Blood Relatives Read Online Free

an imprint of a size-twelve gunboat in the sticky hallway blood—but that was Officer Shanahan’s.) When Carella left for the hospital, he did so secure in the knowledge that a team of highly trained professionals was busily at work looking for any evidence that might help identify the murderer. He did not know, of course, until Kling called him in the mortuary, that the murder had been witnessed, or that Patricia Lowery was alive and entirely capable of identifying the killer.
    He now tried to retrace, with Kling and the lab technician, the route Patricia must have taken from the tenement to thepolice station. He did not expect to find any traces of blood on the route; the rain had undoubtedly washed them all away. Nor was he particularly interested in locating either Patricia’s shoes or her handbag. She had arrived at the precinct shoeless, and carrying nothing in her bleeding hands; presumably, she had either lost her shoes and handbag in her desperate rush for freedom, or else had deliberately discarded them. Carella was interested only in finding the murder weapon. If the killer had indeed pursued her from that abandoned building, he must have been carrying the weapon during his chase. It was entirely possible he had finally thrown it away somewhere along the route.
    They found one of Patricia’s high-heeled satin pumps half a block away from the tenement. It was stained only with muddy water. A little way beyond that, they found the second pump. This one had bloodstains near the heel. The three men—Carella, Kling, and the lab technician—debated the meaning of this. They finally decided that the first pump had fallen from Patricia’s foot, but that she had deliberately taken off the second pump after hobbling along on just one shoe for some ten or fifteen yards. She had undoubtedly grabbed the pump near the heel when removing it, and the bloodstains were probably from her own palm. Three blocks beyond where they’d found the second pump, they found Patricia’s handbag. It was a long, narrow bag, some ten inches in length, some four inches wide, covered in blue satin that matched the high-heeled pumps. There were bloodstains on the satin. Inside the bag, they found a package of cigarettes, a lighter, a comb, a change purse with 63¢ in it, four loose subway tokens, and a wallet containing $17 and a photograph of a slender young man with dark hair and dark eyes.
    They did not find the knife that had been used to murder Muriel Stark. But five blocks from the tenement in which she had been killed, they found a man sleeping in the doorway of aChinese laundry. The man was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, no tie. His hair was brown. There appeared to be bloodstains on the front of his white shirt.
    “Hey, wake up,” Carella said.
    “Go ’way,” the man said.
    “You,” Carella said. “Wake up.”
    Kling flashed his light onto the man’s face. The man opened his eyes and then immediately closed them against the glare. His eyes were blue, they had seen that. And Patricia Lowery had described the murderer as a dark-haired man with blue eyes.
    “What do you want, huh?” he said, and turned his head to one side and squinted his eyes only partially open.
    “What are you doing here?” Carella asked.
    “Trying to sleep,” the man said.
    “What’s that on your shirt?” Kling asked.
    “Where? What do you mean?”
    “There. Is that blood?”
    “Yeah, that’s blood. What do you guys want?”
    “We’re police officers,” Carella said, and flashed his shield.
    “Oh, shit,” the man said.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Louis Sully.”
    “How do you spell that?”
    “S-u-l-l-y.”
    “What are you doing here this hour of the night?”
    “I told you. Trying to get some sleep.”
    “How’d you get that blood on your shirt?”
    “I was in a fight.”
    “Where?”
    “Bar I go to.”
    “How long have you been here in this doorway?”
    “I don’t know. What time is it?”
    “It’s a little past