The Butcher's Boy Read Free

bought a bus ticket for Los Angeles at the Santa Barbara bus station. He was one of twenty or thirty that afternoon that you couldn't have told from one another, but that didn't matter because nobody looked at any of them. If the police were looking for someone in the area, it wasn't on a bus coming toward Ventura on its way to Los Angeles .

    ELIZABETH STUDIED THE SECOND SET of printouts on the day's possibles. The man who had been killed by the shotgun had left a note that satisfied his family and the coroner. The death by torture was linked to a religious cult that had been under investigation for a year and a half. The brake failure was officially attributed to incorrect assembly at the factory in Japan .
    That left the man poisoned in the hotel dining room and the victim of the dynamite murder.

    The autopsy report on the unlucky diner convinced Elizabeth that there wasn't much point in following up with an investigation. Chances were that he 7

    hadn't even ingested the poison on the premises. It was a combination of drugs, all used for treatment of hypertension, and taken this time with a large amount of alcohol. Elizabeth moved on to the last one.

    Veasy, Albert Edward. Machinist for a small company in Ventura, California, called Precision Tooling. Not very promising, really. Professional killers were an expensive service, and that meant powerful enemies. Machinists in Ventura didn't usually have that kind of enemy. Sexual jealousy? That might introduce him to somebody he wouldn't otherwise meet —somebody whose name turned up on Activity Reports now and then. Thirty-five years old, married for ten years, three kids. Still possible. Have to check his social habits, if it came to that.

    Elizabeth scanned the narrative for the disqualifier, the one element that would make it clear that this one too was normal, just another instance of someone being murdered by someone who had a reason to do it, someone who at least knew him.

    She noticed the location of the crime. Outside the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Machinists, Local 602, where he had been for a meeting. Her breath caught—a union meeting. Maybe a particularly nasty strike, or the first sign that one of the West Coast families was moving in on the union. She made a note to check it, and also the ownership of Precision Tooling. Maybe that was dirty money. Well what the hell, she thought. Might as well get all of it. Find out what they made, whom they sold it to, and tax summaries. She'd been expecting a busy day anyway, and the other possibles had already dissolved.

    She moved down to the summary of the lab report. Explosives detonated by the ignition of the car. She made a note to ask for a list of the dynamite thefts during the last few months in California . She read further. "Explosive not dynamite, as earlier reported. Explosive 200 pounds of fertilizer carried in the bed of the victim's pickup truck." Elizabeth laughed involuntarily. Then she threw her pencil down, leaned back in her chair, and tore up her notes.

    "What's up, Elizabeth?" asked Richardson, the analyst at the next desk.
    "You find a funny murder?"

    Elizabeth said, "I can't help it. I think we've established today's pattern.
    My one possible blew himself up with a load of fertilizer. You should appreciate that. You're a connoisseur."

    Richardson chuckled. "Let me see." He came up and looked over her shoulder at the printout. "Well, I guess it hit the fan this weekend," he said. "But that's a new one on me."

    "Me too," said Elizabeth .

    "How do you suppose it happened?"

    "I don't know," said Elizabeth . "I've heard of sewers and septic tanks blowing up. I guess there's a lot of methane gas in animal waste."

    "Oh yeah," said Richardson, suddenly pensive. "I remember reading about some guy who was going to parlay his chicken ranch into an energy empire. But you know what this means, don't you?”

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    “No."

    "Brayer's a walking bomb. His pep talks at staff meetings could kill