Cole Perriman's Terminal Games Read Free

event, Nolan and Clayton were called in from Homicide Special Section.
    They had fought their way through a crowd to get to the area the uniformed cops had roped off. By that time, the likelihood of the crime team finding anything useful had diminished to near zero. A half-hearted attempt had been made to look for fingerprints, and fingerprint powder still clung to a brass plate encasing a pair of elevator buttons. That part had been a joke, of course, revealing only an indecipherable jumble. The same was true of the door leading to the escape stairs. Too many people routinely passed through a place like that for fibers or fingerprints to mean much.
    The uniforms were now standing at the edge of the scene, dutifully and conspicuously keeping their hands in their pockets in accord with Nolan’s ritual demand that they not touch anything.
    The pudgy forensics doctor huffed and groaned a little as he brushed his hands off on his trouser legs and rose to his feet.
    “Well, gentlemen,” Smitty said, “I sure hate to go out on a limb with some crazy-assed hypothesis, but my guess is it was murder. Guess that’s good news for you guys. When folks stop doing each other in, you’ll be looking for work.”
    “I could do with a change,” Nolan said. “I’ve been following the want ads for months.”
    “Yeah, and I’ll bet there’s a lotta work out there for an over-the-hill jerk who’s done nothing his whole adult life ’cept go poking around other people’s business.”
    “Hey, I’m not looking for a job for you, Smitty.”
    “Very funny. You’re too fast for me, Nol.”
    “Doesn’t take a Ferrari.”
    “You could never go civilian. You love this stuff. Who could help but love it?”
    “Okay, let’s call it murder for a moment, just to be goofy,” Nolan said. “Who was the perp?”
    “Hey, you’re the homicide dicks,” Smitty said. “Don’t ask me to do your job for you. I can tell you one thing, though. The motive wasn’t robbery.”
    Smitty stooped over and raised up the victim’s left hand. He carefully removed a ring with a substantial diamond. Then he took a glittering gold Rolex from the wrist.
    “Hell, those watches cost more than my car’s worth,” Clayton observed, as Smitty took the items off the corpse, dropped them into a plastic bag, and handed them to Nolan.
    “That kind of cash’d sure help with Molly’s college tuition.”
    “Stop begging,” Smitty scolded.
    “Let’s have a look at his wallet.”
    “Just make sure you turn it in the way you found it.”
    Smitty slid the wallet across the floor. Nolan stooped to pick it up. He opened it, and a batch of glittering, multicolored, metallic-embossed credit cards tumbled out, accordion-fashion. Nolan thumbed through the wallet. It hardly contained anything except credit cards—just enough cash to give the hotel staff rudimentary tips.
    “No pictures of his wife and kids.”
    “And no portraits of Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer or the Dalai Lama, either,” Clayton added, looking over Nolan’s shoulder. “Plastic can sure take up a lot of room in your life,”
    Part of Smitty’s team was now unfolding the black body bag. The doctor hovered over them, admonishing them fussily about every move, treating the corpse like an artistic treasure. Nolan was reminded of the career-loving gravedigger in Hamlet. Whenever Nolan worked a homicide scene with Smitty, he more than half expected the man to whip out an extra skull for proud display. Smitty never looked happier than when he was hovering over a dead body.
    As for himself, Nolan could feel his own face frozen into a joyless expression. He didn’t find his own wisecracks amusing, and he didn’t really imagine anyone else did, either.
    So why do I do it?
    The clichéd explanation was that cops told jokes around murder scenes to keep themselves sane. Nolan sometimes suspected that that was a pretty flimsy rationalization.
    Maybe we tell jokes to hide the fact that we’ve already