The Shadow Man by John Katzenbach Read Free Book Online Page B

right, let me take a look inside first.’
    ‘I’ve already called forensics. And the medical examiner. They’re on their way over.’
    ‘Good going. Thanks.’
    The detective stepped up to the front of the building. He hesitated for a moment, and then walked slowly into Sophie Millstein’s apartment. With each step he shed a bit of the easygoing camaraderie that he’d employed outside, replacing it with an attention to detail. Another uniformed officer was standing in the living room, next to a covered bird cage, writing in a notebook. He nodded and pointed toward the back, needlessly, because Walter Robinson was already headed in that direction. He was glad that he’d arrived before the forensic team, heartened, as well, that the first police on the scene were not milling about the body, as they tended to do. He preferred to have a moment alone with every victim; it was a time when he could let his imagination play out the dead’s final seconds. If there was a moment when he could hear the murdered person’s voice speaking to him, it would be then. In the sturdy, fact-driven world of the homicide detective, this he knew, was romance. But it helped him along the path of understanding, and he had long ago recognized that anything that spurred the steady progression of comprehension was useful.
    As he quietly sidled into the bedroom, moving like a parent careful not to awaken a sleeping child, he thought, as he always did, that he hated being a homicide detective. It was an endless succession of hot nights, dead bodies, and paperwork. Heat, stench, and drudgery. Although he
    was still a young man, he had long before given up the fanciful notion that he was somehow linked with Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, nor did he see himself, as some of the more experienced men in his office did, as society’s surrogate avenger, dedicated to righting the seemingly never-ending succession of wrongs that people committed against each other. He had come to see himself as an accountant for the dead. It was his job to tidy up and organize their last, awful moments and present the truth of those seconds to a subsequent authority, be it grand jury or court of law.
    The body was spread-eagled on the bed, twisted about unnaturally, tangled in a knot of torn bedclothes. He thought: She must have kicked hard against the weight holding her down, killing her.
    He believed he performed his job in a routine, dogged fashion, preferring not to focus on the moments of electric recognition and surging imagination when he centered on a killer. He preferred to consider the excitement he felt as the inevitable result of mere tenacity, where others, who watched him work, would have spoken about artistry. Regardless, his style created results. He cleared as many cases as any other detective on the force, and was held in high regard by his shift commander, a man who cared little for how crimes were solved, but who valued the power of statistics, and thus Walter Robinson was considered a man of potential by the hierarchy of the Beach department.
    He, on the other hand, ignored labels, thought potential something similar to a disease, and preferred to work alone.
    Robinson approached the victim slowly, taking care with where he put his feet, keeping his hands close to his body. He made a quick notation of the strident red marks on her throat, and saw that her eyes were open wide in
    death; there was an old myth that a murdered person’s eyes would print a vision of the killer as death snatched them. He had more than once seen a victim’s eyes ripped from their skull postmortem by superstitious killers. He wished the myth were true. Make things a lot easier, he thought.
    He wanted to ask: Who killed you? But all he saw was terror. This did not surprise him; what awakened her was the pressure around her windpipe. If the noise of the breakin had aroused her, then the killing would have taken place somewhere else. He glanced around, looking for sleeping