Read Online Evidence of Blood by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online

told,”Kinley assured him, lying through his teeth, and yet not exactly sure who would have been the first person.
    Kinley’s assurance seemed to lighten Warfield’s mood. “Well, that doesn’t change the tragedy of it, though, does it?” he asked.
    “No, it doesn’t.”
    “You were close to Ray, I understand.”
    “We were old friends.”
    Warfield nodded sagely. “Well, the way it is now, with everybody rushing around, most people don’t have old friends. They don’t have time for them.”
    “Not many, that’s true.”
    Warfield leaned back in his chair, now considerably more relaxed. “Well, if there’s anything else I can do for you, I hope you let me know.”
    “I don’t think there’s anything,” Kinley answered.
    Warfield gave him a sweet, avuncular smile. “Well, if you need anything at all,” he said, “we like to keep an open door to the public here in the office.”
    After leaving the courthouse, Kinley drove across town to his old high school, parked in its cramped parking lot, and made his way inside the building. The same hallways greeted him like faces from his youth, the trophy box at the front, the school flag draped on the far wall, the brass statue of the school mascot, a snarling bobcat, fangs exposed, claws ripping fiercely at the air. He could remember the first day he’d walked into the building, a mountain boy whose only reputation was that he lived with a crazy old woman and possessed an inexplicable brilliance that a “bunch of Yankees” had somehow discovered, and which everyone thought terribly, terribly important. For a time, the other kids had shied away from him, as if his mind were a flailing electric wire they wanted to avoid. Ray had been the only one to approach him, and as he lingered for a moment outside the school’s office, he realized that the approach itself had happened in this very corridor, andthat when he’d first glimpsed Ray’s hulking figure, he’d thought him the dim-witted school bully who’d been sent to beat him up. He’d even flinched at Ray’s first words:
You’re the smart one, right?
    “You’re Jack Kinley, aren’t you?”
    Kinley turned to see a tiny woman with blue hair and thick glasses. It was Mrs. Potts, his old English teacher; now close to eighty, she seemed hardly to have aged at all since his high school days.
    “Mercy, Jack, what are you doing here?”
    “I’m in town for a few days.”
    “Oh, of course you are,” Mrs. Potts said. “For Ray’s funeral, I bet.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Well, mercy, Jack, you sure haven’t changed much,” Mrs. Potts said. She grinned impishly. “You just reminiscing here, now?”
    “Not exactly,” Kinley said, then realized that he had very little to reminisce about for all his four long years at Sequoyah High. There’d been no love to set his heart ablaze, nor even that first frenzied sexual encounter. Instead, he’d graduated a stone-cold virgin, almost the same aloof, unapproachable senior as he had been a shy, remote freshman. Only Ray had been able to pierce the wall he’d built around him, flinging himself over it heedlessly and shamelessly:
You’re the smart one, right?
    “Are you back for long, Jack?”
    Kinley focused his attention on Mrs. Potts again. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Actually, I was looking for Serena Tindall.”
    “Serena works up on the second floor,” Mrs. Potts said, “but if you’ll wait right here, I’ll go get her for you.”
    “Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”
    Serena came down the far staircase a few minutes later. She was wearing a light blue dress with a white collar, and reminded Kinley very slightly of Lois as she’d looked in high school, tall and willowy, but with somethingheavy about her, a figure slogging through the air, her fingers gripped brutally to a pencil as if it were a spike.
    “I went to the District Attorney’s Office this morning,” Kinley told her. “I read the autopsy report. I read the police