Bloodsworth Read Online Free

though, Morin had grown more worried himself. What test could possibly take so long to complete? Had the semen stain even yielded a testable DNA sample? Would the results ever come? And what might they show?
    It was the telephone number of Dr. Edward Blake that Morin dialed late on the afternoon of April 27, 1993. He’d run out of excuses to give Kirk, run out of his own wick of patience. The phone rang just once. Morin was taken aback when Dr. Blake answered it personally. Morin introduced himself. He asked about the Kirk Bloodsworth test results.
    â€œBloodsworth?” he heard Dr. Blake say. “Bloodsworth? Yes, Bloodsworth . . . Yes, yes, I have him right here.” Morin could hear Blake rustling through papers on the other end of the line. The DNA scientist seemed to take forever. Morin closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited.

FOUR
    A T ALMOST THE SAME MOMENT , about fifty miles away, Kirk Bloodsworth entered a room in the Maryland Penitentiary designated as the prison library. He’d been lifting weights with Stanley Norris, known as Bozo because he had hair like the clown’s, and Big Tony, who had once been a Hell’s Angel and could bench press 500 pounds. Kirk, himself, had pressed 380 that day. He was burly, overweight from the prison food, wore a bandanna around his head and his dark sunglasses. His faded purple T-shirt was damp with sweat from his workout. On his way to the library, he’d been listening to his Walkman radio through the earphones. The disc jockey had been playing hard rock and heavy metal hits from the past. Kirk had listened to one of his favorites, Guns N’ Roses playing “Welcome to the Jungle.” Music that touched on his world, that sought to reflect or capture his mean existence, had become an important source of both solace and escape in the prison. A few years before, when inmates had rioted and taken over Dormitory C, near where his cell was located, and he’d heard the incessant screams of an inmate who was beaten and raped sixteen successive times, he’d played a Guns N’ Roses tape over and over to drown out the terrible sound.
    The DJ that afternoon followed up with a song by Ozzy Osbourne, known as the grandfather of heavy metal. The song was called “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” Hearing it, Kirk had stopped in his tracks and leaned against the tier wall. Kirk considered himself a religious man, but in a waterman’s way—drinking, smoking pot, womanizing—these were just part of his life as a Chesapeake Bay crabber. Along with his faith in God, he also believed in portents, dreams, and mysticism. He’d been born on Halloween and was convinced that spirits inhabited an invisible world connected to this one. In prison he’d converted from Protestant to Catholic. He liked the ritual, the symbolism, the mystical side of the Catholic Church. Hearing Ozzy Osbourne that afternoon sing “Mama, I’m Coming Home” gave him a jolt. He had always liked and admired Osbourne’s music. He’d only heard this song a few times, but its refrain was the wish and hope of his life. Kirk felt it might be a sign. Hearing the song made him both hopeful and afraid.
    Once in the library, Kirk sat at a steel table in the center of a small windowless room around which a couple of hundred books were stacked on institutional shelving crumbling with rust. The books were all secondhand, old law books mostly, some dime store mysteries, some true crime accounts; a few were hardbacks with their covers still intact but most looked ragged and dog-eared. Kirk had spent thousands of hours in this room. He believed that he had read nearly every book on the shelves. For a waterman’s son, he thought to himself humorlessly, he’d become damn well read.
    He had entered the library to begin drafting yet another of the hundreds of letters he still wrote and sent out regularly protesting his innocence in the crime of