Dark Blonde by David H. Fears Read Free Book Online

body sprawled diagonally across the upper part of a king bed, twisted at the waist, legs bent and together, feet arched with toes pointed down like she was in a half-tuck dive, breasts bloody with crossing thin red lines and welts that were recent. Her arms reached straight down toward her knees and her hands were cupped together like they’d been posed.
    The bedspread was a pattern of scarlet hearts and blood red squares. Funny how little things like that are noticed when a body’s staring up at you. Except this body wasn’t staring. It was headless.
    I approached and bent over the corpse. A faint red and blue tattoo, the letters “CF” with two small hearts was visible high up on one buttock. My scar twitched.
    The head had been severed, but it hadn’t been a clean job. It looked like someone had hacked away with a dull machete a dozen or more times. Lifting up one hand revealed a broken nail, and some greenish material under it that looked like vegetation. She wore no rings or other jewelry and there weren’t any ring depressions on either hand. Her wrists were bruised with red streaks chewed through the top layers of skin with dried blood down one arm, like she’d been bound and bled there from the struggle. She might have put up a fight but with the condition of the body it was hard to tell.
    “Any sign of what was used to bind her? You find the head?”
    “It’s in there,” Rick said, pointing with his chin to the bathroom as he continued examining the floor around the bed. “I’d say thin wire was used, piano type or smaller. None around though. See how it cut into the sides of her wrists almost to the bone? Rope or power cord wouldn’t make those marks. She struggled hard to get loose. Maybe tortured.”
    I stepped into the bathroom. The milky brown eyes were open, fused to some horror on the ceiling. The mouth was thin and grim. Blood smeared on the cheeks like someone had drawn circles with a finger. Across the forehead, written in bright orange-red lipstick block letters was the word “ANTIGONE.” The reference escaped me right then.
    The sink was full of water, a ghoulish tomato soup. Blood drippings trailed in a curve out the door and across to the bed, like the body had been carried from the bathroom neck down to the bed, twelve feet away.
    Rick called, “If you lift the head you’ll see neck bruises consistent with thick rope. Looks like a few hemp fibers. She could have been hung before decapitation. Hard to say which killed her. This sort of thing involves a lot of hatred.”
    I turned away from the macabre scene and walked out through the bedroom, stopping at the door, my head a sick bubble with the gorilla pounding to get out again. “I’ll take your word for it. I didn’t know you were flying back so soon.”
    “I didn’t know it myself until I’d sat around looking at umpteen cousins with no more to say. I was able to get a quick standby at Newark. It was like watching a bunch of people at the railroad station and suffering the same stale coffee and donuts for a week. But Mom had a good send off, and ninety is not altogether unhappy.”
    I thumbed back toward the bathroom head repository. “So, what’s it mean? Antigone?”
    Rick motioned me out and we stood on the brick walk watching the waterfall gurgle and looking up at the main house. “Sophocles,” he said, which meant zero to me. Then he stuck a hand in his coat like he was playing Napoleon, pasted on a fake face and said, “…and the folly that is mine alone, to suffer this dread thing; for I shall not suffer aught so dreadful as an ignoble death.”
    “Ignoble’s appropriate. Shakespeare?”
    “I can see you’re no student of classic literature, my boy. Sophocles, a Greek scribbler, playwright, predated the Bard some two thousand years. While you were in short pants I was taking all those classes and bedding all those lasses at NYU, expanding the old gray matter and socially finding substitutes for family and