Blood Innocents by Thomas H. Cook Read Free Book Online

suppose.”
    â€œTwo deer!” Mathesson said. “Can you believe that? Can you believe the amount of trouble and expense the department’s going to when it’s not even a murder case yet?”
    Reardon said nothing.
    â€œTwo lousy deer. And you’d think it was the only crime in the city.” He shrugged and changed the subject. “What’s your plan for today?”
    â€œI don’t know for sure,” Reardon said.
    â€œThat ought to please Piccolini.”
    â€œWhat would you suggest then?”
    Mathesson placed his hands in his overcoat pockets and looked helplessly at Reardon.
    â€œCrews are covering the area looking for witnesses, right?” Reardon asked.
    â€œRight.”
    â€œAnd they haven’t come up with any, right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œAnd crews are looking for the weapon, right? And they haven’t found it yet, right?”
    â€œYeah,” Mathesson said.
    â€œAnd there must be crews keeping it out of the papers for a while, right?”
    Mathesson smiled and said, “Right.”
    â€œOkay, that’s it. No witnesses, no weapon and no publicity.”
    â€œHow about the wounds?” Mathesson asked. “Could they mean anything?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œFifty-seven wounds on one body and just one on the other?” Reardon said. “You’re grabbing for straws, and that’s always a mistake.”
    â€œYeah,” Mathesson said. He sat down next to Reardon. “Two lousy deer.” He leaned back, arms stretched casually along the backrest of the bench, and stared up through the trees. “You know, old Wallace himself could have been a pretty good witness if he had some binoculars.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    Mathesson pointed to a line of trees at the top of a twenty-five-story apartment house overlooking Fifth Avenue. “See those trees, the ones on top of that building?”
    â€œYeah,” Reardon answered.
    â€œThat’s the Van Allen penthouse.”
    Reardon stared for a moment at the building. He could tell that the wind was rustling through the trees that grew incongruously and imperiously hundreds of feet above Fifth Avenue.
    When Reardon returned to the precinct house later that morning, he reviewed the arrest sheet for the previous day. For the last twenty-four hours people had been molesting each other in the accustomed fashion. They had been stealing from and killing each other, raping and falsely accusing each other, and running out on debts. Someone named Bill Rob-bins had attacked his mother with a ballpoint pen in a restaurant on 79th Street. Two teenagers named Thompson and Berger had drunkenly run down a pedestrian on Second Avenue. A homosexual had propositioned a plainclothes officer in the washroom of Grand Central Station. Two construction workers had wrecked a bar on First Avenue. At another bar a few blocks away an off-duty policeman had beaten his wife to a pulp in full view of twenty-seven people. Some of them had still been cheering him on when patrolmen arrived and arrested everyone, spectators included, for disorderly conduct.
    Reardon wearily ran his fingers through his hair and continued reading the arrest sheet, his eyes reviewing the crimes, roaming up and down the streets and avenues where they were committed, through the roster of whores, pimps, muggers, purse snatchers and drunks, through the embittered marriages, the turncoat friends, amateur arsonists, and everywhere through hopelessly flailing rage. But he did not stop. He was looking for something, and about two-thirds down the third page he found it. The first thing he noticed was the place the arrest had been made: the steps leading up to the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Central Park Zoo on 64th Street. Quickly, he ran his finger across the page for the time of the arrest: Monday … 3:35 A.M. There was little other information available on the report.