Sufficient punch to get it through the skull, insufficient to make its way out again, and that dime’s-worth of lead just battered and ricocheted around inside, banging off the internal walls of some poor sucker’s head until their brain was chicken soup. The thought went like that, and he wanted it to stop. He thought of the girl who had died, the girl who had left him, the IAD investigation, the newspapers. He thought of these things, just as he had thought of them for the past three months, and he tried to make them inconsequential and irrelevant. He sat in the office of Washington Second Precinct Captain Frank Lassiter. He focused on what he’d seen at the Sheridan house the night before; he waited patiently for what he knew was coming.
    Lassiter came through the door like a raid. He banged it shut behind him, dropped into his chair. He shook his head and scowled, and when he opened his mouth he hesitated for a second. Perhaps he’d planned to say something else, and then changed his mind.
    ‘You know what this is, right?’ was the question he asked.
    ‘The serial, or this woman specifically?’ Miller replied.
    Lassiter frowned, shook his head. ‘This is the proverbial worst case scenario, that’s what it is.’
    ‘We’re presuming that the MO is the same as—’
    Lassiter cut him short. ‘We’re presuming nothing. I don’t have anything from forensics yet. I don’t have a coroner’s report. I have a murdered woman, second in this precinct’s jurisdiction, and because the other two were out of precinct, because this whole system is a jigsaw puzzle of bullshit and bureaucracy, I don’t have anything to hang anything on. All I know is that the chief of police called me at seven this morning and told me that the whole thing was now my problem, that I better put some good people on it, that it better be sorted out . . . you know the speech by now, right?’
    Miller smiled sardonically.
    ‘So here we are,’ Lassiter said.
    ‘Here we are,’ Miller echoed
    ‘So what the hell is this crap about transferring out of Homicide?’
    ‘I don’t know, captain, some crap about transferring out of Homicide.’
    ‘Sarcasm I don’t need, detective. So you’re gonna leave us then?’
    ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I believed . . .’
    Lassiter laughed suddenly. ‘Believed what? It’s dead people, that’s what it is. That’s why it’s called Homicide.’ He placed his hands on the arms of his chair as if to stand. For a moment he looked closely at Miller. ‘You don’t look so good,’ he said.
    ‘Just tired.’
    ‘Still in pain?’
    Miller shook his head. ‘It was just bruising, a dislocated shoulder, nothing serious.’
    ‘You get some physio?’
    ‘More than enough.’
    Lassiter nodded his head slowly.
    Miller felt the inescapable tension of what was coming.
    ‘So you ran the gauntlet, eh? You know how many times my name’s been in the papers?’
    Miller shook his head.
    ‘I don’t either, but it’s a lot. A fucking lot. They’re buzzards. That’s all they are. They fly