Blood Trust Read Online Free Page B

“However, that theory leaves one question unanswered.”
    Willowicz put his hands behind his back. “And what might that be?”
    “I don’t know,” Peter McKinsey, Naomi Wilde’s partner, said. “You seem awfully cool for someone whose lover of five months has been brutalized and killed.”
    “If you’ve got nothing constructive to contribute, fuck off,” Alli said. Addressing Willowicz, she said, “You said he bled to death. None of these subcutaneous cuts, even en masse, would have done the trick.”
    Again, that sharp look was exchanged by Willowicz and Fellows.
    “So how did poor Billy die?” Alli said.
    Willowicz beckoned with a crooked forefinger. Something about his demeanor reminded Alli of a Grimm’s fairy tale witch or ogre, anyway someone delighted to be up to no good. “Come closer.”
    She walked over the uneven ground. The crunch of even her light weight pierced the paper-thin layer of ice, and with each step she seemed to sink farther into the boggy ground beneath.
    A sickly smell enveloped Billy, of rotten meat, ice cream, and fecal matter. She gagged once, and then, because everyone’s attention was on her, caught hold of herself and fought down her rising gorge. Billy’s eyes were so swollen and bruised she had first thought they were covered in flies. Deep contusions showed around the spiderweb of cuts like dark clouds gathering around the heart of a storm. His face was so distorted that, close up, she scarcely recognized him. There could be only one reason why he had been slowly and systematically taken apart.
    “What did he know?”
    “Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it,” O’Banion said. “The other is that there was a single killer. A crime of passion.”
    “You’re still at this angle,” Alli said.
    “We go by the odds,” said Willowicz. “In these cases, the person closest to the vic is the perpetrator.”
    “Not this time.”
    Both detectives regarded her stonily.
    Naomi Wilde, never far from her since she had stumbled, said, “We thought you might be able to shed some light on what happened here.”
    Alli said nothing, but delivered an Et tu, Brutus glower. Then, she turned to the corpse and looked into Billy’s face, trying to stare past the terrible beating he had sustained, into the mind of the boy she had known, briefly but wildly. Even before she had been traumatized by her kidnapping and brainwashing two years ago, she had had difficulty with intimacy. She was embarrassed and ashamed of her body, which was small and immature. Now, through first Jack’s and then the academy’s help with physical training, her arms and legs were toned. But to her they still looked like a girl’s limbs, totally lacking the womanly curves of her contemporaries.
    Naomi wrapped an arm around Alli’s shoulders. “Whatever you know, you have to tell us.”
    “All I know is that I had nothing to do with this monstrous … this atrocity.” She shook her head. “It’s beyond me how anyone could do this to another human being.” If Jack were here he’d know that for a lie. During her time with him and Annika in Russia and the Ukraine she had witnessed examples of the hatred and contempt for human life some people harbor deep in their hearts or just beneath their skin. And with the Russian agent Annika, at least, she had discovered depths of human betrayal she had not even been able to imagine, even growing up in the snake pit of American politics.
    “Ms. Carson,” Willowicz said, “no one believes you don’t know what happened here.”
    Alli felt her heart constrict. “How can you say that?”
    “You and the victim were having an affair—illicitly, as it happens, on the grounds of the academy. But two days ago something happened. The two of you were seen in an argument—rather violent, from all reports—in a bar in town. Harsh words were exchanged. As a result, he stalked out.”
    “So, what, you think I tortured him and strung him up like an attic ham in