Mister X Read Online Free Page B

numbness in me, Detective Kasner. Has been for years. Not a depression. A numbness because something is missing.”
    Edith hadn’t looked closely at Pearl’s ID when Pearl had identified herself as a detective. It wasn’t ethical for Pearl to let the woman go on assuming she was with the NYPD, but Pearl was afraid the interview might not be granted otherwise.
    Seven years ago in June, Rhonda Nathan had worked late at the advertising agency where she wrote copy, alone in her office cubicle. Her body had been found there by the office cleaning service just before daylight the next morning. She was slouched dead in her desk chair, nude, her nipples removed, the grotesque and bloody X carved deeply into her torso beneath her breasts. Her panties had been removed and knotted into a gag, stuffed deeply in her mouth in such a way that leftover material allowed for a leg hole to be looped around her neck and knotted to hold the gag firm. It was a method that had to be the result of planning and practice. A pencil had been placed between the victim’s fingers, doubtless after death, as if she’d been taking notes throughout her torture and demise. A small thing, but it carried a jolting incongruity. It was one of several examples of a gruesome sense of humor that the Carver sometimes exhibited to the police at his crime scenes. A taunter, was the Carver. Not unusual in a serial killer who assumed he was much brighter than his pursuers.
    Pearl decided not to go into the details of Rhonda’s murder.
    “In the intervening years since…it happened,” she said, “have any new thoughts come to you, any recollections that might be of help? Even those that you might not think important?”
    “Such as?” Edith asked softly.
    “Anything that became clearer to you, or that you remembered about the week or so before the tragedy.”
    “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing. And I think about that time every night, and sometimes I dream.”
    “Do you recall your daughter acting strangely—or simply out of character—in the time leading up to her death? Is there someone you can think of who could have had some disagreement with her? Someone who might have had a motive?”
    “Motive?” Edith seemed mystified and slightly angry. “My daughter was a girl well liked. I would say very well liked. Rhonda was slain by a deranged monster, Detective Kasner. It’s as simple and horrible as that.”
    “I think you’re right,” Pearl said, “but the monster doesn’t necessarily seem like one when he’s not being…himself. It’s possible you knew him at the time, or at least had met him.”
    “Rhonda had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Charles Correnwell. It would be difficult to see Charles as a killer. Anyway, he moved to live with his mother in California weeks before Rhonda was killed, and has an alibi.”
    Pearl knew that to be true. Charles Correnwell, on the other side of a continent, had attended a college lecture and was later drinking with friends at the approximate time of Rhonda’s murder.
    “Your husband…” Pearl began.
    Edith stared at her sharply. “He’s dead.”
    “I know, ma’am. I know the circumstances.”
    “We were both shattered by the loss of our daughter,” Edith said, “but I’m sure Aaron’s death was an accident. He wouldn’t leave me, leave the world, that way.”
    “I wasn’t thinking that,” Pearl said. “I was wondering if there might have been someone with an irrational motive to get at your husband by murdering his daughter.”
    “I’m sure there was no one that sick among our social or business acquaintances.”
    Pearl said nothing, and she and Edith exchanged glances. They’d established that monsters didn’t always seem like monsters.
    “Someone with protective coloring, you mean?” Edith said.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    Edith shrugged beneath the blue robe. “I’d have no way of knowing, would I?”
    “Not unless a way came to you. Sometime when you were doing something