The Snow Angel Read Online Free

him. Their eyes locked momentarily before Kane looked away.
Mother-fuck,
Bell thought,
this just isn’t my day.
    He knew exactly why Kane was here. From an operational point of view it made sense. But Bell had spent the last twenty-three years avoiding the little bastard. You can do that in a big police department. It had worked out fine, until today.
    Inspector Roberta Easterly, still a looker at forty-five, walked in to conduct the briefing. In her business suit, she looked more corporate executive than cop. She was flanked by Slaughter and the city’s new Chief of Police, Jefferson Mosely, also wearing suits.
    Mosely, an African American, had been in town for only a month. He was still floundering around in this new department, here in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities. The word on Mosely was that he still hadn’t even learned the names of the major streets.
    The city’s police, already stung by the appointment of an outsider, were openly suspicious of the newcomer, freshly hired away from Dallas. Many a secretive phone call had been placed to contacts in the Dallas P.D., who universally described Mosely as politically crafty but a second-rate cop—and a backstabber. He knew how to play the racial angles, they said, so he had been popular with the so-called “black community” in Dallas. But the rank-and-file Texas officers, white and black, detested him.
    Now, at the briefing, Mosely wisely deferred to Byron Slaughter and Bobbie Easterly. He was smart enough to appear in civvies. The old-line cops resented an outsider wearing their cherished uniform, regardless of title.
    On the other hand, even the most reactionary males in the department respected Easterly. She pre-dated affirmative action, so had made rank the hard way. It helped that, as a rookie, she had won the Medal of Valor for rescuing a wounded policeman under fire.
    So the working stiffs didn’t think of Easterly as a woman. To them she was a
cop.
Behind her back they called her “Ballsy Bobbie.” Her passion in life, which she had honed to an art form, was catching evil people who did terrible things to good people. Everyone in the room would go to the wall for a skipper like Easterly.
    The rank-and-file held Byron Slaughter in similar esteem. At fifty-six, he was at the second level of department command, his pay grade equivalent to that of a Deputy Chief. There were two other Deputy Chiefs—both of them away for Christmas—plus a fourth Deputy slot,which was vacant.
    â€œOkay, listen up,” Easterly addressed the task force. “I’m sorry to screw up your weekend. But you people are the best of the best, and we really need you.”
    Easterly held up a blown-up photograph of a light-skinned black boy, his smile radiating innocence. He seemed familiar to many in the room.
    â€œHere’s our victim, age seven,” Easterly said. “His name is Darryl Childress. Darryl’s a child actor who has appeared in several local fast-food commercials. Perhaps you or your kids have seen him on TV. I don’t have any children and I don’t watch much television, but I’m told he has a large following. Kids apparently love him.”
    Easterly checked her watch. “Darryl was grabbed by two male suspects a little less than four hours ago from the front yard of his family home in the Seventeenth Precinct, the 14000 block of Lawndale Avenue. He was in the yard building a snowman. His parents were inside dressing for church. They’re professional people—he’s a teacher, she’s a nurse. It’s a racially mixed marriage—he’s white, she’s black. This is their only child.
    â€œDarryl’s mother happened to look out the window and got a fleeting look at the suspects. She saw them pull the boy into a car. In the struggle, he lost one of his gloves, which we’ve recovered. The vehicle is a late-model gray sedan with tinted windows, make and