The Skin Trade by George R. R. Martin

Author:George R. R. Martin [Martin, George R. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Published: 2012-07-03T10:27:54+00:00

The cab let her off two houses down. Police barricades had gone up all around the house, a dignified old Victorian manor badly in need of fresh paint. Curious neighbors, heavy coats thrown on over pajamas and bathrobes, lined Grandview, whispering to each other and glancing back at the house. The flashers on the police cars lent a morbid avidity to their faces.

Randi walked past them briskly. A patrolman she didn’t know stopped her at the police barrier. ‘I’m Randi Wade,’ she told him. ‘Rogoff asked me to come down.’

‘Oh,’ he said. He jerked a thumb back at the house. ‘He’s inside, talking to the sister.’

Randi found them in the living room. Rogoff saw her, nodded, waved her off, and went back to his questioning.

The other cops looked at her curiously, but no one said anything. The sister was a young looking forty, slender and dark, with pale skin and a wild mane of black hair that fell half down her back. She sat on the edge of a sectional in a white silk teddy that left little to the imagination, seemingly just as indifferent to the cold air coming through the open door as she was to the lingering glances of the policemen.

One of the cops was taking some fingerprints off a shiny black grand piano in the corner of the room. Randi wandered over as he finished. The top of the piano was covered with framed photographs. One was a summer scene, taken somewhere along the river, two pretty girls in matching bikinis standing on either side of an intense young man. The girls were dappled with moisture, laughing for the photographer, long black hair hanging wetly down across wide smiles. The man, or boy, or whatever he was, was in a swimsuit, but you could tell he was bone dry. He was gaunt and sallow, and his blue eyes stared into the lens with a vacancy that was oddly disturbing. The girls could have been as young as eighteen or as old as twenty. One of them was the woman Rogoff was questioning, but Randi could not have told you which one. Twins. She glanced at the other photos, half-afraid she’d find a picture of Willie. Most of the faces she didn’t recognize, but she was still looking them over when Rogoff came up behind her.

‘Coroner’s upstairs with the body,’ he said. ‘You can come up if you’ve got the stomach.’

Randi turned away from the piano and nodded. ‘You learn anything from the sister?’

‘She had a nightmare,’ he said. He started up the narrow staircase, Randi close behind him. ‘She says that as far back as she can remember, whenever she had bad dreams, she’d just cross the hall and crawl in bed with Zoe.’ They reached the landing. Rogoff put his hand on a glass doorknob, then paused. ‘What she found when she crossed the hall this time is going to keep her in nightmares for years to come.’

He opened the door. Randi followed him inside.

The

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