The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3 by Mark McNease Read Free Book Online Page B

paramedics to set up their gurney and go about removing poor Teddy from the bottom of the pool. He realized suddenly that the scene would soon change as the EMT workers removed the body; evidence that was there now might be gone or contaminated simply by being handled. He hurried over to the edge of the pool, aimed his camera down into it with a quick adjustment of the zoom, and took a half dozen photographs in rapid succession, moving very slightly each time to create, once he had the pictures in front of him, a wide, detailed view of the scene in the pool. As he was about to take a shot of Teddy’s body being moved to a stretcher, he felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling his arm away from the camera.
    “No photographs,” said a cop, the one Kyle had not noticed in the turmoil. “You from the news?”
    Kyle turned to the officer. He was older and heavy, probably not far from retirement, and Kyle wondered why he would still be a patrol cop. You didn’t usually see men of his age out from behind desks. His patrol car identified him as being from the New Hope Police Department. His hair was a gray crew-cut, and his nose was red and pitted as if he’d had a few too many Appletinis himself over the years.
    “No,” said Kyle. “I’m not in the media. I’m staying here at the Lodge. I just take pictures.”
    “Well not today, not here,” said the cop. And then, to all of them, “Don’t go far. Detective Sikorsky is going to want to speak to everyone.”
    “Is this a murder?” asked Maggie, hoping for something juicy to share on her social networks.
    “It’s not for anyone to say,” the cop said, “but frankly it looks like too many drinks and a step in the wrong direction.”
    This, Kyle knew, was not the case. At least, he was as sure of it as he could be, given Teddy’s history and the personal things he had shared with Kyle over the last year. Kyle hurried away from the group, back down the hill to Cabin 6 to get Danny out of bed and tell him what was happening. The lonely blue pool wasn’t lonely anymore.

Chapter 5
    Room 202
    T he woman whose name was once Emily watched the scene play out poolside from her second-floor window. The sound of the ambulance and police arriving had woken her fully up, even though no sirens had blared. Before then she’d been lying in bed in a half-dream state, remembering the shock on the man’s face in Detroit and how sorry he had professed to be, so very sorry for what he believed had been a momentary lapse in judgment. It seemed he considered killing her parents while she cowered in a closet a bad split decision. So convinced was he of his own powers of persuasion that he readily gave up the names of the other two men, and while not all three had stayed in contact the connection had never been completely lost. Tracing one to the other would not be difficult and he would in fact be happy to help her, something for which he would need to be alive. She thanked him for the offer and shot him in the head.
    “Oh,” she said to his corpse on the couch, his head thrown back with a bullet hole above the left eye, as she slipped her father’s watch into her pocket, “I kept the gun, too.”
    She wished she could say that killing a man was the last thing she could imagine herself doing, but it was the one thing she had imagined every day for thirty years. She had fantasized it, prepared for it, and now, in a shabby apartment in a dilapidated city, she had done it. The only thing that surprised her as she collected her things and wiped down what few fingerprints she may have left, was how plain it felt, how anticlimactic. It was, she realized sadly, as cool and unemotional as it must have been for the man she’d just killed to murder her parents. At least she knew now she could do it, and would do it twice more.
    She shook off the memories and made a cup of coffee with the machine in her room, then stood by the window and watched the commotion at the pool, standing to the side so