Evidence of Blood Read Online Free Page A

fingertip grew a bit more insensitive with each touch. As his heart had finally done, he suspected now, so that fifteen years later he could reply truthfully to Maria Spinola’s agonized question without blinking an eye:
Unfortunately, I think Norwood probably loves prison. For some people, it’s not a punishment at all
.
    The plane was almost an hour late in departing La Guardia, but after the initial tension he always felt on actually leaving the ground, Kinley was able to peer out the window and enjoy the lights of the city as the planemade its long, lazy circle before turning southward into the rural night.
    Once the city had disappeared behind him, he ordered his nightly scotch and leaned back into his seat. The soft hum of the engines lulled him gently, but the nap he’d hoped for insistently eluded him. Instead, he found himself drifting back toward his youth, as if the plane were returning him to the granite cliffs and pine breaks in which he’d wandered, the little house perched at the canyon wall, the long afternoons of sitting on the old porch swing while Granny Dollar read to him from the only magazine she ever bought, the
Police Gazette
.
    The tales had been gruesome, he remembered, and the accompanying photographs had been even worse, but his grandmother had always ended her reading with a decidedly reassuring remark. “What some people do,” she’d always said, as if it were only “some people” who did such things, and that the house beside the canyon was far away from them, well beyond their deadly reach. It was only later he’d realized that it was her love that had somehow wrapped him in a strangely unthreatening atmosphere, despite the horror of the tales she read.
    She had seemed such an irreducible part of his early life that even now it was hard for him to imagine her dead. It was Ray who’d brought him the news, the telephone ringing urgently only a month before, while he had been busily typing up his first interview with Norwood.
    Hello, Kinley? It’s Ray, Listen, I have some bad news for you. It’s about Granny Dollar. She’s dead. She was sitting on the porch, they said. Just sitting in her old rocker. Bolt upright, like she was tied to it
.
    He’d taken a plane home immediately, and now, after only two months, he was taking another one, his mind shifting anchorlessly from Ray to his grandmother, as if together they formed the single, tenuous line that still connected him to some part of life that was not drenched in blood.
    •    •    •
     
    The plane circled the Atlanta airport for over half an hour before touching down. It was an enormous terminal, but Kinley knew it well. His first trip had been almost fifteen years before, when he’d been writing his book on Colin Bright, the itinerant con-man who’d stumbled upon a farm family in southern Georgia one afternoon and killed all seven of them one by one over the next three days. It had been Kinley’s first prison interview, and he could still recall how Bright had talked about the murders. He’d expected a dull, plodding mind, lumpishly stupid, with hooded eyes and slurred speech, a look and manner he associated with an earlier form of man. Instead, Bright had talked energetically and with immense detail about the final days of the Comstock family, how they’d wept and pleaded for themselves and each other while he moved among them with godlike power and demonic arbitrariness. “I discussed it with them,” Bright said. “Who to do first, and how to decide. Maybe I should kill them in alphabetical order, I said, or maybe according to size, or, hey, maybe something even weirder than that, you know, like hair length, longest or shortest first, or who could keep their eyes open the longest without blinking, kill that one last, you know, or some crazy thing like that.” The intelligence and cunning in his eyes, along with the boyish gleam which remained despite the fact that Bright was nearly fifty, was what had