Crusher Read Online Free

open, for the light.”
    “Were they open when you left this morning?”
    “Yeah. He opened them while I was in the shower.” Prendergast made a silent, brief note; Amobi glanced at him, his expression composed and neutral, but I sensed he thought Prendergast already had a theory he wasn’t sharing.
    “Take us through this morning, from when you got up till you left for work.”
    I talked about that morning, again. It didn’t take long. But I noticed Prendergast was writing nothing down, and trying not to smirk. I began to see where this was going, but got to the end of the story before my anger bubbled up to the surface. Amobi sat there, relaxed and attentive; he hadn’t made up his mind about anything from what I could see. When I finished speaking, Prendergast let a few seconds tick by. Eventually Amobi leaned forward.
    “Finn—did you notice anything missing? Had anything been taken?”
    “Dad’s laptop.”
    “Any idea of the make?”
    “A MacBook, about six years old.” Amobi slowly took a note. Dad had bought it from a bloke in a pub a few years before. Maybe it had been nicked, I never asked. It was already pretty clapped-out when he got it, but it was reliable, and it did enough of what he wanted: browsing the Net for research, soaking up the endless writes and rewrites and edits and rewrites.
    “He must have been using it when … when he was attacked. Listening to music. He did that while he worked. He wouldn’t have heard a thing.”
    Prendergast nodded as if this all made sense. Amobi noticed me frown.
    “What?” said Amobi.
    “His notes were gone too,” I said. “He used to write stuff longhand before he put it onto the computer. He had loads of printouts and cuttings and background stuff. Whoever killed him must have taken them.”
    “We found another laptop upstairs,” said Prendergast.
    “If it’s an old Dell, it’s mine.”
    “Why do you think this intruder left that behind?”
    This intruder
. I shrugged. “Because it’s a piece of crap?”
    “Was there any money in the house? Anything valuable?” Amobi was taking notes of his own. Slowly, not in shorthand. I caught a glimpse of his handwriting; beautiful copperplate.
    “No. Nothing. We’re not exactly loaded.”
    “Was there anything that might have attracted the attention of a burglar?” asked Prendergast.
    “Like what?” I asked.
    “Drugs,” said Prendergast. He had sat back in his chair with his hands crossed on his belly, like a bloke listen-ing to a story he’s heard a hundred times before but is too bored to interrupt. His fake-relaxed pose conveyed its own sense of menace, as theatrical as cracking his knuckles.
    “No.”
    “Would this intruder have had any reason to think there might be drugs in the house?”
    “Why don’t you find him and ask him?”
    “Maybe we already have.” Prendergast’s smirk had vanished, and in its place was anger and indignation, as if someone had murdered
his
father and was giving him the runaround.
    Amobi cleared his throat and cut in, “Perhaps we should take a break. You’re sure you don’t want anything to eat, Finn?”
    “I’m OK, thanks,” I said, still staring at Prendergast. His smirk was back. Amobi stood up and pulled back his chair, and eventually Prendergast lumbered to his feet. He was overweight and out of condition, and the way he kept finding things to do with his hands suggested they weren’t happy unless they were holding a cigarette. But he was a big man and I could sense a deep dangerous current of bitterness and anger surging underneath that soft muscle.
    Prendergast and Amobi left. The uniformed PC stayed in the room, but took a seat, saying nothing. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation anyway. I was still trying to figure out what it meant, the scene in our downstairs room, my dad slumped over the table, his headphones plugged into nothing, his laptop gone, his notes gone. The laptop was an ancient piece of crap, but some smackhead might have