Tangled Souls Read Online Free

elevator had announced its demise, and added to the note were misspelled obscenities, no doubt penned by the patrons of this half-star hotel in a futile attempt to vent their frustration. O’Fallon was less inclined to be poetic—a call to a building-inspector buddy was already on tomorrow’s agenda.
    The hallway was dimly lit,every other bare bulb illuminated, with cobwebs hanging from them in streaming gray trails like dusty curtains. A dark-brown mouse nosed its way down the hall, threading a path through the debris on the floor. It paused for a moment as if scenting danger and then continued to maneuver through the rubbish.
    While making a mental note to get more exercise, O’Fallon mopped his forehead with a limp handkerchief. He’d been in fairly good shape when he’d been on the force, but the PI lifestyle hadn’t proven to be so healthy with its late night stakeouts and too much fast food. It’d been bad enough when he’d been a cop.
    While he waited for his heart rate to calm, he realized the hotel should be bustling with all sorts of illicit activity—dopers and winos and a few down-on-their-luck prostitutes working the halls. Instead, it was unusually quiet.
    O’Fallon fished the tarnished brass room key out of his jacket pocket. That key had cost him a ten spot, and he’d still needed to bully the manager to get it. As he paused in front of the room denoted by the tattered crime-scene tape, it was easy to imagine the scene on the day Benjamin Callendar’s body had been found. A couple of uniformed cops would have kept the curious at bay while the homicide detectives interviewed the tenants and traded dark humor. A suicide in a dive like the Hotel LeClaire didn’t make for a compelling case, despite the fact that the kid was too middle-class to be here.
    He slipped the key in, but before he could turn it the door fell open, the lock broken. He muttered an oath for the wasted ten bucks.
    O’Fallon hesitated at the threshold and dug into an inner pocket to retrieve his rosary, his armor against that which was not of this world. He clutched it in his right hand and, after whispering a short prayer, he edged into the room. His pulse pounded in his neck. A streetlight cast a thin trail through a grimy window, one of its panes broken, the edge of the ragged glass glowing from the faint illumination. The buzzing whine of a mosquito echoed near O’Fallon’s ear and he swatted at the insect in irritation.
    A flick of the light switch yielded a harsh glow that did nothing to mitigate the squalidness of the surroundings. O’Fallon’s eyes glanced around the room, taking inventory out of habit. The drapes were threadbare, the carpet of questionable pedigree, and a scratched table sat near the window. A dilapidated wooden chair was only inches away from the lumpy twin bed. His eyes settled on the tightly braided white rope and followed it from the ceiling down to where it had been severed, no doubt to remove the body. The chair sat beneath it, tiny bits of plaster flecked on the seat and the carpet beneath. The remnants of a shoe print remained, visible testimony to the victim’s last moments.
    He stepped closer and reached out his hand to touch the chair, the contact like a bolt of lightning through his body. O’Fallon felt the vision coming, though he had no real name for what would encompass him. Sweat sprang to his forehead and his temples pounded in time with his heart. His head burned, on fire from within. Vision and hearing collapsed, tunneling inward as if he were sitting in a darkened movie theater. He squeezed his eyes closed and tried to let go. To fight it meant failure.
    He was entirely vulnerable during these moments, and that frightened him witless. As with a seizure, there was no control, no sense of what was happening around him, only the grand movie playing in his head. He saw images, heard voices, sounds on a scale that made a pin drop exquisitely painful. The film was not whole, but