Hush by Anne Frasier Read Free Book Online

immediately in the kitchen. The
first thing you smelled was gas from the pilot light. Right there
was a small table with two black stools, a few steps more and you
were at the white enamel sink. To the left of the kitchen area was
the bedroom, with the bathroom off that. Next to the double bed was
a window with white paint so thick it would be hard to open or
shut. Ivy could tell that the building had once been nice, years
and years ago; it still had that hint of past elegance, like
beautiful wooden floors and ornate ceiling lights.
    Students lived there. And businessmen whose
real homes were somewhere else. Construction workers. Displaced
people in a transient period of their lives. Some kids. Mothers in
the middle of a divorce. Or maybe their husbands had abused them
one too many times and they'd moved out.
    Not a happy place.
    But a real place.
    "Get another dead-bolt lock on the door," Max
told the landlord.
    Ivy collected Jinx from Max's car. Max seemed
suddenly more than happy to carry her huge black suitcase up the
two flights of stairs. He put it down just inside the door and
placed the case files—one thick, one thin—on the narrow kitchen
table.
    "There's no direct subway line from here to
Grand Central Police Station," Max told her. "You'll have to take
the Green Line to Central, then catch a metro bus."
    "I'm sure I'll get the hang of it." Even
though she was in an unfamiliar area of Chicago, she had a good
sense of direction.
    After Max left, Ivy sweet-talked the
still-drugged Jinx, opening his cage so he could come out when he
felt like it. She offered him water that he refused to drink and
poured dry cat food in a bowl.
    While he was still indisposed, she walked
down to the corner store and picked up some groceries, along with
other necessities like toothpaste, toilet paper, and cleaning
supplies.
    Back at the apartment, she donned a pair of
yellow rubber gloves and cleaned the bathroom—claw-foot tub, sink,
medicine cabinet, and toilet—with a disinfectant so strong it made
her eyes and throat burn.
    When she'd completed the requisite tasks
needed to make her new home habitable, when she could no longer put
off the inevitable, she sat down at the table and opened the thick
case file, the one labeled "Madonna Murders."
     

Chapter 6
    Ivy stared at the glossy black-and-white
eight-by-ten. The photo was of a woman murdered in a neighborhood
park sixteen years ago, her body dragged into the bushes, her baby
discovered not far away, wrapped caringly in a blue blanket.
    The way the infant was found was typical of
murder by a relative's hand, often a parent. Someone who loved the
child. But the Madonna Murderer most likely didn't know any of his
victims. If by some chance he did, he probably didn't know them
well. But in his confused mind, he thought he knew them. In a way,
he thought all of the victims belonged to him.
    The mothers weren't treated with the same—for
lack of a better word—respect. Their bodies were left like so much
garbage, stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, ligature marks and
blue bruises left by the killer's fingers around the neck. There
had been an ongoing debate over what came first, the stabbing or
the strangulation. Cause of death was sometimes asphyxiation,
sometimes bleeding out.
    In the tiny apartment, there were no chairs,
only the stools. Nothing to prop under the doorknob. Jinx meowed,
beginning to come out of his drugged stupor. He stepped from his
carrier on uneasy legs, drank a little of the water Ivy had poured
for him, then took a few more steps and fell over, the bell on his
collar ringing.
    "You poor thing."
    Ivy picked him up, the heavy limpness of his
body a stark contrast to the wired way he usually felt when she
held him. She wouldn't give him as much of the tranquilizer on the
way home.
    It was apparent that he wanted to be left
alone. She removed his stretch collar, sliding it over his head.
Then she showed him the litter box, which he sniffed suspiciously
before