The Perfect Crime Read Online Free Page B

in the back of his brother’s electronics store. He’d come by to help Jack unload a truckload of merchandise scheduled to arrive that morning...only he’d overslept.
    It was a miracle that his brother was still alive. Barely. He’d lost a lot of blood. Grady found him slumped behind the glass counter on the floor, his face lacerated by glass shards. The back of his head was worse. It was crushed. There was a gaping wound and the brain itself was visible, surrounded by splintered bone and hair matted with blood. He’d also been stabbed in the back of the neck. Gore was everywhere, soaking his brother’s shirt and pooled on the floor around him, making it difficult for Grady to keep his balance.
    It wasn’t the first blood-splattered victim in Grady’s experience, not from sixteen years on the Dayton police force. It was just the first one he’d been related to. That made a significant difference in his reaction, he discovered.
    By the time the ambulance and police arrived, every fiber in Grady’s being was alive with rage. In his years on the police force he’d witnessed hundreds of victims, but his brother’s wounds were barbaric beyond anything in his memory. His intuition told him that the person who did this wasn’t just desperate to get what he wanted, but took a savage glee in his attack.
    He also felt an excruciating stab of guilt. Maybe if he’d been there when he was supposed to... Although, from most of the signs, this had gone down many hours before. His guess would be the night before. Just as he was figuring out this logic, his guilt beginning to assuage, the thought occurred that if he had been there on time, his brother would have been taken to the hospital that much sooner. If he died when another hour might have saved him...
    Before he had time to dwell on that possibility, the front door burst open and the store flooded with people. The emergency technicians found Grady tenderly picking glass splinters from Jack’s face. He didn’t notice he was cutting his own fingers.
    On the heels of the ambulance team came the police, uniformed officers from two squad cars and a detective who pulled up in a blue Taurus. Grady could see all this from the window and then from the front door as they rushed in, picking their way over and around the thousands and thousands of electronic parts and boxes littering the floor.
    “Grady? That you? Grady Fogarty?”
    Looking down at him was a detective Grady knew from his days on the force. Marty Sprague. He’d come in direly behind the white-coated E.T.’s and ahead of the uniformed cops.
    “Marty.”
    “Jesus, man!” Then, “This a friend of yours?”
    Grady nodded. His voice was husky. “My brother.”
    “Christ!” He shook his head from side to side. “I’m sorry, Grady. Man! You just keep getting dumped on, don’t you!”
    Grady let the E.T.’s take his brother and watched as they moved him carefully into the ambulance.
    “I’m going with him.”
    One of the emergency technicians looked at Detective Sprague who nodded his okay. As they were wheeling the stretcher toward the door, Sprague said, “Grady! I’ll need to talk to you later.” Grady glanced back, squinting in the white sun. He nodded agreement, turned, and hurried to the ambulance. Behind him, uniforms were stringing up yellow tape to secure the crime site. Car radios crackled and people coming out of storefronts and apartments were starting to form a crowd. More sirens in the distance and the sound of a dog barking barely entered Grady’s awareness as the driver slammed the doors and trotted around to the front of the vehicle.
    In spite of the circumstance, his mind shot back to the last time he’d ridden in an ambulance. That time he’d been the one lying on the gurney, his left eye socket shattered by a burglar’s bullet.
    He could trace a lot of shit from that moment. Bad karma, the New Age folks would say.
    Somewhere during all that--the lost eye, his forced retirement from