Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection. Dean Koontz

base had moved on. They whidded away like walleyed horses stampeded by the crack of thunder.

      Under her foot, the windshield-washer couldn’t quite bring himself to admit defeat. “Hey, bitch, your badge, it said homicide. You can’t touch me! I ain’t killed nobody.”

      “What a moron,” she said, holstering the pistol.

      “You can’t call me a moron. I graduated high school.”

      “You did not.”

      “I almost did.”

      Before the creep – predictably – took offense at her impolite characterization of his mental acuity and threatened to sue for insensitivity, Carson’s cell phone rang.

      “Detective O’Connor,” she answered.

      When she heard who was calling and why, she took her foot off the gangbanger.

      “Beat it,” she told him. “Get your sorry ass out of the street.”

      “You ain’t lockin’ me?”

      “You’re not worth the paperwork.” She returned to her phone call.

      Groaning, he got to his feet, one hand clutching the crotch of his low-rider pants as if he were a two-year-old overwhelmed by the need to pee.

      He was one of those who didn’t learn from experience. Instead of hobbling away to find his friends, telling them a wild story about how he’d gotten the best of the cop bitch after all and had punched out her teeth, he stood there holding himself, ragging her about abusive treatment, as though his whining and threats would wring from her a sudden sweat of remorse.

      As Carson concluded the call, pressed END, and pocketed the phone, the offended extortionist said, “Thing is, I know your name now, so I can find out where you live.”

      “We’re obstructing traffic here,” she said.

      “Come jack you up real good one night, break your legs, your arms, break every finger. You got gas in your kitchen? I’ll cook your face on a burner.”

      “Sounds like fun. I’ll open a bottle of wine, make tapas. Only thing is, the face gets cooked on the burner – I’m lookin’ at it.”

      Intimidation was his best tool, but she had a screwhead that it couldn’t turn.

      “You like tapas?” she asked.

      “Bitch, you’re crazy as a red-eyed rat on meth.”

      “Probably,” she agreed.

      He backed away from her.

      With a wink, she said, “I can find out where you live.”

      “You stay away from me.”

      “You got gas in your kitchen?” she asked.

      “I mean it, you psycho twat.”

      “Ah, now you’re just draggin’ me,” Carson said, draggin’ meaning sweet-talking.

      The gangbanger dared to turn his back on her and hobble away fast, dodging cars.

      Feeling better about the morning, Carson got behind the wheel of the unmarked sedan, pulled her door shut, and drove off to pick up her partner, Michael Maddison.

      They had been facing a day of routine investigation, but the phone call changed all that. A dead woman had been found in the City Park lagoon, and by the look of the body, she hadn’t accidentally drowned while taking a moonlight swim.

       CHAPTER 3

      WITHOUT USING HER SIREN and portable flasher, Carson made good time on Veterans Boulevard, through a kaleidoscope of strip malls, lube shops, car dealerships, bank branches, and fast-food franchises.

      Farther along, subdivisions of tract homes alternated with corridors of apartment buildings and condos. Here Michael Maddison, thirty and still single, had found a bland apartment that could have been in any city in America.

      Bland didn’t bother him. Working to the jazz beat and the hoodoo hum of New Orleans, especially as a homicide dick, he claimed that he ended every day in local-color overload. The ordinary apartment was his anchor in reality.

      Dressed for work in a Hawaiian shirt, tan sports jacket that covered his shoulder holster, and jeans, Michael had been waiting for her to drive up. He looked wry and easy, but like certain deceptive cocktails, he had a kick.

      Carrying a white paper bag in one hand, holding an unbitten doughnut in his mouth with the delicacy of a retriever returning to a hunter with a duck, Michael got into the passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut.

      Carson said, “What’s that growth on your lip?”

      Taking the doughnut from between his teeth, intact and barely marked, he said, “Maple-glazed buttermilk.”

      “Gimme.”

      Michael offered her the white bag. “One regular glazed, two chocolate. Take your pick.”

      Ignoring the bag, snatching the doughnut from his hand, Carson said, “I’m crazy for maple.”

      Tearing off a huge bite, chewing vigorously, she swung the car away from the curb and rocketed into the street.

      “I’m crazy for maple, too,” Michael said with a sigh.

      The yearning in his voice told Carson that he longed not only for the maple-glazed doughnut. For more reasons than merely the maintenance of a professional relationship, she pretended not to notice. “You’ll enjoy the regular glazed.”

      As Carson took Veterans Avenue out of Jefferson Parish into Orleans Parish, intending to catch Pontchartrain Boulevard to Harrison and then head to City Park, Michael rummaged in the doughnut bag, making it clear that he was selecting one of the other treats only from cruel necessity.

      As she knew he would, he settled on chocolate – not the glazed that she had imperiously recommended – took a bite, and scrunched the top of the paper bag closed.

      Glancing up as Carson cruised through a yellow light an instant before it changed to red, he said, “Ease off the gas and help save the planet. In my church, we start every workday with an hour of sugar and meditation.”

      “I don’t belong to the Church of Fat-Assed Detectives. Besides, just got a call – they found number six this morning.”

      “Six?” Around another bite of chocolate doughnut, he said, “How do they know it’s the same perp?”

      “More surgery – like the others.”

      “Liver? Kidney? Feet?”

      “She must’ve had nice hands. They found her in the City Park lagoon, her hands cut off.”

       CHAPTER 4

      PEOPLE CAME TO THE fifteen-hundred-acre City Park to feed the ducks or to relax under the spreading live oaks draped with gray-green curtains of Spanish moss. They enjoyed the well-manicured botanical gardens, the Art Deco fountains and sculptures. Children loved the fairy-tale theme park and the famous wooden flying horses on the antique merry-go-round.

      Now spectators gathered to watch a homicide investigation in progress at the lagoon.

      As always, Carson was creeped out by these morbidly curious onlookers. They included grandmothers and teenagers, businessmen in suits and grizzled winos sucking cheap blends out of bagged bottles, but she got a Night of the Living Dead vibe from every one of them.

      Centuries-old oaks loomed over a pool of green water fringed with weeds. Paved paths