Legion Read Free Page A

papers and I see—I see …
    (The witness gestures toward the body of the victim; cannot continue; investigating officer postpones further questioning.)
    The victim was Thomas Joshua Kintry, a twelve–year–old black and the son of Lois Annabel Kintry, widowed, thirty - eight, and a teacher of languages at Georgetown University. Thomas Kintry had a newspaper route and delivered the Washington Post. He would have made his delivery that morning at the boathouse at approximately five a.m. Mannix’s call to police headquarters came in at five thirty–eight a.m. Identification of the victim was immediate because of the nametag–with address and telephone number–embroidered on his green plaid windbreaker: Thomas Kintry was a mute. He’d had the paper route for only thirteen days, or else Mannix would have recognized him. He didn’t. But Kinderman did; he had known the boy from police club work.
    “The old woman,” Kinderman echoed dully. Then his eyebrows gathered in a look of puzzlement and he stared away at the river.
    “We’ve got her in the boathouse, Lieutenant.”
    Kinderman turned his head and fixed Atkins with a penetrating look. “She’s warm?” he asked. “Make sure that she’s warm.”
    “We’ve got a blanket around her and the fireplace going.”
    “She should eat. Give her soup, hot soup.”
    “She’s had broth.”
    “Broth is good, just be sure that it’s hot.”
    The dragnet had picked her up about fifty yards above the boathouse, where she was standing on the grassy southerly bank of the dried - out C & O Canal, a now - disused waterway where horse - drawn wooden barges once carried passengers up and down its fifty - mile length; now it had been given up mainly to joggers. Perhaps in her seventies, when the search team picked her up the woman had been shivering, standing with her arms tightly akimbo and staring all around her with tears in her eyes as if lost and disoriented and frightened. But she could not or would not answer questions and gave the appearance of being either senile, stunned or catatonic. No one knew what she’d been doing there. There were no habitations nearby. She wore cotton pajamas with a small flower pattern underneath a blue woolen belted robe, and pale pink wool–lined slippers. The temperature outside was freezing.
    Stedman reappeared. “Arc you through with the body yet, Lieutenant?”
    Kinderman looked down at the bloodstained canvas. “Is Thomas Kintry through with it?”
    The sobbing came through to him again. He shook his head. “Atkins, take Mrs.’ Kintry home,” he breathed. “And the nurse, take the nurse with you, too. Make her stay with her today, the whole day. I’ll pay the overtime myself, never mind. Take her home.”
    Atkins started to speak and was interrupted.
    “Yes, yes, yes, the old lady. I remember. I’ll see her.”
    Atkins left to do Kinderman’s bidding. And now Kinderman stooped to one knee, half wheezing, half groaning with the effort of bending. “Thomas Kintry, forgive me,” he murmured softly, and then lifted off the drape and let his gaze brush lightly over the arms and the chest and the legs. They’re so thin, like a sparrow, he thought. The boy had been an orphan and had once had pellagra. Lois Kintry had adopted him when he was three. A new life. And now ended. The boy had been crucified, nailed through the wrists and feet to the flat end sections of kayak oars arranged in the form of a cross; and the same thick three–inch carpenters’ ingots had been pounded through the top of his skull in a circle, penetrating dura and finally brain. Blood streaked down in twisted rivulets over eyes still wide in fright and into a mouth still gaping open in what must have been the mute boy’s silent scream of unendurable pain and terror.
    Kinderman examined the cuts on the palm of Kintry’s left hand. It was true: they had a pattern–the sign of the Gemini. Then he looked at the other hand and saw that the index finger was