The Sleeping and the Dead Read Free Page A

nodded at the theater manager, who seemed even paler than before. “I think maybe this guy’s a copycat.”
    â€œGreat,” Billet said. He paced the stage with his hands behind his back, while Wiley smirked and bagged the victim’s hands. “That’s just fucking great. That’s all we need right now.” His voice boomed through the auditorium, resounding in the shadows of the balconies and galleries. I looked for the little girl beneath the Exit sign, but she wasn’t there anymore. Two in one day—that was a bad sign.
    â€œI think the killer felt remorse and tried to cover up the body with the mattress,” Adam said, but something about this didn’t ping. The mattress looked like it had been pulled out of a Dumpster. He must have brought it with him, which meant he had planned it this way, for whatever reason.
    â€œYou’re the expert, McPeake,” Chief Billet said. “Now tell me what I’m supposed to tell the cameras.”
    Adam shrugged.
    â€œJesus!” the crime-scene tech swore. Dr. Wiley hurried over with a plastic bag to catch the sludge flowing from the pipe rammed up the victim’s anus.
    â€œFlesh is cauterized and fused to the metal,” he said as he examined the point of insertion. “It must have been red hot when inserted.”
    â€œMarlowe!” I shouted. Everybody stared at me. I had known some of these cops from when I was on the force myself, but most of them wouldn’t speak to me now. To them, I was just a junkie mooching off the chief’s generosity. A few of them had heard about my bad habit of seeing people who weren’t there, and I’m sure they thought I was talking to one of my special friends again.
    Billet was one of them. He lifted a curious eyebrow. “Well?”
    But I wasn’t crazy, not this time. I had read about this scene in an English history course in college. “This is from Edward the Second by Christopher Marlowe,” I said. “According to Thomas More, Edward was smothered with a mattress, then a red-hot copper pipe was shoved up his butt.” The brutality of historical British executions had been one of Professor Cromwell’s favorite subjects. Writing about a truly grisly one, like Edward II’s, was a good way to get an A in his class.
    â€œAdam?” Billet turned to his expert.
    Adam shrugged. “That scene was never in Marlowe’s play.”
    I said, “Edward’s death was. The killer’s not re-creating, he’s interpreting. He’s making it his own. Maybe he’s a frustrated playwright.”
    â€œWrite us a book report,” Billet said. “What I want to know is why did they shove a pipe up his ass?”
    â€œYou ever see the movie Braveheart ?” Billet nodded that he had. “Edward the Second was Longshanks’ gay son.”
    It was like a light came on over the heads of the cops around me. “That movie’s fucking awesome,” one said.
    â€œThen this is the work of our killer?” Billet started straightening his tie.
    â€œProvided the victim is gay,” Adam said. We wouldn’t know for sure until he was identified, but there wasn’t much doubt anymore. It fit his pattern. The Playhouse Killer’s last victim had been staged in a scene from Shakespeare’s Richard III , but this was his first murder in a long time, and his boldest and most public staging by far.
    Chief Billet winked at me and slipped out to talk to the reporters, while Wiley continued his work in sullen silence. He wouldn’t look at me now, not even when I took a picture of him bending over the body. Adam was talking to some guys dusting for fingerprints near the backstage door. It was pretty clear from the placement of the body and the lack of blood that the victim hadn’t been killed here. He must have been brought in, but how had he done that in a public place like the Orpheum without being