Suspects Read Free

tell. But it was useless. She could not produce a sound. Not even her strenuous gasps for air seemed audible.
    She tried one-handedly to roll Donna over to the supine. But the body had too much inertia to be moved, and it was glued down by the dense blood. Then at last, with a heroic effort, using both hands and putting her weight into it, she succeeded.
    Donna, face up, was inaccessible to the kiss of life. Her upper teeth were embedded to the gum in her lower lip. Below her chin she was all raw flesh, with a continuous open wound from groin to breastbone.
    Mary Jane remained soundless. Her emotions had been instantaneously annealed by the horror before her. In the next moment she was down the hall and at Amanda’s bed. The child at least must be saved. But when she pulled the pink blanket aside, she saw that Amanda’s delicate throat had been slit from just below one pale little earlobe to the other.
    The morning began with Lloyd Howland’s butter-fingered loss of an electric razor to a washbasin full of water. The fuse blew, and the shaver was probably permanently ruined. He could not go to his job without shaving. He was on thin ice at work for many reasons, and had already been chided for a recent appearance with a stubbled chin, which he had failed to get the boss to accept as being in the current fashion of many popular young film stars. “This is not a movie, Howland. This is a supermarket. Also wear a clean shirt tomorrow. Stay in back today. Keep off the floor.” So he unloaded produce from the big tractor-trailers that pulled around to the rear of the shopping center. He hated truck drivers on the highway and liked them even less close up. For one thing, they were habitually overweight, and Lloyd, himself constitutionally slender irrespective of diet, had an instinctive contempt for anyone he saw as obese. So he was wont to wisecrack in the hearing, sometimes even into the face, of some tub of lard who had climbed down from the high cab to waddle back and unlock the truck doors, and not all who were so derided had a sense of humor about it.
    â€œYou’re going to get your tail kicked one of these days,” the produce-department manager told him with obvious pleasure. “You got it coming.”
    â€œAny time they want to try,” Lloyd said, “I’m available.” He thrust his jaw at the man. “Or anybody else.”
    â€œThat’s really going to throw a scare into ‘em,” sardonically murmured this narrow-shouldered, balding person. “Now get back to work.”
    Lloyd would have liked to smash him in his smirking face. But he had already lost one job since the year began, and his duties here were easy enough to shirk. Not to mention that if he took on everybody whom he found objectionable, he would have to fight most of the world. So he had grimaced hatefully but pretended to do as ordered.
    He had the definite feeling he could not get away with showing up unshaven so soon after the episode of last week, even though he now had a genuinely reasonable excuse. When they were against you from the start, they would never grant you a single point.
    So he went to the pay phone down the block and got through to his boss. “Jack, Howland. I’m calling in sick today.”
    â€œNo, you’re not,” Jack responded crisply. “You’re calling in to quit.”
    â€œNo, I’m really sick. I mean it.”
    â€œHave it your way. I was just letting you save face. So you’re fired.”
    â€œFired? What the hell for?”
    â€œYou figure it out, Howland. You haven’t put in a decent day’s work here since you were hired, and you called in sick how many times in three weeks? If you’re in that bad a condition, you ought to retire. I’m making it convenient for you.”
    Lloyd slammed the phone into its chromium hanger. Well, he had tried, and see where it had got him. He was on the downward route again, three