Last Breath Read Free Page A

every window sealed.
    “Are you willing to admit that it was your imagination now?” her dad asked sternly.
    “He was real,” C.J. said stubbornly. “He was the boogeyman.” Even as she said it, she knew this was the wrong choice of words. Everyone knew there was no such thing as the boogeyman. Even she had known it until tonight.
    Her parents wouldn’t listen. When she pressed the point, they lost their patience. They sent her to bed, telling her that she would not be left without a sitter again.
    The Sheriff’s Department was never called. After a while C.J. stopped talking about the intruder. Meekly she acknowledged that she must have imagined him. It was the safest thing to say. But it was a lie.
    That man was real. And he might still be out there. Waiting, as he had said. Studying her. Biding his time.
    How he had entered the house remained a mystery for a month or so, until she remembered the doggy door. The Osborns had no dog, but the ranch’s previous owners had kept two schnauzers and had built a small swinging door at the rear of the house. It had not been used in years, but when she tested it, she found that the door still opened easily, and the hinges made only a faint squeal, inaudible at a distance.
    The opening was small, and she herself could barely pass through it. But she recalled the man’s long, skinny arm. He had been bony, almost skeletal, and somehow, by some incredible contortion of his shoulders and hips, he had crawled through the little door. And when he heard her parents returning, he’d crawled out again.
    She knew this was so, because snagged on a splinter of wood in the doggie door’s frame were a few black threads. She remembered the black trousers he’d worn.
    Of course it proved nothing. There was no point in even raising the issue with her mom and dad. They would look at her strangely, and there might even be talk of consulting with a psychologist in Blythe, as there had been for a few days after the attack.
    She didn’t want to see a psychologist. She kept her thoughts to herself.
    But from then on, whenever she played outdoors or rode a pony in the desert or climbed a trail to a high ridge, she kept watch for a tall, lean figure in black.
    The boogeyman was out there.
    And someday, she knew, he would return.

PART ONE
     

The Red Hen
     

 
     
    NOON-8:00 P.M. WEDNESDAY

1
     
     
    Morrie Walsh hated autopsies.
    He knew he was supposed to be accustomed to this part of the job after thirty years as a cop, but somehow it never failed to get to him—the unpacking of a human body, the utter violation of a person.
    Of course, as he knew too well, Martha Eversol had already been violated far more profoundly. Nothing the pathologist could do to her really mattered. The true damage had been done by other hands.
    Walsh stood beside the steel autopsy table, one of two tables in a specially ventilated room at the Los Angeles County Morgue, a room restricted to badly decomposed remains. Martha Eversol had been dumped in an abandoned mini-mall on Sepulveda Boulevard a month earlier, and the condition of her body was not good.
    One saving grace was that there had been no rain. January, often the start of LA’s rainy season, had been unusually dry this year, with some days approaching the windy dustiness of the Santa Ana season that normally developed in September. The dryness had helped to preserve the corpse. Instead of rotting, it had been mummified. The skin had a taut, leathery quality, and the other tissues had withered away, making the bones sharp and obvious beneath.
    The body lay utterly limp. Rigor mortis had dissipated many days ago.
    The medical examiner was a lean, ponytailed man named Sarandon who lacked most of the quirks associated with members of his profession. His only noticeable eccentricity was a habit of humming complicated melodies during an autopsy. He seemed partial to Bach.
    Sarandon stood opposite Walsh, reviewing the tools in his kit: scalpel; surgical