Wages of Sin Read Online Free Page B

wasn't so abandoned that the electricity had been cut off. Lights in wire baskets hung by chains from the ceiling rafters. At least half still had their bulbs and were burning. Rourke turned back to ask if the lights had been on when they got here, but the patrolman had already gone out to the curb to help Fio.
    The factory was long and narrow and still filled with all the machinery for mixing, rolling, cutting, and drying the macaroni. Another uniform cop stood at the far end of the building, next to something that promised to be bad.
    The buttons and shield on the cop's blouse gleamed in the yellow electric light. He was pulling a cigarette out of a box, but he kept his gaze on Rourke as he licked the seam and lit the end. He flicked the spent match onto the floor, and then he began to swing his nightstick in his hand.
    The heels of Rourke's shoes clicked on the stone floor as he walked. His breath was coming hard and hurting now. As he got closer he smelled the blood, and something he hadn't expected—burnt flesh.
    Closer now, and Rourke could see that the something hanging was indeed a priest. Or at least someone dressed like a priest in black cassock and white bands.
    Rourke pushed his hands into his pockets to hide their trembling. He'd always been a betting man. He'd bought the Bearcat with gambling winnings; he'd been known to drop a C-note at the track and not feel the pain. A betting man would go with the odds. Two hundred and seventy-five to one.
    It wasn't his brother.
    The size of the body was all wrong—too short by at least three inches and too lean. The dead man's mother would have been hard pressed to recognize him by looking at his face, though. Both cheekbones were broken, his nose was smashed, and you couldn't see either one of his eyes. His mouth was pulpy and ringed with blood.
    He hung from the crossbeam of one of the drying racks, nailed to it through the wrists. His feet were bare and bound together with rope, and burned to bloody raw blisters on the soles. The dead man had been hung so that his feet dangled just an inch or so above a cluster of votive candles.
    Rourke squatted on his haunches. He took a fountain pen out of his breast pocket and pressed the tip of it into one of the candles, next to the wick. The wax was still soft.
    Rourke stared at the feet. They were slender and well formed, and pale where they hadn't been burned. There was something, he thought, so vulnerably human about the sight of bare feet. He'd always hated this part of the job—looking at the dead bodies. The murdered ones.
    Rourke's gaze lifted to the beat cop. The man was in his early thirties, around Rourke's own age, with ruddy good looks and Irish red hair. That deep, loamy auburn color. His blue uniform blouse strained over his deep chest and a belly that was already showing a tendency to swell with fat. He seemed to be finding Rourke's presence at the crime scene something to smirk about.
    “Were these candles burning when you got here?” Rourke asked.
    The cop took his time drawing on his cigarette before he answered. “Naw. The stiff was so fresh, though, you could still smell the death fart.”
    Rourke looked back down, breathed. He could feel blood shooting through his hands. He wanted to hit something.
    The killer, he saw, had carefully removed his victim's shoes and socks, rolled up the socks and put them inside the shoes, and then neatly set them aside. Near the shoes lay a bloody cloth that looked like a piece of ripped-up sheet. Its ends were twisted, as if they had once been tied into a knot.
    “Was there a gag in his mouth?” Rourke asked.
    “Jesus, we didn't touch nothin', all right? 'Cause we knew we'd get our asses chewed by you jumped-up, jackass dicks if we did.”
    Rourke pushed himself to his feet, twisting half around, so that when he came up he was right in the other cop's face. When your daddy was a drunk and you have those demons inside of you as well, you know the signs of a man with a