Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

Author:David Morrell [Morrell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical, Suspense, Thriller, Mystery, Fiction / Thrillers / General, Fiction / Mystery & Detective - Historical
ISBN: 9780316216777
Google: RU9sLwEACAAJ
Amazon: 0316216798
Barnesnoble: 0316216798
Goodreads: 15791436
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2012-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

INSIDE, THE YELLOW flames from gas fixtures showed the barred doors to the radiating corridors. The flames also showed the open doors to four rooms situated between the corridors.

The doors were open. In the first room, the jailer was slumped over his desk. In the second, a guard was similarly slumped. In the third, a big man in street clothes lay unconscious across a desk while the Opium-Eater’s daughter slept on a cot.

The fourth room was empty, the prison’s efficient, secure design requiring no other personnel to be on night duty here.

Each man had a bowl in front of him. While the guards’ food was of better quality than that of the prisoners, all of it was prepared in the prison’s kitchen, and all the food brought to the hub and the radiating corridors, whether to prisoners or guards, had been drugged by someone who worked in the kitchen and owed the messenger a great favor.

The sight of the Opium-Eater’s daughter and her escort was unexpected but convenient.

The messenger removed a ring of keys from the drugged jailer’s waist. He unlocked the door to the middle corridor and proceeded past the quiet cells. He found a door on the right whose number matched the entry in the governor’s ledger that indicated where the Opium-Eater was being held.

He unlocked that door. It could be opened only outward. The gaslight in the corridor cast his shadow into the cramped cell.

The light was sufficient to reveal that the cell appeared unoccupied.

The messenger frowned. Had he made a mistake when he’d examined the governor’s ledger? Perhaps he’d misread the number next to the Opium-Eater’s name. No. The messenger didn’t make mistakes. It was far more likely that the governor had made a mistake when he wrote the entry.

Remaining just outside the doorway, the messenger peered in toward the corner on the right. No one. He peered in toward the corner on the left. No one was there either.

He slowly entered the shadowy room. At the opposite end, the hammock hung against a wall, its thin mattress and its blanket upright within it, awaiting a new prisoner. The messenger directed his attention toward the table. Its chair was slightly askew, as if making room for someone under there. Ready to complete his mission, he yanked back the chair and lunged under the table.

His hands grabbed air.

There wasn’t an empty bowl on the table. Only a Bible.

The governor wrote the wrong number! the messenger inwardly bellowed. Now I need to go from cell to bloody cell!

He returned to the corridor and closed the door so that his view of the corridor would not be impeded. Arbitrarily, he chose the cell on the right. He unlocked the door and stepped into the fetid confinement, which smelled of night soil in the pail that served as a chamber pot. An empty bowl on the table showed that the cell’s occupant had eaten the drugged food. A large man—too large to be the Opium-Eater—snored on a hammock.

Blast it.

The messenger proceeded to the next cell and the cell after that.

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