Blood Child Read Online Free Page B

substantial to link the estate with their disappearances—no bodies, no evidence, no crime. Strangely enough, very few missing persons cases were filed. They just vanished. Charges couldn’t be filed based on rumors and speculation.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T he blood evidence alone could have been used for finger-painting, it was in such abundant supply after the weekend of the funeral, but Old Count Atalik couldn’t be charged. He had been dead a week. The crime scene photos Em provided were even more grotesque than the ones in the file. I guess paying for information didn’t guarantee you got everything. I wondered why she had them and how she got them. The partial reason was that her money and connections had greased the wheel more than mine had. The other part of the reason was because of Em’s therapy.
    She couldn’t remember what had happened, so she tried reacting to or stimulating the trauma with one of her therapists, using the photographs. It was absurd and didn’t work. The therapist quit, saying that helping Em gave her nightmares.
    Bodies were mutilated to the point that I wasn’t sure the mounds of flesh were really human until my eyes, seeking to make sense of the images, found the stray finger or a head staring blankly at the camera. It took the coroner’s office nearly a month and a half to put the bodies back together. It would be another month until the final report came out.
    Cause of death for most of the deceased was unable to be determined. The majority of the bodies had been dismembered in an “incomprehensible manner” while they were still alive. The lucky minority, including Em’s beloved brothers, were poisoned and then slaughtered. Every corpse had the same marks that Em’s body bore as scars.
    The investigator’s report indicated traces of an unknown substance in her system. Doctors speculated that a mystery drug, combined with the medication she was taking at the time, led to an altered mental state, possible amnesia. She had been prescribed antidepressants and anxiety medication since her sophomore year of college. The therapy started after she moved to Florida. It was the beginning of her quest for a normal life. Maybe that was the reason her home was so blah now. She just worked at being normal. An ordinary life was her goal. Her money would have allowed her to have whatever she wanted if only she let it, but normal to her wasn’t being trapped behind walls with bodyguards. She strove to be boring the way some people sought out fame. The bookshelves in her house were lined with just the right number of books to make her appear well-read without seeming cluttered.
    Nearly everything I saw could have been easily purchased on a teacher’s salary. It made me wonder what, if anything, she had done with her father’s money. She had also inherited her brother’s estates as well. She had sold their cars, condos, and possessions in a private auction a year after their deaths. The auction house had leaked news of the sale and her attendance to the press. Em didn’t show up for the sale, but plenty of other people did. She made over three million dollars. And she drove an effing Volvo. A rusty one at that.
    Her lack of recall about the weekend after arriving at the mansion and having dinner with her family and their guests was still stunning. Some of the tabloids reported that Em had spent her fortune trying to bring her memories back and prove her innocence. They also claimed that she had multiple personalities, and as soon as she remembered, the personality who was responsible was going to kill her. It was insane, but running her picture or a picture of someone who looked vaguely like her still sold papers.
    It is possible that the trauma she experienced caused the memory loss. More than likely she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, given her violent childhood and the bloody occurrences of the funeral. Diagnosing PTSD isn’t a straightforward process. Symptoms range from