Slaughter on North Lasalle Read Free

right. No matter howhard they partied or worked, he’d never known his friends to sleep in this late.
    “Bob?” Karnes called, pulling open the screen door and knocking. “Bob, are you there?” When no one answered, he tried the front door and found it unlocked. That worried him because the people in the neighborhood didn’t leave their doors unlocked. Now even more anxious, he called out again before finally pushing open the front door of the quiet, darkened house, the odor of stale beer instantly assailing his nostrils. “Is anyone here?”
    When Karnes stepped into the living room and saw the twenty or so empty Stroh’s beer bottles scattered around, and spied a coat hanging on one of the dining room chairs, he felt a cool wave of relief wash over him. He’d been silly to worry about them. The men were simply sleeping off a hard night of drinking after all. Shaking his head at himself, he walked through the living room full of mismatched furniture and started to enter the short hallway, still calling out for the men, his footsteps seeming abnormally loud on the worn gray-and-black-spotted white tile. As he reached the corner of the hallway, though, Karnes stopped and looked down at something odd. There appeared to be a footprint on the hallway floor in what looked like blood. He knew it couldn’t be that but wondered what might have made it. After looking at the reddish brown impression for a moment, Karnes continued on, trying to imagine where it could have come from.
    A few steps into the hallway, though, he stopped suddenly,as if attached to a short tether. Karnes could see a pair of feet on the floor sticking out of the bathroom, a trail behind them of what he now admitted to himself was definitely blood. It looked to him as though someone bleeding pretty seriously had been dragged across the floor. After a second of confusion, Karnes crept over and peeked into the bathroom.
    Karnes felt as if he had been suddenly transported into an especially gruesome horror movie. What he was seeing couldn’t be real. He would later say of his discovery, “I couldn’t believe what I saw. I couldn’t believe it. It just wasn’t human—I still can’t believe it.”
    Lying faceup on the red and pink shag rug, hands and ankles bound, was the body of James Barker. A huge pool of blood, from what appeared to be gaping cuts across his throat, circled his head. Spatters of more blood, looking like some grotesque modern art exhibit, covered the toilet, sink, bathtub, and nearby walls.
    Horror etched on his face, Karnes quickly backed away from the bathroom and then stumbled down the hallway. In the back bedroom at the northwest corner of the house he found another grotesque sight: Robert Gierse, lying faceup on the bed, also bound at the hands and ankles, and also with a slit throat that had gushed blood all over his dark pink shirt and onto the bed around him. As in the bathroom, large spatters of blood covered the walls, while a dark red pool of congealed blood surrounded Gierse’s head. Gierse, he could see, wore a gag made of what appeared to be torn cloth.
    His stomach lurching, Karnes turned and again stumbledback down the hallway, trying to get away from the gruesome sights. But when Karnes looked into the bedroom at the northeast corner of the house, at the other end of the hallway, the nightmare continued. Although he had already seen similar sights twice, seeing it a third time didn’t make it any less horrific. Sprawled facedown on the bed, pieces of a torn cloth binding his hands behind him and his ankles together, lay Robert Hinson. Karnes gulped for air as he stared at the splatters of blood on the pink walls and then looked unbelieving at the huge pool of congealed blood that surrounded Hinson’s face and had soaked his blue shirt and suede jacket.
    The brutality of what he had found seemed unbelievable, and at first, Karnes didn’t know what to do. He had no life experiences to show him how to deal with