Garrett Investigates Read Online Free

hacked about the forearms.
    “Sweet Christ,” Bitner said, and turned from the drone of flies. He made a show of examining the gate, the rotting iron fence—some twelve feet high—that separated the yard from the alley, and the stones of the tenement to either side. “There’s no sign this was climbed,” he said. “You couldn’t climb something this rusty without making noise and leaving signs.”
    “Was it locked?”
    “The gate and the door from the tenement, too. And the hallways are full of Irishmen.” Bitner’s jaw worked. “The girl was no better than she had to be. I think we’ll find she got money from most of them. None of them saw anything, of course. Unless somebody got inside all over blood, stepping over sleeping men without waking one of them, he didn’t leave that way.”
    “Maybe the blackguard sprouted wings and flew.” Cuan turned back to the dead. He swallowed bile and leaned over the blood, careful not to trespass its margins.
    “She fought,” Cuan said, and realized only when he heard his own voice that he’d spoken aloud. “DI, come look at this.”
    Bitner gagged, but didn’t retch. He squared himself beside Cuan and squinted through the gloaming, arms folded over his chest. “He attacked the young one first.”
    “She’s just a girl,” Cuan said. Agony and death didn’t help the process of determining her age, but by her sloped nose and the plumpness of her cheeks and jaw he made her out to be no more than sixteen. The older might be thirty, though she looked half a crone. Women aged fast in poverty. “Her mother or sister or friend came to her defense—”
    He glanced from side to side, brow itching as it furrowed. There was less blood behind the body—a slope had pulled it chiefly in one direction—and so he circled to approach from that direction. He crouched there and lifted one of the older woman’s arms. Her garments were worn, stained. There was too much blood and muck on them to tell if they had been clean before she fell.
    “These are wounds from defense,” he said. “There’s blood under her nails.”
    Bitner handed him a penknife and an envelope. “Maybe some of it is his. And he might have cuts—she must have fought like a tigress.”
    Having scraped her fingernails into the envelope, Cuan laid her hand gently down from where he had lifted it. He patted the dead woman’s matted hair. “I hope you got your claws in him, love,” he said. “Good for you.”
     
    ***
     
    When Cuan arrived at the Enchancery, it was half eight, hammered light making the old city glint like copper and pewter under a ragged sky. He didn’t expect DCI Garrett to see him at all. He certainly didn’t expect her to meet him in her dressing gown and slippers, eyes red-rimmed and strands of bobbed hair twisting out like twigs around a pallid face. The doorman sniffed with patent disdain as he left them alone together, but Cuan was honestly more concerned with the grayness of her cheeks and the smell of bourbon on her breath.
    “Late night?”
    She rolled her eyes at him exactly the way Bitner might have, so he choked back a bark of laughter. She caught it, too, to judge from her hollow-backed smile. “Do you have a sweetheart, Coen?”
    He shook his head.
    “You’re better off without one. What have you brought me? You’re holding that parcel like you had a dead rat by the tail, so I imagine chocolates are too much to hope for.”
    Cuan chuckled under his breath and held out the brown paper package, which he had indeed been dangling from a fingertip thrust through the twine. “Nothing nice, I’m afraid.”
    She lifted the box with both hands, cradling it six inches before her bosom. “It never is. There’s been another killing.”
    “Two. In the small hours of the morning.” He was hovering, he realized, giving her a covert stare like a wishful hound. He should explain himself, excuse himself, and go. “Those are scrapings from under the fingernails of one of the