A Faint Cold Fear Read Free

halfway to the scene, looking up at the bridge. The design was a simple concrete beam with a low railing. A ledge jutted out a couple of inches from the bottom, and between this and the railing, someone had spray-painted in black letters DIE NIGGER and a large swastika.
    Sara got a sour taste in her mouth. She said derisively, 'Well, that's nice.' '
    Ain't it, though,' Jeffrey replied, just as disgusted as she was. 'It's all over campus.'
    'When did it start?' Sara asked. The graffiti looked faded, probably a couple of weeks old.
    'Who knows?' Jeffrey said. 'The college hasn't even acknowledged it.'
    'If they acknowledged it, they'd have to do something about it,' Sara pointed out, looking over her shoulder for Tessa. 'Do you know who's doing it?'
    'Students,' he said, giving the word a nasty spin as he resumed walking. 'Probably a bunch of idiot Yankees who think it's funny coming down south to play hicks and crackers.'
    'I hate amateur racists,' Sara mumbled, putting on a smile as they approached Matt Hogan and Frank Wallace.
    'Afternoon, Sara,' Matt said. He held an instant camera in one hand and several Polaroids in the other.
    Frank, Jeffrey's second in command, told her, 'We just finished the pictures.'
    'Thanks,' Sara told them, snapping on the latex gloves.
    The victim was lying directly under the bridge, facedown on the ground. His arms were splayed out to the side and his pants and underwear were bunched up around his ankles. Judging from his size and the lack of hair on his smooth back and buttocks, he was a young man, probably in his twenties. His blond hair was long to the collar and parted on the back of his head. He could have been sleeping but for the splattering of blood and tissue coming out of his anus.
    'Ah,' she said, understanding Jeffrey's concern.
    As a formality Sara knelt down and pressed her stethoscope to the dead boy's back. She could feel and hear his ribs move under her hand. There was no heartbeat.
    Sara looped the stethoscope around her neck and examined the body, calling out her findings. 'There's no sign of the kind of trauma you'd expect with forcible sodomy. No bruises, no lacerations.' She glanced up at his hands and wrists. His left arm was turned awkwardly, and she could see a nasty pink scar running up the forearm. From the look of it, the injury had happened within the last four to six months. 'He wasn't tied up.'
    The young man was wearing a dark green T-shirt, which Sara lifted to check for further signs of damage.
    A long scrape was at the base of his spine, the skin broken, but not enough to bleed.
    'What is it?' Jeffrey asked.
    Sara did not answer, though something about the scrape seemed odd to her.
    She picked up the boy's right leg to move it aside but stopped when the foot did not come with it. Sara slid her hand under the pant leg, feeling for the bones of the ankle, then the tibia and fibula; it was like squeezing a balloon filled with oatmeal. She checked the other leg, finding the same consistency. The bones were not just broken, they were pulverized.
    A set of car doors slammed, and Sara heard Jeffrey whisper, 'Shit,' under his breath.
    Seconds later Chuck Gaines walked down the bank, the shirt of his tan security uniform stretched tight across his chest as he tried to navigate the slope. Sara had known Chuck since elementary school, where he had teased her mercilessly about everything from her height to her good grades to her red hair, and she was just as happy seeing him now as she had been on the playground those many years ago.
    Lena Adams stood beside Chuck wearing an identical uniform that was at least two sizes too big for her small frame. A belt kept the pants up, and, with her aviator sunglasses and hair tucked under a wide-brimmed baseball cap, she looked like a little boy playing dress-up in his father's clothes, especially when she lost her footing on the bank and slid the rest of the way down on her bottom.
    Frank moved to help her, but Jeffrey stopped him