Read Online Blood Ties by Nicholas Guild - Free Book Online

the second floor, lurking around in the impenetrable early evening shadow, Ellen was too far away to hear the words, but that was what it looked like. Without even pausing for an answer, the waiter set a cup down on the table and produced a silver coffeepot from somewhere behind his apron. No cream, no sugar. No little plate of chocolate-covered cookies. That was that. He seemed to enjoy a comfortable understanding with Tregear, as if what a man liked to drink over his Chronicle was the true index of his character. If only he knew.
    Not that Ellen was feeling particularly smug about it. Looking down from her hiding place at the man with his newspaper and his neat coffee, she was forced to admit to herself that Stephen Tregear was a highly unusual suspect.
    How many murderers had she processed in her two years on Homicide? Maybe thirty or thirty-five. As a rule they were not very complicated types. As a rule they were stupid, astonished to be under arrest. Astonished at the fuss everybody was making just because they had knifed some guy over a twenty-dollar gambling debt. The more intelligent ones, the career bad guys, that distinct minority who could figure out for themselves that homicide was not classified as a misdemeanor, were usually remarkable only for what was missing from their interior furnishings—principally any sense at all that, aside from their own, human life had value.
    Killing was simply a way of tidying things up, an exercise in problem solving. As Stalin put it: no man, no problem. Murderers, in Inspector Ridley’s experience, were guilty first and foremost of a lack of imagination.
    But the man who had eviscerated Sally Wilkes while she was still alive was neither a fool nor an emotionally blunted drug dealer just looking after his customer base. Our Boy was an enthusiastic student of pain and death, a perfectionist, a technician and an artist, laughing at his critics and audience, the SFPD. He was a book written in a language only he understood, a permanent enigma. He was a monster, a beast that should have been born with scales and claws.
    And right now, if hunches meant anything, he was sitting in the patio of the Cannery, drinking a cup of black coffee and reading the basketball scores. A nice fellow, a favorite customer. His human face was his disguise.
    The sunlight was fading. The outside floodlights popped on with a little electronic crinkle of sound, which somehow threw Ellen’s hiding place into deeper shadow.
    This is where I live, she thought. In shadow.
    In her head she kept replaying Mindy’s reaction to her turning down Ken the photographer’s dinner invitation.
    â€œAre you out of your mind?” she had almost shouted. “Why the hell did you do that?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    And that had been the truth—she didn’t know. And then she had mumbled some excuse about not being big on casual sex.
    â€œWell, great. We’re over thirty and you want to play the dewy virgin.” And then she had cocked her head to one side, looking at Ellen through narrowed eyes. “You’re not still pining for Brad, are you?”
    â€œNo—maybe. I don’t know.”
    â€œWhat are you going to do, be like the Indian widows and throw yourself on the funeral pyre? Brad wasn’t worth it. And casual sex is better than no sex at all. Any day.”
    And now, instead of being tucked up in bed with Ken or anybody else, she was watching a man read the sports pages.
    For twenty minutes Tregear had been hidden behind that newspaper. Then, all at once, he closed his paper, folded it neatly and stood up. He shelled out five bills on the table—no wonder the waiter liked him—and started up the steps that led to Beach Street.
    Ellen left the building by another direction. She took her time, and spotted him again within a block.
    She had more or less decided she would let him go now. The fit had passed off, and she realized she wasn’t