Read Online The Reckoning by Carsten Stroud - Free Book Online

out. His pants were down around his ankles. His legs were rubbery blue and covered in fine brown hairs. He had a black handle sticking out of his right eye socket. It took a second for Nick to get that it was the sort of handle you’d find on a round file or an ice pick. It was jammed up to the hilt in the victim’s eye. There wasn’t a lot of blood, so Nick figured it had gone all the way back to the guy’s cortex and just shut him off like a switch. A hit like that wasn’t an easy thing to do. It required arm strength and commitment. A whole lot of commitment.
    There was a CSI tech in a white jumpsuit, a woman, she looked maybe twelve, doing something unseemly inside the guy’s shorts and Mavis, who hated that sort of thing, looked away at the rest of the ground floor and then moved out into the main room, taking it in. Nick didn’t know the tech’s name and since she was wearing those all-white head-to-toe sperm suits the CSI people have to wear, all he had to go on was her face, a sort of cute cheerleader face, except for the sad eyes. She looked up at Nick, sat back on her heels, glanced at the readout on a digital thermometer. “Body temp is still too warm for a time of death, Detective.”
    Nick shrugged his suit jacket off, put it over his arm. “It’s this heat. Maybe the killer ran the furnace setting way up to make the TOD impossible.”
    She shook her head. “Furnace wasn’t on. This heat came in with the killer or killers. We have no idea how it was done, but for a while it was hot enough in here to melt the candles on their dining room table. And this handle, stuck in the vic’s eye there, that grip isn’t painted black, it’s burnt black. It was red hot when it went into the guy’s eye. Roasted his brain like a red-hot poker.”
    She said this with a degree of professional appreciation. Nick realized that CSI work could get pretty damn dull. At least this was…
interesting.
    “What have we got here, Miss…”
    She stood up, a lithe lift only the young can pull off, removed her latex glove, offered Nick her hand. “I’m Sergeant Dakota Riley, Detective Kavanaugh. I’ve heard good things about you. Nice to finally meet you.”
    Nick shook her hand, thinking
Dear God, a sergeant at twelve years old.
    “Good to meet you, Sergeant. I’m surprised we haven’t met before.”
    “I’ve only been on the force for six months.”
    “You made sergeant in six months?”
    She smiled, shook her head. “I was with the state patrol in Alabama for ten years, based in Montgomery. I wanted to live in a sleepy southern town with live oaks and Spanish moss. Niceville offered me a job, said I could keep my rank, so here I am.”
    “What’d you do in Alabama?”
    “Pretty much what I’m doing here. I trained at Quantico. Agency offered me a job, but I didn’t want to be just another dweeb lawyer with a gun. I like forensic work.”
    “Even this?”
    Something moved across her face, sadness, regret, and Nick got the idea that there had been some kind of loss, something bad had happened, and she had come to Niceville to forget it.
    “It is what it is. Once guys like you catch the bastard, we can help you send him to hell.”
    “Lot of younger people think the death penalty is too harsh.”
    She got a flat-eyed look. “For what was done in this house, strapping the guy down on a board and slowly skinning him alive would not be harsh enough.”
    Nick could see she meant it. “I guess I’d better see it for myself. Can you lay this out for me?”
    She stepped away from the corpse, led Nick into the living room, where Mavis was standing, looking hot and sick. The main floor was open plan. No vestibule. No foyer. If you were through the front door, you were in the house. A very nice house, with a big green leather sofa and love seat, a large oriental carpet in jewel tones, soft lighting, real oils on the walls, a huge Samsung flat-screen, the silky feel of ready money and lots of it.
    Now all in ruins