Gethsemane Hall by David Annandale Read Free Book Online

exactly. Over six hundred.”
    Crawford had all the resources of a university behind him. Kent believed in his work. It was respectable, but just sexy enough to be media-worthy. If she had that kind of backing, she’d be producing results that would show him where to go. “He talked about magnetic fields, didn’t he?”
    “He found some strong variances.”
    “He debunked Bromwell.”
    Corderman’s eyes were shining . Don’t cry, Pertwee thought. Don’t you dare cry. This isn’t over. We’re just getting going.
    Pertwee said, “Load up.”
    “But what are we going to —”
    “We carry on. The new project is even more important now.” She gave Corderman a punch on the arm. Buck up, soldier . “Crawford had better watch out. Gethsemane Hall is going to debunk him .”
    Corderman’s eyes still shone, but now with a warrior’s hope.

chapter five
    god’s good plan
    Meacham decided to hedge her bets. She felt good about the inspiration the radio had given her. One skeptic was good. Two would be better. She wasn’t just going to clean the Adams fiasco. She was going to sterilize it. She found the other name she wanted in the background files. The face was in a picture taken at Adams’s funeral.
    In Paris, Kristine Sturghill was working the saw down to the bone. She was well down into the flesh and gristle. The sounds were a chuckling gurgle of wet snaps. The woman she was working on didn’t twitch. She looked dead sexy, every pun intended. Blood flowed, poured, pooled. The floor was covered in a growing puddle that reflected the lights from its darkness. She cut through the last of the gristle, and there was the grind as the blade sank its teeth into bone.
    The audience roared.
    Sturghill was performing at La Bourgeoise Épatée. The theatre was a hole in the wall in the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth in the 3rd Arrondissement, spitting distance from the stolid respectability of the Arts et Métiers museum, only two blocks from the bustle of the Boulevard St. Martin, but far enough east to be removed from the sleaze factor of the peep shows and porno palaces that sprang up the closer the Grands Boulevards came to Pigalle. The building had been a theatre off and on for a hundred and fifty years, and was making its mark in its new incarnation by revelling in its own filth, while tapping into its age for class. The in-crowd was squirting with pleasure. La Bourgeoise Épatée put on shows that were unapologetically pornographic and cheerfully debased, but had an aura of hipness that meant the city guides carried the listings in the same sections as the grand dame of La Comédie Française, rather than relegating it to the sex-tour back pages with the likes of Chochotte and Sexodrome. The decor was restored neo-classical, the seats new and spacious. The lighting was excellent, and Sturghill had to admit that even the dressing rooms were not only clean (a bonus, given what she’d dealt with in the past) but comfortable. Actually comfortable.
    The hall was packed, the box office fat, and she was making nice coin. So where was the love?
    She leaned into the saw, and the sound of grating and snapping bone filled the space. Not a twitch, not a visible breath, from the woman. A huge crack, and she was through. There was an enthusiastic gout of blood. The offal stench was building. Sturghill had already severed the upper torso, and now she pulled the centre of the box out. More blood pooled. The butchered woman, motionless, sexy, dead, glowed in the spotlight. Sturghill stepped forward and grinned at the audience. She was wearing the full Dietrich: tux, fishnets, stilettos, blonde killer as sexy as her red-headed victim (have to match the blood, don’t you know), dressed in just enough masculine garb for that extra piquance of double-edged homoeroticism. She raised the saw blade and licked some blood from it. God’s thunder of applause. She doffed her top hat and bowed low. Fade to black on the scene of slaughter. That was