Famished, Meghan O'Flynn [free ebooks romance novels .txt] 📗
- Author: Meghan O'Flynn
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“Downtown, there’s a fire station on Anderson that’s listed as a Safe Haven.” Bannerman made a final note and handed the paper to Petrosky, who folded the page into his pocket and stood.
“Thank you for your time, sir.”
“Father.” Bannerman straightened his shoulders.
“Whatever,” Petrosky said.
Outside the church, rain sheeted, rattling the glass and making the stark tinny sound Petrosky had heard in Bannerman’s office. He pulled the collar of his jacket tight against the wind and hustled to the car, littering the dash with tiny spots of water from his coat as he climbed in and jabbed at the heat controls.
Morrison was silent, tapping on his phone.
“You doing that texting thing with Taylor? None of that hanky-panky shit during work.”
“No, Boss.” Morrison didn’t raise his eyes from the screen.
Petrosky turned onto the main road and watched the gothic church give way to a similar building that now belonged in equal parts to a legal practice and a bank. They passed a lot full of weed-ridden gravel. Then a gas station. Then a fast food joint. Only eight more restaurants to go, and they’d be at the precinct. He stopped at a red light.
“Baby boy found dead on October twenty-third four blocks from Lawrence’s apartment,” Morrison said.
“Lots of babies are found dead, Morrison. But we’ll follow up.”
“He was wrapped in a duck blanket, according to the news reports. They ran a picture of the blanket instead of a dead kid.”
Petrosky squinted at the grainy image Morrison held out to him. He could barely make out a tattered blanket covered with yellow and orange ducks, graying with filth.
Petrosky turned back to the road. “Looks like we need to haul Keil back in for questioning.”
“He gave us an awful lot of information for someone trying to hide the fact that he left his girlfriend’s kid to die three years ago,” Morrison said.
“True. But not all killers are smart.” Petrosky tried to picture Keil in the mausoleum, dopey eyes staring at the wall as he painted words in blood: A boat beneath a sunny sky, Lingering onward dreamily…
Petrosky shook his head. “If she was the one who left the kid, daddy might be pissed at her. So far, Keil’s the last one to see her alive, and he might know more than he thinks he does.”
Above them, the light turned green, and Petrosky hit the gas. “There’s a burger joint up here on the left. We can get it to go, hit the precinct to look up that poem, and head back to Keil’s place.”
“You want soup and salad?” Morrison looked up. “I know a place with awesome vegetarian chili.”
“Unless it has dead cow in it, I don’t want it.”
Nothing but the pitter-patter of sludge on the windshield. Petrosky glanced over.
Morrison stared at his phone, brows knit together in a mask of concentration. Probably a California thing, worrying about poor, abused cows. Maybe. Petrosky craned his neck to see the screen.
Morrison lowered the phone, and Petrosky straightened and stared out the windshield.
“We don’t need to stop at the precinct. I’ve got it.”
“Got what? You sending PETA after me?”
“The poem. It’s from Through the Looking-Glass. Circa eighteen-seventy-one.”
Petrosky raised an eyebrow. “Rare?”
“An original copy? Maybe. And our guy might have one if he’s that into it. But the poems are available anywhere, as evidenced by me pulling it up in two minutes on the web. I read it at some point in school, probably undergrad. One of those what’s-the-meaning-of-all-this-shit kinda thing. I think I read it younger, too.”
“Younger?”
“It’s the prequel to Alice in Wonderland.”
In Petrosky’s mind, the gory letters on the wall, morphed into a children’s book, pages fleshy and oozing. “We’ll hit the libraries tomorrow, make some calls, and see what we can come up with.”
“Crazed professor?”
“Doubt it, but they might know something about the literature angle that we’re not thinking about, even with your fancy-ass English degree.”
Morrison didn’t take the bait. “The words at the Lawrence scene are only the first few lines. The poem has seven verses, Boss. That worries me.”
“It should, Morrison.” The rain relentlessly hammered the car, as if the clouds were attacking. Petrosky pressed harder on the gas.
Six more. That worried him too.
The clock glowed five minutes until quitting time. Robert Fredricks popped his knuckles and studied the three-dimensional quarter panel blueprints on his computer screen. The design wouldn’t win him any awards, but it was what his lead had asked for. And the job was a prime gig even if his asshole boss found something wrong with this design the way he had last time.
The call had come unexpectedly: “Can you come to Michigan?” Robert didn’t remember signing in with the head hunters at Harwick Technical, but he assumed he must have. Even if it had been a paperwork mistake, he’d figured it was about time for his luck to change. He had packed up his basement apartment of meager belongings and taken a bus that same week. He wasn’t in the main building on the lake, but it had only been a couple years. You never knew what might happen tomorrow.
At precisely five-thirty, he stood and threaded his way through the array of cubicles, down the elevator, and to the parking lot. His Nissan stuck out in the sea of Chryslers. The taupe and black granite building behind him cast a long shadow over the lot.
“Hey!” Thomas Norton waved his hands, a cheerleader above the rows of cars. Thomas had a cubicle in the same department, across the aisle from Robert. When Robert had started at Harwick Tech, Thomas had been the first person in the room to say hello, loping over on stocky legs with his mop of sandy hair shellacked to his head like a helmet. Thomas hadn’t stopped talking since, though that wasn’t what bothered Robert. It was Thomas’s eyes, big and brown and all-knowing, the kind that seemed to peer into your soul. Robert hated that feeling, even the merest hint that someone could guess his most private thoughts. But, if Thomas had even the faintest idea what went on in Robert’s head, he wouldn’t be smiling as he approached. And the women… Shit, if they knew what Robert was thinking they’d run screaming into the night.
“Yo, Jimmy! We still on for drinks later?”
Idiot. Robert smiled. “You bet.”
Thomas grinned like a fucking clown. “I’ll have a seat waiting.”
Robert climbed into his car. Jimmy. Ugh. He hated the name, but it was necessary now that he could no longer use his own. The world was not a friendly place for ex-cons. Not that it had been particularly friendly before his arrest. He gritted his teeth and pulled from the lot.
He had always been bad. There had always been a filthy wrongness lurking within him, despicable and abhorrent, waiting to be exposed. He could remember the exact moment he discovered the truth of it.
He had been adopted into a pious family in southern Mississippi where the air was so thick in the summer it was like breathing underwater. Their old plantation house was surrounded by gnarled oaks— “hanging trees” his father called them because of the slaves who had once strangled to death in the boughs. As a child, he often watched the wind rustling the branches with rapt attention, squinting until he swore he could see the bodies swinging. Even walking to the bus stop, something ominous always tainted the air, a wisp of energy not yet departed from the place, a tingling on his back whose origins he couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Especially under those trees.
Sometimes he could feel the weight of the whole place bearing down on him, concentrated in the glare from his father’s eyes. They were the eyes of a prophet, an angel even, at least if you asked the women of their congregation.
His father was not those things.
Despite his unknown heritage, Robert possessed those same eyes. He also had thick black hair and a finely boned face with a jaw wide enough to be attractive, or so he had assumed from the way the girls at school watched him. He wondered if they knew fornication was a surefire path to Hell. Desire was a manifestation of the Devil, his father would say, a ploy for the souls of the weak-minded.
Then it had happened to him, an unfamiliar tingling in his thighs as he watched his sixth-grade teacher write Shakespearean verses on the blackboard.
But there’s no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust.
Since then, his lust had never been sated, each libidinous thought
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