"Folsom, Allan - The Day After Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Folsom Allan)

economic backgrounds.

What made it even stickier were the statistics: more than fifty percent
of the time a murder victim is identified, headless or not, the murderer
is found. In these seven cases not a single bona fide suspect had been
uncovered. All told, police experts of five countries, including
Scotland Yard's special 'murder investigations unit and Interpol, the
international police organization, were batting an even zero, and the
tabloid press was having a field day. Hence the call had come to the
Los Angeles Police Department for one of the best in the singular world
of homicide investigation.

Initially, McVey had gone to Paris, where he'dd met with Inspector
Lieutenant Alex Lebrun of the First Section of the Paris Prefecture of
Police, an impish rogue of a man, with a big grin and an always-present
cigarette. Lebrun, in turn, had introduced him to Commander Noble of
Scotland Yard and Captain Yves Cadoux, assignment director for Interpol.
Together the foursome examined the crime scenes in France. The first
was in Lyon, two hours south of Paris by Tres Grande Vitesse, the TGV
bullet train; and, ironically, less than a mile from Interpol
headquarters. The second, in the Alpine ski resort of Chamonix. Later
Cadoux and Noble escorted McVey to the murder scenes in Belgium, a small
factory on the outskirts of Ostend; Switzerland, a luxury hotel
overlooking Lake Geneva in Lausanne; and Germany, a rocky coastal inlet
twenty minutes by car north of Kiel. Finally they went to England.
First, to a small apartment across from Salisbury Cathedral, eighty
miles southwest of London, and then to London itself and a private home
on a square in the exclusive Kensington section.

Afterward, McVey spent ten days in a cold, third-floor office in
Scotland Yard poring over the extensive police reports of each crime,
more often than not finding it necessary to confer on one detail or
another with Ian Noble, who had a much larger and warmer office on the
first floor. Mercifully, McVey got a respite when he was called back to
lose Angeles for a two-day testimony in the murder trial of a Vietnamese
drug dealer McVey had arrested himself when the man tried to kill a
busboy in a restaurant where McVey was having lunch. Actually, McVey
had done nothing more heroic than stick his .38 service revolver in the
man's ear and quietly suggest he relax a little bit.

After the trial, McVey was supposed to take two days for personal
business and then return to London. But somehow he'dd managed to
squeeze in some wholly elective oral surgery and turned the two days
into two weeks, most of which was spent on a golf course near the Rose
Bowl where warm sun filtering through heavy smog helped him, between
strokes, muse on the 'killings.

So far, the only thing the victims seemed to have in common, the only
single connecting thread, was the surgical removal of their heads.
Something that on first goround appeared to have been done either by a