Bloodback by Darby Harn

Author:Darby Harn [Harn, Darby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fair Play Books
Published: 2020-04-21T22:00:00+00:00

Eight

Dense fog shrouds the lake and what should be a grand view from Blind Tiger’s penthouse apartment. Buildings form and dissolve before I get any sense of their shape. The sun flares, illuminating the expansive, lavish apartment, but then withers just as fast, leaving me in cold, gray confusion.

Boshi’s heels clack against the hardwood floors. “He’ll be another minute. He’s with a client.”

I leave the window. “At seven in the morning?”

“The Responder of Chicago has many demands on his time.”

“So do I.”

“I’d think you’d want to draw this out,” Boshi says, walking through the open floor of the apartment into the kitchen. She takes an orange from the massive fridge and starts peeling it at the sink. “Get a couple nights out of this.”

This bitch. I head for the door. “He can email me.”

Just then, Blind Tiger comes into the apartment. “Kitsie, where are you going? Why do you look so tired? I can guess. Didn’t get much sleep last night, I take it?”

I rub my neck, imagining Abi’s fingers, her lips, her warmth so ready and I don’t know how I spent the night without it, but I did. Eight hours at the gaming tables, watching. Calculating odds. Exploring different outcomes.

House always wins.

“Can we make this quick?” I say. “I have to get back.”

“Or maybe you slept on the wrong side of the bed.” He goes into the kitchen. Boshi hands him the peeled orange slices. Anwar leans against the island. “Mmm. That’s good.”

I drift back to him. “Are you wearing a cape?”

“Anything less is uncivilized,” he says, and shrugs the black cape off his shoulders. He rests it over a stool at the island. “I apologize for my lateness, Kitsie. It was a long night for me, too. I have some information for you. Boshi.”

Boshi touches her PEAL. All the windows tint. Digital files manifest on the glass, as if the windows are monitors.

“What is this?” I say.

Anwar takes his time with the orange slices. “I did some digging. You mentioned Lamar was emaciated. That got me thinking. I’ve investigated a few incidents over the years, most of them on the South Side. Over into Gary, though it’s out of my jurisdiction. People who were found dead in just such a way. Nothing improper was ever found in the autopsies, but loved ones insisted the emaciation was sudden. Happened overnight.”

My hand glides across the glass as I swipe through documents and pictures from the Chicago Police Department. All of them feature victims with extreme emaciation, but the coroner’s reports were inconclusive. I grind my fingers into the back of my neck. There have been at least twelve incidents in the Chicago area, mostly on the South Side, some going back twenty years.

This is a serial killer. An Empowered one.

Blind Tiger sucks the juice off the end of his thumb. “Aren’t you glad you stayed?”

Maybe Lamar isn’t as specific a target as I thought. And maybe there have been other victims in Break Pointe over the same period, but we just don’t know.

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