The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) Read Online Free Page A

hours, the security system is equipped with motion detectors sensitive enough to pick up breathing. No readings all day. I’ll show you the printouts if you like.”
    “I’ll take your word, Hermes. I also assume you’ve had the audio on the tape slowed and filtered.”
    Kamanski nodded. “We brought every single sound up to a hundred times its normal resonance and separated each one into individual segments.”
    “Footsteps?”
    “Not that we could find. If there were any, they got lost in the screaming.”
    “Let me see the bedroom,” said the Ferryman.
    Kamanski hadn’t been exaggerating in the helicopter. Other than the removal of severed body parts and other remnants of the corpse, nothing in Jordan Lime’s bedroom had been touched. Huge pools of dried blood were everywhere—on the floor, the sheets, the rug. Fingers of near black reached out from the walls in frozen animation, seeming almost to slither as Kimberlain gazed at them.
    He moved about the room and in his own mind could see it all happening, Jordan Lime being torn limb from limb. But he couldn’t visualize the actual murder. All he saw were the pieces being scattered to the sounds of the horrible screaming he had heard on the tape downstairs. He tried once again for a fix on Lime, tried to envision what had done this to him, but drew a blank. Very often when the Ferryman walked onto a crime scene he could feel the residue of the perpetrator as clearly as he could see the crawling fingers of blood in Lime’s bedroom. But now he was coming up empty. Stick with the technical, then , he urged himself. “The floors?” he asked.
    Kamanski was just behind him. “Dusted and electronically scanned. No footprints other than Lime’s.”
    “Inconclusive. The killer could have worn shoes with Teflon-coated soles. No marks or residue that way.”
    “Granted, except Teflon squeaks on wood. We’d have heard something on the tape.”
    The Ferryman continued to gaze about the room. He focused on the window. “Was that open Sunday night?”
    “Yes, but the glass curtains covering it are reinforced with steel linings. Bulletproof and electrified. Our man didn’t come through that way. Nothing living did, anyway.”
    The Ferryman was still looking that way. “A ray,” he said. “A ray fired from a good distance beyond the window. Your steel lining might not stop that.”
    “But a ray would certainly have left heat fringes on the severed body parts. Lime’s limbs were sliced off. A sword like the one you were polishing back in Vermont. That’s what we’ve been thinking about.”
    “Wielded by a killer who couldn’t possibly have been in the room.”
    “The theory’s not perfect.”
    “I want to bring that inventor friend of mine in on this,” the Ferryman said.
    “The best minds in the country have already run the circle.”
    “Conducting a search based on what they can legitimately accept to be real. My friend can accept anything. Nothing gets ruled out.”
    “Call him in. Whatever it takes.”
    The sun was down by the time Kimberlain pulled into a parking lot adjacent to Sunnyside Railroad Yard, a resting place for mothballed railroad cars in New Jersey, just outside the tunnel under the Hudson River to Penn Station. He danced across dead tracks as if current might still have been pumping through them.
    The gray and brown steel corpses of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit cars were lined up for a good eighth of a mile, rows squeezed so close together that there was barely enough room for Kimberlain to shoulder his way between them. The pair of rusted brown cars he was heading for had carried cargo, not passengers. They were off to one side, apart from the neighboring lines of Amtrak cars, and were in relatively good condition; they seemed to be beggingto be hitched onto engines once more.
    “Ferryman here,” he said softly into a small slit, cut at eye level on the side of one of the rusty cars. The car’s rear door opened with a familiar