The Ways of the Dead Read Online Free Page A

know. Gina gets girls from all over, the serious ones.”
    “Did Dad bring her to class, or was it Mom?”
    “Mostly Momma, from what I know. But I’ve seen Daddy in there on Saturdays dropping her off. Handsome, like.”
    “How many lessons did Sarah take a week?”
    “What is this, two million questions?” Arms unfolding. Sully caught it from the corner of his eye. He looked up. You had to have eye contact or they got pissed.
    “Sorry. Hey, look—I’m not an ass, I just play one on TV. You’re helping me out here. So. About how many classes?”
    “I think it was two. Friday night, Saturday morning, lots of girls do that. Gina’d know for sure.”
    “Okay. Sarah ever come with a boyfriend, anybody like that?”
    “Not that I saw.”
    “Any pervs hanging out? Strange calls to the studio?”
    “I don’t answer the phone, mister.”
    “Don’t imagine you do. We got started talking, I didn’t even ask your name.”
    “You going to put it in the paper?”
    “Only if you say I can. I don’t know your name right now. If you don’t tell me,” and here he looked up again, smiling, trying to muster some charm, “I don’t have any way of doing that.”
    “Why you got to put me in there? Police’ll tell you all that.”
    “Hard as it is to believe, ma’am, we get accused of making the shit up.”
    “I see a little white girl run off to get killed and you want to tell everybody where to find me?”
    “How about first name only?”
    “Gee, that’ll help.”
    “So, okay, look—if you gave me your middle name I wouldn’t know the difference. And nobody would recognize it. And I wouldn’t have to make you an anonymous source.”
    “Anonymous. I like anonymous. Make me anonymous.”
    “They won’t use it. Which would be bad, because I think you’re telling the truth.”
    “Why would I lie?”
    “Because everybody does.”
    She eyeballed him.
    “I been doing this twenty-something years,” he said.
    “My middle—okay, it’s Victoria? You can put that in there. Make it ‘Vicky.’ But don’t put I work at the studio. Gina’ll fire my ass, talking to you.”
    “Deal, Miss Vicky.” He reached out and tapped the card she was holding. “You remember something else? Call your old friend Sully. You work here most every day?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I might stop by.”
    She nodded, walking away, looking at the card. He waited for her to toss it in the grass, but she didn’t, and he had a little hope.
    He looked at his watch. He had forty-fucking-three minutes.
    He started walking away, pushing back through the crowd. He turned left on Otis, hustled past the recreation center to Warder Street, then turned left for a block until he got back to Princeton Place. He turned left again, having made the block, and now came down the street behind Doyle’s Market.
    Halfway down, a cruiser blocked off the street and yellow tape stretched all the way across both sidewalks. Sully walked down the middle of the street until the yellow tape stopped him. This was a block of old houses, duplexes, at least half a dozen of them boarded up. Most of the streetlights were out. A cop in the cruiser was talking on his radio and stood up out of the car to eyeball him. Sully stopped and held up his press ID and gave the cop a half wave. The cop nodded and went on transmitting, still eyeing him.
    He was maybe seventy yards from the intersection, fifty from the alley in back of the store where Sarah’s body had been found. Houses and trees blocked the view, but it was easy to see squad cars, a forensics van, unmarked vehicles. He walked over to a light pole just off the sidewalk and leaned against it, taking the weight off his knee.
    He had thirty-one minutes to file.
    The child’s killer or killers had left the scene three hours before, maybe two and a half, and had vanished into the breeze. Nobody on the street knew a goddamned thing. Right at this minute, local cops and the feds were crushing perp lists, sex offender files,