Death Trap Read Online Free

don’t know anything at all about it. I don’t know who he killed or where he killed her or anything about it.”
    “He was a weird boy, mister. I guess I can use his name in the past tense without being too inaccurate. Too many brains. Like that Loeb and Leopold team years ago. I guess he figured that the laws of decency that apply to you and me didn’t apply to him. He was going to college over there in Dalton. Sheridan College. He was in his last year. He was running around with an eighteen-year-old girl named Nancy Paulson. She had a kid sister named Jane Ann Paulson, age sixteen. It just so happens that I know Dick Paulson, the father. Now I’m not the sort of guy to claim we were bosom buddies. But I did meet him a couple of times when I was over in Dalton on business. Dick owns a market over there. Good meats. He gets a high-class trade. This Landy boy had the use of a car. It was his sister’s car. She was working for the college at that time. You understand, this all happened way back in April, six months ago.
    “Anyway, all of a sudden Jane Ann Paulson is missing. She’d been in some kind of Christmas pageant so there was a real good picture of her. Pretty little kid. It really stirred up the area. They had everybody and his brother out hunting for her, and cops from all over, and everybody trying to get in on the act. She turned up missing on a Friday night, I think it was. She had a girl friend in her class in high school, daughter of one of the professors lived up on the hill. The last anybody saw of Jane Ann, she was walking up the hill. But she never got there. Some farm kid found the body the following Wednesday afternoon in an aspen patch near Three Sisters Creek. She was naked and dead, raped and cut up some.
    “Then the fun really started. The college boys park with their dates on a side road near where the body was found. Feeling ran pretty high in Dalton. There wasn’t a college boy who would have dared go down into the village alone. A smart state cop took over. He figured that the kid had to have been taken out there by car. It was five miles beyond the college, and over six miles from the village. He impounded every car that college kids had the use of. While the other police were rounding up known sex deviates, the state cop had lab tests run on a hundred and twelve automobiles. It took time. But they came up with the right car. It was the Ford that belonged to Landy’s sister. Blood had been scrubbed off the upholstery, but they took the fabric off and they got enough from the underside to run off the type. It matched the kid’s blood.
    “That cop, Frank Leader his name is, was too smart to jump quick. He wanted to sew it up good; and he did. The Landy boy lived with his sister in a small apartment in an old house in the village. Leader found cleaning fluid there that he could tell—or the lab could tell—had been used on the car seat. And he found the rag and the lab was able to show it was human blood on the rag, even though they couldn’t type it. They’d vacuumed the car out and got female hair and did comparisons and found two of the hairs were from the dead girl’s head. Leader wanted the knife and he wanted to find the pocketbook the girl had been carrying. They really tore up that place. Found the pocketbook and the knife buried in a flower bed in the yard. It was a new knife, a paring knife. Leader traced it to a hardware store in Dalton. He was able to prove Landy had been in the store a few days before the murder. Nobody sold him a knife, but they were on open display.”
    “Did he confess?” I asked.
    “No. With all they had stacked up against him, he might just as well have. The ground was soft at that lover’s lane place. A smart speed cop kept people off the parking places until he could get help. They took molds of the tire tracks and matched one up with the Ford.”
    “What was the defense?”
    “The old yelp—you know—it’s all circumstantial. Landy had no