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

squatted on her haunches and stared at the wound in his chest.
    “Man, I wish I knew what the asshole used on him,” she murmured.
    Behind her, Mac grunted. “If ya know too much, Bruce, it takes all the fun out of it.”
    “Coroner said maybe like a steel pipe, with sharp, jagged edges. Something metal and hollow, rammed into him like a pile driver.” She leaned forward. “But a clean incision, just like this one.”
    “Yeah, Bruce. But we figure that already, right? I mean, how many MOs are we gonna see where we get a hole in the chest and a heart on the floor? Maybe when somebody spills this one we see some kind of copycat thing, but nobody knows about it yet.”
    “I know, I know. Man! ” She stood up, shaking her head, her features somber. “Hell of a way to go out, Mac.”
    “They all are, Bruce. They all are.”
    She glanced over and saw a couple of white-jackets from the coroner’s office unrolling a body bag. They both looked incredibly young to her.
    One of them came up. “Can we bag and tag him yet?”
    “Yeah, I’m done. Listen, tell your boss I want full wound comparisons done between this one and the murder wound in the Baxter case.”
    The tech stared at her, a cynical grin playing across his youthful features. “I didn’t do the pickup, but it’s not exactly a secret around the office there’s another one like this. I think you can count on a comparison.”
    She refused to take his bait. It was too late, and she was too tired, to play mind games with a baby-faced body hauler.
    “Go ahead, cowboy. Get him out of here.”
    As she watched the two techs fit the body bag around Madrone’s corpse, she felt that prickly little mind-buzz again. Something more, something that she’d missed. She tried to trace the thread through her mind.
    “What—” McKenzie started to ask but she cut him off with a motion of her hand. Her subconscious was trying to tell her something subtle, and she had to take a moment to listen.
    What was it? The room? The window? The scrapes in the outside wall? All were similar to the Baxter murder, but that wasn’t it. It was…
    She sniffed.
    The smell. It was the smell. She walked over to the window, sniffing the air all along the way. No doubt about it. It was there, ever so slight but highly distinctive, that oily burnt smell. She’d smelled that same scent, like hot sesame seed oil, in the room where Baxter had bought it. And that was odd. For one thing, the room in which Baxter was murdered had no food in it that night.
    It was a museum archive, for Christ’s sake. And now the same distinctive smell here. But this wasn’t a museum archive. Food would be—
    She headed for the kitchen. She opened the cupboards, then the fridge. No spices, no oils, nothing like that. Big Man TV dinners, boxes of generic mac and cheese, a couple of frozen pepperoni pizzas. Some salt and pepper, and that was in a drawer in the little paper packages takeout restaurants gave away. Sesame oil was a Chinese seasoning. But there weren’t any Chinese takeout containers in the trash or in the fridge or anywhere else. In the living room, either.
    McKenzie followed her. “What? What is it?”
    “The smell. You smell that?”
    He sniffed. “Yeah? So? Smells like Chinese food.”
    “Think about it, Mac.”
    “Think about what? So he liked Chinese food.”
    “Did he? Does it look like it?” She waved at the pizza boxes on the floor.
    McKenzie shrugged. “Okay. Maybe not. Why?”
    “The archive at the university smelled the same way.”
    His forehead wrinkled again. “Yeah, you’re right. It did.”
    He thought some more. “So what’s that mean?”
    “Could mean nothing. Could mean something. But it’s another similarity.”
    As the techs lifted the bag with Madrone inside, Sandra saw something. She moved closer and knelt by the stain on the floor that had been hidden by his body.
    “Hey, Mac,” she said, “what do you make of this?”
    McKenzie made his way over and crouched