The Edge of Sleep Read Online Free Page B

talking, told Larry to amuse himself for a minute. She thought he had gone to the toy store ... They found his body on the divider of the Merritt Parkway six weeks later.”
    “On the divider? Not the side of the road?”
    “On the divider. Is that significant?”
    “Curious, anyway. The divider is on the driver’s side of the car, in the passing lane. I know the Merritt Parkway; there’s no way you could pull over and stop on the divider without drawing an awful lot of attention to yourself.”
    “Which means?”
    “Which means either he stopped on the right-hand shoulder, which is not uncommon and wouldn’t attract too much attention—but then he’d have to carry the body across the highway to the divider. Or he pushed the body out of the driver’s side while driving, which makes him both very strong and very adroit. The boy was how old?”
    “Nine.”
    “While driving he had to lift a corpse weighing what? Sixty? Sixty-five? Seventy pounds? This one was in a garbage bag, too?”
    “The manufacturer calls them leaf bags. You can buy them in any grocery store by the dozen.”
    “So he had to manipulate a seventy-pound bag, even tougher because there’s nothing to grab on to, no arms or legs for leverage.”
    “Christ. Becker.”
    “You want me to stop?”
    “I don’t like the image of this monster grabbing a nine-year-old boy by the arm and tossing him out the window.”
    “The boy was already dead.”
    “I’m not sure that makes it any easier to take.”
    “He was already dead, wasn’t he?”
    “Forensics said he’d been dead about three hours before he was thrown onto the divider.”
    “He was thrown then?”
    “At some time after death, anyway. There was vast post-mortem trauma.”
    “Was the bag torn?”
    “I don’t know. But they’re made not to tear.”
    “Find out.”
    Karen nodded.
    “So either we have this guy performing a considerable feat of strength while driving a car at some speed, or else we have him dashing across the highway with a body bag in his arms. Either way he’s taking a considerable risk. Why?”
    “I don’t know. Why?”
    “Only one reason I can think of offhand. Were the others found on the side of the road?”
    “Yes.”
    “So why is this one in the middle ? What is there about the middle of the road that is different from the side—where it would be a lot easier and safer to put the body?”
    “Don’t play Socrates with me, John. If you know, tell me.”
    “If the body is on the middle divider, you can’t tell which way the car was going when the body was dropped. If the body is on the right-hand side, you might as well place an arrow saying ‘car going this way.’ But if it’s in the middle, the car could have been going in either direction.”
    “Which tells us the bastard is concerned about being followed. He knows, or thinks he knows, that we’re after him.”
    “Maybe,” Becker said.
    “Which means he’s left a pattern and is aware of it and thinks we are, too.”
    “Although you’re not,” Becker said.
    “Yet,” said Karen. “Which means he knows we’re after him in the first place. Now, how would he know that? We weren’t posting rewards, there was no publicity suggesting a connection between these cases.”
    “But the Bureau had, in fact, already linked these deaths?”
    “I’ve been working on it since Ricky Stine in Newburgh. The computer alerted us to the similarities.”
    “You’ve been on the case for a year?”
    “Seven months.”
    “Two kids killed in seven months’ time?”
    “Six months. We found the latest a month ago.”
    “He’s accelerating very rapidly.”
    “That’s part of the reason I’m here, John. This guy has started to need them so frequently he’s practically in free-fall. If he knows we’re on to him, it hasn’t slowed him down, it’s only made him cagier.”
    “So how does he know you’re on to him? Does he have a spy in the Bureau?”
    “I’m not that paranoid.”
    “Maybe he