Cold Vengeance

CHAPTER 64

AT TWO THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON — THAT IS, just after rising — Corrie Swanson left her dorm room, hit the street, and headed for her cubby in the Sealy Library on Tenth Avenue. Along the way, she stopped at the local Greek coffee shop. It felt like winter all of a sudden, a cold wind blowing trash down the sidewalk. But the coffee shop was a warm oasis of dish clatter and shouted activity. She put down her money and slid out a copy of the Times from the middle of the pile on the counter, then bought a cup of coffee, black. She was turning to leave when her eye caught the headline in the Post:

Grisly Beheading in Riverside Park

With a sense of embarrassment she also took a Post. She had always looked on the Post as a paper for cretins, but it often covered the really gruesome crimes the Times primly shied away from, and it was her secret vice.

When she got to her cubby at the library, she sat down, looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and with a vague feeling of shame opened the Post first.

Almost immediately she straightened up, horrified. The victim was one Edward Betterton, on vacation in the city from Mississippi, whose body had been found in an isolated section of Riverside Park, behind a statue of Joan of Arc. His throat had been slashed so savagely, the head had almost been separated from the body. There was other, unspecified mutilation that might be signs of a gangland slaying, the Post said, although there were also indications it could have been a vicious mugging, with the pockets of the victim turned inside out and his watch, money, and valuables missing.

Corrie read the article a second time, more slowly. Betterton. This was awful. He didn’t seem like a bad guy — just off base. In retrospect she’d felt sorry about the way she had reamed him out.

But this brutal killing couldn’t be a coincidence. He’d been on to something — a drug operation, he’d said — even if he’d gotten the Pendergast angle all screwed up. What was the address of the house he’d told her about? She concentrated, feeling a sudden panic she wouldn’t remember — and then it came: 428 East End Avenue.

She put down the tabloid thoughtfully. Pendergast. How was he involved, exactly? Did he know about Betterton? Was he really working on his own, with no backup? Had he actually blown up a bar?

She had made a promise not to interfere. But checking something out — just checking it out — even Pendergast couldn’t call that “interference.”