A Bat in the Belfry by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online

his own breath, either, like tiny high-pitched whistles inside his chest. Partly they were due to his extra poundage, but most of the internal sound effects were because he, too, had asthma.
    Just like his daughter. He’d just never paid any attention to it before, figuring that everybody had some damn fool problem or another, and doctoring for it was a waste of time and money.
    Lately he felt differently, wishing that over the years he’d stayed in better shape, that he was a better physical specimen as a husband and father, and—let’s face it—as a cop, one who once in a while was required to climb a ladder, find out whether or not a girl-murdering scumbag was hiding up there in the dark.
    Hell, there might even be another body lying up there, or—
    Just as he was about to stick his head through the hole, the first Eastport squad car pulled up outside. Bob recognized the sound of the old Crown Vic’s engine, the little thweep-thweep squeal of the fan belt keeping time with the knocking from either a valve or a rod.
    Then came the solid thud of the Vic’s door slamming, and a voice from the church vestibule. “Bob? You inside?”
    “Yeah. Up here. Look around outside, Paulie, stop anyone you see looks iffy. And watch where you step and so on.”
    “Got it” came the reply, then the sound of Paulie Waters’s boots heading out again. Waters was a young guy, in his twenties with not much cop experience, but a quick study and he read a lot. He’d know how to proceed. Bob aimed the flashlight up, then followed its beam into the huge, silent darkness of the bell chamber.
    Directly above him hung the bell, a bronze behemoth with a silver ring in its rim, pitch dark inside where no moonlight penetrated. Railed catwalks went all the way around the inside of the wood-framed belfry, bolted to the walls. Above the catwalk, tall, narrow arched windows slatted over by shutters loomed on all four sides; the openings between the slats let the sound out.
    Over hill and dale , Bob thought irrelevantly, the phrase from another of the children’s books he read. But the image of his little girl’s bedroom didn’t belong here; he shoved it away, knowing someone else’s child lay below him, bloodied and dead.
    He knew whose child, too. Bob wasn’t sure which of his duties he hated most tonight, finding her or telling her father about it. Not that it mattered; he’d done one, and he would have to do the other. Mine is not to reason why  … Christ, though, Hank Hansen was going to be a crazy man when he found out.
    Pouring between the slats of the big shutters piercing the walls, the moonlight formed a striped pattern on the old floor. Bob hauled himself the rest of the way through the opening into the belfry, his flashlight’s beam picking out the long-forgotten items lying around: a coil of ancient rope, a pipe wrench lying in a mess of rust flakes.
    On the floor near the rope spread another pool of blood, and then a smear mark. Because he dragged her. The son of a bitch cut her and then he—
    “Bob?” It was Waters, calling from below. “One of the girls at the Boarding Hostel saw someone, maybe. And I found something.”
    Nobody up here . Bob aimed the flashlight around once more to make sure. “Waters,” he shouted down, “don’t—”
    “Yeah, first I picked it up and handled it,” Waters cut in before Bob could finish, “got my prints all over it and messed up anyone else’s, and then for good measure I spit on it.”
    In addition to being smart, Waters was a smart-ass. “No, I marked it and left it,” he added in conciliatory tones. “You all right up there?”
    Bob climbed down the ladder. At the foot of it, a local girl named Karen Hansen lay dead. From the color of her face, white as a page from one of Bob’s own little girl’s storybooks, almost all of the blood had been drained out of her.
    “Yeah, I’m just ducky,” Bob managed. “You got the boarding home woman squared away?”
    He didn’t