Blood Hunt Read Online Free Page B

he knew, he could screw up his head and burn out. Mossman and his peculiar bruise, though, haunted him...maybe because of the bruise, whose twin case eluded him? It lurked in the back of his mind the rest of the evening, even through the excitement of watching the Giants win a 1-0 squeaker. He stared at the TV screen with Harry, trying to pull the case out of his memory and asking himself who would stick two needles into someone’s jugular and drain out all his blood. It sounded like something from a horror movie.
    Garreth had no particular desire to go home to his empty apartment, so after leaving Harry and Lien, he drove back to the Hall of Justice. He sat in the near-empty office doodling on a blank sheet of paper and letting his mind wander. Bruise...punctures...blood loss. He recalled a photograph of a man in a bathtub, arm trailing down over the side to the floor. A voice said, “Welcome to Homicide, Mikaelian.”
    He sat bolt upright. Earl Fay’s voice! It had been Faye and Centrello’s case. Faye had told Garreth — new to the detail then — all about it in elaborate, gory detail.
    Garreth scrambled for the file drawers. Everything came back to him now. The date was late October two years ago, just about Halloween, one of the factors which fascinated Faye, he remembered.
    “ Maybe it was a cult of some kind. They needed the blood for their rituals.”
    Methodically, Garreth searched. The file should still be here. The case remained open, unsolved. And there it was...in a bottom drawer.
    Seated cross-legged on the floor, Garreth opened the murder book. Cleveland Morris Adair, an Atlanta businessman, had been found dead, wrists slashed, in the bathtub of his suite at the Mark Hopkins on October 29, 1981. The death seemed like suicide until the autopsy revealed two puncture wounds in the middle of a bruise on the neck, and although Adair bled to death, his wrists had been slashed postmortem by someone applying a great deal of pressure. That someone had also broken Adair’s neck. Stomach contents showed a high concentration of alcohol. The red coloring of the bathwater proved to be nothing more than grenadine from the bar in his suite.
    Statements from cabdrivers and hotel personnel established that Adair had left the hotel alone on the evening of October 28 and gone to North Beach. He had returned at 2:15 A.M., again alone. A maid coming in to clean Sunday morning found his body.
    Hotel staff in the lobby remembered most of the people entering the hotel around the time Adair had. By the time registered and known persons were sorted out, only three possible suspects remained, and two of them were eventually traced and ruled out. That left the third, who came through the lobby just five minutes after Adair. A bellboy described her in detail: about twenty, five- ten, good figure, dark red hair, green eyes, wearing a green dress plunging to the waistline in front and slit to the hip on the side, carrying a large shoulder bag. A high end call girl, the bellboy thought, since the few times he saw her before, she had been coming in with different men.
    What interested Faye and Centrello about her was that no one saw her leave. Their efforts to locate her among the city’s call girls failed. Nor did they find any wild-eyed crazies who might have made Adair their sacrifice in some kinky ritual. The Crime Lab turned up no useful physical evidence, and robbery was apparently no motive; Adair’s valuables had not been touched.
    Garreth reread the autopsy report several times. Wounds inflicted by someone applying a great deal of pressure. Someone stronger than usual? The deaths had striking similarities and differences, but a crawling down his spine told him that his gut reaction believed more in the similarities than in the differences. Two out-of-towners staying at nice hotels whose blood had been drained through needles in their jugulars, then the bodies doctored to make it seem they bled out other ways. It had a ritual