The Abortionist's Daughter Read Free Page A

dryer above. He opened a beer and put on some music and settled down onto the sofa. It had been a long day, and he was looking forward to a day off tomorrow. He could get the oil changed. Do a little Christmas shopping, find something for Carolyn.
    He was flipping through the channels when the telephone rang. Now: Huck Berlin wasn’t the spookable type. He didn’t believe in ghosts and he didn’t believe in ESP, and except for that strange thing with the mildew smell, he really didn’t believe in crystals or seances or any of that New Age stuff this town was so full of.
    Tonight, though, when he picked up the phone and heard Ernie informing him that Diana Duprey was dead—just minutes after her daughter had been stalled in his driveway with a fogged-up windshield—Huck felt an unmistakable chill run down his spine. He turned off the television.
    “The abortion doctor?”
    “That’s right, my friend.”
    “How?”
    “She drowned in her pool.”
    “They have a
pool
?”
    “One of those little indoor jobbers. You swim against a current.”
    It sounded like Ernie was eating something. Huck opened the door to let more cold air in. “When?”
    “We don’t know exactly. Sometime after five this afternoon. Frank found her about eight-thirty.”
    “How can you drown in a pool like that? What’d she do, bonk her head?”
    “Something like that.”
    “And they don’t know how she did it—”
    “—and that’s why they called us,” Ernie finished. “You got it. Anyway, the coroner’s on her way over there now. What are you doing at the moment?”
    “Laundry.”
    “Where’s Carolyn?”
    “Off to Minnesota.”
    “Why?”
    “Her mother had a stroke this morning.”
    “Bad?”
    “No. I just got back from the airport. Long day, bud.”
    “Well, not as long as Diana Duprey’s. Pick you up in ten.”
    Huck hung up the phone and rubbed his eyes. Truth be told, he really wasn’t a big fan of Frank Thompson’s. It was a personal thing that had to do with an old case. Three years ago one Sally Templeton had been found dead in a frat house on a Sunday morning with a blood alcohol level of .38 and multiple semen stains on her legs. Huck and Ernie had gotten matching DNA samples from five different boys, but Frank wouldn’t go forward because of one arguable screwup with chain-of-custody issues. Huck always felt that Frank’s decision had had more to do with one of the frat boys being the son of a prominent businessman than any chain-of-custody issues; this was a huge mistake, in Huck’s view, and it was compounded when the press started hinting that the police department couldn’t be trusted to collect so much as a fingerprint without screwing up.
    So there was no love lost between the two of them. Still, it was wrong to hold a grudge. And in the end, whatever the professional gripes, right now they didn’t matter. Frank Thompson had lost his son a while back, a terrible thing, one of those kids with Down syndrome. And now to lose his wife, right before Christmas? Huck had seen stable, well-adjusted men at the height of their careers spiral into a ruin over things like this.
    And the girl. What was she, a freshman in college?
    He pulled a gray sweatshirt over his head and waited for Ernie.
    —————
    The Reverend Steven B. O’Connell got the news as he and his family were negotiating over the appropriate pose for the annual Christmas photo. Emotionally drained from his own day’s unfortunate events, Steven was in no mood for a picture, but his wife Trudy had booked the photographer months ago. For their part, three of the four children were disgusted with both parents for operating on the assumption that they’d be able to pose with smiles, for they all felt that the world at large would be better off if their respective siblings would go off and die in a plane crash. And Scott, the fourth, had his own set of problems—big problems, nasty problems—that made any notion of smiling into a camera