"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Death on D Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

on the ornate red sofa. His face was puffy from lack of sleep. He'd been up the night before helping one
of Rena's girls down the way through a particularly difficult birth.

I gave him a sideways look. Doc nodded toward the floor.

Jeanne lay there, legs splayed, wrapper open. Her torso was undamaged. The only visible wound was
around her neck. It had been cut so deeply that her head had nearly been severed. Her hands, flung back
beside her face, were cut as well.

I crouched beside her body. Her eyes were open. Her expression was one of great fear. I'd seen that
expression on her face before. Her ebony skin brought a certain kind of clientele to Lucinda's—one with
exotic tastes. But some of the customers objected to Jeanne's presence. Most of the fights I'd stopped in
his last year as sheriff had started over Jeanne.

“Someone got her this time, huh?” I asked.

“It's not that simple.” Doc pushed himself off the wall. He pointed to her hands. A single matching slit ran
across both palms.

“So he surprised her, cut her throat, and she grabbed at the knife at the last minute.”

Doc nodded. “But he killed her in here.”

I rocked on his toes and looked around. Blood spattered the rug and a nearby table. It had clearly
spurted. “He spun her.”

“Yep.”

I sighed. Murder in a small town was always difficult. I hated the cases when they involved someone
important. Investigating one with a prostitute—and one who wasn't even white—would be even harder.

“We knew it was only a matter of time, Doc,” I said. “If someone didn't get her here, they would have
got her when Lucinda sent her to service the boys in Shantytown.” I'd escorted her back a number of
times and that was when I'd seen the fear on her face. The men usually ignored her, but the town's
women—even my usually tolerant wife—gave her looks filled with hate.

Doc's eyes narrowed. “You gonna let this slide, then, Will?”

Of course I was. Solving murders wasn't my responsibility any more. “That's for Sheriff Muller to
decide.”

“Sheriff Muller's a drunk and you know it. You gave him the job so someone would take the midnight
calls and you could continue overseeing everything else.”

I stiffened. “The girls get hurt. Sometimes they die. It's not a safe or particularly joyful profession. If
anyone knows that, it's you, Doc. How many times do you get sent to D Street to tend to someone
who'd had it too rough or was dying in childbirth and didn't know who the father was?”
“So we let this go.”

I looked at Jeanne. She'd been pretty in a quiet sort of way. And she had been soft-spoken, almost shy.