The Boy Must Die Read Online Free

light brown hair, and wasn’t bothering to hide his paunch. Billy surmised he was one of those clean-faced young men you meet in most small towns in rural southern Alberta. Men brought up by strict Protestants who worked hard with their dads on a ranch or in a two-room store. Dodd suited this small police station. It had only two patrol teams, two canine units, and a general investigation branch with a revolving roster of three sergeants. Dodd was Staff Sergeant, Criminal Investigations. Chief Eddy “Butch” Bochansky had explained to Billy that most of the crime in the city was property theft. Murder and drugs were occasional, not on the scale of Vancouver by any means. Butch handled the murders himself. He didn’t want the cable TV people and the religious radio shows riling up the public against the police for not doing their duty. “Murder scares people,” Butch had said. “And scared people like to blame the law for not keeping order and peace.”
    Dodd sat down at the table across from Billy; behind him the computer screen saver twisted and turned: a wave of palm trees undulating in front of an ocean of stars.
    “When did you get the call?” Billy asked.
    “Around eight. Dispatch sent over a constable to Satan House, then he called the chief and me around eight twenty-nine. We got to the site at nine.”
    “A neighbour? Someone in the house?”
    “You mean who called in? The tenant. She leases the place. A woman, name of Bird. Sheree Lynn Bird.”
    “How old was the boy?”
    “Fourteen or fifteen. Similar case happened last winter.”
    “How similar?”
    “Juvenile, too. A hanging.”
    “Butch said it was suicide.”
    “Yes, sir.” Dodd slid a notebook out of his upper right pocket. He flipped it open and read over the scrawled lines on the page. “Miss Bird knew this kid. And the other one. She called this kid’s mother and informed her. Bird said she’d been helping him. Talking to him. She’s some kind of part-time psychologist. Used to be with family services. Her home was a sort of halfway house for these two boys. Cody Schow and Darren Riegert. The kid’s mother sure as shit took it bad. She’s been wailing at the chief now for an hour. She says there’s no way her little boy should’ve been in that house.”
    “Anything unusual at the site?”
    Billy found himself automatically falling into the old routine: drinking coffee, grilling the staff sergeant. Dodd didn’t seem to mind. He leaned back in his chair.
    “I did the walk-around upstairs before I viewed the corpse in the basement. The place was run-down. It’s been changing hands for years. I’d always heard it was a flea trap. Chief and Tommy, our medic, were examining the victim’s body, strung up on an old steel heating conduit. Blue nylon rope. The kid was naked, with a kind of drawing on his chest — carved with a knife point. Star shape. Crosses on his wrists. Star scrawls on the walls. Chief thought they were done in latex paint. Candles. Some kind of cult thing.”
    “Cult?”
    “I guess. From the looks of the book we found by the body. One of those Satanic jobs. What my dad calls a false bible. And the candles too, in a circle at the kid’s feet. The last kid, Cody Schow in December, he had the same book with him. Seems these kids, according to Miss Bird, were buddies at school.”
    “So, you figure there’s a tie-in?”
    “Chief won’t say for the moment. But I guess that’s why you’re in on this.”
    “Well, we’ll see, Dodd.” Billy’s interest piqued. “How do you read Sheree Lynn Bird?”
    Dodd looked puzzled for a moment; then he blushed. “She’s
real
something, sir.”
    Billy blinked and on examining Dodd’s face understood that his question had embarrassed the young sergeant. “Dodd?”
    The sergeant sat up in his chair. “Sorry, sir. I figure she’s on the level. Responsible.” His voice trailed off.
    “Was she upset?”
    “Yes. She’d been crying by my reckoning.”
    “How many boys