The Christine Murders Read Online Free Page A

but he was too fast for her. The voices were telling him what to do. “Please don’t try that again. It’s locked, dear. I’m sorry, but you can’t get away now.” Luther started the car and pulled quickly away from the curb and into the night.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    FRIDAY - OCTOBER 7 th
     
    Christine read the headline on the morning’s paper: “NO LEADS IN MURDER OF HOTEL CLERK”. Beneath the heading was a picture of the murder victim, Kelley Grant, a pretty young woman with blonde hair.
    Christine frowned and skimmed through the story. She had heard about this on the news last night, after she had returned home. It had happened on the night of her last flight. She loved city living but hated reading things like this.
    She put the paper aside, saying a silent prayer for this poor girl and wondering about the family she left behind.
    ***
    Lieutenant John Patrick Kinsella swallowed a handful of tablets from one of several partially filled bottles gracing his desk and wondered if anyone had ever died of indigestion. Indigestion coupled with extreme frustration more likely. Of the two, he was growing more convinced that it would eventually be frustration that would get him first.
    He thought about Kelley Grant again. The last thing John Kinsella wanted or needed now was another murder dumped in his lap. Overworked and short-staffed as it was, he had balked when the Chief had assigned him the investigation of the Grant killing, even though he knew it would do him absolutely no good to complain. So he had done as he was told, pulling together a small team of six already overburdened officers who would attempt to find an answer for another senseless killing in the city. So far, after two and one-half days of tracing the dead woman’s final hours, John was exactly where he had started. Not one single lead had presented itself.
    Kelley Grant’s battered body had been found early Wednesday morning in a filthy alley behind a warehouse off Valencia Street. She had been discovered, stuffed behind a trash dumpster, by a sanitation crew making its morning rounds, strangled with a dark blue silk scarf. Her wallet and purse were intact, and her few pieces of jewelry untouched. Her friends at the Westin St. Francis admitted that Kelley was a flirt and desperately lonely. All those to whom Kinsella had spoken, however, swore that Kelley would never pick anybody up; she was very unhappily married, yes, but still married and she respected that. She would never take a ride or go off with any stranger.
    Which left the possibility of a stranger abduction, but where? Kelley had left work at the St. Francis on Powell and Geary slightly after eleven p.m. on Tuesday night and had walked home, as she had done every night during the time she had worked at the hotel. Nobody saw her leave with anyone.
    She had been seen alive only one other place after that – at a deli on Geary down the street from the St. Francis. Workers there recognized Kelley as a fairly regular late-night customer. She was always alone, they had said. On Tuesday night, she had come in alone and purchased several take-out items. The cashier thought she might have seen Kelley talking to a man on her way out, maybe somebody just holding the door for her. But she could not be sure. The deli had been very crowded; theatres had just gotten out, and the place had been packed. Nobody had seen anything else.
    Kelley Grant had walked out of that deli and vanished into thin air. If there had been an abduction, which seemed more and more likely, it would have been along Geary somewhere as she made her way home.
    The girl had a husband, a down and out loser if there ever was one, as her friends had said. Whatever his problems were (and Kinsella could easily see they were many after interviewing him Wednesday morning), the guy hadn’t even noticed that his wife had not returned home Tuesday night. He reacted in dazed shock when police arrived at the door of the grimy apartment where he