Evidence of Blood Read Online Free

what the doctor said. Massive.”
    “So he died quickly,” Kinley said before he could stop himself.
    “And so young,” Serena said. “I guess that’s why they wanted an autopsy.”
    “Who did?”
    “Mr. Warfield,” Serena said, “the District Attorney, the man he worked for.”
    “Ray was working for the District Attorney’s Office?”
    “Yeah. He didn’t run for Sheriff again. Didn’t he tell you that?”
    “No.”
    “Well, I guess he just got tired of it, decided not to run. That’s when he took this job with the District Attorney.”
    “I see.”
    “Anyway, Mr. Warfield wanted an autopsy.”
    “It’s probably a good idea.”
    “You know about this kind of thing, I guess. From your work, I mean.”
    “A little.”
    “He was a good man,” Serena said. “I’m just sorry hehad to die alone, way down in the canyon.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “Looking for something, I guess. What do you think it was?”
    Kinley shook his head silently. Maybe just a way through the vines, he thought.

THREE
     

     
    By mid-morning his travel service had made all the arrangements for his flight to Atlanta late that night. A rental car would be waiting for him there, and by midnight he expected to be back in Sequoyah, his hometown.
    In the meantime, there was work to be done, and he spent the better part of the day doing it. First he transcribed his interview with Maria Spinola, reading it carefully once again as he typed it out. There was always a chance that something might be missed, a small detail that could bring a human touch to otherwise inhuman events.
    As he read, he could hear Spinola’s voice again as she’d said her last words to him:
Is he sorry?
She meant Norwood, was he sorry for what he’d done to her. He’d known what she wanted to hear, that Norwood was racked by nightmares, that his screams of remorse echoed through the cells and catwalks of Walpole CI, that his suffering was as Dante might have imagined it, burning skin, boiling eyes. Instead Norwood now munched sandwiches, watched television, and probably masturbated from time to time while feverishly remembering the pleasure he’d taken in raping her.
    At the time, he’d wanted to give her the answer she needed, but found he couldn’t, no matter how much it might have soothed her. It was a curious holding back of natural sympathies which he had long ago accepted as part of his character. For a time, he’d believed that it was his work that had drained them from him, the long trailof blood he’d followed, the pictures he’d seen, the even more desperate ones he’d imagined. He remembered a time early on, when a police sergeant had pulled out a carousel projector to try to find the slides that had been taken of the Comstock murders. He’d routinely aimed the lens at the opposite wall, projecting one picture after another onto it while he looked for the ones Kinley needed. What had flashed before him during the next ninety seconds was the whole terrible story of man’s unspeakable misdeeds, a vision of random carnage so shocking that Kinley had actually glanced away, his eyes lighting on the old detective’s face. It was a motionless, passive face, the large eyes blinking listlessly as the red-tinted light from the wall swept over it, went black, then swept over it again, until the carousel had finally whirled to the slide he’d been looking for, and Wilma Jean Comstock’s ravaged body hung from the white wall of the squad room, face-up, naked, arms outstretched across the barren field, eyes open, glaring, her mouth pulled down in a tortured grimace, and nothing but the old detective’s voice to orchestrate her suffering. “Yeah, yeah, here we are, Mr. Kinley,” he’d said as he handed him the small black remote with which he could turn the wheel himself. And he had taken the little black button and pressed it, moving through the slides, each image sinking in as the black wheel turned obediently, and the skin on his