6 - The Eye of the Virgin: Ike Schwartz Mystery 6 Read Free

Most of the people I talked to assumed he was a parent of one of the patients. But, like I said, there’s a bunch of people we couldn’t question last night.”
    “Will you have any trouble finding out who all was there?”
    “No. We have the names from the admission forms. Addresses too. We should be able to interview them all pretty quick.”
    “It brings up the question, though, doesn’t it?”
    “How so?”
    “Why would anyone go to all that trouble? Why not leave him in an alley or a parking lot?”
    “It’s a poser for sure.”
    Billy sipped his coffee and made a face. “Maybe whoever did it hoped that the hospital could do something, like, after the fact. You know, an accident, shooter feels guilty and brings him in but is afraid to stick around. Sort of like a denial thing.”
    “It’s a stretch but, okay, maybe. We’ll have to wait for the ME’s final report. Either way we have a homicide. You wrote there was no identification on the vic. Was there anything to tell us who he was or why he was here? I gather he’s not local.”
    “Nothing, Ike, no wallet, no cards, no receipts, nothing. Nobody knew him, you know. Out-of-town person, it seems.”
    “We have any finger prints?”
    “They should be coming over this afternoon. I’ll have Samantha run them through her fancy computer program thing—AFIS.”
    Frank had not yet been able to call Samantha Ryder by her nickname, Sam, although everyone else did and she’d asked him to more than once. Her main contribution to the Sheriff’s office was her computer skills. She made the television versions seen on
CSI
in its many permutations seem inept. Most of that stemmed from her ability to hack into nearly any program she wished to. Ike made a point of not asking how she did it or whether she was siphoning off information he’d otherwise have to pay for with a license fee. Picketsville did not have a large budget devoted to technology. Not in the sheriff’s office, not anywhere. Depending on the availability of federal subsidies, small towns were either annoying in their sophistication or they were in the electronic Stone Age, computer-wise. Except for Sam and her machinery tucked away in the back corner, Picketsville was Early Pleistocene.
    “Let’s hope. I am, for one, not that eager to have a John Doe on my hands. Okay. We’ll have to wait. Okay Billy, your turn.

Chapter Three
    “Straight up and down breaking and entering, Ike. This guy…” Billy consulted his notes. “Louis Dakis, came back from doing an evening class up at the college—”
    “University now.”
    “Tell me the difference. One day it’s Callend College for women. A week later it’s Callend University. What happened in a week?”
    “Not weeks, months. Callend was, for a hundred years or so a college. It started as a ladies’ finishing school, very popular back in the day in this part of the world. Then, it evolved into a liberal arts college, but still only for women, and then last summer it merged with Carter Union, a business college, added a business school offering advanced degrees, and became coed. Because it has a school of liberal arts, a school of business, and now a separate school of fine arts, it qualifies as a university, which is usually defined as a collection of schools or colleges gathered in one place. Not always, however. Being called a university doesn’t mean what it used to.”
    “Yeah, whatever, college, university, school for rich kids is what that place is. Anyway, Dakis says he comes back to his house and finds somebody busted a window and climbed in and ransacked a bunch of holy pictures he had stacked up in the dining room.”
    “Holy pictures? What kind of holy pictures are we talking about here?”
    “Like in them foreign churches. You know, lots of pictures of Jesus with his fingers crossed, Mary and the baby Jesus all pretty like only she looks like she’s wearing a football helmet, and other people, saints, I guess the kind of