Dark Heart by Margaret Weis;David Baldwin Read Free Book Online

sighed. None of it made any sense. And neither did this. Madrone was a street guy, knew how to handle himself. He might have been an old timer, but his alarm system looked up-to-date. So did he know his killer? Did he open the door? Or was the killer waiting for him when he got home?
    She didn’t know which was harder to believe, Madrone letting down his guard so completely, or the killer wiggling through a window fourteen stories up.
    “Madrone was a cop,” Mac said slowly. “And Baxter was a security guard. Kind of a cop…”
    Sandra rubbed her neck. “Yeah. That, too. So we got what, three similarities now? MO of the actual murders, problems with entry and exit, and maybe cops.”
    “Something like that,” Mac agreed.
    “Our Baxter guy snagged himself a souvenir,” she said, moving out of the living room toward the kitchen.
    “And maybe something like that happened here?”
    “It’s a thought.”
    “Let it pass, Bruce. Look at this place. You could probably move the fridge out and it would be hard to tell. Well, not the fridge, but—” Mac gestured toward the debris littering the living room. “I don’t think Madrone was the kinda guy who kept an inventory of his empty beer cans and used newspapers. And that’s about all there is in this dump.”
    Sandra wandered back to the window. Something about it was stuck in the back of her mind, like a tiny burr. She pushed her head out and looked down. Squinted.
    Turned back into the room. “Hey! Anybody got a flashlight?”
    A tech grunted, reached into his bag, and handed her one. A long-handled Maglite.
    “Thanks.” She adjusted the focus of the lens for wide-angle, then leaned out and aimed the beam at the brick skin of the building beneath the window frame.
    There they were, just like the ones on the college building where Baxter had been killed. Those strange marks on the windowsill, the scratches in the brick.
    “Hey, Mac,” she said softly. “Take a look.”
    She moved aside as he pushed his bulk at the window, then poked his head out. He stared silently for a moment. “Jesus,” he said. “Those look like—”
    “Yeah. The same as the ones under Baxter’s window.”
    They eyed each other.
    “Look fresh, too. Like Baxter’s,” he said.
    “Climbing equipment?” Sandra said. “Some kind of hooks or claws?”
    “We checked that with Baxter and came up pretty much empty, Bruce.”
    “Yeah, yeah. So we check this, too. First thing we check is if they’re the same kind of scratches.” She turned back and faced the room.
    “I got some stuff on the exterior wall I want checked,” she announced.
    The tech who’d given her the flashlight stood up and ambled over. “Yeah? Like what?”
    Her voice went brisk. “There’s scratches or marks out there, under the window. They look fresh. I want photos and casts. And then I want somebody to compare them with the same stuff we got from the Baxter scene.”
    The tech raised an eyebrow. “Baxter? Oh, yeah. I remember.”
    She nodded. “Check the whole building. Make sure it isn’t something from the window cleaners or whatever.”
    “Right.” The tech leaned out and looked. “I did the Baxter scene,” he remarked.
    “Yeah, I remember you.”
    “These look like the same kind of thing. Not identical, you know? But the same kind…”
    “Well, let’s get it checked out.”
    The tech rubbed the side of his nose. “Maybe some kind of climbing equipment.” He thought about it. “I dunno, though. Fourteen floors up? That’d be a hell of a production. Even after dark, somebody would have to notice.”
    Sandra shrugged. “Just get it all into the record. We’ll figure it out later.”
    The tech nodded, then headed for the kitchen where the photographers were still flashing away.
    Sandra turned, went back to Madrone’s corpse, and stared down. His face looked old, older than she’d remembered him, and his features were twisted in an expression of terror. Terror frozen by death.
    She