Pursuit:novel

Chapter 1 Daniel Millikan looked down at the thirteenth corpse. This one was at the back of the restaurant kitchen, dressed in a white uniform with a ridiculous paper hat on his head that was supposed to keep his hair out of the food, and a long apron that had been filthy even before the blood had gushed down to soak it red. Millikan corrected himself. This was the first corpse, and the one a few feet from it was second. The others, logically, came later. He bent to let the light catch the tile floor just right so he could tell if there had been any wet footprints in the kitchen, but there had not. There were none in the dining room either: the killer had been here, done his work, and locked the door behind him before the rain had begun. Time in the restaurant had been stopped athe would guessaround nine-thirty. The light, misty spring rain had not reached Louisville and begun to gleam on the street pavements until late at night, after Daniel Millikan had finished his speech at the conference and retired to his hotel downtown. He had still been awake and noticed it when the rivulets began to run down the window of his room. He had been frustrated because he needed to catch the plane back to California at seven tomorrow morning, but he had been too agitated and restless to sleep. He never felt tense while lecturing his own students at the college in Los Angeles, but the audience tonight had been people he thought of as grown-ups. They were serious men and women of his own generation who had heard of him andat least some of themread his books. They had come to take a look at the expert . . . or, more accurately, at the alleged expert. They had listened to his lecture on the interpretation of homicide evidence with a polite attentiveness that he could only call professional. In the faces of the grown-ups there was always a reserve, something they held back or maybe even disguised, possibly because they had worked homicides and, unlike Millikan, expected to do it again. He had considered pouring one of the little bottles of scotch from the bar cabinet into a glass, diluting it with tap water, and swallowing enough to help him sleep. He was glad that the two cops had arrived in the lobby and rung his room before he had done it, instead of after. Lieutenant Cowan's voice on the telephone had been courteous but confident: after delivering that particular lecture, Millikan could hardly say he would not dress and go with the police to look at a homicide scene. Right now, he was glad that his brain was functioning quickly and efficiently, but he knew that when he got back to the hotel, he was going to want that drink. Millikan studied the angle of the body, judged the steps from the back door: ten to twelve. It was easy to see where the boning knife had come from. The row of black-handled kitchen knives in the gleaming stainless steel rack had only one gap. The killer had slipped in the back door and silently cut the dishwasher's throat with the knife he had found. That was a disquieting sign. This killer had been right about too many things: that there would be a weapon where he could reach it; that it would be at least as good and as sharp as anything he could buy and carry; that it would not be of any use to the police, because tracing it led only to the rack on the wall; that he would be quiet enough to take twelve paces unheard and formidable enough to fall on a healthy, strong man in a brightly lighted room and kill him without so much as knocking over a pan or letting him cry out. Millikan judged the distance from the back door to the body againa good thirty feet. Maybe this killer was invisible. Millikan looked in the other direction, toward the swinging door to the dining room. After the dishwasher was dead, the killer had dropped the knife into the soapy water in the sink. Then one of the waiters had come in froPerry, Thomas is the author of 'Pursuit:novel' with ISBN 9780679453062 and ISBN 0679453067.