BLACK NOTICE. PATRICIA CORNWELL

She got up and unlocked a drawer of a metal filing cabinet, where files were squeezed so tightly together she had difficulty pulling one out. It was not labeled, and inside was a torn piece of blood-speckled brown paper protected by a transparent plastic evidence bag.

“Pas la police. iVa va, ga va. Pas de probléme, tout va bien. Le Loup-Garou,” she read. “It means No police. It’s all right. It’s okay. Everything’s fine. The werewolf.”

I stared at the familiar block letters. They were mechanical and almost childish.

“The paper looks like a piece of a torn bag from the market,” she said. “I can’t prove it’s from him, but who elsewould it be from? I don’t know whose blood it is, becauseagain, I can do no tests, and only my husband knows I got this.”

“Why you?” I asked. “Why would he come after you?”

“I can only suppose it’s because he saw me at the crime scenes. So I know he watches. When he kills, he’s out there in the dark somewhere, watching what people like us do. He’s very intelligent, cunning. I have no doubt he knows exactly what happens when his bodies come to me.”

I tilted the note in lamplight, looking for hidden strokes that might have been pressed into the paper by the force of someone writing on whatever had been on top of it. I saw none.

“When I read the note, the corruption became so plain to me, as if there had been any doubt,” Dr. Stvan was saying. “Loop-Garou knew it would do no good to submit his note to the police, to the labs. He was telling me, even warning me, not to bother, and it’s very odd, but I feel he was also telling me he won’t try again.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that,” I said.

“As if he needs a friend. The lonely beast needs a friend. I suppose in his fantasies he matters to me because I saw him and didn’t die. But who can know a mind like that?”

She got up from her desk and unlocked another drawer in another filing cabinet. She lifted out an ordinary shoe box, peeled off tape and removed the lid. Inside were eight small, ventilated paper boxes and just as many small manila envelopes, each labeled with case numbers and dates.

“It’s unfortunate no impressions were made of the bite marks,” she said. “But to do that I would have to call in a dentist, and I knew that wouldn’t be permitted. But I did swab them, and maybe that will help. Maybe it won’t”

“He tried to eradicate the bite marks in Kim Luong’s murder,” I told her. “We can’t cast them. Even photographs would do no good.”

“I’m not surprised. He knows there’s no one to protect him now. He’s-how do you say-on your turf? And I’ll tell you, it wouldn’t be hard to identify him by his dentition. He has very strange pointed teeth, widely spaced. Like some sort of animal.”

I began to get a strange sensation.

“I recovered hair from all of the bodies,” she was saying. “Catlike hair. I’ve wondered if he breeds angora cats, something like that.”

I leaned forward in my chair.

“Catlike?” I said. “Did you save it?”

She peeled tape off a flap and retrieved a pair of forceps from a.drawer in her desk. She dipped into an envelope, withdrawing several hairs. They were so fine they floated like down as she lowered them to the ink blotter.

“All the same, you see? Nine or ten centimeters long, pale blond. Very fine, baby-fine.”

“Dr. Stvan, this isn’t cat hair. It’s human hair. It was on the clothing of the unidentified man We found in the cargo container. It was on the body of Kim Luong.”

Her eyes widened.

“When you submitted evidence in the first case, did you submit some of these hairs?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And you heard nothing back?”

“To my knowledge the labs never analyzed what I sent:’

“Oh, I bet they analyzed it, all right,” I said. “I bet they know damn well these hairs are human and are too long for baby hair. They know what the bite marks mean and may even have recovered DNA from them.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *