02 Blue Murder by Emma Jameson Read Free Book Online Page A

breaking. “I’m not the one
who provoked him! I’m innocent!”
    It was the perfect declaration for an
earthbound angel with crumpled cardboard wings. Still, Hetheridge
took those final three sentences more to heart than anything else
Emmeline Wardle said, weighing them long after the constables
dragged her away.

    ***

    T he body of Trevor Parsons was still being examined by the
divisional surgeon when Hetheridge entered the Wardles’ vast media
room. Judging by the wild disarray, it had been the heart of
Emmeline’s Halloween party. The vast theater-sized telly, taking up
an entire wall, had been muted. A zombie film was playing, young
women shrieking soundlessly onscreen while SOCOs photographed and
videotaped every possible angle. Once Parsons’ body was finally
removed, the SOCOs would place a robotic camera just inside the
taped outline, documenting the crime scene “in the round,” from its
epicenter. As much as Hetheridge found public worship of the FSS a
bit over the top, fueled by television fantasies that distorted
their work almost beyond recognition, he had to admit a videotaped
record of the scene was helpful. Donning protective gear—booties,
paper gown and face shield—Hetheridge approached the divisional
surgeon, Peter Garrett, a man he’d known for more than twenty
years. Garrett was crouched beside Parsons, examining the body with
the aid of a very bright handheld torch.
    “ Give it to me straight,
doc.”
    “ He’s a goner,” Garrett
replied from long habit. It was an old routine, amusing only to
cops like Hetheridge who had actually heard defense counselors ask,
months after a decapitation or disembowelment, “Did any qualified
expert declare the victim to be dead?” So in this modern era, every
single murder victim was verified deceased by a qualified expert,
even a victim stiff with rigor
mortis , an axe buried in the back of his
skull.
    “ Have you already examined
Clive French?”
    “ I have. One of the PCs
told me you thought the body may have been moved. Livor mortis doesn’t
support that, I fear,” Garrett said, referring to the way blood
pooled in the lowest part of the body after circulation ceased. “Of
course, it’s possible the poor young man was moved just after
death. Have to wait and see what FSS finds under the remains of
that bonfire.”
    “ Were both men killed with
the same sort of axe?”
    “ Precisely the same.”
Garrett, a thin-faced man with prominent lower teeth, gave
Hetheridge his trademark deaths-head smile. “Each was brand new,
from the look of it. This one even has its price
sticker.”
    Hetheridge squatted down for a closer look,
ignoring the pain in his arthritic left knee. The UPC coded sticker
bore a name he didn’t recognize: W. C. Marsden’s.
    “ Do I imagine it, or is the
blade sunk more deeply into Parson’s head than in
French’s?”
    “ You do not imagine it,”
Garrett said, lifting one of Parson’s hands, pre-bagged by the
scene’s first responders to protect potentially vital evidence
lodged beneath the fingernails. “The blade is almost three
centimeters deeper into Parson’s head. It’s a clean central blow.
As if the killer was trying to separate the right hemisphere of
Parson’s brain from his left. As for defensive wounds …” Garrett
gently replaced the bagged hand. “I doubt you’ll find any. I think
this poor boy was taken entirely by surprise.”
    “ It appears both men had
their backs to the killer,” Hetheridge said. “Might indicate a
murderer incapable of facing his victims. Someone physically
weaker, like a small male or a female.”
    “ It might,” Garrett said,
eyes on his work. “Mind you, I can’t imagine why a physically weak
or intimidated killer would choose a Halloween party to attack.
Slaughtering one victim in a Chelsea garden and the other amid a
houseful of wild youngsters seems like the height of arrogance to
me.” He flashed that deaths-head grin again. “But that’s why I’m
the