Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005
- Автор: Dean David, Dempsey Timothy F.
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN 1054-8122
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
“Get back in? Ms. Terry, this is a serious matter. The first thing I’m going to do when we’re done is to notify security and human resources that he’s not to be permitted on the premises. I’ll put him on administrative leave without pay, then see that he’s discharged.” She sounded very righteous and determined, with a look in her eyes I was glad wasn’t directed at me. “Beyond all that, you’ve convinced me about the police. I will do whatever is in my power to see that he faces charges, but it has to be done through channels. All right. Let’s get this thing wrapped up, shall we?”
I tried to feel reassured, but when we went back in there, the cold lights glaring, I shivered my way across to where Daniel lay at rest.
I opened the drawer, and maybe I stood there a little too long, because she said with a touch of impatience, “I’ll keep you posted on the outcome of the proceedings against Mr. Ludlow. I guess that finishes it.”
“You’re forgetting me,” said Ludlow’s voice behind her. I think he’d been listening for a while, because I hadn’t heard the doors open a second time. He sure as hell looked pissed off enough to have heard everything. They say never put a suspect between you and the door, so I sidled toward it, the way you do if you think something nasty is about to unfold and you’d rather be somewhere else. I figured neither of them would notice, because they were getting ready to kill each other.
“You bitch, you think you’re going to lay it all on me?” he asked.
She said to Ludlow, “What are you talking about? You know better than to try to implicate me.”
“Implicate you? It was your—”
He stood there, blinking. I knew his astonishment was real. He was too stupid to be a good actor.
Oh, God. So she was in it, too!
I said, as much to myself as to him, “She’s going to sell you out.” I ran for the door, but she moved fast enough to intercept me. That’s when I saw the disposable scalpel in her hand. Like lightning, she had it at my throat, her other hand gripping my arm to keep me from moving.
I couldn’t hear much over the thundering bass drum beating in my ears, but made out Dr. Cannon saying, “Don’t say another word.” She gripped my arm tighter, and next I felt the faintest tingle quickly turning to a tiny burning spot at the base of my throat. But she stopped there. I couldn’t move to see if I had started to bleed, but it felt like it.
“You’re one fine little detective,” she said with contempt. “Too bad nobody will ever get to know how good you were.”
I noted her use of the past tense.
She eased up on my throat and arm, then gave me a little shove. “Now open that drawer. I have the scalpel right here, so please do cooperate, Ms. Terry.”
I knew self-defense, but she knew medicine, so I had to play along. I knew why she was doing it, and what she planned to do with me. Death from hypothermia, no blood, nice and neat, just like her. The perfect crime, anatomical waste, illegal to open the boxes she put me into. I saved myself the indignity of repeating the old line about how she wouldn’t get away with it, and thought of ways to leave behind some forensic evidence as I rolled the drawer open and set a clunky boot awkwardly inside, playing for a little more time.
She had a voice of command when she said, “Nick, get that ladder over here so we can keep the drawer closed.”
Ludlow was a little slow, but he got it. “What? Hey, I’m no murderer!”
Dr. Cannon turned to him just long enough for me to shift my weight and arc my booted foot out of the drawer, through the air, and smack into her ribs with a satisfying impact. She’d been asking for it. With a screech she went down, but I didn’t wait to see what happened next. I ran out the doors, and jammed a chair leg into the handles to keep both bad guys in while I went for help.
I ran to the elevator, but before I could hit the Up button, the doors opened on Sean, shaken at the sight of blood on my throat, ready to attack something, and utterly gorgeous. Also an eager, wiry little security guard with one hand on the gun protruding from his holster.
It was about six-thirty A.M. when the police were finished with us and I’d had the superficial cut bandaged. I changed clothes again in the SUV and met Sean at a chain coffee shop where, over steaming cups, we smiled like survivors.
“You were something, the way you talked to the cops, the way you handled yourself, everything. You were great. I think I was falling in love with you.”
I ignored that because my nervous system had had enough jolts for the last twenty-four hours and anyway, I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “Look, I wasn’t great. In fact, I messed up big time. I ignored my own rules.”
“Like what?”
“Never trust your client completely — I mean her, not you. I missed so much of what I should have seen. She rolled over way too easy at the beginning, paying me under the table, all kinds of warning signs.” I shook my head, thinking how life was full of disappointments. Like Sean was going to fade back out of my world now that the case was closed. Like Dr. Cannon wasn’t going to get life without parole. It’s not nice, but I was kind of glad she cut herself so badly with her own damn scalpel — sweet irony — that she had to make her demands for a lawyer from a bed in the jail hospital ward.
Sean smiled and reached out and took my hand. “Hey, it’s all over now. Cash or check? And what are you doing after breakfast?”
That made me laugh. With some sense of entering unknown territory, I curled my fingers into his. “After breakfast,” I said, serious now, “I’m going to walk along the beach and remember Daniel. I don’t mind if you come along to help.”
Copyright ©; 2005 by Patricia McFall.
Puncture Point
by Peter Turnbull
Called “the best of our home-grown police proceduralists” by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Peter Turnbull has used several different settings for his procedurals over the years. His Glasgow P-Division stories were based on his experiences as a social worker in Glasgow. After he’d returned to his native Yorkshire, he began a new series set in York. His latest book, Reality Check (Allison & Busby) is set in Cambridge, England.
MONDAY, 3RD JANUARY.
It was cold, very cold, pleasantly, reassuringly cold, for this was January of the year, still within the twelve days of Christmas; it was as it should be, as cold as the man could wish it, as cold as he recalled it being in his childhood. It was the period of snow and ice and biting easterlies, of the weather that folk would complain about. But in the last few years the winters had been mild, too mild, un-healthily mild, more like a pro-longed autumn than a proper winter. No good, hard, prolonged frost, which killed off all the sickly fauna and flora, and occasionally, tragically, a few aged and sickly humans as well, but then, the man thought, that was the nature of winter, it was how things should be in this part of the world, and this winter was like the winters of old. Not as long-lasting, perhaps, but the cold snap had lasted for a few days now, ice formed on ponds, householders worried about burst pipes, black ice caused car accidents, the air was cold to breathe for the first time in a very long time. The man walked with his dog on Askham Bogs; the ground beneath his feet reassuringly frozen. His dog, as all dogs are, was unhappy in the heat, but this weather suited him admirably, and the man himself, wrapped up against the cold, felt a sense of reassurance as he surveyed the frosty, Christmas-card-like scene, for this is exactly, exactly how it should be in Yorkshire during the winter. It was in Askham Bogs that the man, the dog-walker, met another man who did not complain about the weather. The second man was dead.