Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

carpenters working on those days—too wet.”
    Ronnie studied the storm drain map. “Right. This place is Detective Kapp’s candidate for crime scene.”
    “But there are quite a few older houses on the next block that were certainly here a year ago. If he was put in the drain here, he was probably dead already so nobody would hear the shots, and they’d have to do it at night, so nobody saw it.”
    They visited another site in the northern part of the Valley in the foothills below the wall of mountains. It looked similar to the first neighborhood, with a few variations.
    “This is a little bit newer,” said Ronnie. “If you picture the place a year ago, it’s a possibility. There wouldn’t have beenpeople living close by who would hear a small-caliber gunshot, and probably nobody would pass by to see the body being dragged into the pipe. But this place isn’t on the way to anything, and it would be hard to discover by accident.”
    They reached the third development as it began to get dark. This was the farthest north, a bit higher elevation than the others, but still not high enough to notice unless the observer happened to be thinking about water flows. There were two streets that looked like the others, with many of the homes already occupied and only a few that still had the realtors’ signs on their lawns. But there were also three more streets with houses in varying stages of construction, and one that was only a gravel track through an empty field. On one side there was a single row of foundations dug and poured, with the wooden forms still installed. Far down at the end there were two houses that had been partially framed, like skeletal remains of something that had been started and abandoned. There were no streetlamps in yet. The street was dark.
    “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Sid. “This would be a good place to kill somebody.”
    “Or dump a body, anyway.”
    Sid stopped the car. “There aren’t any cameras or fences like they sometimes have on construction sites. I guess there’s nothing here to protect yet. Nothing to steal.”
    “At least without prying apart the lumber they’ve nailed together,” said Ronnie.
    “Too much work for thieves, I guess. Okay. Let’s try to work this out while we can see it. So this guy decides to kill James Ballantine.”
    “Or gets hired to kill him.”
    “He figures a good place to do it would be in a sparsely populated area north of the city, a place where he can discharge a firearm without waking the neighborhood, because nobody lives in the houses yet. He drives Ballantine up here to look at the lots for sale, or brings him here, maybe drugged or tied up. At some point he shoots him twice in the back of the head with a .22 pistol. The street has an open trench dug in the middle, with a big concrete pipe being laid in as the main channel for storm runoff. The pipe is big enough to drag a body in, and the start of it is already connected to the existing part of the storm drain system. So he drags the victim as far as he can into the completed part of the storm sewer. Right now is the rainy season, and he hopes that as soon as there’s a storm, the body will be swept downstream, maybe all the way to the ocean. Or he might have done this after the rain had already begun. He saw the water running into the drain and realized he had a solution to his body problem.”
    “This doesn’t seem like a crime of opportunity to me,” said Ronnie. “There’s too much that’s ideal—no lights, nobody who lives nearby, a way to wash the body of all trace evidence and transport it far away at the same time. You don’t usually find all of those things by happy accident.”
    “Okay,” said Sid. “He knew that this development was all new streets, so they’d have to put in pipes to connect with the main storm sewer system. He could have come to the construction site any night and looked closely at the place. With online weather forecasts, he could know