The Godless One by J. Clayton Rogers Read Free Book Online Page B

shot
himself."
    "Yes?" said Ari, his interest piqued.
Detective Louis B. Carrington had been intimately involved with the
Riggins family, and had in part been the death of them. Ari
concocted an expression of mild dismay, with a touch of disgust
thrown in—just to show the policemen that he was as sickened as
they presumably were by Carrington’s suicide; nor was he so
depraved as to relish gory images.
    "There’s a summary from the police
report, too," said Jackson.
    "There’s not much detail." Mangioni
gave him a cryptic look. "But you don’t seem to need much in the
way of detail, do you?"
    Although the bodies and every trace of
evidence (not to mention every stick of furniture) had been removed
long before Ari arrived at Beach Court Lane, he had been able (with
Sphinx and a little unofficial help from Karen Sylvester) to piece
together the solution to the crime. In fact, he had discovered far
more than Karen intended.
    "We’ve heard some rumors about
you…"
    Ari’s eyes went to the car door.
Jackson had been telling the truth. Not merely was there no lock on
the handle…there was no handle at all. If they were here to accuse
him, he was already neatly packaged for delivery.
    "Rumors?" he inquired
politely.
    "We started asking around about you,
after Carrington," said Jackson, a little menacingly. "We didn’t
get far before downtown stopped us. They said you weren’t involved,
and that was that. But we did hear that you were the last one to
see him alive. You said something to him and he went and offed
himself."
    Ari’s face was magnificently
blank.
    "Then some detective from the absolute
wrong precinct magically discovered that Louis killed Moria Riggins
after she had killed everyone else."
    Ari performed a small cough and shook
his head sadly.
    "This is the kind of bollocks we get
from the feds when they want to hide something. FBI, Homeland
Security…" Jackson had a stiff neck. Turning around was difficult
for him. But he managed to give Ari a good dose of eye-fever. "So
we think you’re not who you say you are, or who anybody we know
says you are. All we know for sure is that you told one set of
folks you were an architect, another set that you worked for the
Cirque du Soleil, a third that you were a croupier for a casino in
Lebanon. Sounds like you were having fun."
    Ari decided then and there that he
would have to find another way to amuse himself at his neighbors’
expense.
    "If you’re in the Witness Protection
Program, you need to show a lot more care about what you say to
people."
    Ari ran a finger over the stubble on
his face. He really needed to shave.
    "One thing else. There was a big
gunfight out at that international food store on Broad Street not
long ago. Louis told Mangioni and me he thought you were the
shooter. He even thought you might be some sort of hero, killing
three perps and all. He also thought you might be dangerous as
hell."
    Ari held out both hands
and said with perfect amazement, " I …?"
    "You nailed him on the Riggins case.
You confronted him about it. Am I right? He was filled with grief
and remorse and all that other good stuff. But let me tell you
right now, neither Mangioni or me thinks he did what they said he
did out there in the Cumberland woods. He was the last man on earth
who would think of killing himself."
    "Please, Officer Jackson. How can I
possibly—"
    "You know something more than you’re
telling, because the people protecting you know more. Even if you
don’t know who the killer is, we think you can take a good guess.
Go ahead, open the pouch. Take a look at the pictures and see if
you can see anything we missed. Oh yeah, and another thing. We
couldn’t get anything from the State Police. It takes an act of God
to get anything out of them. But the local yokels in the Cumberland
Sheriff’s Department got a tidbit that even the Staties missed.
There was a van with a Quebec license plate seen near Bear Creek
the night Louis died."
    "You mean…Canadian?"