"Charles de Lint - Mulengro" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

Briggs nodded. “But he saw something and it scared the shit out of him. And I don’t think it was just the
booze.”

“No. It wasn’t just the booze…”

“What I can’t figure,” Briggs said, “is why the murderer would take the time to make it look like it was
the work of an animal, but then leave that symbol scratched in the dirt like some kind of calling card.
Anyone with half a brain—”

“Psychos only have about half a brain.”

“Yeah.”

The two men stood silently by the car. At length, Briggs headed over to where the patrolman was still
waiting.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/de%20Lint,%20Charles%20-%20Mulengro%20v.1.htm (11 of 319)8-12-2006 23:49:09
 MULENGRO



“I want you to run Cleary downtown,” he said. He pulled out his wallet and took out a twenty-dollar bill.
“But get some food into him first.”

“Sure. What’s the charge?”

“No charge. Let’s call it protective custody. He’s all we’ve got right now and I don’t want to lose him.
And I don’t want the press to get wind of the fact that we’ve got him and I don’t want anybody—and I
mean anybody—asking him questions. Now before you go, this is your beat, right? Where were you
when it happened?”

“I had a disturbance up on Dalhousie—a couple of hookers got into a tussle over this John and…”




The coroner’s initial report, combined with the story Ralph Cleary had given them, brought Will’s
offhand remark about juju a little too close to home. Juju was Will’s catchall word for anything
inexplicable or spooky. And this alley murder, Briggs thought, was shaping up to fit both categories
perfectly.

“Look, Briggs,” Cooper had said when the two detectives stopped off in his office, “at this point I can’t
rule out the possibility that some kind of animal didn’t do it.”

“What about the symbol scratched in the dirt?” Briggs asked.

“And there were no tracks,” MacDonald said from his desk across the room.

The two men shared the office, Alec MacDonald a hulking figure behind his desk, while Peter Cooper