Graveyard Plots Read Online Free Page A

turn."
    "Where?" Pordenza asked.
    "There's a narrow dirt road up ahead. It winds up into the hills, to some private homes scattered across the tops."
    "Anything between the highway and those homes?"
    "No."
    "That's it," Reilly said.
    The hardtop turned onto the dirt road. Agenrood followed. They began to climb steadily; the road twisted an irregular path, with several doglegs and a sharp curve now and then. High wisps of fog began to shred in Agenrood's headlights, and he could see that at the crests of the hills, where the private homes were, it was thick and blanketing.
    The hardtop came around one of the doglegs and its stop lights went on, flashing blood-red in the gray-black night. Agenrood said, "There's a turnout up ahead. I think he's going in there."
    The hardtop edged into the turnout, parallel to the upper end, where a slope was grown thickly with bushes and scrub cypress. "He's stopping," Agenrood said.
    "Pull up behind him," Pordenza directed from the floor of the back seat. "Leave a car's length between you."
    Agenrood complied. When he saw the headlights on the hardtop go out, he shut his own off. It was dark then, but the moonlight—though dimmed now and then by the tendrils of fog—bathed the turnout with sufficient light to see by.
    "What's he doing?" Pordenza asked.
    "Just sitting there."
    "When he gets out of the car, let him get clear of it by a few steps. Not too many. Then let us know."
    Agenrood could hear faint stirrings in the back seat. He knew Reilly and Pordenza had moved one to each of the rear doors. They were waiting there now, with one hand on the door handles and the other wrapped around their guns.
    "It's a report on one Steven Cain," the studious man told him. "A very comprehensive report we had compiled."
    Cain continued to look out of the window.
    "It says you were a colonel in the Marines during the Second World War, twice decorated for valor on Leyte and Okinawa. It says that you graduated at the top of your class at the University of California, where you majored in law enforcement following the war. It says that you joined the San Francisco Police Force in 1949 and while you were a patrolman in the Mission District you once captured four men in the act of robbing a factory payroll. It says that you were the youngest man in San Francisco police history to be promoted to the Detective Squad, and the second youngest to make division lieutenant." The studious man paused, looking up at Cain again. "There's more, a lot more. It's a very impressive record you've got, Cain."
    Cain did not answer.
    "Impressive enough to indicate an acute intelligence," the studious man said. "But I don't see any sign of intelligence in this crazy stunt you pulled off here. I don't see anything at all of the man this report covers."
    Again, Cain did not answer.
    "It was because of your daughter, wasn't it, Cain?" the man with the long neck said suddenly, speaking for the first time. "Because of what happened to Doreen?"
    Cain brought his eyes away from the window and let them rest on the man with the long neck. He kept his lips pressed tightly together.
    "It's all there in the report," the man with the long neck said. "About how you raised the girl after your wife died twelve years ago, how you were devoted to her. And it's in there, too, about how she was run down and killed by a car on an afternoon eight months ago when she was coming home from high school; how a patrol unit nearby saw the hit-and-run and chased the car and caught it a few blocks away; how the driver pulled a gun when they approached and one of the officers was forced to shoot him in self-defense, killing him instantly; how that driver turned out to be a twenty-three-year-old drug addict and convicted felon; and how they found almost half a kilo of heroin under the dashboard of the car—"
    "That's enough!" Cain was leaning forward on the bed, oblivious to the sharp pain that the sudden movement had caused in his chest; his jaw was