Darkness on the Edge of Town Read Free Page A

block the road.  It would be hard to get in and out.  He’d have more of a chance of being seen.”
    Laura thought he was probably right
    A cicada buzzed, hard and violent.
    She was aware of the two of them looking at her.  “Let’s go down the stairs.”
    As they entered the park, Officer Billings headed for the bandshell steps. 
    “Officer,” Laura said.  “Stay with us.”
    He blushed at his lapse of judgment.  “Sorry,” he said, quickly rejoining them at the entrance.
    Laura stood still, facing out into the park. The body of the little girl would wait.  Wordlessly, the two men stayed with her.  She could see Detective Holland out of the corner of her eye. She hated dividing her attention between two people she didn’t know and the crime scene.  If she had it her way, she’d be here alone. 
    Looking at the park with her back to the bandshell, she measured with her eye the distance to the other end—approximately two hundred feet, maybe a little more.  Inside the long oval of the park, the basketball court formed a smaller, concentric one.  Near the wrought iron fences there were cookie-cutter scraps of dirt, where the trees grew.  She realized that she was in a natural amphitheatre, houses all around, many of them looking down from the tall hills—a ready-made audience.
    Laura closed her eyes, trying to summon the thoughts of a killer.  Sometimes, if she narrowed her field of vision enough, she could see things from his perspective.   
    Laura knew he craved an audience, knew it from the evidence he’d left behind.  Even as she tried to draw him in, think like him, her analytical mind ticked away underneath, logically picking up and discarding theories—the easiest way for him to enter the park, if the girl was dead or alive when he brought her here, and what he did last, just before he left.
    The reason he had to dress her up like a doll.
    A scrape of shoe on cement—Holland or Billings.  Whoever it was, her concentration broke.  The killer had something to say to her, but she couldn’t hear him.  Maybe it was Detective Holland, his disapproval of her jamming the frequencies. 
    She would come back later, alone.
    She turned and faced the bandshell.
    The 1916-era bandshell was small and shabby—stuccoed-over cement.  The stage apron stood a little over waist-high.  Under the arch, the shallow interior had been painted pale blue—to represent the sky?—but was now overpowered by graffiti.
    The body of the girl had been placed in the center, propped against the wall, legs out.  Flies zoomed around her. 
    Finally, Laura looked directly into the girl’s face.  Shocked, she thought: I know her.

4

    The barriers of time and place dissolved, and she saw the grainy newspaper photo of the two-tone sedan and the headline above it: CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND.
    It wasn’t Julie, though.  Of course not; it couldn’t be.  And now that she really looked, she saw that the girl was not an exact match.
    Laura owed it to this girl not to get sidetracked.  Her resemblance to Julie Marr was just a coincidence. Looking for a distraction, she glanced at Buddy Holland.
    His face had turned deep crimson. He stared at the child, eyes fixed, a vein pulsing in his jaw.  For a moment she wondered if he was having a heart attack.  She opened her mouth to ask him if he was all right.
    He turned his head to look at her.  For a moment the bleakness in his eyes reminded her of Frank Entwistle staring across the hospital bed at his own death—what one guy in her squad referred to as the thousand-yard stare.  Then his eyes turned stony, unreadable. 
    Laura looked at the girl.  She was barefoot and dressed in an old-fashioned white dress.  A little girl’s dress—babyish.  Something a seven-year-old would wear to First Communion.  If this girl really was Jessica Parris, she was fourteen years old—far too old to wear a dress like this.
    “I wonder where he got the dress,” Laura