Read Online A Grave Talent by Laurie R. King - Free Book Online Page B

and a half years, and had been paroled seven years before. Her house was less than two miles from where Samantha Donaldson had been found.
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    Vaun Adams lived in one of the few houses on the Road that looked like a place to live in rather than an experiment or a fantasy, despite the gleam of photovoltaic panels on the roof and its almost unreal air of perfect simplicity. It lay on top of a hill half a mile up from the Road. A footpath wound through redwoods and opened up on a broad acre or two of vegetable beds and fruit trees, surrounded by a high wire fence. Some of the beds had a few straggly lettuce heads, beets, and broccoli growing in them, and one tree showed a handful of premature white dots on its branches, but the rest was neatly mulched over for the winter.
    The house looked more at home on the site than the garden did, as if it had grown from the ground under the supervision of the wise trees. Simple, long, wood and glass, its back set actually down into the earth so that its two stories appeared low, it was a structure both distinctive and totally unobtrusive. Kate wondered where Adams had found an architect who did not insist on a splashy signature and wondered, too, if in houses as in clothing the simple and well-made were the most expensive.
    There was a face looking down at them from the stretch of upstairs window.
    "She's seen us," Hawkin noted.
    "She could hardly miss the sound of that truck."
    "Looks almost Japanese, doesn't it?"
    "The house? It does, now that you mention it. I was thinking it looked deceptively simple."
    Hawkin nodded. "Solid. It sure wasn't built by the guy who did the leaky dome or that place with the turrets and gargoyles."
    The entrance was tucked under an upstairs deck. A small, mesh-covered pond with a few bright koi swimming in it lay next to the front door. Hawkin reached for the bell rope, but the door opened first.
    Christ, she's gorgeous, was Kate's first thought, followed immediately by, She looks like one of those living dead looking blankly into the camera outside Dachau or Buchenwald. Her glossy black curls were slightly too long and tumbled onto her shoulders and around a pair of startling, icy blue eyes that revealed nothing whatsoever of the thoughts behind them. Her cheekbones were high and thin, her skin pale, her mouth a fraction too wide for the rest of the face. A heavy, loose, brown sweater with flecks of color spun into it and a smear of blue paint on one sleeve emphasized the slimness of the body it covered and revealed long hands with short, square nails. She had soft, dark brown corduroy trousers on her long legs, cloth shoes on her feet, and a deep, even voice as she stood back from the door.
    "I wondered when you would come for me."
    "Miss Adams?" Hawkin, too, seemed taken aback by her appearance and words.
    "Yes. Come in."
    "You were expecting us, then?"
    She shut the door and turned to face him. Her eyes were as calm and as vulnerable as those of a dead woman, but there was a slight smile at the corners of her mouth.
    "Come now, Inspector Hawkin. If three dead girls are found within a few miles of a woman who was convicted of murdering a little girl, she'd have to be a considerable fool to expect that the police would ignore her. I've been expecting you for weeks."
    "You know my name."
    "And Inspector Martinelli's. Tommy Chesler was here last night and told me all about you. I was about to stir up the fire and make myself some coffee, but when I heard you coming I thought I'd better wait to see if you planned on taking me in, 'for questioning,' as they say. I don't like to leave the house with a fire going," she added simply.
    "No, go ahead," said Hawkin. "Unless, of course, you're planning on confessing to the murders." Kate thought it a joke in very poor taste, if it was a joke. Vaun Adams did not react, other than smiling the half-smile and turning to lead them through a dark hallway and out into a spacious, high-ceilinged