The Judas Child Read Online Free Page A

eyes were struck with fear. On the inside, this woman was screaming—silently, madly.
    Another mother.

two
    In the late afternoon, Rouge Kendall had ended his longest tour of duty, and now he sat on a bar stool in Dame’s Tavern. His eyes were red and sore; he had not seen his bed since yesterday morning. Finding that purple bicycle had changed his plans to sleep off last night’s liquor.
    A television set was mounted high on the wall behind the bar, and photographs of the missing children appeared on the screen in a pastiche of home videos and still shots. Mercifully, the bartender had turned off the volume. The silent pictures changed to coverage on the young boy who had spotted Sadie Green’s abandoned bicycle at a bus stop. Young David Shore had neatly backed up the bike thief’s story. The camera framed the thief with a jacket pulled up over his head to hide his face from the press as he was led away by state troopers.
    In the next shot, a camera zoomed in on ten-year-old David exiting the building with his guardian, Mrs. Hofstra, a willowy woman with iron-gray hair. The boy was tall for his age, handsome and graceful. There was much about him to inspire self-confidence, yet throughout the police interview, shy David had never said one word which was not whispered into Mrs. Hofstra’s ear and relayed by her larger voice.
    Now the television screen showed Rouge an event he had not witnessed from his post inside the building. The reporters were converging on the boy, their winter coats flapping in the wind like the wings of crows as they screamed out their questions and thrust microphones in the child’s face. David’s blue eyes rounded out with extreme fear as both hands rose high to fend off the assault. His guardian put one protective arm around the ten-year-old and guided him into the waiting car. Rouge couldn’t tell what Mrs. Hofstra was saying to the reporters, but he hoped it was obscene.
    A camera panned back to the door of the police station. Lieutenant Governor Marsha Hubble was standing at the top of the steps, an imperious blonde in a black leather trench coat. She was not as pretty as her daughter Gwen, but she did hold a man’s attention. She was flanked by the two male FBI agents who had questioned David at the station. These men might be taller than Marsha Hubble, but there was no mistaking where the power lay in this trio. The lieutenant governor was raising one fist in the air, and Rouge could guess what that was about. The bicycle at the bus stop supported the theory of runaways. But the lady politician preferred her own game plan of wall-to-wall federal agents, troopers, roadblocks and a tristate manhunt for a kidnapper. Her face was an angry hot flush.
    Gwen’s mother was a strong woman, pushy as hell, and Rouge admired that. This politician would do anything to get her child back, and she didn’t care if the voters took her for a world-class bitch.
    Rouge lifted his glass to the screen. Go, Marsha, go.
    The images changed, and Sadie’s mother, Becca Green, was eliciting more sympathy with her simple cloth coat and her plain broad face. The camera cut to a shot of this crying woman, clutching a microphone and imploring everyone to help find her little girl.
    It was just as well the television’s volume had been turned off. Rouge didn’t need to hear those words ever again. His own mother had said them all, fifteen years ago, in a futile public begging for his sister’s life.
    The moment he thought of Susan, something moved in the mirror on the other side of the mahogany bar. He caught sight of his dead twin’s hazel eyes peeking out from behind a line of bottles.
    Fool . Of course they were his own eyes and not Susan’s—only a reflection, nothing more. Yet he moved to a stool farther down the bar and away from the mirror. Now, between Rouge and the back wall of dark wood, a large pyramid of stacked wineglasses replicated his pale face in a honeycomb of small distorted images; his