Read Online Time Release by Martin J Smith - Free Book Online

Like the city, the European working stock remained segregated into tidy little ghettos, even in death. The Jews and blacks were with their own, of course, somewhere else.
    Not that it was a bad place. Of the city’s million or so cemeteries, St. Michael’s, with its big-screen view of the Downtown skyline, was one of the best kept. Even now, with the brutal late November rain and the trees nearly bare, it had the feel of a high-end headstone showroom. Even so, Downing hated graveyards. Strictly a professional opinion: The colder the body, the less use a homicide cop has for it.
    Carole was Italian, one of a couple Marinos among the Borellis and Cippolas and Tambellinis spread across a slope on the east side. Time blurs everything, even this, he thought. Could he find her again? He did, and stooped in the dim reflection of his headlights to brush leaves from the flat granite marker.
    Carole Marino Carver. She’d kept her married name for the options it gave her in a town obsessed with ethnicity. But with her waist-length hair the color of Kona coffee, not to mention Italo-short fuses on her temper and her passion, Carole didn’t fool anybody.
    â€œHow you been, baby?” Downing said.
    He closed his eyes. He’d stopped praying ten years ago, but he always tried to remember the dead as they were premortem. And what came to mind first were Carole’s panted whispers as she moved beneath him that last time, arching her back and stretching her arms through the spindles of her cherry-wood headboard. Only woman he ever knew who did that, and she’d done it even when they were in college.
    Then he thought of the first time they met. He was eighteen, maybe nineteen, at a party. Bunch of kids just drinking and trying to get laid. She came in, and he heard himself sigh when he saw her. More of a moan. The air just left his chest, involuntarily. She told him she’d had nearly the same reaction. Within a week they started a relationship that lasted four years, off and on, until they graduated. Four years of blowout fights followed by the kind of sex he’d fantasized about ever since. Fight, fuck. Fight, fuck. When they got tired of the roller coaster, they’d talked themselves into separate lives, knowing it was the best thing. He remembered what she said on her way out the door: “We’re two live wires, Grady. We both need grounds.”
    He saw her under the Kaufmann’s clock one morning thirty-four years later, standing there like she was waiting for him. They had lunch and laughed about the disaster that might have been their marriage, agreeing that both had found their grounds: Trix for him, CPA Gerald Carver for her, at least for the ten years their marriage lasted. Then they rocked Hilton room 663 all afternoon, breaking only to nibble fruit and sip cold duck from a room-service tray.
    Downing tried to enjoy the memory, but a videotape began replaying in his head. It showed them sitting in his car, talking, kissing, vulnerable to the stalker behind the viewfinder. Then, like static interference, something else crackled into his mind. A high-pitched whine, like a dentist’s drill, only coarser. The Stryker bone saw. And an image: a scalpel tracing a Y incision from the clavicle to the mons veneris. And another: that outrageous hair dangling to the floor, trampled and crusted with blood.
    Downing willed the thoughts away.
    â€œTold you I’d be back when I had some news,” he said.
    A trickle of rain scored his spine, channeled along the deep gorge that divided his back into two muscular halves. Shivering, he felt his stomach tighten, reminding him of the slight cop gut he’d been able to avoid until the past few years. Rain made his right shoulder ache where a bullet entered years ago, but he’d learned to live with the occasional twinge.
    Downing stood up, pulled his raincoat collar tight around his thick neck, and licked the raindrops from his