"Spencer,.Wen.-.Ukiah.1.-.Alien.Taste" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spencer Wen)

Max cuffed him without taking his eyes off the traffic. "Don't be silly. Heads up, we're here."
They had swung around the Hill District, cruised along the Monongahela River, then taken the Oakland exit to one of Pittsburgh's many pocket neighborhoods growing on the hillside, competing with the determined scrub woods. Max drove to a narrow street of brick row houses backed against Schenley Park. The street was blocked off from the main road by a police cruiser, its doors open as if suddenly abandoned, its lights strobing in the early dusk. As Max eased the Cherokee around the cruiser, the storm winds shifted and brought the stench of death their way. Ukiah went still in the close quarters, overwhelmed by the sudden chaos before him.
The narrow street was lined with abandoned police cars, their radios a crackling, harsh chorus. The row houses had identical worn faces. Everyone's attention pointed to one lone door, through which a stream of people poured. The coroner's wagon came up behind them and stopped, blocking the street.
"You okay?" Max asked, pulling up in front of a neighbor's driveway. It was the only parking space on the street.
Ukiah pulled himself back enough to nod. "There's more than two people dead in there. The walls must be painted with gore."
"I hate the case already. Don't worry, I'll do the talking. Just keep your shit together and your head down." Max muttered. "There's Kraynak."
Despite having quit cold turkey three months before, including the cigars on their poker nights, the big policeman was breathing smoke like a dragon as he jogged up to them. He motioned them brusquely out of the car.
"It's bad?" Max asked.
"Shit like this doesn't happen in Pittsburgh. New York, every other day. L.A., twice daily. But not here, not like this. Someone carved up three girls, Carnegie Mellon students, and took the fourth woman for a walk, we think. If they did, we need to find her pronto. Shit is about to hit the fan."
"Damn it, Kraynak, a multiple homicide! Why call us?"
"Because you're the best at what you do. We've got a dozen men in Schenley Park, even flew a helicopter with heat-tracking equipment over the son of a bitch and came up with zilch."
Max gave Ukiah a "you still game?" look and Ukiah nodded back. "Okay. Some ground rules." Max jerked his head toward Ukiah. "He needs room to workЧclear the house. He touches anything he wants, nothing hands off. If he leaves the house, he gets backup, at least two good runners."
"You don't ask much, do you?"
"If she was here and they walked her out, he'll be able to tell you."
Kraynak regarded them with angry eyes as he took another deep drag on his Marlboro. "Shit." He flung the butt onto the pavement and ground it dead with his foot. "I'll go see if we can clear the place. Coroner won't like it. They think they're God on murder cases."
As Kraynak stalked away, Max turned to study Ukiah. "You can do this."
"I know, but I'm starting to get your bad feelings. This is going to be a scary one."
Max winced and looked away. "You heard him, they took a woman. She might be alive. If she is, you're going to be her only hope. We've got lots of backup on this case. When you find her, we'll just step aside and let the police finish the case."
Ukiah trembled, feeling like every part of him wanted to fly in separate directions. Excitement, fear, and nervous energy rushed through him like a storm wind.
Max patted him and went to the back of the Cherokee to pop the tailgate. "Come on, let's get geared up."
Ukiah clipped on his headset and ran a VOX check. The periscope camera showed a clear picture on Max's laptop. Max unlocked the gun box and pulled out the pistol tray.
"No rifles. Take your Colt. I want you to have stopping power."
"I hate guns."
"You're going to take your .45 and your Kevlar."
Ukiah frowned but strapped on his kidney holster. The bulletproof jacket, for once, felt comforting, a strong hug to keep him in one piece. The storm wind whipped dead leaves out of the park, tainted with the presence of death from the row house. His bare arms tingled with reports of punctured spleens and spilled bowels. He rubbed at them to give them something else to consider.
Max was clipping on Ukiah's tracer when Kraynak returned with his captain. She was a solidly built blonde with sharp quick eyes. She was frowning as she stopped before the two private detectives. Her eyes inventoried their gear.
"So this is the boy raised by wolves." She snorted. "Kraynak, I don't know how I let you talk me into this. Are you really that good at finding missing persons?"
This was directly to Ukiah, so he answered instead of letting Max do the talking. "On walkouts, I'm a hundred percent. If they got in a car, I'm only running at forty percent."
"One hundred." The captain whistled. "Then let's hope that they stayed on the ground. Kraynak tells me you need room to operate."
Ukiah nodded. Max added in, "He works better if there's no distractions. This is very detailed work. Lots of people moving around will muddy the trail."
The captain sighed. "I'll give you twenty minutes to work the house. Forensics has been through, but the coroner wants to start on the bodies."
Ukiah frowned at the time limit. With multiple bodies, he would need that long just to work out who was there and which woman was missing. Surely there was a way to cut his search down. "Why do you think they walked out the woman?"
"The neighbors say that all four women were home, three blondes and a brunette. We've got three blonde bodies." The captain held up an evidence bag holding a driver's license. "The missing brunette is Doctor Janet Haze. Her purse and keys are inside. There were kids playing in the street all day. No one saw anything come or go by the front door, so the killer probably came in the back. Oh piss, the media is here."
The media took the form of a truck with the local TV station logo painted on its side and a dish transmission tower on top. It pulled up and stopped, almost touching bumpers with the police cruiser blocking the street. The captain flagged over a uniformed policeman and sent him to stall the news crew. "We need to find her, Wolf Boy, and we need to find her fast. Once this hits the air, I'll have every parent of thirty-odd thousand college students in a panic."
If the killer came in the back, he probably left by the back door too. Yet Ukiah still needed a baseline on the missing woman, which meant he'd have to go into the house. "Okay, let's go."
The first woman was sprawled by the front door, a bloody trail showing that the police had shoved her sideways as they forced the front door. Her scalp hung in tatters, and she was missing fingers where she had tried to protect her head with her hands.
Ukiah swallowed a wave of nausea and fingered one of the wounds, finding traces of dense steel. "Have you found the weapon?"
"Nope." Kraynak answered him from the porch. "Never seen wounds like these before either. Thin like a knife, but with amazing force. You usually get this amputation with axes and such."
Ukiah scanned the room, then nodded his chin toward a piece of black lacquered wood on the wall. "Sword rack for a katana."
"A what?" Kraynak asked.
"Japanese sword." Max answered, stepping over the body to tap on the rack. "The sword is missing. It looks as if someone was a rabid Otaku. That's a fan of Japanese animation."
"Damn," Kraynak swore. "I thought that was some kind of weird coat rack. Well, we didn't find any sword, so the killer took it with him."
Max bent to point out a length of hollow wood. "Left the sheath."
"We'll dust that for prints." Kraynak pulled on a disposable glove. He picked it up and dropped it into a long clear plastic bag.
The second dead woman was in the cluttered living room. Ukiah examined it and moved on. The third was in the kitchen and the back door hung open, its doorknob bloody. He returned to the front hall, earning a puzzled look from Kraynak in the doorway.
"I'm not sure who I'm looking for yet," he explained, and detoured upstairs to examine the bedrooms. The three on the second floor were unmarked by the chaos of the first floor. He moved through them, checking the clothes and the bedsheets to establish which dead woman belonged to which empty bedroom.
"There's an attic bedroom." Max tapped a door in the hall.
"That's hers, then."
Max opened the door, revealing narrow, steep stairs leading upward. The smell of a young woman bloomed out, tainted with the odor of sickness. Pillows that had been set on the bottom step plopped out onto the hall floor. Stepping over the pillows, Ukiah led the way up into the cramped bedroom. The dormer window was thrown open, and the oncoming storm winds played with a black blanket serving as a curtain. A desktop computer sat on a desk, its plug dangling over its dark monitor. Small dinosaurs made of K'NEX guarded an open book. A ragged stuffed rabbit sat at the head of the unmade bed, ears drooping, wearing an overlarge green turtleneck sweater. A normal bedroom of a normal woman, but there was something that sent shivers down his spine. Something was wrong. Something was out of place, but he couldn't place what.
"Our twenty minutes are almost up," Max said quietly from the attic door.