The Red Scream Read Online Free

screwed up in pain. When he got to the doorway, he leaned against it and took several ragged breaths. “Well, I guess I haven’t budged you at all,” he said, facing Molly.
    She shook her head. “I don’t budge easy.”
    He looked down at her with his eyes narrowed. “Let me ask you something else. If you are determined to write this article, why not interview me instead of Alison or Stuart? On the record.”
    Molly lowered her eyes to give herself time to consider. Here was another bribe more tempting than the first—a bribe she might be able to accept. He was offering, after eleven years of never saying a public word, to give her an interview. And she still wanted to hear what he had to say. She felt the gears begin to turn in that cold journalist part of her mind, that icy lobe of the brain that was always weighing alternatives. On the one hand was the husband who keeps a stoic silence for eleven years and then finally speaks out on the occasion of the execution of his wife’s murderer. And the husband is a rich and powerful man to boot. It could make a hell of a story.
    On the other hand was the story she had been planning, the one about the eleven-year-old girl, who was in the house when her mother was murdered, who saw the murderer drive off in his car, and her older brother, fourteen at the time, who arrived home to see his mother’s body lying in the garage. What were they like now? How had that event shaped their lives? And how did they feel aboutthe approaching execution of their mother’s murderer? Now there was a story.
    She looked up at Charlie McFarland’s big, mournful face and said, “You’d be willing to talk about the murder and your feelings about it all now?”
    He stared back over her shoulder into his office. “Yes, if you’d agree not to interview my kids.”
    Molly felt a prickling of self-contempt in her chest, but she knew from experience it would pass quickly. For the past twenty years she had written about crime; it was her work and her obsession. She was a self-appointed messenger of the worst news society could generate; sometimes the message was ugly and painful to the living, but it was her job and to do it well she had to seek out the stories where they were.
    “Let me think about it, Charlie. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she told him.
    He stood aside to let her pass, then followed her down the bluebonnet-lined hall to the front door. At the door he punched a code into the wall control box to deactivate the alarm. Then he pulled a key ring out of his pocket and leaned down to unlock the several dead bolts. Those precautions didn’t seem at all excessive, Molly thought, in someone whose family had once encountered the likes of Louie Bronk.
    “How long have you lived here, Charlie?” she asked to break the silence.
    “Oh, I started this house right after the trial, about ten years ago. I couldn’t stand the idea of staying on in the old house and I thought it might be safer here—closer to town, more neighbors. And I figured a change of location might help me and Alison forget.” He straightened up and pushed the door open. “Didn’t work a damn, of course. Neither of us forgot, and now she’s moved out. But Georgia likes it.”
    Molly turned to say good-bye, but he stepped out into the courtyard ahead of her. “I’ll walk you to your truck,” he said.
    They walked in silence, at Charlie’s slow pace, across the brick-paved courtyard to her Chevy pickup parked near the wrought-iron gate. Molly unlocked the door of her truck and he held it open for her.
    But when he saw the truck’s customized interior with the recliningleather seats, wood-trim dash, phone, special CD player and stereo, he let out a whistle of surprise. “Looks like a regular old Chevy pickup from outside and a goddamned German luxury car inside.”
    “Yeah,” Molly said, “I’ve always driven Chevy pickups, in honor of my father who thought they were the Second Coming. But now I’m older, I